The Amazing Adventures of Archibald Esq.
A Belated Birthday Wish for Snuppy
Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog, celebrated his birthday the 25th April 2006. The Guardian newspaper used a pun on a Mother Goose rhyme with the use of ‘Give a Dog a Clone’ as their headline for the story (The Guardian, Tuesday 25 April 2006, p.21).
Give the dog a clone? Woof? Come to think of it, I’m positive that Snuppy would prefer - as a jaunty man said to my folk the other day as we walked along the London Canals - that his keepers ‘Let Him Breed.’ So that’s my wish for Snuppy - that they let him breed - like all red-blooded boy-hounds dream of.
Of course all this cloning-around is not just for laughs. The desire to clone dogs isn’t so that people can clone their favourite pet - and don’t any of you out there get ideas and want Archie-clones from me ’cause if anything I’ll have you know that I’m a natural breeder! No - the aim in cloning Snuppy was deadly serious, and many hope that cloned dogs can pave the way to discoveries for serious human and canine diseases and causes of death.
Professor Kong, who replicated six cats last year for the first time in Korea, said that cloning dogs is of immense clinical value because the dog is physiologically very close to a human. The dog has as many as 203 genes that can be used as disease models for human beings. In comparison, the tallies stand at just 65 for the pig and 123 for the cat.
Sadly, with the exception of a single cloned dog, all the scientific discoveries claimed by Woo Suk Hwang, once the world’s leading stem cell scientist, were faked, a university panel concluded. The report completed the ignominy of Dr Hwang, a national hero in South Korea who was given free first class flights on Korean Air for a decade. Just before Christmas, an interim report from the panel said that Dr Hwang had fabricated the bulk of his research.
The only discovery authenticated by the panel was Dr Hwang’s creation of Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog. Woof! Its name a blend of “Seoul National University” and “puppy”, Snuppy, an Afghan hound, was born in April 2005 after a normal, full-term pregnancy in a yellow Labrador surrogate mother. Dogs are notoriously difficult to clone, and Snuppy was hailed as proof of Dr Hwang’s virtuoso technical ability. Time magazine named it the “most amazing invention of 2005.
Dr Hwang, 52, has resigned from South Korea’s best known university. But even if Dr Hwang is now lying low and staying in hiding, Snuppy’s legacy lives on. Superwoof Snuppy! We wish you all the best - and especially a bit of breeding!
Awoof! Archie
Posted 01 May 06
Leave a Reply
©2008 Roleta Archibald, Awoof!™