A lesson in cloning....
His Cat’s Death Left Him Heartbroken. So He Cloned It.
China’s first duplicate cat marks the country’s emergence in gene research and its entry in a potentially lucrative and unregulated market for cloning pets.
BEIJING — 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.
It also suggests that China could turn pet cloning into a viable business. Duplicating dogs and cats has not really taken off in the United States and elsewhere, experts say. Pet-obsessed China might be different. The size of China’s domestic pet market is expected to reach $28.2 billion this year, up nearly one-fifth from 2018, according to Gouminwang, a pet consultancy in Beijing. The country already has 55 million pet dogs and 44 million pet cats, and demand for cats is accelerating.
Pet cloning is not confined to China — Barbra Streisand famously declared last year that two of her dogs are clones — and people have been cloning cats for years. But Garlic is the first cat cloned by China, solidifying its position among major cloning nations, which include the United States, Britain and South Korea.
Mi Jidong, Sinogene’s chief executive, said the company decided to start cloning pets in 2015 after conducting a survey of roughly 1,000 people that showed there was demand. The company has cloned more than 40 dogs, including schnauzers, Pomeranians and Malteses, at a cost of about $53,000 each, some as pets and others for medical research.
It charges more for dogs than cats because the window for harvesting a dog’s eggs is very small, according to Mr. Mi. He said more than 100 people had stored the DNA samples of their pets in anticipation of creating clones.
Garlic:
Garlic 2.0:
