By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

The offspring of Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, will be offered to a selected group of pet owners later this year, according to researchers at Seoul National University (SNU), Thursday.

The artificially created Afghan hound became a father in May last year after impregnating two cloned bitches, in what was the world's first successful breeding involving only cloned canines. One of the 10 puppies died shortly after birth, but the remaining nine ― six males and three females ― remain healthy.

Lee Byeong-cheon, the chief scientist responsible for the creation of Snuppy and a number of cloned dogs and other mammals since, said the school will take online applications until Oct. 31 and offer the puppies to willing pet owners for free after a screening process. Each dog will receive surgery to make them sterile, the researchers said.

``All of the dogs are in good health,'' said Lee.

``We will look through the applications and give the dogs to owners who we believe are most capable of raising them.''

Lee's team used artificial insemination to impregnate the two cloned Afghan hound females, Bona and Hope, last year. A male Afghan hound can weigh up to 28 kilograms, while the adult female dogs will weigh around 23 kilograms.

Lee collaborated with now-disgraced gene scientist Hwang Woo-suk in the creation of Snuppy in 2005. Hwang was fired from SNU in the following year after his landmark work on cloned human stem cells was exposed as fraudulent. However, Snuppy happens to be one of Hwang's verified achievements.

After his separation from Hwang, Lee has since established himself as one of the world's top authorities on animal cloning, producing dozens of dogs since Snuppy and also the world's first cloned wolf, Snuwolf. However, the wolf was found dead in a Seoul zoo earlier this week, just months after Lee's team announced it would attempt to mate it with other clones to test their reproductive capability.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr