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Seoul: An American woman received five puppies on Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service.
The head of Seoul-based RNL Bio, Ra Jeong-chan, said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.
The clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.
McKinney saw the cloned Boogers at a Seoul National University laboratory. She joyfully hugged the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.
The company was contacted by McKinney after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked US-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.
The Korean scientists brought the dog's frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.
McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at US universities, said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.
RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will only receive $50,000 from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity.
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