Afghan is First Cloned Dog

An afghan hound called Snuppy was named yesterday as the first dog to be cloned by scientists. The hairy pup has the same floppy ears as his genetic father, which is not surprising. It was an ear that provided the skin cell from which he was made.

Scientists in South Korea, which leads the world in cloning, took genetic material from the cell and placed it in an empty egg.

The egg was then stimulated to start dividing and develop into an embryo.

Once activated, it was transferred to Snuppy’s surrogate mother, a yellow Labrador.

Snuppy was eventually delivered by caesarean section after a full 60 days of pregnancy. His name stands for Seoul National University puppy, after the centre where the cloning was carried out.

Scientists in Texas announced the birth of a cloned cat, CopyCat, or CC, in 2002 and the first made-to-order kitten, Little Nicky, was produced for a Texan woman last year. A US company is now offering pet owners the opportunity to clone their cats for $50,000 (pounds 26,000) each.

Cloning dogs is much more difficult, because their eggs are released from the ovary earlier than they are in other mammals.

The South Korean team, led by Professor Woo Suk Hwang, from Seoul University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, obtained just three pregnancies from more than 1,000 embryo transfers into 123 recipients.

Of these, one miscarried. Two puppy clones were eventually born, but one died of pneumonia after just 22 days.

Dr Freda Scott-Park, president elect of the British Veterinary Association, was concerned about the likely reaction of dog lovers to the research, published yesterday in the journal Nature.

She said, ‘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.’

An American member of the cloning team, Dr Gerald Schatten, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, said, ‘We are not in the business of cloning pets. Nuclear transfer is an extraordinary tool for scientific and medical research. It has never been about reproductive medicine or making any members of our family – even our pets.’

The main purpose of cloning is to obtain stem cells from embryos that can potentially become any kind of body tissue, and may revolutionise medicine.

Dr Schatten said dogs could find themselves at the heart of this research.

‘Once embryonic stem cells are established from dogs, veterinary applications of stem cell transplantations for the various diseases and disorders that occur in dogs might well be the first clinical uses of therapeutic cloning,’ he said.

Domestic dogs had a wide range of characteristics, and different breeds suffered from different diseases and disorders, some of which closely mirrored those in humans.’

The research may help scientists learn more about the root causes of disease in dogs and humans alike, Dr Schatten added.

The technique used was the same as that which created Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.

Prof Hwang’s team was also the first to successfully clone human embryos last year.

In May he announced the creation of human embryo clones that had yielded stem cells tailored to individual patients.

Part of his success is said to be the use of ‘fresh’ eggs obtained direct from human donors.

Most scientists working on therapeutic human cloning, including those in Britain, have had to make do with eggs left over from IVF treatment.

Prof Hwang

was congratulated by Professor Ian Wilmut, from the University of Edinburgh, who led the Dolly team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, who hopes to clone human embryos to produce stem cells that could be used to treat patients with motor neurone disease.