Britain gets its first cloned dog

Britain's first cloned dog has been born after a 12-year-old dachshund was reproduced as a puppy in a South Korean laboratory at the cost of 60,000 pounds.
Rebecca Smith, a caterer from West London, had the puppy created in a test tube using DNA from her pet, Winnie.
"My sausage dog is very special but she is 12 and not going to be around forever. My boyfriend always joked, 'We need to get her cloned'," Smith said.
"Then I read an article about it and there was a competition to get your pet cloned. We sent in some videos and it just sort of snowballed from there," she said.

Smith, 29, won the 60,000 pounds competition and travelled from Britain to Seoul, South Korea, and witnessed 'mini Winnie' being born on March 30.
Winnie was chosen by a party of executives from Sooam Biotech who travelled to the UK to pick three dogs from a shortlist before presenting each case to the company.

A sample of Winnie's skin tissue was taken and stored in liquid nitrogen before being transported to South Korea.
In Seoul, her cells were put into eggs from a donor dog of the same breed. A spark of electricity then created a cloned embryo which was in turn transferred into a surrogate dog, 'The Mirror' reported.

Mini Winnie was born via caesarean from a mongrel dog much bigger than itself and weighed just over 453 gm.
"I saw it being born and it looks exactly like Winnie. It is identical. Personality-wise I couldn't tell you because it doesn't see and it doesn't hear yet - it is just a little sausage dog that wriggles around drinking milk," Smith said.
However, Sir Ian Wilmut, who led the team that cloned the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996 said he was sceptical of cloning dogs.
"Owners will be disappointed. So much of the personality of a dog comes from the way you treat them. If you spend 60,000 pounds on a cloned dog you will treat it differently. I am sufficiently sceptical," he said.