SEOUL, South Korea — Bernann McKinney says her beloved pit bull Booger saved her life when another dog attacked her, then learned to push her wheelchair while she recovered from a severe hand injury and nerve damage.
He died in 2006, but now he’s back — at least in clone form, after the birth last week of puppies replicated by a South Korean company.
“Yes, I know you! You know me too!” McKinney cried joyfully Tuesday, hugging the puppy clones in a Seoul laboratory. “It’s a miracle.”
The five clones were created by Seoul-based RNL Bio in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who in 2005 created the world’s first cloned dog, a male Afghan hound named Snuppy.
It is headed by Lee Byeong- Chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, whose purported breakthroughs in stem-cell research were revealed as fake. Independent tests, however, proved the team’s dog cloning was genuine.
Lee’s team has since cloned about 30 dogs and five wolves but claims that Booger’s clones, for which McKinney paid $50,000, are the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.
The procedure, which costs up to $150,000, is drawing criticism from animal-rights groups that oppose cloning pets. They say it can lead to malformed offspring and unfounded claims that the new animal is an exact copy of the original.
There are millions of homeless dogs and cats in the U.S., said Martin Stephens, vice president for animal research issues at the Humane Society of The United States, and “we don’t need new sources to compete with animal shelters and reputable breeders.”
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