SEOUL, South Korea — Every Friday, Junichi Fukuda leaves his apartment in Tokyo at 2:30 p.m. to make the 4:10 p.m. flight to Seoul's Gimpo International Airport. From there he heads to a biotech lab at the edge of the city, where he picks up a bouncy black pug by the name of Momotan. He takes the 5-month-old puppy to an apartment he has rented nearby and spends the rest of the weekend playing with her. On Monday morning, he drops her off and begins the eight-hour commute back home.
Fukuda, 55, has been doing this since May and will continue until November, when his puppy will be old enough to pass through Japanese customs and come home.
This may seem like a lot of work to see an animal, but "Momo" is no ordinary dog, and Fukuda has already invested a ton of money in getting her this far.
"If she were to reject me because she's not used to seeing me, that would really hurt me," Fukuda says through a translator. "So that's why I think it's very important to visit every weekend."
The truth is that Momo is a clone: a googly eyed, heartwarming breakthrough.
Tech Insider flew to South Korea to report on Sooam Biotech, the lab that produced Momotan.
We learned that cloning dogs is surprisingly easy — if you have $100,000 to spare.
In Fukuda's case, he was willing to spend that and more to create a genetic replica of Momoko, a dog who saw him through a divorce and gave him lots of love in her 16 years of life.
"She was the best pet in the world for me," says Fukuda, who runs a television commercial production company in Tokyo. "The reason I was able to work hard and become more successful was because I was together with Momoko, that was how much I loved her."
Fukuda worked with Sooam to take a cell sample of the dog just weeks before she died late last year, and three months later, his clone was ready. His eyes widen while comparing his old and new dogs. Momotan, he says, "acts exactly the same as Momoko, but I understand that she is a different dog."
Not only is Sooam the world's leader in commercial dog cloning, but it is also making radical advances in genetics. The insights gained in genetically engineering dogs could unlock advances in human medicine, resurrect extinct species, and more.
Inside the clone factory
When Fukuda walks into the care room where Momotan is kept, it's madness at a puppy-size scale.
Several breeds — Cocker spaniel, Labrador, pug, Boston terrier — hop up at the sight of him, tails wagging, mouths yapping. The animals here are waiting out their quarantine periods before they're sent to their owners in Japan, South Korea, England, Brazil, or the US.
Momotan stands on her hind legs, shivering with excitement at the sight of her master.
Contrary to the unease that the word "clone" tends to summon, these little beasts aren't science-fiction horrors; they're the kind of animals you spent your childhood begging mom to let you bring home.
"These puppies don't know they are clones," explains David Kim, a bespectacled and soft-spoken Sooam biologist who is showing us around the lab.
Somewhere out there — probably deceased — are the donor dogs that gave these animals their genetic material. With a little bit of science, their genes have found new life.
Sooam says it can clone any dog, regardless of age, size, or breed. It says about one out of three cloned embryos will develop into a healthy puppy. Though institutions like Sooam and its peers are not transparent with their success rates, it's reasonable to say Sooam is the most efficient cloning lab in the world.
To date, Sooam has cloned more than 600 dogs. At any given time, 40 to 50 of them are housed there in care rooms.
Below Momotan's room is the infant-care room, where you'll see tiny puppy clones beside surrogate mothers.
Surrogates don't have to be the same breed as the clones they carry to term, so you'll see some incongruous pairings, like these black-and-white puppies nursing from a brown mutt.
Now, it's true that pet-cloning is a niche market. There are only so many Simon Cowells in the world ready to spend $100,000 to get a dog that may have a totally different personality from the original dog's.
Indeed, that is why some people think the whole operation is sketchy. Beth Shapiro, a biologist at University of California-Santa Cruz who wrote "How to Clone a Mammoth," says what Sooam does is "kind of predatory."
"They're preying on people's heartfelt and sincere love for a pet to give them a genetic clone as if it's the same thing, but it's not," she says.
Less controversial is the cloning of genetically gifted working dogs, which is a source of millions of dollars in revenue for Sooam every year. The lab has been doing this for years: In 2009, it cloned Trakr, a search-and-rescue German shepherd who purportedly pulled the last survivor out of the wreckage from the 9/11 attack in New York.
Recently, the lab made nine clones of a working dog from the Seoul SWAT team (they're the black-and-white pups shown above), which will soon be sent to the police force to be groomed to fight crime.
How to clone your dog
The first obstacle to cloning your dog is that $100,000 cost. The second is getting the right kind of cells.
It's easier if your dog is still alive, in which case you just take it to the vet to get a biopsy sample, a piece of skin from the abdomen measuring 8 millimeters, or about half the width of a penny. Then you put those samples in an ice-pack-filled plastic-foam box and mail the box to Sooam.
You can clone a dog that has been dead for fewer than five days, too, as long as you wrap its body in wet towels and place it in a refrigerator, which keeps it from drying out before getting to the vet. If the dog is dead, Sooam asks that you send as many skin samples as possible so that the lab has a better chance of finding living cells.
Once the samples get through Korean customs, which can take up to three days, Sooam's biologists can finally get to work. The process they do perhaps better than anywhere else in the world is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). A somatic cell is any cell that isn't a reproductive cell like a sperm or an egg; in this case, it is the skin cell taken from the biopsy.
The biologists sterilize the sample, isolate the cells they want, and put them in a growth medium. One to two weeks later they have the cells necessary for the cloning process.
Then it's time for the most controversial part. Sooam operates on a pair of dogs rented from a lab-animal provider: an egg donor and a surrogate mother. These dogs are used only once by Sooam before they are returned for whatever else life holds for a lab-rental dog.
A surgery is happening when we visit Sooam, as there is just about every day.
Kim, the Sooam biologist, leads us through a set of lab doors to the audience chambers of the operating room. A Labrador-size dog is splayed out on the operating table, arms and paws out wide, comatose before the operation.
Dr. Woosuk Hwang comes in next with about half a dozen clinicians. The controversial leader of Sooam (more on him later), he leads the operation like a veteran quarterback methodically moving his team down the field, explaining what he is doing at every step.
First up is making an incision with a pen laser, sending the unforgettable scent of burnt dog flesh into the room. Then surgeons pull out the dog's pink ovaries to flush out the eggs.
On the other table rests another splayed dog. This is the surrogate — a cloned embryo will grow inside her. I watch as Hwang and his team nimbly insert an embryo into the animal.
"Hopefully, we can get a cloned puppy after 61 days," Hwang says matter-of-factly and without translation.
These operations happen five to 20 times a day at Sooam. Hwang has a saying that the days of the week are "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday, and Friday" — meaning everybody comes to work every day. As it was explained to me, the dogs, eggs, and embryos don't know it's the weekend, so that's no excuse for taking off work.
One floor up, in a library-quiet lab — the kind where you have to don a blue jumpsuit and get blasted by air to remove any lingering dust or other loose particles before you can walk in — a biologist will place a petri dish with the oocytes under a microscope attached to what looks like an old-school arcade cabinet. Using two joysticks, he will guide a hypersensitive pipette to puncture the egg and pull out the nucleus so it no longer has any genetic material.
The biologists will take a cell from the donor dog and insert it into that "enucleated" egg. The egg will then be placed into a machine called an Electro Cell Manipulator, which zaps it with electricity to make the membranes of the donor cell and the egg more porous, allowing them to fuse.
In this way, the donor dog's genetic material acts kind like sperm in natural reproduction. In normal reproduction, the egg and the sperm combine to get all the chromosomes of the baby to be. But in the case of cloning, all that genetic information is coming from the somatic cell.
And voila: It's a cloned embryo. No sperm needed.
Thirty days later, Sooam will be able to verify the surrogate's pregnancy, which the company says has about a 40% success rate. If all goes well, then after another 30 days the clone will be born.
