A LITTER of cloned puppies have been introduced to their owner in a medical company's first commercial deal.
Five replicas of American owner Bernann McKinney's late pit bull Booger were created by a South Korean team.
The screenwriter, 57, said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three time
s his size.
The five clones – which share identical white spots below their necks – are all healthy, although their weight varies slightly.
Ms McKinney was given a special rate of £25,000 for being the first customer, but Seoul-based RNL Bio said its usual price would be up to £75,000 per dog.
The clones were born last week after being produced in co-operation with a team of Seoul University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005, a male Afghan hound named Snuppy.
The cloning team is led by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalised the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005. Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned 30 dogs and five wolves.
He said: "The cells' status was bad as they had been stored for a long time, so we cautiously approached the work."
Ms McKinney described the sight of the cloned dogs in a university laboratory, sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs, as "a miracle".
RNL Bio claims the cloning of Booger is the first successful commercial cloning of a dog.
Ms McKinney contacted the firm after Booger died of cancer in April 2006.
Booger's frozen cells were transported to Seoul in March and nurtured before formal cloning began in May.
