If you've ever had a dog, you know just how deep a connection you can develop with "man's best friend ". But a dog's life is much shorter than humans, about 12 to 15 years long, which means every dog owner has to go through the heartbreaking moment when their loving pet passes away.
Why not make a clone of that dog then? This is the solution offered by a South Korean company, Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The company has already successfully cloned at least 400 dogs, mostly for US customers, ever since it pioneered the technique in 2005. Now, Sooam Biotech has introduced its business to UK dog owners as well, offering them dogs that look just like their lost ones.
To clone a dog, researchers first need to take a skin cell from a living dog or one that has just died. Meanwhile,another dog is selected to supply an egg. Researchers then replace the DNA in the egg with that from the skin cell and implant the egg into the womb (子宫) of a female dog. The egg grows into a puppy over the following two months. The whole process takes less than a day, but it comes at a shockingly high price — around ￡63,000.But if you can't afford it now, you can also save the cell in a laboratory and access it at a later date.
However, magical as cloning might sound, there is no guarantee that the cloned dog will be a perfect copy of the original one. Just like identical twins of humans, they share the exactly same DNA but there will still be small differences between them. "The spots on a Dalmatian (斑点狗) clone will be different, for example " Insung Hwang, head of Sooam Biotech, told The Guardian.
Dog owners will also have to accept the fact that personality is not "cloneable ". Apart from genes, personality is also determined by upbringing and environment, which are both random elements that cloning technologies simply cannot overcome, Professor Tom Kirkwood at Newcastle University, UK, told The Telegraph.
Perhaps bringing our dogs back by cloning is not the best way to remember them after all. Kirkwood, a dog owner himself, pointed out, "An important aspect of our relationship with them is coming to terms with the pain of letting go. "
