Would you give YOUR dog a clone ?
When his girlfriend’s beloved boxer died, Richard flew to Korea and had two puppy clones made. Now if you’ve got £77k (and can overlook some troubling health warnings) he’ll help you do the same . . .
THERE are 11 of us in the room, soaking up the sunshine pouring through the window. Richard Remde and his partner, Laura Jacques, are on either end of the sofa, with shih tzu crosses Alfie and Dinky stretched out in the middle.
There are four more — mercifully sleeping — dogs on the floor: Chloe the golden retriever, Harvey the bull mastiff, Sassy, an indeterminate cross, and Max, an ancient cocker spaniel. Two more dogs (we’re at eight now), boxers Chance and Shadow, are careering from end to end of the room, leaping, jumping, bouncing.
A rescue dog (that’s nine pooches) is in an adjacent room, too shy to join the party.
Somehow, above the racket, there’s the sound of a phone ringing. It’s Laura’s. The ring tone is the ‘woof woof’ of a dog barking.
Then Richard’s phone goes off, a normal tone this time, but there’s a man on the other end of the line, crying. His labrador has just died and he wants to get it cloned.
Am I in a mad-house? Not quite. Allow me to explain.
Richard and Laura are certainly dog mad. Beyond obsessed. Back in 2015, the pair’s devotion to their dogs made headlines when they travelled from their home in West Yorkshire to a dog-cloning facility in South Korea to have Laura’s beloved boxer, Dylan, who had died from a brain tumour, cloned.
In their luggage were cell samples that Laura had taken from Dylan’s belly using a biopsy kit bought from Amazon. To keep them as cold as possible, the samples had been put in test tubes, wrapped in ice packs and packaged inside bubble wrap.
When the couple got to Korea, they were told the cells were useless and had to return to the UK, get Dylan out of the freezer, where his body had been placed in storage prior to burial, thaw him out and have another go.
Richard jetted back again to Korea to hand over the second batch. This time the procedure was a success — and, five months later, not one but two clones of Dylan were born, Chance and Shadow, to two surrogate dogs at the Korea laboratory. SO
IN this room surrounded by dogs and dog- mad people, when Richard, a stonemason, announces he’s gone into the dog cloning business, my reaction is not how utterly bizarre, but rather, what else could he do? For if anyone was born to be a dog cloning consultant, is it not Richard?
He’s entered into partnership with the group of scientists who specialise in cloning dogs within the walls of Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, an imposing castle-like facility on the outskirts of Seoul. Richard is their UK agent, their facilitator.
You might have guessed already what’s in store for Max, the 18-year-old cocker spaniel, snoozing obliviously on his special rug on the floor.
Four months short of his 19th birthday, he’s had his ups and downs. It was during the latest scare, a few weeks ago, when the vet mentioned the unmentionable (I won’t spell it out) that Richard knew Max was going to have to be cloned, too.
‘I’m going to be really devastated when he goes,’ says Richard, who plans to chart Max’s cloning journey on YouTube. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. I’m going to get him cloned because I want to keep a part of him. Cloning is about helping people deal with their grief when they lose their best friend.’
So for anyone else out there who can’t bear the thought of the final goodbye from their cherished companion, here’s what you have to do.
First of all, you need to put your dog’s remains in the fridge ( not the freezer). Once this distressing, but necessary, task is complete, Richard will take care of everything else.
He’ll get straight on the phone to his veterinary surgeon contact in South Korea, who will jet out immediately to the UK and remove a batch of cells from the deceased pet. (Richard is hoping in time he’ll find a UK-based vet who will agree to do it.)
These will be handed over to Richard, who will pack the precious vials of cells into a suitcase and head to the airport.
Once he’s batted off any awkward questions at security about what on earth he is carrying in his luggage, he’ll fly to South Korea and hand the tissue to the dog cloning team on standby at Sooam.
The cloned puppy is made through a process known as ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’. Starting with an egg harvested from a donor dog on heat, using a high-powered microscope scientists poke a micro hole in the egg and remove the nucleus — the DNA.
They then replace the nucleus with a cell from the dog being cloned. The hybrid egg is blasted with electricity to fuse the cells and begin cell division, and the embryo is implanted in a surrogate dog’s womb. Then, if the pregnancy is successful, an exact replica puppy of the deceased pet will be born around 60 days later.
AFEW months after that, the puppy will be flown to the UK for a ‘ cloning reunion’ with the owner of the original dog. So all in all, it’s quite a bargain for the $ 100,000 (£77,000) fee. Did you really think you could cheat the rules of nature for anything less?
You don’t have to be just mad to clone a dog, you also have to be rich.
‘It’s expensive, but it’s guaranteed,’ says Richard, 46. ‘No dog, money back guaranteed.’
You might wonder how many people there are out there who want to have their dogs cloned and are rich enough to do it.
But business is already coming in. There is that call, for example, from the elderly labrador owner seeking Richard’s help. ‘ He was very upset,’ says Richard. ‘He told
me he’d lost his wife two years ago and now his labrador has passed away and he is totally devastated. So I told him what he needed to do and I’m going to try to help him.’
Preparations are already under way for when Max passes away. Accompanying Richard on this sad journey to Korea will be his first dog cloning client — a wealthy woman whose rottweiler passed away.
This woman got in touch with Sooam, the Korean laboratory, some weeks ago, and was then put in touch with Richard.
By this time, the woman had found a vet to take the necessary cells from her dog and had them ‘banked’ in an animal artificial insemination facility in the South of England.
‘What I do is a bit of handholding,’ says Richard. ‘I’m a sort of funeral director. Going to Korea might be a bewildering experience. She doesn’t have to go but she wants to.’
When Dylan passed away, Laura was so grief- stricken that Richard became desperately worried about her. She wasn’t eating or drinking and seemed to be in total shock.
Initially, he was sceptical about the cloning process, but agreed to give it a go because he wanted to help her. The man
who runs Sooam — and who is Richard’s new business partner — is veterinary surgeon Hwang Woo- suk. Richard met him when he went to have Dylan cloned.
Dr Hwang has a chequered history. In 2004, while serving on the faculty at Seoul National University, he co-authored a story in the eminent journal Science stating that he and his team had successfully cloned a human embryo. While in Korea he was hailed a genius, there was understandable disquiet elsewhere.
Two years later, the claim was revealed to be false. In court, he was acquitted of fraud but convicted of breaking South Korea’s bioethics law. He was permitted to continue practising, but is barred from attempting to clone a human embryo.
Richard, however, has nothing but respect and praise for Dr Hwang, whom he describes as a ‘sound’ man who is ‘doing a lot of good, research into cancers and Alzheimer’s and the like’.
In 2005, while still at the university, Dr Hwang led the team that cloned the first dog — called Snuppy, an amalgam of Seoul National University and ‘puppy’. Using a cell from the ear of an Afghan hound, Dr Hwang impregnated 123 surrogate dogs, only one of which gave birth to a puppy that survived.
Today, Richard says proudly, the number of cloned dogs at Sooam stands at 1,632. The laboratory has successfully produced a coyote clone, born to a dog, and one of its most ambitious projects is to attempt to bring back to life the extinct woolly mammoth, using material taken from preserved mammoth remains in Siberia. But dog cloning is its mainstay. It’s certainly futuristic, but is it right? Where will this tampering with the laws of nature all end?
Critics have said the process itself is cruel, that it can take a dozen or more embryos to produce a single healthy dog. What, ask those against cloning, happens to the embryos that don’t make it?
It has been said that surrogate mothers may be treated with hormones that, administered over a long period, can be harmful (Sooam has reportedly denied doing this), and that many puppies are born dead or deformed. No one really knows, though, what goes on behind closed doors. There are concerns, too, that cloned dogs will be more prone to illness and will not have a normal lifespan because of ‘ abnormal epigenetics’ — changes in the animal’s DNA as it ages. Last year, Sooam reportedly said it was now able to achieve a viable pregancy from implanting multiple embryos into three surrogates.
Richard is adamant things have progressed even more since then. ‘ I’m told that cloning will be strictly controlled so that only one dog is produced. One embryo will be implanted into one surrogate. Techniques have massively improved since the early days of cloning. It’s much more refined.’
However, the RSPCA’s position on cloning is unambiguous. ‘Cloning is a serious concern,’ it says. ‘The process involves scientific procedures that can cause pain, suffering and distress.
‘We believe animals are often being cloned with little consideration for ethics or animal welfare.’ BUT
is there any evidence of health issues in Chance and Shadow, the cloned boxers? To be fair, not a bit. They seem just like any other boxers: superfriendly, over-excitable and slightly potty. Both look in pristine health.
‘Shadow looks more like Dylan than Chance does, and he’s like him in personality, too,’ says Laura, 33, who helps Richard run his stonemasonry business.
‘I love all my dogs the same, but I have the closest bond to Shadow because he reminds me so much of Dylan. He’s really kind and he’s a ringer for him.’
Richard is aware that cloning is controversial, but he believes in the positives and says he wants to help people and do some good.
‘There are big costs involved in cloning and my profit is actually quite small,’ he says. ‘I want to help people and do some good.
So if the dog cloning business is a success, what next for Richard? Yup, you guessed it. Cats! ‘Sooam tell me they think the market for cats is going to be even bigger than dogs,’ he says. ‘They’ve got a dedicated team working on it to produce a cloned cat — and I reckon they’ll have cracked it within a year.’
After that, it’s anyone’s guess.