Woman has puppies cloned from beloved pit bull, Booger

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 6, 2008

SEOUL, South Korea - Bernann McKinney says her beloved pit bull "Booger" saved her life when another dog attacked her, then he 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.

On Tuesday McKinney cried joyfully at a news conference to show off the puppies, hugging them as they slept with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed-breed dogs, in a Seoul laboratory. "It's a miracle," she told reporters.

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.

The firm 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 some 30 dogs and five wolves, but claims Booger's clones, for which McKinney, of California, paid $50,000, are the first successful commercial cloning of a canine. McKinney, who sold her house to raise the money, got a discount because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, the firm said.

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 exploitation of surrogates and egg donors, and they dispute as unfounded claims the new animal is an exact copy of the original.

"It's fraught with animal welfare concerns and it does not bring back a loved one," said Martin Stephens, vice president for animal research issues at The Humane Society of The United States, based in Washington.

"A dead animal's DNA does not guarantee the offspring will be identical to the deceased. It takes more than just genes to create an animal," said Stephens, who is a biologist. There are millions of homeless dogs and cats in the United States, he added. "We don't need new sources to compete with animal shelters and reputable breeders."

McKinney, 57, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, contacted Lee after her dog died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier gone to U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone, but it shut down in late 2006 after producing only a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.