It's hard to find dogs that have just the right set of attributes to sniff for drugs, which is why South Korean Customs officials got their favorite drug-sniffing dog cloned. The seven clones (four are pictured here) have all grown up to be excellent sniffers — though only one in ten dogs usually passes drug-sniff training, all seven passed. All seven dogs are called Toppy, and each cost over $100,000 to clone, plus $40,000 extra to train. Over at Technovelgy, Bill Christensen points out that the cloned drug-sniffers have a precedent in a science fiction whose representation of cloning was so inaccurate that you'll be surprised it got anything right.

Christensen writes:

Science fiction fans might consider this to be a commercial business use of the RePet technology used in the film The Sixth Day. The cloning research and work was done by a team of Seoul National University scientists led by Professor Lee Byeong-chun. Now, if only they could master syncording, which is the fictional technology in The Sixth Day that assured that your new RePet was behaviorally identical to your old pet, they wouldn't even need to train them!

It actually sounds like the Toppys (Toppies?) do have the same temperament as the dog they were cloned from, since they were all able to pass the same training he did.

Given the black market in imitation pharmaceuticals, it might also be useful to have a dog that could sniff out cloned drugs, too. Imagine a dog that could tell the difference between Pfizer's Viagra, and Bob's black market V1agr@.

Korean Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs [Technovelgy]