A dog cloned in Korea?
Does the owner know Korean cuisine?
US woman orders $150k cloned pitbull terrier
Korean cloning outfit RNL Bio has taken its first order for a cloned dog - a copy of a deceased pitbull terrier called Booger whose Californian owner was so attached to her mutt she's willing to stump $150,000 for the privilege. The canine doppelganger will be produced by a team from Seoul National University using tissue …
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Friday 15th February 2008 15:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
'Particularly attached' to dead canine
That reminds me of the Dogwelder - http://www.dogwelder.com.
Other notable Section 8 members include Jean de Baton-Baton ("A bizarrely gaunt walking French caricature who defeats enemies with 'the power of Frenchness', as expressed by savage beatings with a baton and occasionally blinding others with rings of garlic and onions") and Bueno Excelente ("An obese, sweaty, and bald Latino in an overcoat who defeats evil with 'the power of perversion'").
Ah, comics - but are they any more surrealistic than reality - I mean, cloning pitbulls, c'mon?
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Friday 15th February 2008 21:17 GMT John
We laugh now
at this sort of thing and shake our heads. The sad thing is, in another 20 years we will be reading about the mother who spends 1.5m to have her son or daughter cloned. And we will shake our heads and move on because we have been and are being de-sensitiszed to this sort of thing. first cells, then a mouse, then a sheep, now dogs....
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Friday 15th February 2008 21:17 GMT Andy Bright
Wahooo!!!
Genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark pigs + dog cloning = glow-in-the-dark dog.
Glow-in-the-dark dog + combining the DNA of animals and humans = talking glow-in-the-dark dog.
You can stuff your stem cell research to find cures for cancer, aids and passionate conservatism where the sun most definitely doesn't shine. This is ground breaking science of the future, surely meriting the Nobel Fucking Awesome Prize (official title).
I see a talking-glow-in-the-dark dog arriving in time for Christmas. But why stop there? The pigs were universally green in colour, and while amusing, one colour can only stimulate the entertainment senses for so long. So why not go the keyboard route and give us a switch to choose 3 or 4 different colours as well as a colour cycle option. If we can do it with christmas lights and keyboards, surely this will represent only a small challenge to our top-notch geneticists.
Now what do I teach my dog to say first?
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Saturday 16th February 2008 00:49 GMT John H Woods
I might be a voice in the wilderness, but ...
... if I could afford it I would definitely have my dog cloned. I am well aware that not all personality is genetic --- not even all markings --- but you'd get a dog that was better than the previous best alternative -- a puppy which would only share 50% of its DNA with your favourite dog.
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Saturday 16th February 2008 04:30 GMT J
Stupid...
OK, it's her money and she can do whatever she wants with it but... it's stupid nonetheless. Just go to the fucking dog pound, find a friendly mutt with a personality she likes, pay a few bucks, and voilá! We once got a nice abandoned female Pitbull Terrier doing exactly that. She runs from the cats, they beat her...
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Sunday 17th February 2008 00:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
WTF?
Correct me if I'm wrong but when you clone using anything but sperm (or any other cell with an intact copy of the animals DNA), you get an animal born of the same age as the one that died. Thus if the dog was 10, your new pup will be born with DNA that is already 10 years degraded. This is why animals such as dolly the sheep showed signs of advanced age early in life.
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Sunday 17th February 2008 08:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
How to make $149,750 profit...
Now let's see... If you're looking for quick money to fund your advanced human cell cloning research, would you:
a) spend $150,000 in materials, laboratory time and research in cloning a facile bint's dog...
b) pop down to the nearest pound or pet shop, and find a puppy in the "same shade" as the loopy one-armed bandit's expired dog, and pocket $149,750...
Let's face it, until we have the capability of cloning as portrayed in most Arnold Schwarzenger films, I wouldn't bother checking under the eyelids for a version number. I'd be checking it's arse for a pet shop price tag.
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Monday 18th February 2008 00:38 GMT Hans Mustermann
Re: WTF?
"Correct me if I'm wrong but when you clone using anything but sperm (or any other cell with an intact copy of the animals DNA), you get an animal born of the same age as the one that died. Thus if the dog was 10, your new pup will be born with DNA that is already 10 years degraded. This is why animals such as dolly the sheep showed signs of advanced age early in life."
Well, not necessarily.
To the best that anyone can figure it out, "age" in the aging sense is tied to the cells' telomeres. Basically each cell has a counter, how many times it can divide before it can't any more. When more and more of your cells hit the limit, more and more damage can't be repaired, and eventually you die. That's old age.
This seems to be, among other things, a defense against cancer, btw. Cells go out of control with division all the time, but then they hit the limit and stop. E.g., HPV reprograms cells to start dividing out of control, but you get at most a wart because they hit the limit. To get a full cancer, the cell _also_ has to accidentally activate one of the two known mechanisms to increment its counters right back.
The thing is, though, cells have their own mechanism for that too, and naturally produced embryos get their telomeres padded right back to full.
So you're right that early embryos did show that problem. They inherited the used up counters of whatever cell they were made out of. I _think_ they figured out how to fix that problem, though.
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Monday 18th February 2008 09:03 GMT Jon Tocker
More than just a handful of genes
From what I've read (disclaimer: it may have been discredited or nullified elsewhere by now) there's more to this producing-a-living-creature thing than just a few handfuls of DNA - prions (proteins that tell other proteins how to "fold" into the right (or occasionally wrong) "shape", so far as I am aware) and other "bits 'n' bobs" in the host egg and in the womb play their part in shaping and modifying the growing embryo (so an in vitro embryo implanted in a surrogate mother will not be a true genetic offspring of the original egg and sperm donors in the same way that an in vitro embryo implanted in the egg donor's womb would be).
This would mean that cloned animals - unless the original mother were used as the host and she had been somehow regressed back to the point she was when the original animal was conceived and lots of Powerful JuJu were employed to make all the conditions the same as when the original was conceived (and then that things progress exactly as before despite what Chaos Theory would have us expect) - the cloned animal is not remotely an accurate clone of the original - and that's LONG before we get to nurture-related aspects and the clones not having the original markings as the original.
Even using the original mother as a host would not guarantee the same results.
So, this "clone" will pass a DNA test to prove it has the same actual DNA strands but what has been done with them will be totally different.
@How to make $149,750 profit...
If she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned, you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested to ensure the same genetic material was used - however it will be "cooked" and raised wrong so it won't be remotely like what she is hoping for.
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Monday 18th February 2008 13:10 GMT Chewy
doing what it's supposed to do
as I understand it she had a dog which has the function of being a guard dog. the said animal did what its trained to do and defended her when she came under attack. said dog dies from old age. woman spends a fortune on recreating her loyal dog, when any good pedigree pitbull would have done the same thing. oh well a fool and her money ...
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 10:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Jon Tocker
<quote>If she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned, you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested to ensure the same genetic material was used - however it will be "cooked" and raised wrong so it won't be remotely like what she is hoping for.</quote>
Now read that back again and spot the subtle flaw in your logic.
"she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned"
"you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested"
I think those two statements on a scale of logic are polar opposites. Would a woman dumb enough to clone her dog - somehow conceiving that the clone would have the same environmental and emotional experiences, even memories - have the foresight to get the new, sorry, "Version 2.0" dog DNA tested?
This woman doesn't strike me as being spectacularly well-endowed in the brains department.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
