April 8, 2024
By Minseo Kim
Samoyed Tico, a YouTube channel that has introduced daily life with dogs, has gone viral by releasing a cloned dog. The YouTuber reportedly stopped working with the cloned dog a year later after an accident occurred when he left the dog at the workplace. She said, "I hope someone will learn about cloning and someone will be able to overcome pet loss", adding that she is not identifying the cloned dog with her deceased dog. Since it is unusual for the general public to disclose animal cloning for research purposes, both support and criticism are rising.
The pet cloning market has just opened, and companies that replicate and store somatic cells for cloning are also emerging. In 2005, a team led by professors Hwang Woo-seok and Lee Byung-cheon of the Suam Biotech Research Foundation succeeded in cloning dogs for the first time in the world and created Snoopy, a cloned dog. In 2017, Professor Kim Min-gyu's team at Chungnam National University cloned the previous Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee's dog Benji for the fourth time. In 2019, Professor Kim Min-gyu's team also cloned an endangered species, a short-haired Sapsaree.
To create a cloned dog's fertilized egg, an egg donor dog; that provides eggs and a surrogate mother dog; that will give birth to a cloned dog are needed. First, the dog's skin tissue that needs to be cloned is removed, the body cells are collected, and then the egg is extracted from the egg donor dog to remove the nucleus. This way, the dog's somatic cell nucleus is inserted into the egg from which the DNA of the egg donor dog has been removed to create a fertilized egg, and the cloned dog is born by implanting it into the surrogate mother's womb. After a cloned dog is born, DNA testing determines whether the replication has been successful.
Animal rights legislations argue that commercial animal cloning should be eliminated because it imposes a lot of pain on animals. Dogs suffer to create a cloned dog, such as collecting an egg by inserting a needle into the stomach or pulling a cloned dog out of a surrogate dog's belly by a cesarean section. Another problem is that the implantation success rate is low and the process is repeated many times. Cloned dogs are also born with diseases that existing animals have, so they don't live long.
There is also a view that animal cloning itself is not something to be prevented. It is an opinion that research and experimentation should continue for the development of biotechnology. As the animal cloning market has already been established, social discussions are needed on how far animal cloning should be allowed. As technology advances, the market will grow, making costs decrease, but laws and institutions will have to be established sooner. #Cloning #Pets #Samoyed #Tico #globalposts #영자신문
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