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Cloned dog latest milestone for S.Korea's stem cell pioneer
News of the cloning fronted most major South Korean dailies Thursday. "Hwang Woo-suk's team clones dog in world first," read the top headline in the mass-circulation daily Hankook Ilbo, accompanied by a photo of Hwang holding the black, white and gold Snuppy. "It's a matter of great national pride that such a person came from our country," Ro Suk-rae, a merchant in downtown Seoul, said of Hwang. "All Korean people are waiting for the final results of his research ... to be applied to cure humans." The name of the cloned puppy, the lone success from more than 100 dogs implanted with more than 1,000 cloned embryos, highlights the importance of Hwang's research base. Snuppy is shorthand for "Seoul National University puppy." Seoul National is South Korea's top school, akin in the Asia-Pacific region to Japan's Tokyo University, China's Peking University, the National University of Singapore and Australian National University. Admission is considered a sure ticket to the corridors of power and influence here. Researchers congratulated Hwang's team on improving techniques that might someday be medically useful. "The ability to use the underlying technology in developing research models and eventually therapies is incredibly promising," said Robert Schenken, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "However, the paper also points out that in dogs as in most species, cloning for reproductive purposes is unsafe." Other animals that have been successfully cloned are sheep, cats, goats, cows, mice, pigs, rabbits, horses, deer, mules and gaur, a large wild ox in Southeast Asia. Still, uncertainties about the health and life span of cloned animals persist; Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell nearly a decade ago, died prematurely in 2003 after developing cancer and arthritis. The successful dog cloning also re-ignites a fierce ethical and scientific
debate about the rapidly advancing technology.
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