SEOUL, South Korea — An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pit bull, Booger, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world’s first successful commercial canine cloning service.
Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney’s dog were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world’s first cloned dog in 2005.
“It’s a miracle!” McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned puppies, for which she paid $50,000.
“Yes, I know you! You know me, too!” McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed-breed dogs.
The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.
Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee’s team has since cloned more than 20 canines.
But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.
McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog, but the company shut down because of lack of demand in late 2006 after producing only a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.
The Korean scientists brought the dog’s frozen cells to Seoul in March and launched formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.
Lee’s team have identified the puppies as Booger’s genuine clones, and his university’s forensic medicine team is currently conducting reconfirmation tests.
McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size. Her left hand was severely injured, and her leg nerves and stomach were also damaged. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.
McKinney said Booger acted as more than just a canine companion as she recuperated from the attack.
Her dog pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out. He opened her house door with his teeth and helped her take off her shoes and socks, even though she never trained him to do so.
“The most unusual thing about Booger was that he has a unique ability to reason,” she said. “He seems to understand I couldn’t use my hands.”
McKinney said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.
RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will receive just a third of that sum from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, company head Ra Jeong-chan said.
Ra said his firm eventually hopes to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in cloning camels for customers in the Middle East.
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