You Can Now Clone Your Dog for Only $100,000
Dog lovers rejoice. Thanks to a company in Korea, if you truly love Spot, you can have two of him. Or three. Or, well, any more than three and you're insane. But you won't be able to blame dog lovers if they try, because Korea's Sooam Biotech has figured out a way to clone the furry friends. That will open the door to people doing all sorts of crazy things.
Sooam Biotech wants anyone who wants a cloned dog to be able to have one. It will charge you $100,000 per clone, but it can make it happen. That's mainly due to its founder, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. Hwang is a genius when it comes to dog cloning, which is something of a rarity. Hwang created the first cloned dog back in 2005, and there hasn't been much progress since then because of how hard it can be to duplicate a canine.
It seems that dogs have more complex reproductive traits than most people realize, including irregular ovulation cycles and that eggs are only optimal for cloning for just a few hours. In fact, according to BusinessWeek, the first cloned dog, Snuppy, took over 120 tries before successfully creating cloned puppy. That 's why many experts at the time, including Hwang himself, claimed that cloning pet dogs wouldn't be feasible for consumers.
However, as the years passed, technology improved, and so did Hwang's techniques. Eventually, Hwang and his Sooam company had the process down pat. If a customer doesn't mind the (current) six month waiting list and the $100,000 fee, they can have their dog cloned. As of 2013, Sooam was cranking out between 150 to 200 cloned dogs per year.
Of course, dogs are just the starting point for Hwang and Sooam. Their real eyes are on the cash cow prize. Literally. Koreans have suddenly grown fond of eating beef, and if Sooam can become the number one cow cloning company, the money will flow.
"The Han-woo is Korea’s equivalent of Wagyu or Kobe, and stocks were devastated by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease three years ago," explains Businessweek. "The morning after the delivery of the precious puppies in China, Hwang met on a farm with Nam Kyung Pil, the governor of Gyeonggi, Korea’s largest province, to celebrate the birth of the first set of cow clones from a Sooam project sponsored by the provincial government. If the pilot program is successful, Sooam is likely to get a much larger contract to take the program national."
It's smart of Hwang to start with dogs, because that will build customer trust. If you can give someone Spot 2.0, they'll be much more receptive to your cloned lump of meat on a plate. Hwang is business savvy. Perhaps one day he'll try to clone himself.
[Image via Flickr - Leonardo Veras]
