First Cloned Dog Delivered to Owners
Jan 29/09) - The world's first commercially cloned dog was delivered this week to its delighted owners.
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The California firm BioArts International was paid $155,000 by a couple from Boca Raton, Florida to clone their beloved labrador retriever, Sir Lancelot , who passed away a year ago from cancer.
Lou Hawthorne, the chairman of the company, hand delivered the 10 week old puppy to the couple. "Lancey" had been raised since birth by the biotechnology startup as they provided it with top notch care and performed batteries of tests to ensure that everything had gone without a hitch. Luckily there were no problems and the cloned dog was a flawless copy of the original.
The actual cloning took place at Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea.
The Otto family, who had the cloned puppy produced, said that "although we have had nine dogs in our lives, Sir Lancelot was special and the most human of them all." In his final months, the Otto's decided to take a DNA sample from him "just in case". They became one of six successful bidders for the first round of cloning by the biotech firm BioArts International.
This was the time a dog has ever been cloned commercially; and marks the beginning of what is sure to be a huge new industry.
But it is not without controversy. The Humane Society is against the cloning of pets. Their position is that thousands of animals are killed every month in shelters across the country; so it is exceedingly wasteful to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to clone one puppy.
Others would argue that its your right to spend your money as you see fit. That is difficult to argue with. In fact, the Otto's stated that they had donated more to the Human Society than they spent on their new puppy.
BioArts possesses the exclusive worldwide licence to clone pets and endangered species using the somatic cell nuclear transfer method of cloning, or SCNT for short. This is same method that was used for the milestone cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. The company is focusing on new and untapped sectors in the worldwide pet and human genetics fields.
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