China has successfully cloned first ever beloved cat. A businessman Huang Yu, a cat owner was completely destroyed when his cat Garlic died due to a urinary tract infection. Hours later after burying his beloved pet carcass, he dug up him and put it in his refrigerator in hoped that soon scientists could helped him brought to life.
Photo from Sinogene
The 23-year-old businessman approached a Beijing-based Sinogene, a commercial pet-cloning company which has a record of more than 40 dogs cloned. They started to collect skin cells form Garlic's frozen body. It cost him about US$35,000 or Php1.8 million to generate a clone of his beloved Garlic, according to a news in Globaltimes.
The company started the experiment from the collected skin cells of his died pet. They used the cells along with eggs harvested from other cats, to generate 40 cloned embryos which were then implanted into 4 surrogate mother cats.
The entire process has resulted to three pregnancies of about seven months, two of which ended in miscarriages.
Photo from AFP
The cloned Garlic was born 66 days after an embryo was transferred to a surrogate mother. There's a little differences in both eye and fur color, where Garlic's black birthmark on her chin was missing.
Huang was overjoyed seeing the similarity between the two cats is more than 90 percent. However, even it appeared to be identical- still it has different temperaments and personalities.
“If I tell you I wasn’t disappointed, then I would be lying to you,” Huang tells The New York Times. “But I’m also willing to accept that there are certain situations in which there are limitations to the technology.”
Despite of some limitations in the cloning process, many have still considered this remarkable achievement especially to people whom they consider their pet as family member.
The first major success in animal cloning was Dolly the sheep, born in Britain in 1996 as the first Mammal cloned from an adult cell.
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