Scientists copy a cat, but miss a few marks

By Rick Weiss

The Washington Post

Scientists in Texas have created the first cloned cat, a domestic calico named "CC" that has immediately taken a curious and controversial place in history as the first cloned domestic pet.

Born Dec. 22 by Caesarian section in a university laboratory, the apparently healthy cat is the sixth type of mammal to be created asexually from a single adult cell — following sheep, mice, cattle, goats and pigs — and the first "companion animal" to be cloned. Scientists said the ability to clone cats could eventually be a boon to biomedical research, but more immediately could satisfy what they said was a growing consumer demand for pet cloning services.

"You can’t beat around the bush. There are lots of people interested in their pets, so why avoid it?" said Mark Westhusin, the lead scientist behind the project at Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in College Station.

But the feat drew intense criticism from animal care organizations, which have spearheaded efforts to reduce feline birth rates through nationwide spaying and neutering programs.

"Isn’t it crazy that millions of animals are killed in shelters in this country every year and people are thinking so selfishly about cloning more of them?" said Mary Sweetland, vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, Va. "They could do so much more good by going to their local shelter and adopting an animal on death row."

The work was funded by Arizona millionaire John Sperling, who has given Texas A&M about $3.7 million so far to develop technology to clone his beloved dog, a border collie-Siberian husky mutt named Missy. Although several pregnancies have been achieved, no Missy clones have survived. Parallel work on cats went faster, Westhusin said, in part because cat eggs grow and mature in culture dishes better than dog eggs.

To commercialize the work, Sperling two years ago created a Texas company called Genetic Savings and Clone, which holds the licensing rights to any proprietary pet-cloning techniques developed by the university’s so-called Missyplicity Project. The company hopes to make a profit by cloning people’s pets — including dead ones from whom a few cells have been preserved — as well as endangered wild cats and specialized dogs such as those used on search and rescue teams or to guide the blind.

Lou Hawthorne, the company’s chief executive officer, said Thursday there are tens of millions of dollars to be made through companion animal cloning services. But the new work, to be published in the Feb. 21 issue of the scientific journal Nature and posted on the journal’s Web site Thursday after The Wall Street Journal wrote about the work, suggests that it may be some time before cat cloning is efficient and profitable.

The team painstakingly fused 188 skin cells with cat eggs whose own DNA had been removed, creating 82 cloned embryos that were transferred to the wombs of seven cats. One pregnancy resulted, but as so often happens in clonal pregnancies, it ended in miscarriage.

In a second effort, the team transferred five cloned embryos to a surrogate mother cat, three of them made from ovarian tissue cells rather than skin cells taken from an adult cat named Rainbow. Sixty-six days later, CC arrived. Her name is an abbreviation for "copy cat" and harkens back to the old secretarial abbreviation for "carbon copy," said veterinary reproductive physiologist Duane Kramer, a member of the team.

In fact, the kitten is anything but an exact copy. Although tests indicate she is a genetic duplicate of the cat that donated the original ovary cell, CC’s markings are different than that cat’s. That’s because calico markings are not fully determined by genetic coding but are the result of random molecular changes that occur during fetal development.

Westhusin denied that cat cloning would exacerbate the domestic feline population problem. "There are more cats going to be born on your block in the next month than are going to be cloned in the next three years," he said.