Winnie the two, the first cloned dog from Britain: Tiny dachshund puppy created in a test tube after owner wins competition

The first British dog to be cloned was born in Seoul, S Korea, on 30 March

It was created with DNA taken from a 12-year-old dachshund, Winnie

Winnie's owner, Rebecca Smith, 29, won a competition to have pet cloned

The caterer from west London put her dog forward to win £60,000 prize

DNA was taken from Winnie, sent to Seoul and fused into an embryo

Miss Smith says the 10-day-old puppy looks identical to her pet



But a cloning expert says the animals won't necessarily be the same

First mammal cloned from adult was Dolly the sheep in Scotland in 1996



Scientists have produced the first cloned dog in Britain after its owner won a competition to have her elderly pet replicated.

Rebecca Smith, 29, from west London, put her elderly dachshund, Winnie, forward to be cloned in a £60,000 competition organised by South Korean tech firm, Sooam Biotech.



She won, and the cloned puppy, called Mini Winnie, was conceived in a test tube and born in Seoul on 30 March.

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Britain's first cloned dog: This dachshund puppy, born on 30 March, was cloned from a 12-year-old, Winnie Rebecca Smith, 29, with her cloned puppy, mini Winnie, at the Seoul lab where it was conceived and born Miss Smith, a caterer, entered her 12-year-old dachshund, Winnie, into the competition for a £60,000 cloning

Tiny puppy: The dachshund, called mini Winnie, was born in a laboratory in Seoul, South Korea The puppy, seen suckling its surrogate mother, will be flown to its new home in London when it is six months

HOW IS A DOG CLONED?

The process involves obtaining live cells from a living dog or a dog five days after it has died. Dogs that have similar ovulation time are selected as egg donors and surrogate mothers.

Eggs are collected from the egg donor through a procedure called ‘flushing’ and the nuclei of the eggs, which contain DNA of the egg donor, is removed.

Then donor cell is then injected into the nucleated egg and the two cells are ‘fused’ together.

This fusion procedure produces a cloned embryo that is transferred into a surrogate dog. The whole process takes less than a day but comes with a hefty price tag, at around $100,000 or £63,000 to clone one dog.

Sooam Biotech has cloned highly trained rescue and police dogs for the South Korean government, as well as a number of highly prized pets in the U.S.



The process was filmed by a television company and will be aired tonight.

The first mammal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep, born in Edinburgh in 1996. Dogs were first cloned in South Korea in 2005, by Sooam Biotech scientist Dr Woo Suk Hwang, but this is the first time a British dog has been reproduced.

Miss Smith, a caterer, said she read about the cloning competition and entered her 12-year-old dachshund, sending in videos of her pet.

She said: 'My sausage dog is very special but she is 12 and not going to be around for ever.'



Winnie made it onto a shortlist of three, and after she won, a sample of her skin tissue was removed, and sent to South Korea in liquid nitrogen. There, the cells were put into eggs provided by a bitch of the same breed, before a spark of electricity fused the two.

The embryo was then put into a donor animal, and the resulting puppy was born by caesarean section, weighing just over 1lb, ten days ago.

Miss Smith, who flew to Seoul and watched the puppy being born, said it looked just like her own pet. British quarantine restrictions mean she now has to wait six months before she can bring the puppy home to meet the original Winnie.

How it's done: Eggs are collected from the egg donor through a procedure called 'flushing'. The donor cell is then injected into the nucleated egg and the two cells are 'fused' together. This fusion procedure produces a cloned embryo that is transferred into a surrogate dog

The puppy was cloned from a cell provided by Rebecca Smith's dachshund in west London Miss Smith, the brand new puppy, and one of the scientists from Sooam Biotech that cloned it

The puppy is still too small to see or hear but Miss Smith, 29, says it is identical to her own pet, Winnie Miss Smith, seen meeting the tiny puppy soon after it was born by caesarean section in a Seoul lab Original: Winnie the dachshund is credited by her owner with helping her overcome an eating disorder

South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-Suk cloned the first dog ever, afghan hound Snuppy, in 2005

The dog's owner, who credits Winnie with helping her overcome the bulimia she suffered as a teenager, told the Mirror: 'Personality-wise, I couldn't tell you [if it is identical to Winnie], because it doesn't see and it doesn't hear yet - it is just a little sausage dog that wriggles around drinking milk.'

The South Korean firm, which produced the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, and has also cloned highly trained rescue and police dogs for the South Korean government, now hopes other Britons will want to pay £60,000 to have their pets cloned.

Cloning expert John Woestendiek said that the dog cloning industry was based in South Korea because it has much lower ethical standards for the treatment of dogs than in Europe or the United States.

He said that some of the dogs used in the cloning process as egg donors or surrogate mothers were often killed and eaten afterwards.

And one of the British scientists responsible for cloning Dolly the sheep said he was sceptical about the benefits of cloning dogs.

Sir Ian Wilmut told the Mail: ‘Owners will be disappointed. So much of the personality of a dog comes from the way you treat them. If you spend £60,000 on a cloned dog you will treat it differently.’

FROM MICE TO DOGS: THE HISTORY BEHIND ANIMAL CLONING

In 1979, researchers produced the first genetically identical mice by splitting mouse embryos and then implanting the resulting embryos in female mice. Not long after, researchers produced the first genetically identical cows, chickens and sheep by moving the nucleus of a cell taken from an early embryo into an egg that had its nucleus removed.

But it wasn’t until 1996, that researchers were able to clone the first mammal from a mature cell taken from an adult animal.

After 276 attempts, Scottish researchers produced Dolly, the lamb from the udder cell of a six-year-old sheep.

Two years later, researchers in Japan cloned eight calves from a single cow, but only four survived.

Besides cattle and sheep, other mammals that have been cloned from somatic cells include: cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat. In addition, a rhesus monkey has been cloned by embryo splitting.

In 2008, scientists were able to create clones of a mouse that had been dead and frozen for 16 years. It was the first time they have been able to clone a frozen animal.

A cat called Little Nicky earned the title as the first commercially cloned pet in 2004 when a woman in Texas paid $50,000 (£30,000) for the service.

Dr Woo Suk Hwang, the chief technical officer at Sooam Biotech, pioneered the dog cloning technique in 2005.

His group is currently the only company in the world that offers dog cloning commercially.

So far, Sooam Biotech has carried out around 400 cloning procedures with big interest in the Far East and America.

But a spokesman for animal rights organisation PETA said: ‘It’s understandable that people fantasise about replicating an adored dog but cloning can only replicate genetic material.

‘Cloned animals will develop different personalities. We cannot resurrect animals, but we can give living animals in desperate need a chance at a happy life. Every year, millions of homeless animals are euthanised.’

Dolly the sheep: The world's first cloned mammal

Scientists in Scotland were the first in the world to clone an adult mammal, resulting in the birth of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian in 1996.

While there had been previous clonings from embryo cells, Dolly was the first successful cloning of an adult mammal.



Scientists took DNA from a single sheep cell and injected it into an egg, which was implanted into a surrogate mother.

Dolly, who had three mothers (one who provided the DNA, another who provided the egg, and a third who was the surrogate), was born on 5 July at the institute, in what was hailed the breakthrough of the year by Science magazine.

One of the British creators of Dolly the sheep (pictured), who became the world's first cloned mammal in 1996, has said he was sceptical of the benefits of cloning dogs

Dolly lived her entire life at the institute, where she was bred with a Welsh Mountain lamb and produced six lambs.

She was put down aged six in 2003 after suffering from a progressive lung disease. Sheep usually live to 11 or 12, and there was speculation that her premature death may have been caused by her having been cloned.

After Dolly was cloned, many other large animals including horses, bulls, pigs and deer were cloned.



Now, despite advances in the cloning process, animal welfare groups say the risks, including deformities, are still too high. And others critcise the methods used by scientists.

