Word: cloned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...help pet owners. Cloning Snuppy (the name comes from "Seoul National University puppy") took nearly three years and cost millions of dollars. Hwang's ultimate motive, he says, is to create a research model for making stem cells that could cure disease in people. "Compared with rodents," he says, dog cells "are more similar to human stem cells." GS&C still wants to capture the Fido-cloning market, though, and company scientists are trying to reduce the inefficiencies. Even if they manage to clone a dog, says Ben Carlson, a company spokesman, it won't be cheap. "We're charging...
...what comes next, GS&C has stored the DNA of several rare or endangered animals in its cryogenic freezers, including two types of antelope. But, as the world was reminded last week, the biggest breakthroughs in cloning are now coming from Asia--not just South Korea but also China and Singapore. Hwang won't say what he's planning, but the next logical step would be to clone a primate. Human cloning may still be anathema, but the world seems to be inching ever closer. --Reported by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas and Alice Park/New York
...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...