A CLONING dogfight is brewing, pitting disgraced cloning pioneer Woo Suk Hwang against former colleagues at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea.
Hwang faces charges of fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations relating to his faked research on human stem cells. But his claim to have cloned dogs still stands up, and he is now working on animal cloning at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Yongin, South Korea.
There he is cloning dogs for BioArts International, a firm based in Mill Valley, California. 鈥淗e was a controversial choice,鈥� admits BioArts CEO Lou Hawthorne. 鈥淏ut he鈥檚 the world鈥檚 undisputed master at cloning dogs.鈥�
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鈥淗e was a controversial choice, but Hwang is the undisputed master at cloning dogs鈥�
Meanwhile, back at SNU, former colleagues of Hwang are working with a spin-off company called RNL Bio, which has its own cloning plans. In February, RNL Bio said it had signed up its first customer, a woman in California who wants to clone a dead pit bull called Booger. The company also says it has created four clones of a dog with the ability to detect patients with cancer through its sense of smell.
This is not playing well at BioArts, which has acquired exclusive rights for dog and cat cloning under patents awarded to the creators of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute in the UK. BioArts and Start Licensing of Austin, Texas, which controls the Roslin patents, say they will take legal steps to challenge RNL Bio鈥檚 cloning activities.
RNL Bio counters that its cloning method is covered by separate patents awarded to SNU.
