All the same: clone breaching lives’ uniqueness? S Korea reveals 1st dog clones - 1 dead dog into 5 identical ones

She has brought her precious pooch back from death, more than one but five – via cloning at the price of $50,000. Not the one unique dog Booger, but a bunch - FIVE!
Woken up at midnight by dear memory of the dead dog? Or thrilled by five identical dogs resembling the dead one? It is not a bad idea to hear from the very first commercial cloning client, or to imagine, the true sentiment before jumping to clone yours.

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(SEOUL, South Korea) — Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service. Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005. Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned more than 20 canines. But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine. "RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone," the company said in a statement.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will receive just a third of that sum from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan. Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.

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Photos courtesy of Ahn Young-joon/AP

Original Source: Time

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