A group of scientists in South Korea modified to clone a dog for the first time.
It was Snuppy, clone of an Afghan hound.
The experiment was carried out by scientist Woo Suk Hwang and his team from Seoul National University.
The name “Snuppy” is a combination of “SNU”, for that educational institution, and “puppy”, which means puppy.
This animal was born by caesarean section and weighed 530 grams.
In the experiment, the researchers transferred 1,095 dog embryos to 123 females, achieving 3 pregnancies.
One of the embryos died as a fetus.
Another replacement was born, but she had pneumonia at 22 days of life.
While the third, Snuppy, successfully modified birth.
It was April 24, 2005 and its birth occurred from adult cells.
These were extracted from the skin of the ear of Tai, an Afghan hunting dog.
To achieve this, a method of nuclear transfer was achieved, a technique similar to that used to breed Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal.
Until that successful moment, this methodology had been tested with sheep, mice, cows, pigs, cats, goats, mules and rats.
However, it had failed in dogs.
Each of the steps that worked well in other mammals failed in dogs.
Scientists had argued that this was because the reproductive biology of dogs was different.
A few months later, in December 2005, a controversy broke out.
Scientist Hwang Woo-Suk was found to have falsified the results of his stem cell research in other projects.
This ended a great deal of questioning about the veracity of his other experiments.
Among them, including Snuppy’s.
However, on January 10, 2006, an investigative committee found that Snuppy’s cloning had been legitimate.
Snuppy had on May 7, 2015, at the age of 10.
He died of cancer, though not the same kind that Tai, his parent dog, died of.
The life expectancy of Afghans is 11 years.
Specimens of that breed often die of cancer, so there was nothing unusual about either Tai or Snuppy.
On April 24, 2005, Snuppy became the world’s first cloned dog.
The story is also news on Radio Perfil. Voiceover by Pita Fortín and script by Sebastián Rojas.
by Radio Profile
