June 20, 2008

South Korean Dog Cloner Reports Success

Dog cloning is all over the news these days. Super Cool Pets has posted about Best Friends Again, who are holding a pet-cloning auction. Now from today's NY Times, Disgraced Cloner Reports Success With Tibetan Dog Breed:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A South Korean team led by a disgraced cloning expert said Thursday that it had created 17 clones of an endangered dog breed popular in China.
The team, from the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, said the cloned Tibetan mastiff dogs were born in April, two months after being requested by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The team that cloned the dogs was led by Hwang Woo-suk, who in 2005 successfully created the world's first known dog clone, but was found the same year to have fabricated research on cloning human stem cells.

Read Disgraced Cloner Reports Success With Tibetan Dog Breed.

Apparently rampant dog cloning is not imminent, but is an intriguing new field to keep watching. There is a August 3, 2005 write-up on dog cloning in National Geographic News which explains:

Cloning man's best friend, though, has proven more difficult than cloning farm animals. The researchers said canine eggs are hard to work with, because they are released from the ovary earlier than in other mammal species.

The researchers purportedly transferred 123 Afghan embryos, which resulted in only three pregnancies, one of which miscarried.