California Woman Pays $50,000 for Booger

Read all about it in Anna Fifield's article in today's Financial Times; it follows.

Ground-dog day as woman pays $50,000 to clone dead pitbull

The prospect of having nine lives is no longer the sole preserve of cats.

In a happy mix of science and commerce, man's best friend can now live again and again — if the owner is besotted and rich enough.

The South Korean stem cell scientists who produced Snuppy [top], a cloned Afghan hound, have received the world's first commercial order to clone a dog and are now preparing to recreate Booger, a pitbull terrier from California. It is an order they hope will lead to the production of as many as 500 born-again pets each year.

"We received an order from an American woman to clone her dog, Booger," said Ra Jeong-Chan, chief executive of RNL Bio, the Korean company that will help Seoul National University stem cell scientists create Booger II. "She is disabled and has trouble walking, so Booger was a big help to her and she wants him back."

The price for cloning a dog is set to be $150,000, but because this is the first order, and because the woman agreed to allow the event to be publicised, she is only being charged $50,000.

An SNU team of scientists produced the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005 but the achievement was overshadowed by the sensational revelations that Hwang Woo-suk, the leader of the team, falsified research suggesting he had created the first human stem cells. However, the subsequent investigation into the production of Snuppy found that the dog was a genuine clone.

Scientists are now preparing to send cells from Booger to Korea, where they will be placed into surrogate mother dogs, meaning Booger II may breathe again in October.

Mr Ra said he expected his company to receive orders for specialist dogs such as drug and bomb sniffer dogs. He added that capacity will be increased in the hope that 100 "companion dogs" can be cloned from next year, and eventually 500 dogs annually.

Mr Hwang's former colleague, Lee Byeong-chun, who remains at SNU but has since admitted to some mistakes in cloning research papers, will provide the technology to copy Booger.

Asked about SNU's past scientific scandals, Mr Lee said: "I don't care about that."

But Mr Ra suggested the move to commercial cloning could help clear up any remaining doubts about Korean science. "I think we need another two years to overcome all the problems," Mr Ra said.

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I remember Woody Allen once remarking that they tipped a map of the U.S. on its side and everything loose fell to the bottom — then they leveled it again and there was California.