I’m sorry for your loss. But here’s a question for you. If had the option to clone your sick or dying pet and could afford to do so, would you? Assume that the clone would live a normal healthy lifespan?
What Is Warm and Fuzzy Forever? With Cloning, Kitty
By GINA KOLATA
Scientists in Texas have cloned a cat, opening the door to what some experts say will be the first large- scale commercial use of cloning — to reproduce beloved pets.
The effort was supported by a company, Genetic Savings and Clone, of College Station, Tex., and Sausalito, Calif., which wants to offer cloning to dog and cat owners. It is investing $3.7 million in the project.
The study will be published in the Feb. 21 issue of Nature, a British science journal, but Nature released the paper yesterday because the result, although not the details of the study, had become public. News of the company's success was first reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.
It was, some said, long expected.
"The commercial future of cloning is absolutely in animals," said Dr. Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. "To put it bluntly, human cloning will turn out to be of interest only to the vain or the desperate, and companies know this. There is no commercial company that I'm aware of that is really interested in human cloning. But on the animal side, there is tremendous interest."
Yet there also is opposition and there are ethical questions.
The Humane Society of the United States issued a statement yesterday objecting to the cloning of pets, saying "it serves no compelling social purpose and it threatens to add to the pet overpopulation problem."
Dr. Caplan said he had two concerns. "Are you preying on grief and desperation that pet owners often have when they lose a pet to promise them something more than cloning can deliver?" he asked.
If cloning creates animals that suffer and die young, he added, can it be justified? While some cloned animals have grown up to be perfectly normal, others have died in infancy of severe medical problems like lung and heart defects. A variety of animals, including sheep, goats, cows, mice and pigs, have been cloned.
The cloned cat, called cc, for carbon copy, is a genetically identical copy of a 2-year-old female cat, Rainbow, that was not anyone's pet. But Rainbow and cc do not look alike, illustrating that identical twin cats may not have identical coats.
Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a cat geneticist at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., said that coat color in cats was determined by how color-containing cells separate and replicate during embryo development, a process that was only partly genetically determined.
Dr. Duane Kraemer, a member of the cat cloning team and a professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M University, said he was glad the clone did not look like the original. "We've been trying to tell people that cloning is reproduction, not resurrection," he said. "This is a good demonstration."
To clone, researchers at Texas A&M, led by Dr. Mark Westhusin, slipped cells from adult cats into cat eggs whose own genetic material had been removed. When cloning works, the adult cell takes over the development of the egg, using its genes to direct the development of the embryo, fetus and newborn, which are the genetic match of the adult that provided the original cell...
Ushering in pet cloning are donor, Rainbow, top, and offspring, cc.
