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The Boogers return

— PHOTO: AFP

One of the five cloned canines in Seoul on Tuesday.

SEOUL: An American woman received five puppies on Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pit bull. She thus became the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world’s first successful commercial canine cloning service.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney’s dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world’s first cloned dog in 2005.

“It’s a miracle!” Ms. McKinney repeatedly shouted on Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers at a Seoul National University laboratory. “Yes, I know you! You know me, too!” she said, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalised the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.

Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Mr. Lee’s team has since cloned more than 20 canines.

But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine. “RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone,” the company said in a statement.

Ms. McKinney contacted Mr. Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.

The Korean scientists brought the dog’s frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.

Mr. Lee’s team has identified the puppies as Booger’s genuine clones, and his university’s forensic medicine team is conducting reconfirmation tests.

Ms. McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size. The incident resulted in her left hand later being amputated, and injured her leg nerves and stomach. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will only receive $50,000 from Ms. McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.

Mr. Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs a year and is interested in duplicating camels for customers in West Asia.

On the Net, RNL Bio is at http://rnl.co.kr/eng/main.asp — AP

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