South Korea Scientists Clone Cancer-Sniffing Dog, Cloning Problems Exist
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
June 16, 2008
Seoul, South Korea (LifeNews.com) — Scientists in South Korea say they cloned a dog that is capable of sniffing out cancers in human patients. However the animal cloning process is still plagued with problems that would make human cloning lead to the destruction of hundreds of unborn children.
The firm RNL Bio said in a statement that it used tissue from a retriever from Japan to clone four dogs. They used the fetus of a six-and-a-half-year-old canine to make the clones.
The Japanese stem cell company Seems, asked the team from Seoul National University, led by professor Lee Byeong-Chun, to clone the dogs.
The cloned dogs will soon head to Japan to learn the same skills as their mother, who was unable to have children. Each cloned dog will be priced at 500 million won ($480,000) and a couple of them will be sold to other clients.
In December 2006, Lee said he had cloned the world’s first cloned female dog, another Afghan hound he named Bona.
Before that, lee worked with disgraced embryonic stem cell research scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who came under fire for faking his stem cell studies and results, to create Snuppy, the first cloned dog.
To create Snuppy, Hwang’s team killed a total of 1,095 reconstructed dog embryos and transferred them into 123 surrogates, yielding only Snuppy and another dog that died 22 days after birth.
With the female, Lee’s team killed 167 dog embryos and transferred them into 12 surrogate mothers to produce the three cloned dogs.
Pro-life advocates say the destruction of hundreds of dog embryos points to the killing of human beings that would take place if scientists try to clone human beings. Human cloning could easily lead to the destruction of hundreds of human embryos — unique human beings.
