I’m not one of a kind?!?
There can be only one dog cloning operation, or so says Lou Hawthorne, the CEO of BioArts, a biotech company based in California.
You may have heard that a South Korean company called RNL Bio announced earlier this week that they produced four cloned copies of a Labrador retriever. The original dog, Marine, was excellent at cancer-sniffing—able to pick out breast, prostate, lung, and bladder cancer cells. But she couldn’t have puppies, so her owner, canine trainer Yuji Satoh, asked RNL Bio to clone her. Two of the four new Marines have been donated to Satoh’s training center and to the Seoul National University lab; the other two are on the market for a cool half-million dollars each. And RNL Bio announced plans to venture into the pet market, cloning your deceased canine if you’ve got the cash.
All these moves have ruffled Hawthorne’s feathers. In a perturbed press release today, he says that his company, BioArts, owns the sole worldwide rights to use it the dog-cloning procedure patented by Start Licensing, another American company. “RNL has no right to offer this service, and is practicing black market cloning,” Hawthorne says. “Individuals who wish to clone a beloved dog have only one legal option, and that’s our Best Friends Again program.”
This isn’t the first time Korean scientists have cloned dogs, and it’s not clear right now how the law will sort this out—Start Licensing has repeatedly threatened legal action, but according to the English-language South Korean newspaper JoongAng Daily, patent disputes are somewhat new to Korea. Seoul National University, the largest patent holders in South Korea, has some staff members connected to RNL Bio, but didn’t have a single patent attorney as of last month, according to the same article.
If courts or trade organizations don’t step in, the marketplace may decide this matter. Early next month, BioArts plans to hold a series of online auctions with six-figure opening prices where people can bid for the few available spots to have BioArts clone their pet. So dig out the checkbook, dog lovers—bidding starts July 5.
Image: flickr/MiikaS
June 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 am
Koreans are smart. They will change a few things and patent their own cloning process.
That’s what the dumb American gets for trying to make a fast buck!
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
If patent rights can’t be upheld around the world then there would truly be chaos in the market. Companies invest millions of dollars in developing new technology. The only way they can often recoup that money is to have the protection that no one else will copy the technology they paid for. This is not a question of what ‘dump American’s get for trying to make a fast buck.’ BioArts paid a significant amount of money to license the patents. Why should a Korean company (or any other company for that matter) get to take advantage of expensive technology and patents without paying for it also? Can Americans or Europeans or Chinese or anyone else just start copying technology developed by Korean companies like LG, Samsung and Hyundai? Patent rights must be protected around the world. If Korea expects to be treated like a developed nation, then it must play by the developed nations’ intellectual property laws.
June 24th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
The US Patent and Trademark Office is 1.5 million applications behind and counting. The supervisors at the USPTO work from home (!!!). Something needs to be done. Somebody please appoint somebody who will fix this problem.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:06 am
The first animal cloning was accomplished by Drs. Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King in 1962, real clone war has recently begun.
The patent related to Dolly the sheep has not been successful in solving BioArts’ problem. It is reported that BioArts asked disgraced Korean scholar Hwang to clone Missy. Hwang was one of the inventors of the world first cloned dog, SNUppy but the patent is owned by Seoul National University. Hwang is not licensed from the university. If he clones a dog for commercial purpose as they plan an online auction, he infringes the SNUppy patent. So does BioArts.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
[...] last time we wrote about BioArts, the California-based biotech company was threatening action against a South Korean competitor over what BioArts says was patent infringement on its dog-cloning [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am
[...] a world without Fido, Misty or Max, now there’s an alternative to getting it stuffed—or cloned. Just yank some fur from your pet’s hide and send it to DNA2Diamonds, where a team will [...]
July 13th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
I’m interested to hear the follow up. Also, it seems pretty far fetched to think that BioArts paid the funds to wrap up all the patentable countries.
Ok. Bad pun, but it was fun.