Chinese Pet Cloning Agency Duplicates An Aging Celebrity Pooch To Keep Him Alive On-Screen

To keep China's most famous on-screen pooch alive, a Chinese pet cloning agency has created a duplicate of 'Juice'. As Juice grew older and his illustrious career came to an end, his Beijing-based master wanted him to live on, one way or the other. And that's when cloning as an option dawned on him.

Reuters

A mongrel stray adopted off the streets, the nine-year-old Juice ¡ª or 'Guozhi' in Mandarin ¡ª is unable to reproduce since he was neutered at an early age.

Sinogene is China¡¯s first biotech company known for their pet cloning services. After they made news for a gene-edited beagle in May last year, they launched commercial cloning services.

For at least 3,80,000 yuan (Rs 38,99,930), pet owners can clone their pets. Sinogene¡¯s CEO Mi Jidong said the company¡¯s pet cloning business is in its initial stages, but he plans to expand services to eventually include gene editing.

Reuters

¡°We¡¯ve discovered that more and more pet owners want their pets to accompany them for an even longer period of time,¡± said Mi.

China¡¯s biotech industry is growing rapidly and compared to similar enterprises in the West, faces relatively few regulatory barriers. Earlier this year, a Shanghai lab produced the world¡¯s first monkey clones, two long-tailed macaques. More controversially, He Jiankui of China¡¯s Southern University of Science and Technology last month claimed he used gene-editing technology to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls.

Tin-Lap Lee, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said while China had regulations on the use of animals for lab research, there were no laws explicitly covering animal cloning.

Reuters

¡°On the government side, the image of this cloning industry is very high-tech, and definitely...is very supportive of those high-tech industries because of their high profit margin,¡± said Lee.

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In Juice¡¯s case, skin samples were collected from the dog¡¯s lower abdomen and within weeks, Sinogene was able to isolate his DNA and fertilise an egg.

Reuters

The fertilised egg was then surgically inserted into the uterus of a surrogate mother dog ¡ª a beagle.

Juice¡¯s copy, 'Little Juice' ¡ª or 'Zhizhi' in Chinese ¡ª was born in mid-September and stayed with its surrogate mother in Sinogene¡¯s lab for about a month.

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The puppy was later given to animal trainer He Jun, at a small ceremony at which the original Juice was present.

SOURCE: REUTERS