April 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of a moment that lives rent-free in the weirder corners of scientific history: the birth of Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog.
Turns out, a whole lot of weird sh*t surrounds Snuppy's birth.
And, we're not even talking about the cloning part.
Snuppy was an Afghan Hound—regal, elegant, and the kind of dog that looks like it judges your Spotify playlists. But more importantly, Snuppy was created in a lab. His birth was the result of groundbreaking cloning research that had the science world buzzing.
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Meanwhile, a world away I was a junior researcher, elbows-deep in petri dishes, cloning cells (not dogs), wondering why my protein of interest hated me so much, and debating whether the vending machine burrito would be more edible if I nuked it twice. (It was not.)
Snuppy got headlines.
I got pipette calluses, 3am identity crises, and the creeping suspicion that academia might be a pyramid scheme in a lab coat.
Turns out, the lab behind Snuppy wasn’t exactly squeaky clean.
The lead researcher, Hwang Woo-suk, became science-famous—then infamous—after it was discovered that much of his earlier work (including human embryo cloning claims) was fabricated. He’d also broken major bioethics rules by paying women—and even his own lab staff—for egg donations. Yikes.
Suddenly, the whole scientific community wondered:
Was Snuppy even real?
Investigations were launched.
One DNA lab confirmed Snuppy was a legit clone… but that lab was hired by Hwang himself.
You can imagine how well that went over.
Eventually, a Seoul National University panel conducted an independent investigation and confirmed it:
Snuppy was, in fact, the real deal.
The first cloned dog. Drama and all.
Snups lived led a fairly healthy life, until his passing in 2015 at the age of ten.
And while he was blazing a trail of cloned dog hair into history, I was in my own era of fluorescent-lit existential dread, gradually falling out of love with the bench—and into love with science storytelling.
I didn’t clone dogs, but I did clone enough cells to lose my fingerprints. And today, I channel that obsessive lab energy into Bark & Bone: a celebration of science, skeletons, and the gloriously nerdy people who love them.
And, even though I nerd out over this kind of stuff, I can't say I'd ever have one of my dogs cloned.
Even if I had the money and the means.
The better question is...
Would YOU clone your heart dog?
🐕🦴 To mark 20 years since the world's first (verified) cloned dog, the Afghan Hound makes its debut into our shop!
Because if we're going to honor science, let it be weird, slightly unethical (but in a learning experience way), and covered in bones.
