US woman orders $150k cloned pitbull terrier

Korean cloning outfit RNL Bio has taken its first order for a cloned dog - a copy of a deceased pitbull terrier called Booger whose Californian owner was so attached to her mutt she's willing to stump $150,000 for the privilege. The canine doppelganger will be produced by a team from Seoul National University using tissue …

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

A dog cloned in Korea?

Does the owner know Korean cuisine?

[Anonymous Coward]

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Presumably she was even more attached to her arm, until it was bitten off - perhaps she could have invested her spare dorrah in stewing up a new one. It could have been conveniently stored up her arse while maturing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's just a flesh wound"

Bit off her arm, eh? Did the dog dutifully retrieve it then? Guess it would really suck if the new dog ran out into traffic after all that effort and expense...

[David Ramsden]

Same dog, but a different dog.

Besides spending a ridiculous amount of money on a dog, the dog will not have Booger's personality, as this is forged throughout the dogs life, so Booger 2.0 will be different.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet crap almighty

When the revolution comes, I'm certain she'll be on the Neo-Bolshevik list of people whose wealth needs to be redistributed. FFS, there are people starving and freezing in the world.

Also: WTF? Booger?

[Geoff Mackenzie]

A litter of clones?

If this has a high failure rate, presumably they do the nuclear transfer on all of the eggs in the litter. So when the mother does deliver a litter it's actually a whole gaggle of Boogers.

[Anonymous Coward]

oops

"particularly attached to the dog, after it saved her life when another dog attacked her and bit off her arm"

... maybe she should have had both cloned - as the first dog appears to have been particularly attached to her....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonus package

Perhaps they can replace her arm at the same time, with a discount.

At least it'll let the new dog prove its worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

'Particularly attached' to dead canine

That reminds me of the Dogwelder - http://www.dogwelder.com.

Other notable Section 8 members include Jean de Baton-Baton ("A bizarrely gaunt walking French caricature who defeats enemies with 'the power of Frenchness', as expressed by savage beatings with a baton and occasionally blinding others with rings of garlic and onions") and Bueno Excelente ("An obese, sweaty, and bald Latino in an overcoat who defeats evil with 'the power of perversion'").

Ah, comics - but are they any more surrealistic than reality - I mean, cloning pitbulls, c'mon?

[Anonymous John]

What's got four legs and an arm?

A pitbull.

[Niall]

Next a couple of clones of Paris Hilton...

One to do the cooking and one to do the cleaning.

What only one icon?

[Chris Miller]

I love El Reg

'stump' + 'bit off her arm'

Mines the Burberry, ta

[John]

We laugh now

at this sort of thing and shake our heads. The sad thing is, in another 20 years we will be reading about the mother who spends 1.5m to have her son or daughter cloned. And we will shake our heads and move on because we have been and are being de-sensitiszed to this sort of thing. first cells, then a mouse, then a sheep, now dogs....

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems pointless.

She is aware that it will not act or even look like the previous animal isn't she?

[Andy Bright]

Wahooo!!!

Genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark pigs + dog cloning = glow-in-the-dark dog.

Glow-in-the-dark dog + combining the DNA of animals and humans = talking glow-in-the-dark dog.

You can stuff your stem cell research to find cures for cancer, aids and passionate conservatism where the sun most definitely doesn't shine. This is ground breaking science of the future, surely meriting the Nobel Fucking Awesome Prize (official title).

I see a talking-glow-in-the-dark dog arriving in time for Christmas. But why stop there? The pigs were universally green in colour, and while amusing, one colour can only stimulate the entertainment senses for so long. So why not go the keyboard route and give us a switch to choose 3 or 4 different colours as well as a colour cycle option. If we can do it with christmas lights and keyboards, surely this will represent only a small challenge to our top-notch geneticists.

Now what do I teach my dog to say first?

[Richard Scratcher]

@Geoff Mackenzie

Cloning an entire litter of Pitbull Terriers would be downright dangerous. They can be very aggressive dogs. What if they attacked their new owner? Can you imagine the newspaper headline?.......hmm......

I'll get my coat

[Anonymous Coward]

bets taken

on how long it will take CloneDog to bite her other arm off.

[Ben Norris]

identical twins

...are often quite different, you can't just clone it and get the same dog out

[Tim]

Stupid woman

As any fule kno the clone, almost by definition, will be evil. It will bite off her other arm at the first opportunity.

[daniel]

@Richard Scratcher

Pack of green glow in the dark talking Pittbull Parishiltonerriers ass-aulted owner in a luminescent remake of a Pet in Paris.

First-response teams did what they could, but it took them 2 hours to remove the smile from owners face.

[Daniel]

$150,000? the cost..

that's an arm and a leg!

well, not yet. But mark my words..

[John H Woods]

I might be a voice in the wilderness, but ...

... if I could afford it I would definitely have my dog cloned. I am well aware that not all personality is genetic --- not even all markings --- but you'd get a dog that was better than the previous best alternative -- a puppy which would only share 50% of its DNA with your favourite dog.

[Joel]

Not My Dog!

How much will she sue the company for when she realizes the dog isn't actually her dog?

[J]

Stupid...

OK, it's her money and she can do whatever she wants with it but... it's stupid nonetheless. Just go to the fucking dog pound, find a friendly mutt with a personality she likes, pay a few bucks, and voilá! We once got a nice abandoned female Pitbull Terrier doing exactly that. She runs from the cats, they beat her...

[Anonymous Coward]

clone zone

apparently those wily oriental types have been cloning iphones as well

[Michael]

For 150k ....

the dog should come with some extras..... maybe 2 mickeys. And maybe the ability to put the seat down.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

Correct me if I'm wrong but when you clone using anything but sperm (or any other cell with an intact copy of the animals DNA), you get an animal born of the same age as the one that died. Thus if the dog was 10, your new pup will be born with DNA that is already 10 years degraded. This is why animals such as dolly the sheep showed signs of advanced age early in life.

[Anonymous Coward]

How to make $149,750 profit...

Now let's see... If you're looking for quick money to fund your advanced human cell cloning research, would you:

a) spend $150,000 in materials, laboratory time and research in cloning a facile bint's dog...

b) pop down to the nearest pound or pet shop, and find a puppy in the "same shade" as the loopy one-armed bandit's expired dog, and pocket $149,750...

Let's face it, until we have the capability of cloning as portrayed in most Arnold Schwarzenger films, I wouldn't bother checking under the eyelids for a version number. I'd be checking it's arse for a pet shop price tag.

[cjrcl]

obsession

Admittedly, Booger 2.0 will be different intrinsicly, but his owner will get her obsession of Booger 1.0 satiated through the extraneous resemblence.

[Hans Mustermann]

Re: WTF?

"Correct me if I'm wrong but when you clone using anything but sperm (or any other cell with an intact copy of the animals DNA), you get an animal born of the same age as the one that died. Thus if the dog was 10, your new pup will be born with DNA that is already 10 years degraded. This is why animals such as dolly the sheep showed signs of advanced age early in life."

Well, not necessarily.

To the best that anyone can figure it out, "age" in the aging sense is tied to the cells' telomeres. Basically each cell has a counter, how many times it can divide before it can't any more. When more and more of your cells hit the limit, more and more damage can't be repaired, and eventually you die. That's old age.

This seems to be, among other things, a defense against cancer, btw. Cells go out of control with division all the time, but then they hit the limit and stop. E.g., HPV reprograms cells to start dividing out of control, but you get at most a wart because they hit the limit. To get a full cancer, the cell _also_ has to accidentally activate one of the two known mechanisms to increment its counters right back.

The thing is, though, cells have their own mechanism for that too, and naturally produced embryos get their telomeres padded right back to full.

So you're right that early embryos did show that problem. They inherited the used up counters of whatever cell they were made out of. I _think_ they figured out how to fix that problem, though.

[Jon Tocker]

More than just a handful of genes

From what I've read (disclaimer: it may have been discredited or nullified elsewhere by now) there's more to this producing-a-living-creature thing than just a few handfuls of DNA - prions (proteins that tell other proteins how to "fold" into the right (or occasionally wrong) "shape", so far as I am aware) and other "bits 'n' bobs" in the host egg and in the womb play their part in shaping and modifying the growing embryo (so an in vitro embryo implanted in a surrogate mother will not be a true genetic offspring of the original egg and sperm donors in the same way that an in vitro embryo implanted in the egg donor's womb would be).

This would mean that cloned animals - unless the original mother were used as the host and she had been somehow regressed back to the point she was when the original animal was conceived and lots of Powerful JuJu were employed to make all the conditions the same as when the original was conceived (and then that things progress exactly as before despite what Chaos Theory would have us expect) - the cloned animal is not remotely an accurate clone of the original - and that's LONG before we get to nurture-related aspects and the clones not having the original markings as the original.

Even using the original mother as a host would not guarantee the same results.

So, this "clone" will pass a DNA test to prove it has the same actual DNA strands but what has been done with them will be totally different.

@How to make $149,750 profit...

If she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned, you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested to ensure the same genetic material was used - however it will be "cooked" and raised wrong so it won't be remotely like what she is hoping for.

[Chewy]

doing what it's supposed to do

as I understand it she had a dog which has the function of being a guard dog. the said animal did what its trained to do and defended her when she came under attack. said dog dies from old age. woman spends a fortune on recreating her loyal dog, when any good pedigree pitbull would have done the same thing. oh well a fool and her money ...

[Anonymous Coward]

@Jon Tocker

<quote>If she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned, you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested to ensure the same genetic material was used - however it will be "cooked" and raised wrong so it won't be remotely like what she is hoping for.</quote>

Now read that back again and spot the subtle flaw in your logic.

"she's shelling out 150K to get it cloned"

"you can guarantee she'll get it independently DNA tested"

I think those two statements on a scale of logic are polar opposites. Would a woman dumb enough to clone her dog - somehow conceiving that the clone would have the same environmental and emotional experiences, even memories - have the foresight to get the new, sorry, "Version 2.0" dog DNA tested?

This woman doesn't strike me as being spectacularly well-endowed in the brains department.