Word: clone
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...also raised two big questions. The first, from many a dog owner: When can I clone my dog? The second: What are they going to clone next? The answer to the first is not very soon. The Korean achievement proves that cloning a dog is possible, not that it's easy. Indeed, billionaire John Sperling, who co-founded the cleverly named Genetic Savings & Clone (GS&C), of Sausalito, Calif., has spent seven years and more than $19 million trying in vain to clone a dog. Texas A&M researcher Mark Westhusin, whose team cloned a cat on its second...
...eggs is extraordinarily labor intensive. You can get cow eggs from a slaughterhouse and incubate them to maturity in the lab. But because very few dog eggs will mature outside of a dog, viable eggs have to be extracted surgically. Once you have inserted the DNA you want to clone and tricked the eggs into becoming embryos, moreover, you can't just implant them at will in a surrogate bitch. Cows, goats and sheep can be thrown into estrus--readiness for pregnancy--by giving them a hormone shot. Not dogs. "You have to monitor hundreds, if not thousands, of dogs...
...important step because a dog's reproductive system is slightly different from that of other mammals. The eggs of dogs, which are needed to grow the resulting clone (in this case, a cell from the ear of an adult Afghan hound was the genesis of the cloned puppy) do not mature in the ovary, but instead finish their development in the oviduct. It's much easier for scientists to obtain eggs from the ovary than from the oviduct. Many researchers have tried, but failed to get the timing right to get the most mature eggs...
...Will I be able to clone...
...perhaps not for many years to come. Snuppy, as the Korean researchers named their clone (for Seoul National University puppy), was the only puppy to be born out of 123 cloned cells that were transplanted to surrogate female dogs. It's still an arduous process, and one that's not likely to be very successful without further refinements...