Cloned pups: Similar but not identical
FAIRFAX, Calif. — The most difficult thing about the cloned puppies is not powerful them apart, but that explaining why they don’t look exactly alike. This was the problem Lou Hawthorne faced on a recent hike with Mira and MissyToo, two dogs whose embryos were created from the preserved, recycled and repurposed nuclear DNA of the creative Missy, a border collie-husky join who died in 2002.
To have being firm, they have a exceedingly strong resemblance to reaped ground other and to Missy. It’s just that sometimes, as soon as people hear that the dogs are clones, the questions start:
“Why is one dog’s fur curlier?”
“Why aren’t the dogs the same size?”
“Why is person of them darker?”
“Why does this some regard a floppy ear?”
Hawthorne, 48, is invested in the notion of likeness. With clones, on account of all, what good does homogeneous do? It is Hawthorne’s biotech visitor, BioArts — which is based in the Bay Area but has arrangements with a laboratory in South Korea — that performed the cloning.
He also has particular reason to be impressible to questions that touch on the authenticity of the clones, given the history of his chief geneticist, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea.
Hwang is it may be best known for fraudulently reporting in 2004 that a team he led had prosperously cloned human embryos and stem cells. After the false claims were unearthed, he was fired by Seoul National University, where he did his research as a professor. But he is also widely acknowledged for having been involved in luckily cloning an Afghan hound in 2005.
“Dr. Hwang’s past is obviously controversial, boundary we feel that his lab and his record when it comes to dog cloning are the best in the field,” Hawthorne said.
Elizabeth Wictum, associate director of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, before-mentioned that earlier this year, she and her staff had taken sets of DNA extracts from Hawthorne’s puppies and compared them with stored samples of Missy’s DNA and concluded the results were “consistent with clones.”
“The puppies had the same nuclear DNA as Missy, and contrasted mitochondrial DNA, which is what you prevail upon from a cloned animal,” Wictum said.
