Koreans Create Something Exactly Like a Hound Dog

A team of South Korean scientists announced today that they have successfully cloned a dog for the first time.

Snuppy, now a 14-week-old Afghan hound - the name stands for Seoul National University puppy - was created using a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Genetic material from the ear of a three-year-old male dog was transferred to an egg whose nucleus had been removed, tomorrow's edition of Nature magazine reveals. The cloned embryo was then inserted into the uterus of a yellow Labrador retriever.

The result is "a frisky, healthy, normal, rambunctious puppy", according to one of his creators, Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The experiment was not an unqualified success. More than 1,000 cloned embryos were implanted into surrogate mothers. Only two pregnancies resulted, both of which produced animals identical to the donor dog. One ended in miscarriage and another in the death of a puppy after 22 days.

Uncertainties about the health and lifespan of clones persist; the first animal to be cloned, Dolly the sheep, died prematurely in 2003 after developing cancer and arthritis.

Hwang Woo-suk's team of scientists cloned human embryos for the first time last year, and three months ago they created the first embryonic stem cells that genetically matched those of injured or sick patients. Dr Schatten emphasised that their work was not intended to enable the commercial cloning of pets to take place. "This is to advance stem cell science and medicine, not to make dogs by this unnatural method," he said.

Nonetheless, a spokesman for the Californian biotech firm Genetic Savings & CloneInc - which has already produced a cloned-to-order nine-week-old kitten - welcomed the breakthrough. "We've long suspected that if anyone beat us to this milestone, it would be Dr Hwang's team - due partly to their scientific prowess and partly to the greater availability of canine surrogates and ova in South Korea," Ben Carlson said.

"The ability to use the underlying technology in developing research models and eventually therapies is incredibly promising," Robert Schenken, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said. "However, the paper also points out that in dogs, as in most species, cloning for reproductive purposes is unsafe."

A spokesman for Britain's Kennel Club condemned the development." It takes all the art out of the science of dog breeding," Phil Buckley told Guardian Unlimited. He added that while he was reluctant to pre-empt any decision by Crufts, he thought it unlikely that the UK dog breeding community would recognise a cloned animal: "Our concern is that these animals are already receiving old genes."

A statement from the club said canine cloning ran contrary to its aim of "promoting in every way the general improvement of dogs": "Cloning cannot be used to make improvements because the technique simply produces genetic replicas of existing dogs."