Biologist Wang Jae Woon immediately puts to bed the notion that a real-life Jurassic Park, with dinosaurs cloned from DNA found in fossil remains from 65 million years ago, can ever happen.
But cloning a mammoth – that could work, he says.
Wang works for the Seoul-based organisation Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which clones dogs and other animals. Since 2012, the firm has been working with a university in Siberia on the mammoth project.
However, while the mammoth project inspires dreams of bringing back other long-extinct species, the cloning of dogs and other animals has already become routine at Sooam and its commercial associate, H Bion.
Since being founded in 2006, the firm has cloned around 900 dogs, no small number considering the hefty price tag – 100,000 dollars.
Behind the glass doors of the white-tiled cages at Sooam, beagles, poodles and all sorts of other dog breeds romp about, waiting to be shipped off to their owners. One Middle Eastern customer had ordered five Salukis at once for a cool half a million dollars.
The company has wealthy clients all over the world, says Wang, but more than half come from the United States. That list includes numerous celebrities, though most wish to remain anonymous.
However, they all want the same thing from the company – for their old pet to be resurrected. “We create an identical twin, though some say we’ve brought back the dead,” says Wang. “Is it the same dog? Yes and no. It’s very subjective,” he adds.
In order to clone a dog, scientists take the genetic material from the original’s cells and insert it into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. The embryo is then implanted into the uterus of a “surrogate” mother dog.
Sooam is open about every step of the process. Team leader Hwang Woo Suk is happy to explain what he’s doing as he performs a Caesarean section on one of the mothers. “Everything’s perfect,” says Hwang, with a look of satisfaction as the newborn puppy gives its first squeak. The success rate for impregnating these surrogate mothers is around 40 per cent, according to Sooam.
But Hwang’s achievements in the field of cloning – in August 2005, nine years after the birth of Dolly the sheep, the 64-year-old presented the world with the first cloned dog, Snuppy – have been overshadowed by one of the biggest scientific scandals in decades.
He was celebrated as a national hero in South Korea when, in two studies published in 2004 and 2005, he announced that he and his team had for the first time managed to clone human embryonic stem cells.
But at the end of 2005, it emerged that the studies were faked. He was left disgraced and later handed a two-year suspended sentence.
Today his company is considered a world leader when it comes to the commercial cloning of dogs, a controversial practice among some animal rights activists. 
“The process involves scientific procedures that can cause pain, suffering and distress,” according to Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “We believe that animals are often being cloned with little consideration for ethics or animal welfare.” 
And Sooam doesn’t just clone pets – it also, less controversially, clones dogs for “special purposes,” for example sniffer dogs that are used by the police or the military. Animals with particular diseases are also cloned so that drugs can be tested on them.
The idea is to develop “disease models” with transgenic animals. Cloning is a “growing business,” according to Hwang. – DPA


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