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The Washington Post

Dylan the boxer meant everything to his owner, Laura Jacques, a dog walker from West Yorkshire, in Britain.
“I fell in love with him from day one,” Jacques said. So when the eight-year-old canine was diagnosed with a brain tumour in June, she was devastated.
“Within 19 days of the diagnosis, he was gone,” she said. “I was still in denial about the fact that he was even going to die in the near future.”
Her partner, Richard Remde, was grieving as well, but his biggest concern was Jacques’s well-being.
“I felt I needed to do something to try to make it better,” Remde said.

This is the part of the story where most folks would go looking for a puppy to adopt. But instead, Remde packed up some samples of Dylan’s tissue and got on a plane to South Korea. His destination was the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which clones dogs for US$100,000 a pup. The company’s founder, Hwang Woo-suk, has a dark past of possible scientific misconduct and fraud, but his career has had a second wind, with Sooam producing hundreds of healthy canine clones.
At first, Jacques and Remde simply hoped to put some of Dylan’s cells in storage with Sooam so they could consider creating a clone somewhere down the line. But on December 26, the couple welcomed a Boxing Day boxer into the family. And a second clone of Dylan followed the next day.
Their birth is something of a landmark, since they were created with less-than-ideal genetic material.ooam clones puppies by taking donor eggs and pulling the genetic material out of them. Then, cells cultivated from the donor dog are slipped inside, and the whole thing is zapped with electricity to encourage everything to fuse. If it works, the egg starts growing like it’s fertilised and becomes an embryo - but the genetic material is 100 per cent provided by the donor dog, not the egg donor.

This embryo is then be implanted into a surrogate, and with any luck, a puppy follows a couple months later.
“We didn't think it were going to work,” Remde said, explaining that cells taken immediately after Dylan’s death hadn’t been properly refrigerated and had failed to grow. Sooam offered to try with older cells - ones that had spent a week in the deep freeze, and were now 12 days deceased - but it was a long shot.
The company had never cloned using cells that old.
“It was never our plan to rush into cloning Dylan, but by the time those cells had gotten to the stage where they were ready to either freeze or clone, they just weren't strong enough that they could guarantee they'd survive being frozen,” Jacques said. “We kind of felt like it might be our only chance. We didn't take this decision lightly - it was an emotional rollercoaster.”

Remde and Jacques say they’ve been happy with the process so far, and that they’re eager to get to know their new puppies - and their puppies’ surrogate mothers, which they plan on adopting.
It would be easy to assume that Remde and Jacques expect the puppies, Shadow and Chance, to be perfect replicas of their beloved dog. But genes aren’t everything, and the identical pups will likely grow into very different dogs than Dylan - and even from each other.
“To be honest, I don't want them to be too similar to Dylan,” Jacques said. “My bond with Dylan . . . I'd never want these puppies to be an exact replica. We're not trying to replace him.”

Cloning puppies - and learning how to give dogs IVF treatments - might seem frivolous at face value. But many argue that these procedures provide scientists with the funds and the subjects they need to push cloning technology forward. Dylan’s case is of special interest, since his cells were in relatively poor condition when the cloning took place.
Doggy DNA that’s spent a few days in a deep freeze is obviously a far cry from, say, mammoth DNA that’s been frozen in a glacier for thousands of years. But one day, researchers like the ones at Sooam could be using these techniques to save endangered species, or even to bring extinct ones back to life.


Their beloved dog’s sudden death was too much to bear - so they cloned him

One of the two puppies cloned from Dylan the boxer. Photo: Twitter/@weloveddylan

The delivery team cradle one of the newborn clones at Sooam Biotech in South Korea. Photo: Twitter/@weloveddylan

Dylan the boxer with owner Laura Jacques. Photo: Twitter/@weloveddylan

Dylan the boxer as a playful puppy. Photo: Twitter/@weloveddylan

Richard Remde and Laura Jacques with Hwang Woo-suk (centre), whose Sooam Biotech cloned their beloved dog, Dylan. Photo: Twitter/@weloveddylan

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