San Francisco  - A California company is to clone five dogs for pet owners who win an online auction to be held in June, it announced Wednesday.

The programme, dubbed Best Friends Again, was immediately denounced by a variety of ethical and environmental groups who charged that it could bring human cloning closer and rehabilitate disgraced South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, a member of the dog cloning team.

Best Friends Again is a partnership between BioArts and the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea.

Bidding for the dog-cloning opportunity will start at 100,000 dollars on June 18.

"We are thrilled to announce the Best Friends Again programme," said chief executive Lou Hawthorne of BioArts Inc, which licensed the cloning technology developed by the Roslin Institute for the cloning of Dolly the sheep. "This auction will give five very lucky people the ability to clone their family dogs. Given how challenging it is to clone dogs, this is a very rare and special offer."

Hawthorne previously ran Genetic Savings and Clone, which claims to have made three copies of his dog, Missy. The company had offered to clone cats for 50,000 dollars but closed in 2006.

"Cloning our pets could bring us closer to cloning human beings," said Jaydee Hanson, director for human genetics policy at the International Center for Technology Assessment.

Woo Suk Hwang is currently under indictment for fraud, embezzlement, violations of South Korea's bioethics law and other counts. He was a celebrated researcher before being exposed as having fabricated data, embezzled millions of dollars in government funds and improperly obtained eggs from women.

"The cloning field has had more than its share of scandals," said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, in a statement. "The Hwang affair has been called the biggest scientific fraud in living memory." (dpa)