A dog famous for Chinese film and television may continue his career even after he dies, now that his master has made a clone of the four-legged star, Reuters reports.
The owner of Juice, a nine-year-old mutt adopted off of the streets, had the dog cloned earlier this year so that he can continue the canine’s stardom for years to come.
“Juice himself is a piece of intellectual property with social influence,” the dog’s owner and trainer He Jun told Reuters.
So He took Juice, who has been neutered, to Sinogene, the first biotech company in China to offer pet cloning. The company extracted DNA from a sample of the dog’s skin, fertilize an egg and carried by a surrogate beagle, the news source reports. Little Juice, Juice’s copy, was born in September.
The service costs $55,065.
Last year, Sinogene cloned a gene-edited beagle and began offering commercial pet cloning services, becoming the first Chinese company to do so, Reuters reports.
The first successful cloning of a mammal happened twenty years ago with a Scottish sheep named Dolly. Despite Dolly dying young, the sheep’s offspring have reportedly lived a long life. It has since become more of a commercial industry.
However, cloning continues to spur controversy.
Just last month, a Chinese scientist claimed to have created the first gene-edited baby, which was met with criticism by the scientific community as well as the public.