Cloning Advancements and Acheivements

Cloning Advancements and Achievements Have you ever had a favorite dog - a pet you would keep for the rest of your life if you could? Well, now you can. Researchers in Seoul, South Korea are betting that consumers will pay big bucks to have their pet brought back to life, at least genetically speaking. RNL Bio announced in mid-February that they are offering commercial pet cloning services to the public. Offering cloned dogs at a price of $150,000, services are marketed to wealthy pet owners. The company 's first order is from an American woman requesting that her dead dog, a pit bull terrier, be cloned. RNL Bio will extract the DNA from ear tissue, which the pet owner preserved with a biotec company a year before the dog 's death. The odds of creating a successful clone are only 25%, but the lab insists it will not give up until her pit bull is recreated as a clone. The average pet owner will not be faced with whether to duplicate their beloved canine or even feline for that matter. The cost of the procedure coupled with the cost of "banking" the DNA sample, not including yearly maintenance on the storage of the sample, will allow only the most wealthy to participate. With all the obvious advances being made in animal cloning, can we expect human clones to be next? With these discoveries coming at such a fast pace, morality issues and ethical questions are continually fueled into the new debates about the future of cloning. The average consumer will not be faced with a personal decision on the morality of cloning but will have to look at it with an outsider 's viewpoint. Aside from human cloning, no cloning project has brought on more debate than the marketing plan of Genetic Savings and Clone, the first U.S. firm to go commercial and offer pet cloning. They were responsible for the first cloned-to order pet sold in the U.S., a cat named Little Nicky. This carbon copy cat had a $50,000 price tag at the time of the cloning back in 2004. "It 's

Bibliography: Moorgate, Roger. "First Human Clone." The Reproductive Cloning Network. 2002. 20 Feb 2008 <www.reproductivecloning.net>. "The clone zone, what is cloning, why clone, what are the risks of cloning." Learn.genetics. 2008. Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. 18 Feb 2008 <Weiss, Rick. www.learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/cloning>.