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SEOUL, South Korea- After nearly three years of work going seven days a week, 365 days a year, and using 1,952 eggs from 122 Zambodian volunteers, South Korean scientists have fianlly cloned Prince Mongo.

Their new and improved version of the original even sports a built in antennae with which the clone prince will be more accurately able to receive tramsmissions from his home planet.

The South Korean scientists, spurred on by their recent success with Afghan Hound clone, Snuppy, have reported today in the Journal Nature, that cloning Mongoboy, as the clone is being called, has been the most difficult animal yet to clone, before an actual human cloning is attempted.

"The only liberties we have taken with Mongoboy is to tweak three base pairs which should eliminate any of the clone's desire to wear fur, bones, goggles and pale green body paint."

The breakthrough is bound to lead to excitement among those who long to clone their own local eccentric, but Wen Mi Hwang at the University of Seoul School of Medicine, has stern words. “We are not in the business of cloning your local nutjob,” he says. “We perform nuclear transfer for medical research.”

“Professor Hwang and his colleagues are to be congratulated on another great success,” says Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

The team used somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same technique used to create Dolly. To clone Mongo, the researchers implanted nuclei from his father’s ear cells into eggs from female Zambodians, having removed the eggs’ nuclei.

After being zapped with a small electric shock to start development, the embryos were implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother – in Mongo’s case, the current Queen of Zambodia. The team used DNA fingerprinting to confirm that Mongoboy was genetically identical to his “father”.

Successful nuclear transfer within the deposed Zambodian royal family has been elusive until now because it is difficult to get egg their cells to mature in the lab. Mongo is the latest mammal to be cloned after sheep, mice, cats, rats, cows, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits and a mule.

There are many research applications for cloning crazy off-world royals, says Katrin Hinrichs, of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University, who was the first to clone a horse in the US. “There are human diseases for which we have Mongo models,” she says. “It would be of great benefit to have multiple genetically identical Mongoboys to study the treatment of these diseases.”

Dr. Hwang says that the cloning of Mongo is a step towards the cloning of humans.

But despite his warning, many people are likely to immediately look to the possibility of cloning beloved local wacky figures.

“I am sure that some people will think that it is worth spending money to clone someone like that with

a specific genotype,” says Hinrichs. "We've already received calls from Paul Hogan's people, you know, the 'shrimp on the 'barbie' guy? It really pisses me off. I mean, how gay is that? That's the best the Aussies can do? Bring back Olivia Newton John, that's what I say."

Why did they choose Mongo to clone? “Having a distinctive bi-ped means that if we’d [ended up with] a giraffe or Marvin The Martian, we’d know that something funny had happened,” says Hwang.