Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pit bull, 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 Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created in 2005 the world's first cloned dog – a male Afghan hound named Snuppy. “It's a miracle!” McKinney repeatedly shouted when she saw the cloned Boogers at a Seoul National University laboratory. “Yes, I know you! You know me, too!” she said, hugging the tiny black puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs. The team of scientists 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 some 30 dogs and five wolves. RNL Bio said in a statement that its cloning of Booger was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine, adding it will offer the service to customers worldwide. McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked US-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing 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 nurtured them before launching 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.
