Missyplicity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Missyplicity Project was a project devoted to cloning Lou Hawthorne's family dog, a border collie and husky mix. Missy died on July 6, 2002 at the age of 15 years.
Operation CopyCat was a branch of the Missyplicity Project that concentrated on cloning cats, after the discovery that dog genes are harder to copy than cat genes. Operation CopyCat announced that on December 22, 2001, CopyCat was born of the Missyplicity Project. She was called CC for short, and was born at the Texas A&M, College of Veterinary Medicine.
In 1997, news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned inspired a quest to find out whether Missy could also be cloned. In 1998, a multi-million dollar project was launched to clone Missy.
The news of this project spread quickly. Calls and emails poured in from people around the world who wanted to gene bank and clone their own remarkable pets. In response to this demand, several members of the Missyplicity Project founded Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) in February 2000.
Missy died in 2002 at age 15 before efforts to clone her had succeeded. Her DNA was gene banked for future cloning efforts. Genetic Savings & Clone made significant advances in understanding the reproductive physiology of both dogs and cats. However, because of the unique challenges specific to cloning dogs and the high cost of the research, GSC made a business decision to shut down its operation in 2006.
One of the key scientists on both The Missyplicity Project and at Genetic Savings & Clone was Dr. Taeyoung Shin, who was born and completed his Ph.D. in South Korea before coming to the United States. After both The Missyplicity Project and GSC proved unable to clone dogs, Dr. Shin’s Ph.D. thesis advisor, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, lead a team of research scientists at Seoul National University in a major dog cloning effort. This project was designed to overcome the specific obstacles which had thwarted both the Missyplicity and GSC teams.
In 2005, Dr. Hwang and his team successfully cloned the world’s first dog, which they named Snuppy. In 2007, Lou Hawthorne, former CEO of GSC and current CEO of BioArts International, was introduced to Dr. Hwang and his team by Dr. Shin of BioArts, and asked if they would clone Missy. They agreed and Missy’s DNA was flown to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation outside of Seoul.
The scientists at Sooam, led by Dr. Hwang, took Missy’s DNA and successfully produced three Missy clones. After 10 years of research and effort, the quest to clone Missy had finally succeeded. There are now three identical clones of Missy back with the original family. The clones are named Mira (after a Korean myth of an all-powerful benevolent dragon), Chingu (which means "friend" in Korean) and Sarang ("love").
Mira is the world’s first clone of a family dog. Mira is named after a Korean myth of an all-powerful benevolent dragon. She has a striking physical and behavioral resemblance to the original Missy. Mira was born on December 5, 2007. She now lives with BioArts CEO Lou Hawthorne in Mill Valley, CA.
Chingu and Sarang are also clones of Missy. They were born on February 15th and 19th. Chingu means "friend" in Korean and Sarang means "love". They were flown to the United States on April 18, where they joined their genetic "twin sister" Mira.
BioArts and Sooam decided to partner to offer a limited number of cloning spots to the public through a program called Best Friends Again.
