THE LONG-CHERISHED dream that man can reproduce his best friend has become a reality when South Korean scientists announced last week they had created the world’s first cloned dog. The canine clone follows hard on the heels of the first cloned cats, the first of which that made its debut four years ago.

Dr Woo-Suk Hwang and his team of researchers at Seoul National University made world headlines earlier this year when they created human stem cells with a patient’s specific genetic material, derived through cloned embryos, giving rise to the usual bout of hysterical headlines about ‘Frankenstein-style science’.

Now the South Koreans have secured their place as leaders in the cloning field by creating Snuppy, the first dog cloned from adult cells by somatic nuclear cell transfer. This is the same technique used to create Dolly the sheep, recognised as the world’s first cloned mammal, and many other animals including pigs, cows, horses, rabbits, rats and mice.

Dr Hwang said the breakthrough in cloning dogs may advance work on combating diseases by therapeutic cloning with stem cells.

Snuppy and mum

“Our research goal is to produce cloned dogs for (studying) the disease models, not only for humans, but also for animals,” Hwang told a press conference.

Lee Beyong Chun, the first author of the dog cloning paper, published in ‘Nature’ magazine, says he and his colleagues began the process on 2 August, 2002, supported by a grant from the South Korean government. Working non-stop and using over 1,000 dog eggs, they finally ended up with an Afghan hound puppy that is a clone of an adult male Afghan.

Snuppy, an acronym for Seoul National University puppy, where Hwang’s lab is located, is a male born by caesarean section weighing 530 grams (19 ounces) on 24 April after a normal, full-term pregnancy in a yellow Labrador surrogate mother.

The second puppy, identified as NT-2, weighed in at 550 grams (19.4 ounces) but died 22 days later from pneumonia. A post-mortem exam showed there were no anatomical problems with the dog that died.

Nuclear cell transfer is a notoriously difficult method of cloning. Dolly the sheep was the only viable embryo to survive out of 600 fertilized eggs. In the case of Snuppy, a total of 1,095 reconstructed embryos were transferred into 123 surrogate mother bitches to create the two dogs - an efficiency rate of 1.6 per cent.

Both puppies were created from an adult skin cell taken from a male Afghan hound using somatic cell nuclear transfer. The Afghan breed was selected mainly for its size and striking appearance, researchers said.

Snuppy and dad

It has taken scientists longer to clone a dog than other animals because of the difficulty in producing mature, unfertilised canine eggs in the laboratory.

Unlike other mammals, dog eggs are released earlier from the ovary than in other species. Instead of maturing the eggs in the lab, the researchers overcame the problem by collecting mature eggs from the dogs.

The egg’s genetic material was removed and replaced with the nucleus of the skin cell from a male Afghan hound, then fused to create an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother at the correct time to coincide with the embryo development.

Ethical Concerns
Some observers cautioned there are many unresolved ethical questions about where the science may lead.

Dr Freda Scott-Park, President Elect of the British Veterinary Association, is concerned about the likely reaction of dog lovers.

“This report demonstrates just how fast the world of genetic manipulation is moving and no one should underestimate the far-reaching consequences of this work,” she said.

“Sadly however, the media interest is likely to attract pet owners keen to re-create their much loved pets.

“No one can deny that techniques that advance our understanding of diseases and their therapy are to be encouraged. But cloning of animals raises many ethical and moral issues that have still to be properly debated within the profession.”

However, another member of the cloning team, Dr Gerald Schatten from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, US, said the South Korean team are not in the business of cloning pets.

“The overall objective of this programme is to learn about the root causes of diseases,” commented Dr Schatten. “We believe it is possible, if you can responsibly develop the ability to derive stem cells from cloned dog embryos, that our very best friends may turn out to be the first beneficiaries of stem cell medicine.

“And as we treat naturally occurring diseases in dogs, we’ll learn about whether it is effective in our pets and we’ll also learn whether it’s safe and effective for our loved ones.”

A spokesman for the RSPCA said: “We serious ethical and welfare concerns about the application of cloning technology to animals. To develop the technology requires experiments that cause animals pain and distress with extremely high failure and mortality rates. There is also a body of evidence that cloned animals frequently suffer physical ailments such as tumours, pneumonia and overgrowth.

“Cloning cats as pets is abhorrent to the RSPCA because we have thousands of cats who need loving homes,” says Dr Maggy Jennings, head of the RSPCA’s research animals department. “No true cat lover would condone causing suffering to cats and wasting their lives for such a trivial and selfish purpose.”

“In any case, a cloned animal is never going to be an exact copy. There is much more to an animal than its DNA. Cloned cats will inevitably have different life experiences, resulting in animals with different personalities.”

Jackie Beeson of the GCCF told OUR CATS of the GCCF’s concerns about the long-term cloning of cats: “While stem cell research could possibly be of benefit to cats, by enhancing treatment of some diseases, at some time in the future, cloning is of no discernable advantage and may result in the production of many ‘rejects’ with abnormalities.

“It is also too soon to know whether the clones themselves will lead normal healthy lives. In addition, much of the appeal of any cat is its personality, a feature which cannot be cloned, so owners who pay large sums to have their cats cloned may very well be disappointed with the result.”

Koreans Win The Race
The fact that the South Koreans won the cloning equivalent of the space race and thus became the first to clone a dog was a bitter blow to the leading American team of Genetic Savings & Clone, who created ‘CC’ the world’s first cloned cat in 2001, and a have since gone on to produce a number of other cloned cats. GSC are based at Texas A&M University, and in 1997 launched a high profile, $4 million dog-cloning project backed by billionaire John Sperling. The ‘Missyplicity project’ was aimed at cloning Sperling’s favourite canine, a crossbred named Missy.

Genetic Savings issued a short and rather terse press release on the Korean first, congratulating its rivals but attributing their win partly to the “greater availability” of dogs for research in South Korea, where animal-protection groups have little sway. “We expect to produce our own canine clones in the near future,” it added.

Texas A&M cloning expert Duane Kraemer, revealed that the GSC group nearly succeeded in cloning a dog three years ago. One of its Missy clones seemed perfectly healthy in utero but was stillborn, he said.

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