Here, Kitty, Kitty!

By Jeffrey Kluger

With her big round eyes, her button nose and her I'm-ready-for-fun expression, the kitten named cc (short for carbon copy and copy cat) has a face that's almost impossible not to love, which may help explain why the hostility that usually accompanies news on the cloning front was almost drowned out last week by the sound of the press corps cooing on cue.

Cc is the name the scientists behind the first cloned house pet gave their creation, a shorthaired calico that is a genetic (though not a visual) duplicate of her biological mom. Because she is so seductively cute--pulling at the same heartstrings an infant human clone would invariably tug--she lays bare the emotional subtext that has so far been missing in the great cloning debate. It's one thing to argue the merits of cloning when you're talking about uncuddly sheep, mice, cattle, goats and pigs. It's quite another when the clone is practically sitting in your lap, mewing and purring and begging for love.

And so it was last week that a debate that began in 1997 with the cloning of Dolly the sheep took on a new urgency. Public opinion was once again split along ethical fault lines, although this time pro-cloners were joined by pet lovers and anti-cloners drew support from the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. "We must question the social purpose here," said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society's U.S. branch. "Just because you're capable of something doesn't mean you should act on it."

Not that making cc was particularly easy. The work was overseen by Mark Westhusin, an associate professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and backed by Genetic Savings & Clone, a private company whose financial benefactor wanted to clone not a cat but an aging border-collie mix named Missy. Dogs, however, don't ovulate regularly, as cats do, and, for reasons not fully understood, dogs' ova don't mature well in laboratory dishes. So after almost three fruitless years, Westhusin and his colleagues turned their attention from canines to felines.

Working first with an adult male cat, they harvested cells from the animal's mouth and fused them with cat-donor eggs that had been emptied of genetic material. This created 82 embryos, which were implanted into seven surrogate mothers. The process yielded only a single fetal clone, and that one died in utero. Researchers then turned to cumulus cells from the ovaries of a female named Rainbow, creating five cloned embryos. These were implanted in Allie, another surrogate, and this time an embryo took hold and grew. The result was cc, born Dec. 22 and announced with a flourish last week by the journal Nature. "It was very exciting to witness," says Lou Hawthorne, Genetic Savings & Clone's CEO. "She's just such a cutie."

It was more than a mere scientific breakthrough. The news, which broke first in the Wall Street Journal, caught the eye of entrepreneurs. Each year millions of pets die in the U.S., leaving behind plenty of well-heeled owners who would be willing to pay top dollar to replace their beloved companion. Genetic Savings & Clone already offers to freeze pet DNA for future cloning, charging a one-time fee of $895 plus $100 a year for storage.

But let the cloner beware. Genetically reproducing a pet is not cheap. "The ones we do in the next year are going to cost five figures," says Hawthorne. Only later, when the procedures get streamlined, will costs drop. There are also technical problems. The Texas lab's 1-in-87 success rate is typical of cloning work, which can produce dozens of dead embryos for every living one.

Moreover, when you do get a viable clone, it may not turn out to be much like its parent in anything but its genes. Rainbow and cc have different coloring, for example, since the coats of calicos are determined partly by genes and partly by random molecular changes during development. Temperament too is a toss-up, since it's hard to tease out how much of an animal's personality is genetically scripted and how much is shaped by environment. "The fallacy is that cloning provides a duplicate," says the Humane Society's Pacelle. Concedes Westhusin: "This is not a resurrection. People need to understand that."

Even if it were possible to create an exact genetic stencil of a lost pooch or kitty, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Given that more than 5 million unwanted cats are destroyed each year, it's hard to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to clone a new one. Why not just adopt? What's more, some of the animals cloned so far have been plagued by fatal heart and lung defects in infancy.

Cloning advocates counter that the frailty of clones will be overcome as the technology improves and that the relatively small number of new cloned pets would have little effect on the stray population. What's more, they argue, cloning has scientific applications. Clones could provide a line of identical animals for lab research, for instance, allowing scientists to conduct experiments without the genetic variability that can confound results.

To critics, such arguments seem like moral fig leaves. They view cc as an ethical dry run for human cloning, and they're troubled by how the rehearsal is going. "Once cloning is on its own as a commercial enterprise, there really is no oversight," says Lori Gruen, a Wesleyan University ethics professor who generally supports cloning research. Could a culture that can't agree on the morality of using human embryos to create stem cells tolerate a technology in which 86 human embryos have to die to create an 87th? "Why do it?" asks Pacelle. "It seems to me a very dangerous line of thought to pursue."

As if on cue, Panayiotis Zavos, a retired University of Kentucky professor who for two years has been boasting that he would be the first to clone a human, announced last week that he has selected 10 infertile couples and is set to begin work next month. If you thought cc was hard not to love, wait until you see the first baby.

--Reported by Sora Song/New York

With reporting by Sora Song/New York