ohmidog!

Getting a laboratory tour is usually a pretty sterile and boring affair: “Here’s the machine that does this. Here’s the room where we do that. But we’re not doing this or that right now.”

So when I walked into the Sooam Biotech Foundation, headed by the controversial Dr.  Hwang Woo-Suk, I wasn’t expecting much more than a quick walk through.

Dr. Hwang — who was fired from Seoul National University on grounds that his research into cloning human embryonic stem cells was fraudulent — wouldn’t be talking to me, I’d been informed. He hasn’t granted any interviews since he left SNU and, with funding from friends and supporters, started his own institute to continue his research.

Given the disclaimers, and my own low expectations, I couldn’t figure out what the hurry was when, after being picked up at the bus station in Yongin, foundation staff rushed me up a winding mountain road and into the driveway of the remote laboratory about 40 miles south of Seoul, outfitted me in a sterile lab gown, surgical mask and headgear and walked me into an operating room where a sedated dog lay on her back with her legs spread open.

It wasn’t until a man in a mask cut a three-inch incision into the dog’s groin and slipped his hand inside that I realized I was witnessing the attempted cloning of a dog, performed Dr. Hwang himself — a process that, from start to finish, would take under three hours.

Hwang was silent and focused as deftly pulled out the uterus, found the ovaries, flushed out the egg cells, and handed them off to a technician who placed them under a microscope and reported they had succesfully removed seven. Hwang replaced the uterus, sewed up the dog, and then opened a second dog that was already sedated and waiting on a gurney. He repeated the process, which only took about 20 minutes.

From there the egg cells were taken to another room, where, using a micromanipulator, another member of the laboratory staff carefully vacuumed out the nucleus of each. Then, using a pipette, she implanted seven handpicked cells from the donor dog — one of six whose owners successfully bid in an online auction to get their dogs cloned through an American company, Bio Arts International. Bio Arts is working in conjunction with Hwang’s lab.

The cells were then put into another machine, which zapped them with electricity to stimulate division. About an hour later, all seven were ready to be implanted into a surrogate dog, an operation, also conducted by Hwang, that took less than half an hour.

And so it goes at Sooam, where 79 dogs have been cloned since Hwang opened shop.

Hwang and Dr. Lee Byeong-Chun were the leaders of the Seoul National University research team that cloned the world’s first dog, producing Snuppy. Shortly after that success, Hwang was suspended from the university and charged with fraud in connection with his human embryo research.

SNU is now working with a Korean company, RNL Bio, that is offering dog cloning to the public. Hwang, meanwhile is working with California-based Bio Arts, which awarded five dog clonings to bidders in an auction last year, and is also cloning a dog for the winner of an essay contest it sponsored — a German shepherd named TrakR, who according to his owner, located the last survivor pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

The cloning attempt I witnessed — and whose DNA can be seen being implanted in the enucleated egg cell above — wasn’t that of TrakR, but it was one of the dogs being cloned for Bio Arts customers. So far, only one dog — a cloned yellow lab named Lancelot Encore — has been delivered.

If successful, the clone or clones resulting from the procedure I saw will be born in two months.