A controversial Korean lab led by Woosuk Hwang is moving from cloning pets to endangered animals. But will cloning help or hurt these species?

Getting ready for the caesarean that will deliver another cloned puppy into the world Mark Zastrow

A dog lies unconscious on the operating table, as Woosuk Hwang gently lifts the puppy from its womb. While I watch, one of his researchers, David Kim, tells me about the original – the source of this puppy’s DNA.

He calls it the original, because the nearly born puppy is a clone.

Hwang snips open the amniotic sac and the little fur ball slips out into the world. It’s black, wet – and motionless. An assistant wraps it in a towel, massages it gently – and it starts to yelp. Success!


This puppy is a sign of things to come for Hwang and his lab. For the past few years, the lab has worked on cloning domestic dogs. Now the researchers plan move on to saving their wild relatives. They want to rescue some of the world’s most endangered canids, including the Ethiopian wolf and the dhole, or Asiatic wild dog.

This has raised concerns among conservationists, not least because they fear cloning will be little more than a shiny distraction from wider efforts to preserve habitats and biodiversity.

From hero to disgrace to hero again

In 2005, Hwang became a national hero. In the space of three months, he made international headlines twice: first, with the creation of 11 stem cell lines cloned from human embryos that could be used to study the diseased cells of individual patients, and then with the unveiling the world’s first cloned dog.

But a year later, he had been unmasked as a fraud. Seoul National University found he had faked the human stem cell lines and expelled him, and a national bioethics commission found he had forced some junior members of his lab to donate their eggs for research. He was sentenced to two years in prison, but this was suspended.

Although an international pariah, he still had supporters in South Korea, who funded the creation of a private lab, Sooam Biotech, in Seoul. There he turned to cloning canines – a verified accomplishment – charging bereaved dog owners to clone their recently deceased companions to the tune of $100,000 a pup.

Hwang’s team extracts the nucleus of skin cells from the animal you wish to clone, and then inserts them into an egg with its nucleus removed. The technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), and they have now refined and extended it to coyotes and grey wolves, using dogs as egg donors and surrogates. Soon they hope to be producing clones of endangered species. “It is the most meaningful way that we can use the SCNT technology to contribute to society,” says Sooam’s research director Yeonwoo Jeong.

Cloning the Ethiopian wolf

First up is the Ethiopian wolf, of which fewer than 500 remain, living in Ethiopia’s high-altitude alpine meadows. The degradation of the highlands because of human expansion has shrunk their range to six enclaves on different mountains, all isolated from each other. Such low numbers of individuals creates low genetic diversity that can reduce their ability to reproduce and survive.

Sooam hopes to preserve these gene pools by cryogenically banking the cells of as many individual wolves as possible. If an animal dies in the wild, Sooam could thaw its stored cells, create clones using domestic dog surrogates, and introduce them into the wild.

Since no Ethiopian wolves are held in captivity they will first need to be captured. In January, Sooam inked an agreement to collaborate with Arsi University in central Ethiopia through which it hopes to receive permission from the Ethiopian government to collect tissue samples. If they succeed, they hope to be providing cloned pups for repopulation efforts within a year.

Only a few hundred Ethiopian wolves remain, in populations scattered across the country’s highlands FLPA/REX/Shutterstock

Because Ethiopian wolves are very closely related to dogs, the team expects the actual cloning to go smoothly. “I don’t think there will be too much of a complication,” says Kim.

Sooam also hopes to start work later this year on the dhole. This canid’s range once included nearly all of east Asia, but now has fragmented into groups scattered across the mountain forests of India and south-east Asia. They also suffer from direct conflict with humans. If they kill livestock, herders sometimes retaliate by poisoning the carcasses, which can wipe out an entire pack. Estimates suggest fewer than 2500 dholes remain in the wild.

Asiatic wild dogs, and more

The dhole will test Sooam’s cloning expertise: it’s more distantly related to the domestic dog and classified in a separate genus. In principle, domestic dogs can become surrogates to any canid, but in reality the success rate will vary. “It depends, species by species, on how closely related they are to the dog,” says Kim. Hwang’s team has attempted to clone the African wild dog, which is also in its own genus. These tests resulted in successful impregnations, but no successful births, so how easy it will be to clone the dhole remains to be seen.

Sooam’s researchers are also starting work on cloning the Siberian musk deer, a fanged deer that has been nearly wiped off the Korean peninsula. They already have technical expertise beyond dogs. They routinely clone pigs with genes susceptible to disease to be used for drug tests. They also clone breeds of cows prized for their high-quality meat, and have worked on genetically modifying cows to produce therapeutic proteins in their milk. In total, they produce about 500 cloned embryos every day across all species.

Is cloning just a high-tech distraction?

So can work like Hwang’s actually help conserve endangered species? Many researchers are far from convinced. Some feel the lab is operating in a vacuum and its work could even hurt existing conservation efforts.

One such sceptic is conservation biologist Claudio Sillero, who founded the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme at the University of Oxford. “They are the last man standing in terms of representing the wilderness of those African meadows,” he says of the Ethiopian wolves.

Three years ago, Sooam proposed a collaboration to help conserve the wolves, he says. But he turned them down, saying cloning wouldn’t be worth their time.

The most pressing problem for Ethiopian wolves is not genetic diversity or any difficulty in reproducing, he says. It’s that they’re losing their habitat and prey, and are susceptible to diseases spread by local domestic dogs. Genetic diversity could be preserved simply by moving animals between packs, he says. And he worries that politicians presented with what looks like a simple solution will choose cloning over the kinds of wide-reaching and long-term conservation programmes that are really needed.

Luigi Boitani, a conservation biologist at the University of Rome, also thinks cloning is a “waste of resources” that should be reserved for extreme, near-extinction situations. “I do not see any canid species in this desperate situation yet,” he says.

Both these dogs were cloned from an original in Woosuk Hwang’s South Korean lab. After their success with domestic dogs, the researchers now want to use their technology to clone endangered species Mark Zastrow

Face to face with cloned puppies On the third-floor kennel room of the Sooam Biotech cloning facility in Seoul, I get to meet some of the cloned puppies. The first are two 9-month-old German shepherds, cloned for the national police. Their original was a working dog deemed particularly capable and well-disposed. They are endlessly friendly - eagerly jumping up to get attention. But it's also incredibly eerie: not only are their coats identical, so are their mannerisms. When they hop down, they twist their bodies to the left - every time, sometimes in unison. The only detail I can use to tell them apart is that one of them has a left ear that points upwards. Further down is another pair of puppies cloned from the same donor; these ones are just 2 months old. They leap at me with the same unbridled enthusiasm, and one of them also has a perky left ear. I do a double take - a quadruple take, really - glancing back down the row of kennels at their older clone siblings. It's like looking at a living growth chart.

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