5 pups cloned for Calif. woman

The five clones have identical white spots.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Bernann McKinney says her beloved pit bull Booger saved her life when another dog attacked her, then learned to push her wheelchair while she recovered from a severe hand injury and nerve damage.

He died in 2006, but now he’s back — at least in clone form, after the birth last week of puppies replicated by a South Korean company.

“Yes, I know you! You know me too!” McKinney cried joyfully Tuesday, hugging the puppy clones as they slept with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed-breed dogs, in a Seoul laboratory. “It’s a miracle.”

The five clones were created by Seoul-based RNL Bio in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who in 2005 created the world’s first cloned dog, a male Afghan hound named Snuppy.

It is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose purported breakthroughs in stem- cell research were revealed as fake. Independent tests, however, proved the team’s dog cloning was genuine.

Lee’s team has since cloned some 30 dogs and five wolves, but claims Booger’s clones, for which McKinney paid $50,000, are the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.

The procedure, which costs up to $150,000, is drawing criticism from animal rights groups which oppose cloning pets. They say it can lead to malformed offspring and exploitation of surrogates and egg donors, as well as unfounded claims that the new animal is an exact copy of the original.

McKinney, 57, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, contacted Lee after her dog died of cancer in April 2006.

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 said the five clones, which share identical white spots below their necks, were all healthy, though their weights vary slightly.

McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her from an attack by another dog three times his size. She suffered severe injuries to her left hand and damaged nerves in her leg and stomach, and spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.

McKinney said Booger acted as more than a canine companion as she recuperated. He pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out, 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.

“I believe that Booger was an angel that God rented out to me for a short period of time,” she said. “And he knew I would be lost without him, so he sent me some more. He sent me five more mini-Boogers.”

She said she has named the clones Booger McKinney, Booger Lee, Booger Ra, Booger Hong and Booger Park, after herself and the South Korean scientists who achieved the cloning.

McKinney said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California, where she lives with five other dogs and three horses. She plans to donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but was paid a third of that by McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.

Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.