MissyToo, far left, and Mira are clones, but vary in size and color mainly because they were born months apart.


By ERIC KONIGSBERG FAIRFAX, California - The most difficult thing about the cloned puppies is not telling them apart, but explaining why they don’t look exactly alike. This was the problem Lou Hawthorne faced with Mira and MissyToo, two dogs whose embryos were created from the preserved, recycled and repurposed nuclear DNA of the original Missy, a border collie-husky mix who died in 2002.

As soon as people hear that the dogs are clones, the questions start coming:
“Why is one dog’s fur curlier?”
“Why aren’t the dogs the same size?”

Mr.Hawthorne’s biotech company, BioArts, which is based here in the Bay Area but has arrangements with a laboratory in South Korea, performed the actual cloning.

Its chief geneticist is Dr.Hwang Woo Suk of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea. Dr.Hwang is perhaps best known for fraudulently reporting in 2004 that a team he led had successfully cloned human embryos and stem cells. After the false claims were unearthed, he was fired by Seoul National University . But he is also widely acknowledged for having been involved in successfully cloning an Afghan hound in 2005.

“Dr.Hwang’s past is obviously controversial, but we feel that his lab and his record when it comes to dog cloning are the best in the field,”Mr.Hawthorne, 48, said.

Each clone’s embryo was created by joining Missy’s nuclear DNA with the enucleated (which is to say, DNA-stripped) egg of a different dog. After that, each was carried to term in the uterus of still another dog? a step that, though it has no bearing on the dogs’genetic makeup, can affect such external traits as the waviness of fur. (It has to do with different levels of collagen.)

Missy 1.0? Mira and MissyToo’s “genetic donor,” as Mr.Hawthorne calls her? was his mother’s dog. To date, he said, there are four Missy clones running around.

“She was an amazing dog: superior intellect, incredibly beautiful, obedient, a phenomenal temperament,”Mr.Hawthorne said.“I especially loved her majestic plume of a tail.”And in the clones, he said,“all those qualities are represented.”

The clones vary in size and color, Mr.Hawthorne said, primarily because they were born months apart, and none are fully grown yet.

But Joan Hawthorne, Mr.Hawthorne’s mother, thinks differently. “They’re not at all alike,”he said of the old Missy and MissyToo.“The puppy is delicate and aggressive. Missy was robust and completely calm.”She added,“Missy wouldn’t come through my home and knock over every wineglass.”