Cloning Your Pet
At this point it's possible to clone Fluffy, but not Fido.

BY JOY LANZENDORFER

For years, scientists had been trying to clone a dog. Although cat cloning has been around since 2001, like a handful of other species—monkeys and chickens among them—dog physiology does not cooperate with cloning. Everything from the dog’s opaque ovarian eggs to the fact that they go into heat irregularly makes them hard to clone successfully.

Then last summer, South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang announced that he had cloned an Afghan hound named Snuppy. Unfortunately, a few months later, it came out that Hwang had faked the results of another study on cloning human embryos to provide stem cells. Hwang was disgraced, and suddenly people were wondering if Snuppy was a fake as well. Although independent investigation shows that Snuppy does indeed seem to be a legitimate clone, doubt about the dog still lingers.

Even if Snuppy is real, no one has yet cloned a dog in the United States. Sausalito’s Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC)—which cloned the first cat—is currently vying to put that particularly lucrative feather in its cap too.

The company, which will clone people’s cats for $32,000 (a price cut from $50,000), was originally formed to clone dogs. Millionaire John Sterling, who founded the adult-education-franchise University of Phoenix, wanted to clone his dog Missy. In 1997, he enlisted Lou Hawthorne to help him research the possibility. They started the Missiplicity Project at Texas A&M University, and soon discovered the untapped market of pet cloning.

“As a result of the Missiplicity Project being reported in the news, lots of dog owners contacted John about how they could do that,” says company spokesperson Ben Carlson. “John sensed a business opportunity and founded the company.”

Along with cat cloning, GSC offers gene banking, a service that can preserve a pet’s DNA for decades. The company is also reorganizing into BioArts, which in addition to GSC, will have two other divisions and a subsidiary. One of those, Blaze Equine Science, will soon begin cloning horses, specifically “Equestrian/Polo; Cutting/Rodeo like (i.e. quarter horses); Racing (i.e. thoroughbreds); and Pleasure Horses,” according to the Web site www.bioarts.com.

While some people are intrigued with the thought of cloning animals, there are others who hate the idea. In fact, a recent poll by the Marin Humane Society showed that 88 percent of those who responded would not clone their pet.

“We agree with them,” says MHS Executive Director Sheri Cardo. “Cloning is a fallacy. People feel like they are going to get a pet exactly like their previous pet, but that pet was created through a combination of genetics and their environment. The clone may not be at all like the original.”

Many people are aghast at what GSC is doing. Last year a group of animal rights activists and community leaders rallied behind state Senator Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys), for a ban on pet cloning in California. The bill, which specifically targeted GSC, failed to pass the Senate.

In addition to cats and the one dog, animals from cows to deer to sheep have been cloned by various labs. To do it, scientists first collect tissue from the donor animal they want to clone. Since all cells contain the DNA of the animal, GSC uses a process called chromative transfer to make the cells revert from adult cells back to baby cells.

“When you are taking a cell from a grown animal, it has already grown into a skin or muscle cell,” says Carlson. “So before introducing it to the egg, we de-differentiate it, which puts it back into an embryonic state.”

Next, they take an egg from another animal of the same species and enucleate it so that none of that animal’s genetic information is left behind. The scientists then insert the donor’s DNA into the blank egg and stimulate it with electricity or chemicals so that it starts dividing, as if it had been fertilized with sperm. Finally, they transfer the embryo into the surrogate mother. If all goes well, she gives birth to the clone.

SINCE THERE ARE so many steps in the process, many things can go wrong. Cloning typically produces a high volume of dead embryos. The survival rate of clones is estimated to be between .5-4 percent. While most embryos never gain consciousness, this low survival rate means the surrogate mothers undergo repeated miscarriages.

“It’s far from a perfect science,” says Tracie Letterman, executive director of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, which helped co-sponsor Levine’s anti-cloning bill. “To get Snuppy, they went through 1,095 cloned canine embryos to make one dog.”

GSC doesn’t say how many tries they go through to get one clone, although their Code of Bioethics guarantees that in the “unlikely event that an animal is born with deformities or other problems, it shall only be euthanized if it is suffering.”

Of those clones that do survive birth, about 25 percent have cloning-related health problems. According to the Human Genome Project, cloned animals can be abnormally large, have birth defects, and higher rates of infection and tumor growth.

And, while they can seem perfectly healthy when they are young, evidence suggests clones can have shorter lives. For example, roughly one-third of cloned calves die young. Sometimes, healthy clones can die suddenly for no apparent reason. In 2002, when researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge looked at over 10,000 cells of cloned mice, they concluded that about 4 percent of genes were functioning abnormally.

While GSC claims that these kinds of problems seem lower among pets, the company also guarantees the health of their clones, at least when it comes to cloning-related illnesses.

“Some health problems are unrelated to the pet having been cloned,” says Carlson. “For example, if the genetic donor has a predisposition for canine hip dysplasia, we won’t guarantee against that.”

GSC also guarantees that the clone will look like the original. While it seems to go against common sense that a clone could look different from its donor, the first cloned cat, Carbon Copy or CC, was a gray-and-white striped tabby, while the donor, Rainbow, was a calico. The difference was caused by random changes in the calico gene that happen when the embryo is developing. For this reason, Hawthorne told the state Senate, GSC no longer clones calicos.

Although it will promise the clone will look like the original, GSC won’t claim that the clone will act like the original. While many people expect a clone to be exactly the same as the donor pet, in reality, clones are more like a latter-born identical twin. Because it is born at a different time and in a different environment, the clone may act completely differently than the donor.

Carlson admits that some people do have unreasonable expectations about cloning. “There are people who contact us thinking that we can basically bring their beloved pet back to life,” he says. “When we become aware that this is someone’s motives, we explain to them that we can’t do that. A lot of our critics assume that this is the only motive our clients have and that we are exploiting their misperception, but that’s not the case.”

While GSC may explain cloning to its clients, critics think cloning still takes advantage of people who are grieving over dying pets. Though the customer may say he or she knows that the clone is not going to be the same as the original pet, expectations are still naturally going to be high.

“They are exploiting the emotions of the pet owners,” says Letterman. “People who have lost a pet don’t realize that a clone is not a carbon copy of the original. Pet-cloning companies are profiting off people who are willing to pay thousands to clone their pet.”

SEVEN YEARS AGO, Roland and Mary Ann Daniel from Medford, Oregon, had the DNA of their cat Smokey gene banked by GSC. To do this, the company sent the Daniels a kit. They took the kit and Smokey into the vet, who then performed a painless tissue biopsy to collect the cat’s genes. Then, they sent the kit back to GSC, where technicians removed all the water from the cells and replaced the liquid with cryoprotectant, similar to antifreeze, to keeps the cells intact. The whole thing was then frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored where the DNA can keep for years.

Knowing that her cat’s cells were safe is reassuring to Mary Ann. Smokey, who died a year-and-a-half ago at almost 21 years old, came into the Daniels’ lives only two months after Roland’s son had died suddenly. Smokey appeared on a window and seemed to fit immediately into their lives. “He was one of a kind,” Mary Ann says. “I have had many cats, but none of them have matched Smokey in terms of personality. He behaved much like a dog. He was very loyal, always at your side.”

Mary Ann says they probably will clone Smokey at some point, when they can afford it. “He was like a child to us,” she says. “So when he died, I thought that rather than letting it go, I would go this route instead.”

Another satisfied customer is Jayne Lange, in Menlo Park. Lange, who works in biotech, had her two shiba inus, Waka and Akeya, gene banked because, she says, she wanted to preserve the DNA of a rare breed of dog. “And yeah, who knows? I might want to clone them some day,” she says. “Not because I want a dog that looks like them, but I might want a dog with their certain characteristics.”

Gene banking a healthy animal costs $295 plus shipping, vet fees (which can range from $100-$500) and a $100/year maintenance fee. However, if the pet is terminally ill, gene banking costs $895. For dead pets, gene banking costs $1,395. “With a dead pet, we culture and store more tissue,” says Carlson. “Because the comfort of the pet isn’t a concern anymore, we take samples from the internal organs.”

Because it is veterinarians who perform the tissue biopsies, GSC considers them a critical part of their business. This puts vets smack in the middle of the pet cloning debate.

“Ask 10 vets what they think about pet cloning and you get 10 different opinions,” says Dr. Eric Weigand, president of the California Medical Veterinary Association. “There is no single opinion that vets hold to, though the vast majority support research that benefits pets over time.”

In his own Claremont practice, Weigand says several people have asked him about cat cloning, but not dog cloning. He recently received a call from one of the people who had a cat cloned by GSC. The woman said she was unhappy with her new pet. She wanted to get a genetic DNA test to prove it was a clone of the donor pet.

“She said the new cat looked and acted differently from the original pet.”

The woman did not return phone calls to be interviewed for this article. GSC refuses to release the names of clients who have had their pets cloned to protect their privacy.

Some scientists believe that cloning could potentially save endangered animals and even bring back extinct species. BioArts will contribute to this side of cloning as well. Later this year, it will announce plans to partner with an organization preserving endangered species.

Audubon Nature Institute of New Orleans is one such place. The Institute, which just reopened after Hurricane Katrina, is already cloning and gene banking the DNA of rare species, creating an entire “frozen zoo” of endangered animals. Last August at the Institute, two unrelated African wild cat clones bred and gave birth to a litter of eight healthy kittens. It was the first time two clones bred, confirming that cloning is a possible way to propagate a dwindling species. In cloning, the surrogate mother can be a different—although closely related—species from the clone. Domestic cats have carried African wild cat clones and a domestic cow carried an endangered Guar calf clone, although the calf died within 48 hours of birth.

While cloning may help individual species, it ignores what causes extinction in the first place, believes Letterman. “We think that the real reason there is extinction is habitat destruction,” she says. “That’s what scientists should concentrate on when it comes to endangered animals.”

Along with preserving endangered species, extinct animals like the woolly mammoth could be brought back from the dead. While the DNA that has been found in woolly mammoth remains is fragmented, the American Museum of Natural History released a study showing that woolly mammoths shared over 99 percent of their DNA with the African elephant. So, it is possible to create a hybrid animal that is very close to a woolly mammoth clone, according to Ross MacPhee of the museum.

“I feel pretty strongly that it’s a very bad idea to clone the mammoth,” MacPhee told National Public Radio in December. “At the end of the day, you have a single individual, this nice little furry pup, with nobody else to be with. It’s almost exactly parallel to the situation faced by Frankenstein’s monster. When the good doctor created him, he wasn’t thinking in terms of what the monster was most interested in, which of course was love.”

AND OF COURSE, love is what inspired the original cloning of the Missy project.

Since Missy was a border collie and husky mix, GSC originally thought that other people would be most interested in preserving mixed breeds. “We assumed our biggest business would be for the owners of mutts, people who have a breed of one,” says Carlson. “As it turns out, we do have clients who have a pure-bred pet and want to preserve it.”

Now the company is about to get into the lucrative equine world, where people pay tens-of-thousands for the blood lines of certain horses. They are also partnering with Cat Bank, which is owned by The Cat Fanciers’ Association. Cat Bank offers DNA services to cat owners and breeders, such as confirming the cat’s parentage, testing for inherited diseases and gene banking.

Opponents of pet cloning point to the overflowing numbers of pets that need homes. Although the Marin Humane Society euthanizes an “extremely low number” of animals, it deals with homeless pets daily. “Commercial pet cloning exacerbates the animal overpopulation problems,” says Cardo. “That’s not a good thing. Millions of animals need homes.”

GSC argues that it actually reduces the pet population by purchasing eggs from spay clinics, which in turn gives the clinics a new source of revenue to spay and neuter more animals. In addition, BioArts is giving a grant to University of Virginia for the development of immunocontraceptives, a low-cost, nonsurgical alternative to spaying.

But for some animal lovers, that’s simply not enough.

“Their claims that they are helping the pet population are disingenuous,” says Letterman. “This is a business. They are out to make money, not to be charitable.”

This kind of suspicion may be why people accuse GSC of “playing God.” While pet cloning has the potential to help animals in the long run, the idea of paying thousands to reproduce that one special pet can seem to cheapen the very meaning of a pet’s life. For some, this negative far outweighs any positives pet cloning may bring.

In the end, whether or not GSC succeeds may come down to how well it convinces critics that it is interested in more than just the bottom line.

The quotes from GSC’s Ben Carlson came from an earlier interview with the writer. GSC declined to be interviewed for this article; the new policy is to talk with the press only when introducing a new product.

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WERTZ

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