Hwang Woo Suk runs the only facility [Sooam Research of Korea] on earth that clones dogs for customers willing to pay $100,000. He led the team that cloned the first dog in 2005, and he’s produced more than 550 cloned puppies since, increasing the efficiency of a complicated process to a point where he can guarantee an exact genetic copy of a client’s dog, provided he has healthy tissue to work with.
Tibetan mastiffs, a breed of ancient, aloof guard dogs so hallowed in China that owning the best specimens is an assertion of status almost without rival. The donor of the cells used to clone these puppies was an 8-year-old champion stud from Qinghai province whose owner turned down a $5 million offer for him last year. He can earn nearly that much in one breeding season. Earlier this year, a developer paid $2.6 million for a single, gold-colored puppy, and a scarcity of top-quality puppies in China means that the run on mastiffs costing more than mansions is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
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Beyond the symbolic importance of the breed, Chinese officials wanted the operation staged in Weihai because it provided a backdrop for the announcement of a partnership between Sooam and BoyaLife, a fast-growing Chinese biotechnology company with 28 subsidiaries and operations in 16 provinces. Sometime early next year, ground will be broken for a 667,000-square-foot research laboratory on a spectacular plateau of yellow grass and scrubby pines facing the Yellow Sea. There, scientists from both companies will operate China’s first commercial animal cloning facility on grounds landscaped to look like a park.
“Dogs are the entry point,” he says. The far larger and more important focus will be cloning cows to help China deal with a growing appetite for beef. Currently the Chinese favor pork and consume just 5 kilograms (11 pounds) a year of beef per capita, half the global average and one-tenth what Americans consume. But the population is acquiring a taste, so Xu wants to “expedite the production of high-quality beef” through cloning.
In 2014 researchers were reporting cloning success rates of eight out of ten but in 1996 it took 277 attempts to create Dolly.
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Tibetan mastiffs, a breed of ancient, aloof guard dogs so hallowed in China that owning the best specimens is an assertion of status almost without rival. The donor of the cells used to clone these puppies was an 8-year-old champion stud from Qinghai province whose owner turned down a $5 million offer for him last year. He can earn nearly that much in one breeding season. Earlier this year, a developer paid $2.6 million for a single, gold-colored puppy, and a scarcity of top-quality puppies in China means that the run on mastiffs costing more than mansions is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
Beyond the symbolic importance of the breed, Chinese officials wanted the operation staged in Weihai because it provided a backdrop for the announcement of a partnership between Sooam and BoyaLife, a fast-growing Chinese biotechnology company with 28 subsidiaries and operations in 16 provinces. Sometime early next year, ground will be broken for a 667,000-square-foot research laboratory on a spectacular plateau of yellow grass and scrubby pines facing the Yellow Sea. There, scientists from both companies will operate China’s first commercial animal cloning facility on grounds landscaped to look like a park.
“Dogs are the entry point,” he says. The far larger and more important focus will be cloning cows to help China deal with a growing appetite for beef. Currently the Chinese favor pork and consume just 5 kilograms (11 pounds) a year of beef per capita, half the global average and one-tenth what Americans consume. But the population is acquiring a taste, so Xu wants to “expedite the production of high-quality beef” through cloning.
In 2014 researchers were reporting cloning success rates of eight out of ten but in 1996 it took 277 attempts to create Dolly.
Read more »
