SEOUL - South Korea's Woo-Suk Hwang has reached the highest peaks of cloning and stem cell research, but critics say he has taken science onto a steep and slippery slope and raised alarming questions about interfering with life. On Wednesday, Hwang was all smiles as he put on a lab coatand frolicked with an Afghan hound puppy named Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, which he helped create. The dog was named after Seoul National University, where Hwang's lab has produced results that have put his team at the forefront of cloning and stem cell technology. Because of their reproductive cycle, dogs are considered one of the most difficult animals in the world to clone. In May, Hwang's team made the news for research fulfilling one of the basic promises of cloning technology in stem-cell research -- that a piece of skin could be taken from a patient to grow stem cells with that patient's specific genetic material.

The work has made him a national hero in South Korea, where the government will spend about $43 million to fund new labs for him and help Hwang set up a worldwide stem cell bank. Hwang has said he is not cloning human embryos, but using eggs harvested from human females, infusing them with genetic material, to create cells that can never become human beings. Critics have mounted to the type of work being performed by Hwang. U.S. President George W. Bush, has said: "I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable", and the Catholic Church, has theological qualms.

Lee Chang-young, a member of the Bioethics Committee of Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea, said using human eggs from women donors was an affront to the culture of life. South Korea has banned human cloning, a stand Hwang supports. But the country sees great promise in being identified as the global hub of therapeutic cloning, which involves creating embryos for a supply of stem cells for research or therapy to develop cures for diseases ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's. Stem cells are master cells that can be coaxed to develop in any cell tissue type in the body.

Hwang and his team said the process to produce Snuppy -- involving a total of 1,095 reconstructed embryos being transferred into 123 surrogates to create two living dogs -- shows just how difficult it is to conduct reproductive cloning. He said the efficiency rate was just 1.6 percent and the other cloned dog died 22 days after birth from pneumonia. Gerald Schatten, a University of Pittsburgh genetics expert who was part of the team that produced Snuppy, said the moral and ethical costs of producing a human clone were far too high. Reuters