Dogs are highly social animals; their loyalty and devotion to humans are part of their natural instinct and so they earn their title of ‘man’s best friend’. On April 24th 2005, Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea became the proud owner of Snuppy, the first successful dog clone. Somatic-cell nuclear transfer was used to produce Snuppy the dog; an Afghan hound genetically identical to her mother. Genetic material extracted from a cell from the ear of a 3 year old male Afghan hound was injected into an empty egg cell, stimulated to start embryo development and placed in Snuppy’s surrogate mother, a yellow Labrador.
However, cloning is by no means a new breakthrough; famous clones include Dolly the sheep, CC the cat and Ralph the rat. So what makes Snuppy so unique in this funny farm? SNU states “man’s very best friend may turn out to be the first beneficiary of stem cell medicine”, their reasoning: dogs and humans have many common characteristics and diseases which afflict both species, using populations of dogs which are homogenous the root causes of these diseases could be effectively studied.
SNU’s main ‘research call’ is to produce hundreds of these cloned dogs to understand and treat a range of serious human diseases such as cancer and hypertension. However, cloning involves confinement within a laboratory, many invasive procedures and is inevitably stressful on any animal. Is it moral to condone this quality of life for such a highly sociable and loved animal? Is their suffering, purely in the name of science, too much to ask from man’s best friend?
written by: Tristine Friedrich
Primary resource:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0803_050803_dog_clone.html
Secondary resources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4742453.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog
For further information relating to cloning:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml
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