Some guy in China paid $35K to clone his dead cat....
His Cat’s Death Left Him Heartbroken. So He Cloned It.
Garlic was dead, and there was nothing Huang Yu could do. So on a cold winter day, he buried his cat’s body in a park close to his home.
Hours later, still heartbroken, the 22-year-old businessman recalled an article he had read on dog cloning in China. What if someday he could bring Garlic back to life?
“In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable,” said Mr. Huang, who dug up his British shorthair and put the cat in his refrigerator in preparation for cloning him. “Garlic didn’t leave anything for future generations, so I could only choose to clone.”
That thought led him to Sinogene, a commercial pet-cloning company based in Beijing. Roughly $35,000 and seven months later, Sinogene produced what China’s official news media declared to be the country’s first cloned cat — and another sign of the country’s emergence as a power in cloning and genetics.
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To clone Garlic, scientists implanted skin cells from Mr. Huang’s original cat into eggs harvested from other cats. After an electric or chemical shock, 40 cloned embryos were implanted into four surrogate mother cats. That produced three pregnancies, two of which were miscarriages, said Chen Benchi, head of Sinogene’s medical experiments team.
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In his first meeting with the new Garlic in August, Mr. Huang found that cloning had not produced an exact copy of his former pet. The clone is missing a patch of black fur that graced Garlic’s chin. Sinogene said that clones might show slight differences in fur or eye color and that an outside firm had proved the DNA matched.
“If I tell you I wasn’t disappointed, then I would be lying to you,” Mr. Huang said. “But I’m also willing to accept that there are certain situations in which there are limitations to the technology.”
Garlic v1:
Garlic v2:
