Snuppy has been verified

Of all the travesty about the whole 'faking' thing that I've had this obsession with lately, it turns out that Snuppy, the worlds first cloned dog is in fact real.

We also carried out DNA fingerprinting analyses on the cloned dog Snuppy whose generation has been published in Nature in 2005 (Lee BC, Kim MK, Jang G, Oh HJ, Yuda F, et al. 2005.

Dogs cloned from adult somatic cells. Nature 436: 641). We obtained somatic tissue from the egg donor, blood samples from Snuppy, from Tie, the dog that provided somatic cells, and from the surrogate mother and engaged three independent test centers for the analyses. Results from analyses of 27 markers that allow distinguishing amongst extremely-inbred animals and of mitochondrial DNA sequencing indicate that Snuppy is a somatic cell clone of Tie.

Well, at least the complete report filed on Hwang has a ray of sunshine in a sea of darkness, or whatever. I never was very good at that whole poetry and metaphore stuff, so here is the link to the full report (at Aljazeera in fact) if you are wanting to read more scientific drama.

[Spotted the link over at the editors blog for the American journal of Bioethics].