A South Korean firm has received an order for what it said Friday was the world's first commercial cloning of a pet dog - a request from a US woman to re-create her beloved late pitbull. RNL Bio is charging 150,000 dollars to clone the pitbull terrier for the California woman using tissue from her dead pet, named Booger, it said in a statement.
"It seems that she had a disability and her dog helped her cope with the problem, so she was eager to get a clone of Booger," the company's CEO, Ra Jeong-Chan, was quoted as telling the Korea Times. "There are many people who want to clone their pet dogs in Western countries even at this high price."
The cloning will be conducted by Seoul National University while RNL Bio looks after the business side. Ra said he expects up to 500 orders within a few years from rich pet lovers in the United States and elsewhere. A Seoul National University (SNU) team created the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, on a non-commercial basis in 2005.
"Since then, no other teams have ever succeeded in cloning dogs. This will mark the first time that a dog is being cloned in a commercial contract," RNL Bio marketing director Cho Seong-Ryul told AFP.
He said Booger's owner had refrigerated some of its ear tissue. Cells were extracted from this and inserted into ova which were then implanted into eight bitches. Cho said the success rate for producing dogs by cloning in South Korea was already high, as one out of every four surrogate mother dogs producing cloned puppies. "The cost for cloning a dog may come down to less than 50,000 dollars as cloning is becoming an industry," he added. The SNU's feat in creating the world's first cloned dog was underestimated at the time because of the team's links to a disgraced stem cell scientist, Hwang Woo-Suk.
Hwang, once hailed as a national hero before a university inquiry ruled that part of his work was fake, is on trial for embezzlement and fake research. The government has banned Hwang from research using human eggs after his claims that he created the first human stem cells through cloning were ruled bogus in January 2006. SNU researchers last summer signed an initial deal with the customs service to clone drug-sniffing dogs.