A South Korean biotech company has announced it will, for the first time ever, commercially clone a pet dog, according to linkurl:reports;http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2008/02/133_18963.html coming out of the country. RNL Bio said last week that it received an order from Californian Bernann McKunney, to clone her deceased pet pitbull, Booger, to the tune of $150,000. Booger died in 2005, but not before McKinney had tissue from his ear preserved. The Korean company told the linkurl:BBC;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7246380.stm that the cloning will take place at Seoul National University (SNU), where the first dog, Afghan hound Snuppy, was successfully cloned as a proof of concept in 2005. The SNU team that will recreate Booger is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, who was a colleague of linkurl:Hwang Woo-suk,;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933/ the disgraced Korean stem cell scientist who admitted fabricating data on human embryonic stem cell lines in 2006. Hwang's dog cloning work, however, was determined to be legitimate, and the...
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