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| Species | Canis lupus familiaris |
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The Missyplicity Project was a project devoted to cloning Joan Hawthorne and John Sperling's dog, a border collie and husky mix. Missy died on July 6, 2002, at the age of 15. [1]
In 1997, news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned inspired the couple to find out whether their dog Missy could also be cloned. In 1998, a multimillion-dollar project was launched to clone Missy, trading as "Genetic Savings & Clone". Missy died in 2002 before efforts to clone her had succeeded, but her DNA was gene banked for future cloning efforts.
One of the key scientists on the Missyplicity Project and Genetic Savings & Clone was Dr. Taeyoung Shin, who was born and completed his Ph.D. in South Korea before moving to the United States. After both The Missyplicity Project and GSC proved unable to clone dogs, Dr. Shin's Ph.D. thesis advisor, Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, led a team of research scientists at Seoul National University in a major dog cloning effort. This project was designed to overcome the specific obstacles encountered by both the Missyplicity and GSC teams.
In 2005, Dr. Hwang and his team successfully cloned the world's first dog, which they named Snuppy. [2] In 2007, Lou Hawthorne, former CEO of GSC and current CEO of BioArts International, was introduced to Dr. Hwang and his team by Dr. Shin of BioArts, and asked if they would clone Missy. They agreed and Missy's conserved cells were flown to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation outside of Seoul.
The scientists at Sooam, led by Dr. Hwang, used Missy's cells to successfully produce three Missy clones. After 10 years of research and effort, the quest to clone Missy had finally succeeded. Three identical clones of Missy were returned to the original owners. The clones are named Mira (after a Korean myth of an all-powerful benevolent dragon), Chingu (which means "friend" in Korean) and Sarang ("love").
Mira, born December 5, 2007, was the world's first clone of a family dog and bore a striking physical and behavioral resemblance to the original Missy. Chingu and Sarang were born on February 15 and 19. [3] They were flown to the United States on April 18, where they joined their genetic sister Mira.
The news of the project to clone Missy spread quickly, and many people contacted Hawthorne and Sperling wanting to gene bank and clone their own pets. In response to this demand, several members of the Missyplicity Project founded Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) in February 2000.
Operation CopyCat was a branch of the Missyplicity Project that concentrated on cloning cats, after the discovery that dog genes are harder to copy than cat genes. Operation CopyCat announced that on December 22, 2001, CopyCat was born of the Missyplicity Project. She was called CC for short, and was born at the Texas A&M, College of Veterinary Medicine.
BioArts and Sooam decided to partner to offer a limited number of cloning spots to the public through a program called "Best Friends Again" in 2008. [4] In 2009, Lou Hawthorne the CEO of BioArts announced he was withdrawing from the program due to the small market, unethical competition, weak intellectual property protection, unscalable bioethics and unpredictable results. [5] However Sooam Biotech continued developing proprietary techniques [6] based on a licence from ViaGen's subsidiary Start Licensing (which owns the original Dolly patent [7] ) and continued creating cloned dogs for owners whose dogs had died, charging $100,000 a time. [8] Sooam Biotech was reported to have cloned 700 dogs by 2015, [8] a cloning success rate of 40% [9] and to be producing 500 cloned embryos of various species a day in 2016. [10]
Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical genomes, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction; this reproduction of an organism by itself without a mate is known as parthenogenesis. In the field of biotechnology, cloning is the process of creating cloned organisms of cells and of DNA fragments.
Clonaid is an American-based human cloning organization, registered as a company in the Bahamas. Founded in 1997, it has philosophical ties with the UFO religion Raëlism, which sees cloning as the first step in achieving immortality. On December 27, 2002, Clonaid's chief executive, Brigitte Boisselier, claimed that a baby clone, named Eve, was born. Media coverage of the claim sparked serious criticism and ethical debate that lasted more than a year. Florida attorney Bernard Siegel tried to appoint a special guardian for Eve and threatened to sue Clonaid, because he was afraid that the child might be treated like a lab rat. Siegel, who heard the company's actual name was not Clonaid, decided that the Clonaid project was a sham. Bioethicist Clara Alto condemned Clonaid for premature human experimentation and noted the high incidence of malformations and thousands of fetal deaths in animal cloning.
A piebald or pied animal is one that has a pattern of unpigmented spots (white) on a pigmented background of hair, feathers or scales. Thus a piebald black and white dog is a black dog with white spots. The animal's skin under the white background is not pigmented.
Commercial animal cloning is the cloning of animals for commercial purposes, including animal husbandry, medical research, competition camels and horses, pet cloning, and restoring populations of endangered and extinct animals. The practice was first demonstrated in 1996 with Dolly the sheep.
Genetic Savings & Clone, Inc. was a company headquartered in Sausalito, California that offered commercial pet gene banking and cloning services, between 2004 and 2006. The company was launched by billionaire John Sperling, the founder of University of Phoenix. Its Chief Executive Officer was Lou Hawthorne.
Hwang Woo-suk is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher. He was a professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University until he was dismissed on March 20, 2006. He was considered a pioneering expert in stem cell research and even called the "Pride of Korea". However, he became infamous around November 2005 for fabricating a series of stem cell experiments that were published in high-profile journals, the case known as the Hwang affair.
Snuppy was an Afghan hound, the first dog clone. The puppy was created using a cell from an ear from an adult Afghan hound and involved 123 surrogate mothers, of which only two produced pups. The Department of Theriogenology and Biotechnology at Seoul National University, which cloned Snuppy, was led by Woo Suk Hwang. Snuppy has since been used in the first known successful breeding between cloned canines after his sperm was used to artificially inseminate two cloned females, which resulted in the birth of 10 puppies in 2008. In 2017, 4 clones of Snuppy were made by Sooam, and were the first clones made of a cloned dog, to investigate potential health effects of cloning.
A natural bobtail is an animal's tail which due to a mutated gene grows unusually short or is missing completely. The genes for the shortened tail may be dominant or recessive.
Gregory Stock is an American biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Toppy is the name given to seven cloned Labrador Retriever dogs, born in late 2007 to three surrogate mothers. They were the world's first cloned working dogs, and were used by the Korea Customs Service.
Trakr was a German Shepherd police dog who along with his handler, Canadian police officer James Symington, discovered the last survivor of the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. For his accomplishments, Trakr was named one of history's most heroic animals by Time magazine. In 2008 Symington won an essay contest sponsored by BioArts International to find the world's most "cloneworthy dog," as a result of which Trakr was cloned, producing five puppies.
Genetically modified mammals are mammals that have been genetically engineered. They are an important category of genetically modified organisms. The majority of research involving genetically modified mammals involves mice with attempts to produce knockout animals in other mammalian species limited by the inability to derive and stably culture embryonic stem cells.
Byeong Chun Lee, also spelled Lee Byeong-chun, is the veterinary professor at Seoul National University responsible for the ₩300 million KRW "Toppy" dog cloning program in 2007. Yi is a former aide to Hwang Woo-suk, a pioneer in the field with the "Snuppy" clone, who fell from grace after his stem cell research turned out to have been fabricated. Yi has been described as "one of the world's best-known dog cloning experts."
Chung Hyung-min is a South Korean biotechnology professor. He was appointed professor at CHA University in 1997 after obtaining his BA, MA and Ph.D degree at Konkuk University.
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are a pair of identical crab-eating macaques that were created through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the same cloning technique that produced Dolly the sheep in 1996. They are the first cloned primates produced by this technique. Unlike previous attempts to clone monkeys, the donated nuclei came from fetal cells, not embryonic cells. The primates were born from two independent surrogate pregnancies at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.
Genesis 2.0 is a documentary film made by Swiss director and producer Christian Frei and Russian filmmaker Maxim Abugaev. The feature-length film was released in January 2018 in the World Cinema Documentary section at the Sundance Film Festival. At the center of the film is the woolly mammoth, an extinct and iconic species that today is surrounded by wishes and visions. On the one hand, the film documents the hazardous daily lives of a group of men who gather valuable mammoth tusks in a remote archipelago, the New Siberian Islands. On the other, it illuminates the potential of genetic research and synthetic biology — the means by which researchers hope to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.
The Hwang affair, or Hwang scandal, or Hwanggate, is a case of scientific misconduct and ethical issues surrounding a South Korean biologist, Hwang Woo-suk, who claimed to have created the first human embryonic stem cells by cloning in 2004. Hwang and his research team at the Seoul National University reported in the journal Science that they successfully developed a somatic cell nuclear transfer method with which they made the stem cells. In 2005, they published again in Science the successful cloning of 11 person-specific stem cells using 185 human eggs. The research was hailed as "a ground-breaking paper" in science. Hwang was elevated as "the pride of Korea", "national hero" [of Korea], and a "supreme scientist", to international praise and fame. Recognitions and honours immediately followed, including South Korea's Presidential Award in Science and Technology, and Time magazine listing him among the "People Who Mattered 2004" and the most influential people "The 2004 Time 100".
King of Clones is a documentary released on Netflix and directed by Aditya Thayi which examines the Hwang affair involving human cloning by South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk.
Hossein MS, Jeong YW, Park SW, Kim JJ, Lee E, Ko KH, Kim HS, Kim YW, Hyun SH, Shin T, Hawthorne L, Hwang WS.Cloning missy: obtaining multiple offspring of a specific canine genotype by somatic cell nuclear transfer. Cloning Stem Cells. 2009 Mar;11(1):123-30. doi: 10.1089/clo.2008.0029.