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Cat created in Austin is world's first cloned-to-order pet
Woman bought Austin-made clone of her beloved Nicky for $50,000

By Alan Zarembo

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Thursday, December 23, 2004

A Dallas-area woman who paid $50,000 to a Northern California biotech company has received a 9-week-old clone of her dead cat, Nicky, the first known sale of a cloned pet.

Genetic Savings & Clone, based in Sausalito, handed over Little Nicky, a Maine coon cat, earlier this month. The cat was cloned at its North Austin lab.

"He is identical. I have not been able to see one difference," said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Julie, because she said she fears being targeted by groups opposed to cloning.

Ben Carlson, spokesman for Genetic Savings & Clone, said his company has cloned five cats, all but one of them at the lab in Austin. He said the company hopes to clone a total of nine cats next year at the Austin lab and at a new facility in Madison, Wis.

"We're happy to reach this milestone of delivering a clone to a paying client, and we're thrilled that she's more than satisfied," Carlson said.

The next frontier is cloning a dog, which has proven to be much more difficult.

Despite its whimsical name, the company has been working for more than four years on the cat cloning process. Its founder, Arizona billionaire John Sperling, financed the research at Texas A&M University that in 2001 led to the first cat clone, known as CC, or Carbon Copy.

The announcement of Little Nicky sparked criticism from some animal protection groups, who saw the event as opening the door to a new realm of problems.

"There are million of cats being killed in shelters every year," said Michael Mountain, president of Best Friends Animal Society. "There is no shortage of cats, so why do they have to do this?"

He described the cloning of animals -- still a complex and tricky procedure that can result in deformities and genetic abnormalities -- as an inhumane game of trial and error.

"You're dealing with a Dr. Frankenstein situation," Mountain said.

But Lou Hawthorne, chief executive of Genetic Savings & Clone, said there was no denying the intense desire of some pet owners to bring back their deceased companions.

"We're not curing cancer, but we believe we are adding to the sum of joy in the world," Hawthorne said.

Dr. Michael Grodin, a psychiatrist and director of medical ethics at Boston University School of Medicine and Public Health, said he saw no ethical problem with the procedure.

"Many people have a better and stronger and more humane relationship with their pets than they do with other human beings," he said. "Who am I to say that somebody shouldn't clone their cat?"

Nicky died in 2003 at age 17.

"He was very beautiful," Julie said. "He was exceptionally intelligent. He knew 11 commands."

Julie, who said she worked in the airline industry, began investigating the possibility of cloning him in 2001 after reading about the birth of CC.

When Nicky died, she immediately sent a genetic sample to Genetic Savings & Clone. Little Nicky was born Oct. 17.

"When Little Nicky yawned I even saw two spots inside his mouth -- just like Nicky had," Julie said. "Little Nicky loves water, like Nicky did, and he's already jumped into the bathtub like Nicky used to do."

Ever since scientists produced the first mammal clone, Dolly the sheep in 1996, they have repeated the feat with a barnyard of creatures, including mice, pigs, horses and bulls. The cloning of a cat was actually the result of a failed effort to clone a dog.

Sperling, founder of the for-profit, adult-education University of Phoenix, wanted to clone a friend's pet dog Missy. In 1998 he gave researchers at Texas A&M money to pursue the project. Discouraged by the slow progress, he started Genetic Savings & Clone in 2000, while continuing to finance the Texas scientists.

The company uses a technology known as chromatin transfer, a variation of a standard cloning technique known as nuclear transfer.

The nucleus of an egg cell is replaced by genetic material from a donor cell that first has been chemically treated. The egg is then placed in a surrogate, which carries it to birth.

The process still has its pitfalls.

Hawthorne said about a third of the clones do not survive past 60 days. There are also genetic factors that can make the clones and originals look different. CC's coat, for example, varied from that of its original.

"The thing that many people do not realize is that the cloned cat is not the same as the original," said Bonnie Beaver, a Texas A&M animal behaviorist who heads the American Veterinary Medical Association, which has no position on the issue of cloning pets.

"It has a different personality," she said. "It has different life experiences. They want Fluffy, but it's not Fluffy."

Hawthorne said the $50,000 price will eventually fall. In the meantime, several hundred people have paid between $295 and $1,395 for the company to store genetic material from their pet dogs and cats to create clones in case the procedure becomes more affordable.

Additional material from The Associated Press and staff reports.



This woman paid fifty thousand dollars for a clone of her dead cat. Now I'm a person who loves cats, and I've been heartbroken when they die. Losing a pet is always hard. And I'll make it clear that my family has spent hundreds of dollars on vet bills to save sick animals that no one wanted.

But there's no excuse for this gross, selfish behaviour. How many animals in shelters could you save with fifty grand? How many pets could you neuter or spay, how many bags of food and how many could you keep alive with that money? What this woman did is despicable and in light of the hundreds of animals in shelters all around us... it's just cruel.

Yet another thing in the world that proves people are so damned stupid.