South Koreans to clone booger (No kidding)

[RickM]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080215/sc_afp/healthscienceskoreacloning

SKorea firm gets order to clone pet dog: report

SEOUL (AFP) - A South Korean firm has received an order for the world's first commercial cloning of a pet dog -- a request from a US woman to re-create her beloved former pitbull, a report said Friday.
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RNL Bio is charging 150,000 dollars to clone a pitbull terrier for the California woman using tissue from her dead pet named Booger, the Korea Times said.

It said the actual cloning will be conducted by Seoul National University while RNL Bio looks after the business side. Its CEO expects up to 500 orders within a few years from rich pet lovers in the United States and elsewhere.

[billwagnon]

For $75k I think I could find a dog that looked just like Booger!

[RickM]

I'll be honest, when my last Golden was sick I seriously thought of having tissue samples stored.
If this does become commercially viable I wonder where the price will level off.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

With thousands of unwanted pit bulls out there that are routinely used for fighting, why in the world would we clone and create more?

I belabored a decision similar to this recently; our cat Charlie recently passed away and I did some reading up, finding that I could (if I wanted) have genetic material harvested for later cloning. I thought long and hard about this - but ultimately decided against it for the simple reason that although my wife and I loved Charlie and missed him terribly, there are still literally thousands of other pets without homes out there, or that are in the "care" of undeserving or abusive owners.

I consider myself an animal lover. Not a wacky, PETA type that blows up research laboratories, but a person generally concerned about the humane and appropriate treatment of sentient, self-aware beings that are really not that different from us - who almost certainly think, dream, love and can also hurt and suffer. My mission (and anyone else's who would consider this) should be to help those that I can, not to necessarily create more problems. I can't solely solve the world's problems of animal cruelty and abuse, but I can do my part, make a good life for a few at a time by opening my heart and my home to them, and so on.

Not to belabor this, but it seems to me that the LAST thing the world needs (aside from more people) is more unwanted pets - particularly pit bulls. There are some great ones out there, but they tend to attract the lowest dregs of society - the tattooed, pierced schit-kicker, wanna-be-badass types that buy them as a fashion accessory to complete their "tough guy" image. It's sad because the dogs don't know any better - they ultimately just want to gain the "approval" and acceptance of their masters, and if trained to fight/kill in order to get it, they will.

As with most things, the problem is stupid people. And I think that people who would clone more animals, particularly of a typically "unwanted", much-maligned and mistreated breed would qualify as such. Certainly if they're just doing it "because they can", it's little more than scientific masturbation.

[id10t]

Nature vs. Nurture as well... sure, it will have the same DNA code... but not the personality, thought process, etc. that the original would.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally Posted by RickM

I'll be honest, when my last Golden was sick I seriously thought of having tissue samples stored.
If this does become commercially viable I wonder where the price will level off.

It's about $5,000 for the procedure now. The cloning itself is considerably more expensive but expected to drop as you say.

Genetic Savings and Clone was doing this for a while but has now gone out of business; some other places are popping up though but I didn't get deep enough in my researching it to determine prices (I'd decided against it by that point).

[slodave]

Whew! I thought the title suggested that they were going to clone Booger from "Revenge of the Nerds".

Yeah, yeah, the pic is from Better Off Dead.