A 14-week-old Afghan hound pup named Snuppy is such a spitting image of his father, with the same black, silky fur and long, thin face, that he could be a clone. And so he is -- the world's first cloned dog.

	Chung Sung-Jun, Getty Images South Korean stem cell researcher Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang holds "Snuppy" with Gerald Schatten, left, of the University of Pittsburgh during an announcement of the world's first known cloned dog. Click photo for larger image.

The achievement by South Korean researchers, announced in today's issue of the journal Nature, could lead to new, cloned strains of canines for laboratory experiments and perhaps provide a new tool for studying embryonic stem cells.

Snuppy appears healthy, said Gerald Schatten, a reproductive biologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who is a co-author of the paper.

"He looks frisky," he said.

But even as dogs join cows, deer, cats, horses and other species on the list of animals cloned using the same technique as that used to produce Dolly the sheep, today's report also underscores how difficult and inefficient dog cloning has proved to be. And it has renewed ethical misgivings about commercial cloning of pets, including dogs.

The researchers at Seoul National University -- the university's initials were used for Snuppy's name -- implanted 1,095 cloned dog embryos in 123 females, resulting in just three pregnancies. One died before birth, another died of pneumonia 22 days after birth.

"This is just an extremely difficult species to work with," said Mark Westhusin, a veterinarian at Texas A&M University who was involved in earlier' efforts to produce dog clones. "We never did get a live pup," he added.

Researchers in the lab of Woo-Suk Hwang, the celebrated South Korean veterinarian who produced the first cloned human embryos, emphasize that they produced Snuppy in a quest to develop new animal models for studying human disease, not for companionship.

"We just focused on the science," said B.C. Lee, the vet in Hwang's lab who led the dog cloning effort for the past three years.

He explained that the Afghan hound was chosen because the distinctive, long-haired dog contrasts so sharply from the female dog that carried the cloned embryo to term -- a short-haired, yellow Labrador retriever. Researchers are now contemplating what other breeds to clone for studying such diseases as heart disease or cancer, he said last week during a visit to Pittsburgh.

Schatten, director of the Pittsburgh Development Center at Magee-Womens Research Institute, said one of the major goals of the dog project is to learn more about embryonic stem cells. Researchers hope to derive embryonic stem cell lines from dog clones and use them to study stem cell therapies in dogs.

	Ahn Young-joon, Associated Press Snuppy with his genetic father, upper left, and surrogate mother, lower right. Click photo for larger image.

In that regard, producing a cloned puppy was a way of proving that the cloned embryos could be viable sources of stem cells.

"Without having a cloned puppy, we can have cells in a dish and people will ask the legitimate question: How do we know what these are?" said Schatten, who served as an adviser on the study.

Ben Carlson, a spokesman for Genetic Savings and Clone, a Sausalito, Calif., company that clones cats and financed the dog cloning work at Texas A&M, said the company hopes to achieve its own cloned dog by the end of the year.

Crystal Miller-Spiegel, senior policy analyst with the American Anti-Vivisection Society, said the fact that more than 1,000 embryos were created to produce a single pup raises questions about the wisdom of cloning.

"This certainly paints a grim picture of what pet cloning might involve," Miller-Spiegel said, noting that the organization worries about all types of cloning. "I would think that is not something that any animal lover would want to be involved in."

"With so many surplus dogs being euthanized every day, I can't see any justification for cloning a pet," agreed Lilly Marlene Russow, a bioethicist at Purdue University.

A market potentially exists for cloning show dogs, she acknowledged, but even then, "there are too many easier ways of doing things. Cloning for that reason just seems a bad use of resources."

But developing cloned dogs for laboratory research could be beneficial, Russow said. Dogs are a popular experimental animal for drug development, she noted, and a cloned strain of dogs might make it possible to perform those studies with fewer dogs.

Lee said dogs are difficult to clone for a number of reasons. Unlike many domestic animals that ovulate every 20 or 30 days, dogs ovulate once every five to seven months. No one knows how to induce ovulation in dogs, he noted.

When dogs do ovulate, the eggs they release are not fully mature and no one has yet found a way to mature the eggs in a laboratory dish.

Without a method to mature eggs in vitro, the Korean team allowed the eggs to remain in the dog's oviducts for three days following ovulation. They then recovered the matured eggs by flushing the oviducts daily.

	Ahn Young-joon, Associated Press Journalists take pictures of Snuppy, the first successfully cloned dog, during a press conference at the Seoul National University yesterday. South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk and his team cloned Snuppy. Click photo for larger image.

The somatic cell nuclear transfer procedure used to produce the cloned embryo followed the same general outlines used for Dolly: Genetic material from the mother was removed from the egg nucleus and replaced with DNA from a skin cell from the father's ear.

Carlson said Genetic Savings and Clone believes it has found a way to mature the eggs in the laboratory, which would allow the company to reduce costs by obtaining eggs from ovaries removed from dogs at spay clinics, he said.

The company has not indicated how much it will charge for cloning a dog; it charges $32,000 to clone a cat.

Though Lee suggested it should be possible to improve the efficiency of his cloning method, producing cloned dogs with the method detailed in the Nature article will remain costly, said Westhusin. It remains to be seen whether the benefits will justify those costs.

"Dogs are a really great model for cardiovascular and cancer research," he said. "But you can do similar work in mice, goats and rats."