clones

If you find an individual with exceptional talent, why not clone it? That's an idea that may no longer be confined to the realm of science fiction, at least for dogs. South Korea's customs service has now deployed the world's first cloned sniffer puppies for hunting smuggled drugs.

Just 30 percent of natural-born sniffer dogs can normally pass the required training, but South Korean scientists hope that they can improve that to 90 percent by cloning best-of-breed dogs.

Surgical solutions for restoring lush locks have always involved a painful trade-off — transplanting hairs from the rear of your head to the top could leave you thin in the back. But Bessam Farjo, a hair-loss specialist at the British company Intercytex, has devised a less barbaric fix: cloning patients' hair cells. "The concept is to create a limitless supply of donor hair," Farjo says.

The European Union is proceeding more slowly than the Food and Drug Administration did during its investigation into the efficacy and safety of cloned meat and milk. While the United States has already given industry the go-ahead to begin farming the cloned animals, the EU is taking a more measured approach, even with the European Food Safety Authority’s public statement that there is no expectation of additional environmental risks.

In 2005, South Korean scientists created the world's first cloned dog, and now the country has announced plans to use clones to sniff for drugs. Yesterday the Korean Customs Service announced that seven Labrador retrievers had been cloned from an expert drug-sniffer that is still on the job. The scientists leading the research at one point worked with disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-suk, but the dog cloning work is legitimate.

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If the biotech industry has its way, ordering a hamburger might soon sound something like this: one charbroiled cloned-beef patty, with genetically modified cheese, lab-grown bacon and vitamin-C-fortified lettuce, on a protein-spiked bun. The burger of the future is delicious, nutritious and contains more engineering than a stealth bomber.