Korean dog-cloning laboratories are fierce commercial rivals
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SEOUL: The only two laboratories known to have successfully cloned dogs, both based in South Korea, are producing a steady string of genetic copies. But as hopes are rising over the country's latest high-tech product, so is an international dispute over who controls the lucrative right to bring back a deceased pet beagle or duplicate a Dalmatian.
The high-stakes battle pits South Korea's best-known cloning experts against each other: One is Hwang Woo Suk, a disgraced scientist now being tried on allegations of fraud for having faked research saying he had created human embryonic stem cells through cloning. The other is his estranged protégé, Lee Byeong Chun, who also has been indicted on fraud charges.
In 2005, Hwang and Lee created the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy. But since then they have split into rival laboratories, each vying to become the world's top animal cloning center. The competition is spurring technological advances, bringing down the cost of cloning dogs and raising the prospects for a new South Korean export industry.
So far the two laboratories have produced a total of more than 50 cloned dogs, and more are in the works. While most of these were produced in the line of research, an increasing number are being cloned commercially, including a pit bull named Booger.
Last week, two years after Booger died of cancer, five genetic copies were born. His American owner, Bernann McKinney, who met the clones Tuesday, had paid Lee's team $50,000 to replicate the dog she said once saved her from a savage mastiff.
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"When Booger was dying, his eyes locked on mine," McKinney said. "And he told me with his eyes, 'Don't be sad, because I am going to see you again."'
While the possibility of creating a genetic copy of a beloved pet has attracted worldwide interest, the more promising enterprise, from a commercial perspective, is expected to be mass-producing dogs for medical research and as service animals. For example, by next summer, South Korea's customs service plans to put the clones of a champion sniffing dog on patrol to detect drugs and explosives.
On one side of the dog-cloning dispute is the patented technology developed at the Roslin Institute of Scotland in creating Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, in 1997. Roslin never managed to clone a dog, but in May a California-based biotech company named BioArts International bought a sole worldwide license for cloning dogs and cats, based on Roslin's patents.
BioArts, which said it had already spent millions of dollars in unsuccessful attempts to clone dogs, entered a partnership with the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea. The lead scientist there is Hwang, who had headed the team at Seoul National University that produced Snuppy.
After Hwang's work on human stem-cell cloning was exposed as fraudulent, he was expelled from the university. The patents on the techniques used to produce Snuppy remained in the control of the university, and in June it granted an exclusive worldwide license for cloning dogs to a Seoul biotech company named RNL Bio.
RNL joined up with Lee, one of the key researchers on the Snuppy project. Although Lee was reprimanded by Seoul National University, he was allowed to stay there pending his trial on charges of misusing state research funds.
Now BioArts is contesting the right of RNL to clone dogs commercially. It says that the process that Roslin developed and patented to produce Dolly the sheep, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, was "foundational" and has been used in the cloning of numerous mammals.
In this technique, scientists remove the nucleus containing DNA from an egg from a donor animal and inject into it genetic material from the animal to be cloned. If all goes well, the newly constructed cell develops into an embryo, which is then placed in the uterus of a surrogate mother.
Lou Hawthorne, the chief executive of BioArts, said, "RNL has no right to offer this service and is practicing black-market cloning."
RNL has countered with the argument that what matters is technological advancement. While Hwang and Lee employed somatic cell nuclear transfer in producing Snuppy, they scored several crucial breakthroughs in such areas as developing a technique to pinpoint the timing of canine ovulation, a difficult problem that had frustrated other efforts to clone dogs.
"Cloning a sheep and cloning a dog are two different technologies," said Ra Jeong Chan, the chief executive of RNL. "Scientists, including those funded by Hawthorne, had tried but could never clone a dog until the Seoul National University team came along. That's evidence enough that with the Dolly technology you cannot clone a dog and BioArts is full of nonsense."
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