South Korea may be known to many Asian Americans as the land of plastic surgery, but despite a previous cloning scandal in a different lab, it looks like a South Korean lab Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, on behalf of a U.S. company and American clients, have been able to commercially clone a dog:
“Bioarts International CEO Lou Hawthorne, a cloning and stem cell research guru, brought little Lancy to Miami International Airport from Korea. The adorable Lancy is cute as a button, but a clone is a walking controversy. “People think that cloning dogs is a stepping stone to cloning people. Dogs are actually harder to clone than people,” said Hawthorne. The 3-month old puppy is reportedly a clone of a canine the Otto family just couldn’t live without, their yellow 11-year-old Labrador Sir Lancelot, who died last year on New Year’s Eve… The price of royalty is steep. For what it cost to buy a modest home or fancy car, the Ottos cloned the dog they say was worth so much more “It cost over 150-thousand dollars, so it was a lot of money. So, as I said before I did sell something that was precious to me to get something that was even more precious to me,” said Otto.”
Over $150,000 to clone a dog! And if there’s one thing I have learned over the years, it’s the fact that Americans LOVE their dogs. The tag line for BioArt’s service for dog cloning is catchy too: “What if you could be best friends … again?” This story reminds me of something straight out of science fiction like the Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The 6th Day, and the company in the movie, RePet. Science fiction today is science fact tomorrow:
