SEOUL: The team led by disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk received a rare bit of good news yesterday when an investigation panel confirmed the group had produced the world's first cloned dog.

But some experts said it was precisely the team's ability to clone animals that may have led members to believe they could create tailored human embryonic stem cells through similar scientific methods.

The investigation panel, releasing its final report yesterday, said Hwang's team deliberately fabricated data in two landmark papers on those embryonic stem cells.

The first was a 2004 paper in which the team claimed to have produced the first human embryos for research and the second was a 2005 paper on tailored embryonic stem cells.

Hwang's team said in a separate 2005 paper in the journal Nature they had cloned an Afghan hound puppy using somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technique of hollowing out the nucleus of a donor egg and injecting it with the donor's genetic materials.

The panel confirmed after tests the dog was indeed a clone.

Medical experts say dogs are one of the most difficult animals to clone because of their reproductive cycle.

"There is no denying that through Snuppy (the cloned dog), the South Koreans proved themselves as being skilled in somatic cell nuclear transfer," said David Winickoff, assistant professor of bioethics at University of California Berkeley. "But clearly they had not reached the level of ability with humans that they claimed to have reached," he said.

Laurie Zoloth, a bioethics professor at Northwestern University in the Chicago area said the technical challenges were solved in theory but not in practice.

"Somatic cell nuclear transfer does work in animals. Now the question will be whether there is an unstoppable barrier in humans," she said in a recent interview.

Snuppy, short for Seoul National University puppy, where Hwang's lab is located, is a male born by caesarean section in April last year after a normal, full-term pregnancy in a yellow Labrador surrogate mother.

The investigation panel said it obtained tissue and blood samples from Snuppy, its surrogate mother and the animal from which it was cloned. It had independent laboratories conduct DNA testing to verify Snuppy was actually a clone.

The Seoul National University panel said Hwang's team had done good work in somatic cell nuclear transfer in animals.

"But it's just a basic technique," Chung Myung-hee, the head of the investigation panel, told reporters. Time magazine nonetheless billed the cloned dog as the most amazing invention of 2005.

As for Snuppy, he has been kept at Seoul National University, where he has been photographed being taken for walks by students.

Source: China Daily