A cloned puppy was successfully born to a surrogate mother in England on Saturday, but the procedure cost a British couple roughly $100,000.
According to The Telegraph (UK), Laura Jacques, 29, and her partner Richard Remde, 43, lost their 8-year-old boxer, Dylan, to a heart attack in June after he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.
Dylan had been deceased for 12 days when the couple was able to get a skin sample to South Korea biotech firm Sooam for a cloning attempt.
The firm said that the procedure had never worked for any dog that had been dead longer than five days, however Dylan's DNA sample produced not one but two embryos. Those embryos were then implanted into surrogate mother dogs.
The first of those replica dogs was born the day after Christmas — Boxing Day, as the British call it. The couple named it Chance, after a character in the Disney film "Homeward Bound." The second replica pup is due on Tuesday. They expect to name it Shadow, after another character in the movie.
"The noises just make your heart melt don’t they?" Jacques said after the birth.
"After they got him out I still couldn’t quite believe it had happened. But once he started making noises I knew it was real. Even as a puppy of just a few minutes old I can’t believe how much he looks like Dylan. All the colorings and patterns on his body are in exactly the same places as Dylan had them."
"I was much more overwhelmed with emotion at the birth than I expected to be," said Remde.
The first mammal to ever be cloned was Dolly the sheep, born in Scotland in 1996. The first dog was cloned in 2005 by Sooam. It has cloned roughly 700 dogs since, but Dylan's cloning is unique because the cell samples were older than any previously used by the company.
In order to create a dog clone, scientists remove the nucleus and genetic material from a female donor egg, and implant it with the genetic material of the animal they wish to clone.
According to CBS News, "One of the main researchers at the [Sooam] facility, Hwang Woo-suk, is a controversial figure in cloning. In 2004, he and former colleagues at the Seoul National University made claims in the journal Science that they created the first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them, but their report was later discredited. In 2009, he was convicted of embezzling research funding as well as illegally buying human stem cells for this research."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.