Couple Pays Nearly $100K To Have Dead Dog Cloned Into Two Puppies

Jacques, who is a dog walker, and her partner Remde, manager of the Heritage Masonry & Conservation, lost their boxer Dylan to a brain tumour in June this year.

It would be easy to assume that Remde and Jacques expect the puppies, Shadow and Chance, to be ideal replicas of their beloved dog. The second puppy, Shadow, was born on December 27 in South Korea, The Guardian reported.

However, the couple hopes that everything will go well and they plan to adopt both of the puppies’ mothers and bring all four dogs to the United Kingdom at the end of the quarantine period in July.

So they had their boxer, Dylan, cloned into two puppies for almost $100,000.

The cloning of Dylan is overseen by scientists from the Seoul-based Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, including the foundation’s chief technology officer Dr Hwang Woo-suk, who in 2005 was found to have falsified his research into human stem cell cloning.

“This is the first case we have had where cells have been taken from a dead dog after a very long time”. The couple is the first British to get a dead pet cloned and also only the first British paying client of the lab.

Jacques told The Telegraph newspaper: “After they got him out I still couldn’t quite believe it had happened”. It involves the extraction of DNA sample from a dead animal which is implanted into an egg where the nucleus has been removed and then implanted into a surrogate female dog.

Remde and Jacques said they were overjoyed to be the proud owners of two healthy cloned puppies. “I was just clinging onto Richard for about an hour and a half after Chance was born”, she said.

Dogs that have similar ovulation time are selected as egg donors and surrogate mothers. “I didn’t know how I would be able to cope, I thought I would have to throw myself of a bridge or something”, said Jacques.

Mr Remde, 42, who manages a building firm, said the arrival of their cloned dogs would be like “five Christmases coming at once”.

Ms Laura said that although he puppy is just few minutes old, she still can’t believe that it appear very much like Dylan. Or, did they just want a dog that looked exactly like Dylan? I had pins and needles everywhere. Researchers were in fact baffled, given that never before had they managed to create a carbon copy of an animal who had been dead for over 5 days and whose genetic material had decayed so much.

In the first attempt, the procedure didn’t yield the expected results, which is why Remde had to take one more trip to Britain, and fetch another skin sample from the dog’s belly.