Snuppy

Snuppy (Seoul, April 24, 2005 - ibid, May 7, 2015) was the first cloned dog. The Afghan clone was made by Woo Suk Hwang and his team of scientists at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea. The name "Snuppy" is a combination of "SNU" and of "puppy" (puppy). He was born by caesarean section and weighed 530 grams.

Researchers transferred 1,095 dog embryos into 123 females, achieving 3 pregnancies. One fetus aborted, and one clone, named NT-2, died of pneumonia at 22 days of life. A Labrador retriever carried the third embryo.

Snuppy was born on April 24, 2005 from adult cells (extracted from the ear skin of Tai, an Afghan hunting dog) using the nuclear transfer method, a technique similar to that used to engender Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. Until then, that methodology—which had been successfully tested on sheep, mice, cows, pigs, cats, goats, mules, and rats—had failed in dogs. Every step that works well in other mammals fails in dogs because their reproductive biology is different.

A few months later, in December 2005, Hwang Woo-Suk was found to have falsified the results of his stem cell research in other projects. This caused the veracity of his other experiments, including Snuppy, to be questioned. However, on January 10, 2006, the investigative committee noted that Snuppy's cloning had been legitimate.

Snuppy passed away on May 7, 2015, at the age of 10, and died of cancer, though not the same kind that Tai, his parent dog, died of. The life expectancy of Afghan hounds is 11.9 years, and Afghan hounds often die of cancer. So there was nothing unusual about Tai or Snuppy.