Word: cloning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ready to abandon that video altar in my living room? Oh, God, no. When my TiVo box was finally replaced, I ran back to my big-screen TV like a child reunited with his mother. (Not as fast as my kids, who quickly began TiVoing a new stash of Clone Wars episodes...
When Lee Byeon Chun looks back four years to when he helped clone the world's first dog, he confesses it was a stressful time. All of his colleagues, he says, were obsessed with the puppy - an Afghan hound named "Snuppy," overanalyzing its every move and whimper in the lab. "I would sleep there sometimes," says Lee, who now heads a team of scientists and researchers at Seoul National University. Today, Lee does not devote all his waking hours to Snuppy, who still lives in the campus lab kennel. He now has a lab full of other cloned canines...
...That pack is part of a fledging industry that South Korea is leading: the cloning - and sale - of pet dogs. Since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996 by Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, scientists around the world have cloned everything from cats, monkeys and fruit flies to horses, rabbits, cows and wolves - mostly for non-commercial uses. Dogs are notoriously complex to clone, and Korea is the only country where researchers have successfully done the deed. (See pictures of presidential First Dogs...
...meantime, the small world of canine cloning has become fiercely competitive. Some of the players are duking it out over who owns the patent to commercially clone animals in the first place. Last year, California-based BioArts International, which says it has the sole worldwide license for cloning dogs after it bought the so-called Dolly patent, accused RNL BIO of black-market cloning by using technology covered in that patent. "They did not develop core cloning technology," says Lou Hawthorne, CEO of BioArts. RNL BIO, however, insists that the company and its researchers are operating under another, dog-specific...
...this battle in Korea' clone wars plays out remains to be seen. But one thing is sure - the SPCAs of the world can rest easy for now. It will be a long time before cloning the family pet is more popular than buying...