Disgraced cloning scientist comes back with cloned coyotes

Disgraced cloning scientist comes back with cloned coyotes. October. 18, 2011 03:06. bibulus@donga.com.

Disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk is back in the spotlight, saying he and his research team in a world first cloned a coyote by transplanting the wild cat`s nuclei to a dog’s eggs.

Now a research fellow at the Sooam Biotech Research Center, he donated eight cloned coyotes to Gyeonggi Province Gov. Kim Moon-soo Monday at the Wildlife Rescue Center in Gyeonggi Province. The coyotes comprise three females cloned on June 17 and five males reproduced on June 30.

The research team said it is the world`s first to clone a coyote by using a transplant between different species. Coyotes (canis latrans) are on the red list of endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. They are mostly found in North and Central America.

Hwang’s team extracted cells from the skin of coyotes at Cheongju Land and cultivated them in December last year. It transplanted the nuclei into a dog’s womb in February this year and cloned a coyote in April this year but the latter died soon after.

Researchers then transplanted nuclei again into a dog on April 22 and got three coyotes from the dog on June 17. Thirteen days later, they cloned five dogs from two dogs.

“When I reproduced the cloned dog Snuppy in 2004, we had one success after 1,208 attempts, but we`ve dramatically increased the success rate by cloning only after two attempts,” Hwang said.

The team had tried to clone likaons with a nuclear transplant since December last year, but failed due to miscarriages in June and August this year. Though likaons are African hunting dogs, they are different from regular dogs.

“If we succeed to clone likaons, we expect that we can clone a mammoth and an elephant,” Hwang said.

Though an attempt was made to clone a sheep and a goat before the cloning of the coyote, cloning different species has proven unsuccessful.

Gov. Kim visited Hwang’s team and said, “You`ve made a great achievement. If a dinosaur is cloned after a mammoth, you can make a Jurassic Park.”

Hwang donated the coyotes to Gyeonggi Province because the Sooam think tank and the province signed a research agreement on the reproduction of somatic cells of endangered species (coyotes and likaons) in June this year.