"Booger was my partner and my friend," Ms McKinney said, as she appeared with the five identical copies of her pet.

Scientists at Seoul National University created a number of embryos from preserved skin cells taken from Booger's ear tissue before he died.

The embryos were then implanted into two surrogate mother dogs and, three months later, the puppies were born.

Among the scientists involved in the project was Professor Lee Byeong-chun, who was part of the team that created the world's first cloned dog - Snuppy the Afghan hound - in 2005.

Here's what the researchers say they did: They took skin cells from Turkish Angora female cats and used a virus to insert the genetic instructions for making red fluorescent protein. Then they put the gene-altered nuclei into eggs for cloning. The cloned embryos were implanted back into the donor cats, which effectively became the surrogate mothers for their own clones.

Four kittens were born by Caesarian section, but one of them died during the procedure, according to the Korea Times. The fact that the kittens' skin cells glowed under ultraviolet light served as evidence that they were really gene-altered clones.

Assuming that the results are confirmed, Kong's cats would join mice and pigs in the glow-in-the-dark clone menagerie. The implication is that if you can pass along the easy-to-recognize coding for fluorescent markers through cloning, you could eventually pass along more complex genetic coding.

Theoretically, you could add in the coding for an endangered species, producing cloned hybrids to boost the gene pool for Sumatran tigers, Iberian lynxes and the like. You might even stick in the coding to give other creatures human diseases, so that they can be studied without raising the level of ethical concern that comes with human experimentation. (I realize that there's a different set of ethical concerns about such trangenic experiments, however.)