British couple fly to Seoul for birth of cloned puppies

A British couple have travelled to South Korea to wait for the birth of two puppies cloned from their dead, much-loved dog.

The couple’s dog died at an age of eight years in June 2015, due to a heart attack after he was detected with a brain tumor.

She told the Guardian: “I had had Dylan since he was a puppy”, she said. She added: “I see it as Dylan’s puppies but they will have 100 per cent his DNA not just 50”.

To clone a dog, the lab implants DNA into a dog egg that has had its nucleus removed.

Once the new DNA is implanted into the egg, electric shocks are used to trigger cell division, and the egg is implanted into a surrogate female dog to give birth to the clones.

Since then the company has produced around 700 cloned dogs so far but this is the first time that puppies will have been born from DNA samples which have been so degraded. The Yorkshire-based couple is not only the first British paying client of the lab, but also the first British to get a dead pet cloned.

He had been dead for 12 days when the couple took a skin sample to the firm, but were warned the technique had never worked from bodies that old.

The couple initially made a decision to store samples of Dylan’s DNA with Sooam at a cost of £2,000.

However, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has criticized the practice of animal cloning. Sooam Biotech scientist Dr Woo Suk Hwang has been cloning dogs in South Korea since 2005.

His claim in 2004 he had cloned a human embryo in a test tube was later retracted by the journal Science in 2006 after it found no evidence that the cloning took place. Cloning animals requires procedures that cause pain and distress, with extremely high failure and mortality rates. They said that the first puppy was due on Boxing Day and the second one a day later, ” said Jaques.

Mr Remde, who went to South Korea twice for the process, said: “It will be like five Christmases coming all at once”.