At the lab, the staff is preparing for a group of Americans coming to pick up two special puppies, cloned from the DNA of a Belgian Malinois that’s currently deployed with a unit of the U.S. Army Special Forces (which Sooam isn’t permitted to name). The donor dog was chosen because he was a standout among Special Forces canines—elite even among the elite, something like the soldier-dog equivalent of LeBron James—and these three-month-old puppies were heading to the U.S. to undergo training as part of an experiment. Photograph by Thomas Prior for Bloomberg BusinessweekTwo Belgian Malinois puppies, cloned from the DNA of a dog that’s currently deployed with a unit of the U.S. Army Special Forces At this point, cloning a pet is straightforward for Sooam. Given fresh cells, Hwang says, “we have never failed cloning a specific dog, regardless of its size or breed.” In turn, that part of the business is fairly mature. Orders are healthy. There’s a waiting list. What’s most intriguing to Hwang now is the study of clone performance, particularly among what Sooam calls special purpose dogs. He wants to know if a puppy cloned from a truly exceptional working dog will end up performing at that job as well as his genetic twin. If he does, it could seriously disrupt the process of breeding and training police dogs, explosives detection dogs, and others that serve in jobs that help save human lives. Recently, Sooam secured a contract to provide 40 cloned special purpose dogs to the South Korean national police, and several are already in service at the Incheon International Airport near Seoul. But Hwang’s scientists lack proof that the donor dogs were truly special. That’s why they sought out the Americans, to find empirically great dogs to clone. The four Americans arrive after lunch, in the company of some powerful South Koreans, including Younghoon (David) Kim, chairman of the Daesung Group, one of the country’s largest multinationals, and his managing director. Daesung has interests in energy and defense and is invested in this particular project as the Korean liaison to the American company that will, if this experiment proves out, sell cloned super dogs to police departments and military units around the globe. Known as BioPremium K9, the startup was founded by Peter Hwang, a Korean American who served 25 years with the Illinois State Police and the FBI. Hwang (no relation to the doctor) has known Daesung’s chairman since they were both young men, and Kim came to him with an unusual request: He needed to find “the best working dog in the U.S.” for a special project. Hwang recruited an Illinois-based cop and canine specialist named Bert Badertscher to help him, and the two set out to locate just such a dog. Photograph by Thomas Prior for Bloomberg BusinessweekBrannon holds Special Ops clones Ghost and Echo between bite-training sessions in Sharpsville, Pa. Eventually, they settled on Shallow Creek Kennels, a small facility north of Pittsburgh that trains elite dogs for numerous police departments and U.S. government agencies, including Special Operations. The owner, John Brannon, loved the idea and had just the dog in mind. He arranged for fibroblasts to be collected from the dog, which is currently working in Afghanistan and whose identity is classified. Sooam cloned him, resulting in Ghost and Echo, the adorable clone brothers that the Americans had all come to Seoul to collect. Because every day matters when your goal is to turn a puppy with potential into a dependable, battle-ready working dog, Brannon had given Sooam staffers a strict training and socialization regimen to follow from birth, but it isn’t until the dogs are bounding around on the front lawn after a short adoption ceremony that Brannon is able to get his first good look at them. “I’m impressed. They seem advanced for their age. But you don’t really know until a dog is 12 months what you have physically and mentally,” Brannon says, which is why he doesn’t bother with the imprecise and wasteful process of breeding. It’s far more effective for him to travel to Europe a few times a year to source year-old dogs from one of several kennels he knows and trusts. One of the most challenging things about great police dogs, Badertscher says, is finding the right puppies and then training them, only to have to retire them eight or nine years later. “Now we have a chance, an idea—it’s only a theory,” he says. Every time you breed a dog naturally, you lose some portion of its greatness, because the genes are diluted by the contribution of the mate. And you’re lucky if one or two dogs out of a litter of eight might have the drive and focus to become the kind of dogs who can find bombs, take fire, and work independently on command—let alone jump out of airplanes at night. “Ghost and Echo are the first research study to see if this idea works: Can we reproduce these top-quality dogs through cloning” and eliminate most of the margin for error, Badertscher says. Beyond that, he believes, “the next step is giving these dogs a chance to live longer” by using cloning to eliminate problems such as cancer, hip dysplasia, and bad eyesight that can prematurely end a working dog’s career. Two extra years of work would be an incredible boost in productivity, keeping the best dogs working longer and offsetting the increased costs of cloning. “The biggest thing we’ll have to fight,” he says, “is the word ‘cloning.’ ”
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 15:32:02 +0000
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