DYLAN’S DOUBLES
A grieving British couple paid big bucks to have their beloved late dog cloned twice – meet Shadow & Chance HOW IT’S DONE
BELOW: Laura Jacques and Richard Remde of Britain were saddened by the death of boxer Dylan (RIGHT) last year. FAR RIGHT: Now they have a second – and third – chance to hold their beloved dog thanks to a cloning company in South Korea.
WHEN her beloved eight-year-old boxer, Dylan, died from a brain tumour, Laura Jacques was devastated. She’d had him since he was a puppy. “We had an amazing bond,” the British dog-walker says. “He was my baby, my child, my entire world.”
All she wanted was to have him back. And now she does. In fact, thanks to a cloning company in South Korea, she now has two of him.
Her cloned boxer puppies, Chance and Shadow, are seven months old and Laura and her partner, Richard Remde, intend bringing them home to Yorkshire in the UK where they can run about in the garden just as Dylan used to.
Laura describes their births as “a miracle” – but it’s a miracle that didn’t come cheap. She and Richard forked out £67 000 (about R1,27 million) a puppy to Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul, the only laboratory of its kind in the world. As far as they’re concerned it was money well spent.
“I can’t believe how much he looks like Dylan even as a puppy of just a few minutes old,” Laura said soon after Chance was born by Caesarean section in December last year. “All the colourings and patterns on his body are in exactly the same places as Dylan had them.”
Shadow was born three days later via another surrogate and also bears marks identical to Dylan’s.
The boxer puppies made scientific history as they were cloned from samples taken from Dylan almost two weeks after his death. It was previously thought the limit for extracting live cells for cloning was five days.
“This is the first case we’ve had where cells have been taken from a dead dog after a long time,” Sooam scientist David Kim says.
“People have a strong bond with their pets and cloning provides a psychological alternative to the traditional method of just letting the pet go and keeping their memory,” Sooam researcher and spokesperson Wang Jae-Woong says. “With cloning, you have a chance to bring back your pets.”
LAURA and Richard are unfazed by people who criticise them for “playing God” and insist they’ve done nothing wrong. “We’ve helped to make a scientific breakthrough,” Laura says. “I can understand the concerns around human cloning – creating beings that don’t have a real mom or dad – but the same thing doesn’t apply to dogs,” Richard says. “We’re not mad. We’re dog-mad though, and we both absolutely love all animals.”
“I know the new dogs won’t be Dylan,” Laura adds. “I think of them as Dylan’s puppies. It’s important to me that I’m
Sgoing to have a piece of Dylan that’s genetically identically to him. I’d do anything to see his face again.”
The puppies have had to stay in South Korea until they’re seven months old but Laura and Jacques have made several trips to Seoul over the past months to bond with the puppies and their surrogate mothers, whom they hope to adopt. The cells required for cloning can be harvested from a live dog or one that’s been dead for up to five days, the website of South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation says. It has not updated this information to reflect Dylan’s case.
A tissue sample is taken by means of a biopsy and frozen before being sent to Sooam for assessment. The cloning process begins as soon as researchers at the lab confirm the cells are suitable.
Dogs with a similar ovulation cycle are chosen as egg donors and surrogate mothers. Eggs are collected from the donors and the nucleus of each, which contains the DNA, is removed. The “empty” egg is then injected with the original dog’s DNA.
This process produces a cloned embryo, which is implanted in the surrogate mother. Pregnancy is confirmed about 30 days after implantation and a cloned puppy is born about 60 days after the implant.