Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (9 page)

If you could get a clone like CC, who didn’t even
look
like her donor, you could certainly get one with a different personality. A&M’s researchers saw that firsthand when they duplicated a Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was an unusually docile bull who’d starred in movies and on television, and his owner, a rodeo clown named Ralph Fisher, was desperate to have the bull replicated. In 1999, Westhusin made Fisher a clone, but as Second Chance grew up, it was clear that he was not the gentle giant his predecessor had been. Second Chance attacked Fisher. Twice. The second time, the bull pierced Fisher’s left testicle, fractured his spine, and left the rodeo clown hospitalized with eighty stitches in his crotch. Second Chance had Chance’s DNA in his cells, but he had a different upbringing, training, and life than his progenitor and became a different bull. (As for that RePet salesman’s promise that a cloned pet will know all the same tricks as its DNA donor—pure hokum, at least in the real world.) CC and Second Chance are both illustrations of what became Westhusin and Kraemer’s mantra: “Cloning is reproduction—it’s not resurrection.”

For his part, Kraemer was thrilled by CC’s color snafu. He had been worried that pet owners might be easy prey for scammers. “People can be taken advantage of because of their devotion to their animal,” he explains. CC was obvious, visible-to-the-naked-eye proof that even a genetic twin would not be a perfect replica of a special pet. But CC proved that cat duplication was possible, and in 2004, Genetic Savings & Clone launched its “Nine Lives Extravaganza,” offering to mimeograph the cat of anyone who could afford the $50,000 price tag. The company also made a dramatic guarantee: “If you feel that your kitten doesn’t sufficiently resemble the genetic donor, we’ll refund your money in full with no questions asked.” Less than a year later, the company delivered a cloned Maine coon cat named Little Nicky to its first paying customer. (The Texas woman who’d ordered the kitten was impressed. “He is identical,” she told the press. “His personality is the same.”)

Despite the success that GSC and A&M had with cat cloning, the company and the university eventually parted ways, in part because the A&M team encountered failure after failure in their attempts to duplicate Missy, the mutt that started it all. The vagaries of the canine reproductive system made the project more difficult than expected. In cats or cattle, immature eggs can be harvested from the ovaries and matured in a petri dish in the lab. For reasons that scientists still don’t fully understand, this strategy doesn’t work with dogs, whose eggs simply seem to be fussier. That means that researchers have to wait until the precise moment a canine ovulates, then open her up and flush the mature eggs out of her body. “The logistics of it are just a nightmare,” Westhusin says. The A&M team managed to coax two canines to carry cloned embryos in their wombs, but one miscarried and the other gave birth to a stillborn pup.

GSC shut down in 2006 for financial reasons, but Hawthorne was soon back in business, at the helm of a startup called BioArts International. Still desperate for a Missy 2.0, he connected with Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean scientist who had created the world’s first cloned dog, in 2005, an Afghan hound named Snuppy (from
Seoul National University
, where the researchers were based, and
puppy
).
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Hawthorne told Hwang, now at a company called the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, about Missy and asked him to help give the dog a clone. Hwang, delivered—in triplicate—and by 2008, Hawthorne had three little balls of fur on his hands: Mira, Chingu, and Sarang, all clones of Missy.
*
The BioArts website announced, “Missy: Accomplished!” and noted that like their genetic donor, all three pups had soft coats and a fondness for broccoli.

Encouraged by this success, BioArts announced the “Best Friends Again” program, promising to have five dogs cloned by Sooam. The spots would be sold in a global auction, with bidding starting at $100,000. BioArts also announced a “Golden Clone Giveaway,” in which a deserving dog owner, as decided by an essay contest, would win a free copy of his or her canine.
^†

However, the prospect of resurrecting pets didn’t prompt universal excitement. Instead, it spurred the same kind of apocalyptic fantasizing that greeted GloFish. Animal replication sparked fears of copying humans, and a handful of journalists, ethicists, and politicians speculated about the potential for creating, say, an army of Hitlers. Some worried that cloning undermined individual uniqueness or that we were unleashing scientific powers beyond our understanding and control.

Other critics were concerned about animal welfare, an issue that deserves serious contemplation. Experts estimate that scientists worldwide use anywhere from 50 million to 100 million animals in their labs every year, and these creatures don’t always have good lives—think back to all those mutant mice, engineered to have cancer or Alzheimer’s, or the hideous Beltsville pigs. Researchers sometimes inflict physical pain on their lab rats, performing invasive surgeries or exposing the animals to toxic substances. Lab animals can also suffer from psychological or emotional distress, caused by a lack of social contact and mental stimulation or forced participation in stressful experiments. As Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies the inner lives of animals, explains: “Animals have the same desires that we have. They want to avoid pain, they want to just be content, they want to have their needs of food, shelter, friendship, sex, or whatever satisfied, and they want to avoid pain and discomfort and stress and terror. There can be no doubt about that.”

Pet cloning tapped into long-standing worries about the burdens borne by lab animals, and the Humane Society of the United States and the American Anti-Vivisection Society joined forces to denounce the practice. In a 2008 report, the two groups sounded the usual alarm about the health of clones: “Few cloned animals are born alive, and many of those who do survive birth suffer health problems and die soon thereafter.”

As the report pointed out, cloning’s inefficiency raises additional welfare concerns. To duplicate one dog, scientists have to harvest eggs from a whole pack of anesthetized lady canines. Still more dogs are needed to carry the developing embryos in their wombs. (It takes a village. A furry, slobbery, tail-wagging village.) To create Snuppy, the South Korean researchers had implanted a total of 1,095 cloned embryos into 123 female dogs. Only two dogs were born, and only one lived.
Nature
, the journal that published the paper on Snuppy’s birth, noted these sad statistics in an editorial: “It is unlikely that even the most obsessive pet owner would contemplate preparing more than 100 failed pregnancies for just one successful birth … In such circumstances, the cloning of dogs for pet owners remains ethically indefensible.”
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The animals used in cloning, and other kinds of research, are afforded some protections. The federal Animal Welfare Act, which passed in 1966 and has been amended several times since, establishes basic requirements for the housing and care of laboratory creatures. It requires the use of painkillers and anesthesia when appropriate and stipulates that experimenters must consider both the physical and mental well-being of certain species. The law also includes special provisions for canines, social animals that thrive on human interaction. The act encourages researchers to provide dogs with “positive physical contact with humans,” legally defined as “petting, stroking, or other touching, which is beneficial to the well-being of the animal.” If the dogs are housed without any other canine compatriots, this extra human attention is mandatory.
^†

From the beginning, Genetic Savings & Clone made an effort to address welfare concerns by writing up its own strict code of ethics. Among other things, the code stated that all cats and dogs would get at least two hours of daily playtime, and, once their lab duties were over, that all would be placed in “loving homes.” Any animal born with deformities would also be placed with adoptive families, unless the defects were severe enough to cause serious suffering, in which case the animals would be euthanized.

These promises weren’t enough to calm critics, who insisted that any harm caused by pet cloning was unacceptable. After all, zebrafish and mice and goats are one thing—the thought of scientists experimenting with cats and dogs is much harder for us to stomach. Surveys show that more people disapprove of pet cloning than agricultural cloning, with about 80 percent of Americans opposed to duplicating pets in labs. (The percentage of those who say they disapprove of livestock cloning hovers in the mid-60s.)

Even the Animal Welfare Act reflects our preference for some species over others. While dogs are singled out for extra attention, many kinds of rats and mice—the very animals used in most experiments—are explicitly excluded from the act’s protections. So are farm animals being used for “food and fiber.” (Livestock being used for biomedical research are covered by the act, and the A&M team adhered to the federal law and additional welfare standards in its cloning work, according to Westhusin.)

Indeed, there’s an interesting contradiction in the rhetoric that surrounds pet cloning. We’re creating these carbon copies because we love our companions so much that we can’t bear the thought of living without them. And yet that’s also why the endeavor is so fraught—because we value cats and dogs above so many other species. People on both sides of the debate are driven by their devotion to these animals. The controversy over pet cloning is a debate over what it means to love an animal, and it involves values and judgments that we may never all agree upon.

Even the most stringent of ethical codes cannot guarantee that lab animals won’t suffer; experimental procedures, by definition, have unknown outcomes, and cloning is clearly capable of causing animal pain and distress. Though cloners are figuring out how to improve the procedure’s efficiency, they still have more to learn (particularly about the long-term health of lab-grown cats and dogs) before pet cloning is ready for prime time.
*

Hawthorne ultimately came to the same conclusion, and on September 10, 2009, he announced that BioArts was getting out of the pet cloning business for good. In a statement that appeared on the company’s website, Hawthorne wrote that animal duplication remained unpredictable. “Cloning,” he acknowledged, “is still an experimental technology and consumers would be well-advised to proceed cautiously.” What’s more, he wrote, BioArts simply hadn’t been able to attract enough customers. The company had sold just four of the five spots in its dog cloning auction. (BioArts successfully delivered clones to these four customers, plus the Golden Clone Giveaway winner, before shutting down its pet cloning operation.) Despite all the theoretical interest in copying a pet—the thousands of calls and e-mails—only a few owners were ready to pull the trigger.

Perhaps that’s because the appeal of pet cloning is based an impossible dream, the fantasy put forth in
The Sixth Day—
the hope that through the miracle of science, we can bring a beloved pet back to life. Compare this motive with the cold, hard calculus behind agricultural cloning, which is not about love, but money. A cattle rancher simply wants to create twins of animals with superlative musculature or milk production. That’s an achievable goal. Several cloned cows, for instance, have won the World Dairy Expo, the largest dairy show in the United States. Doc, the winning steer at the 2010 Iowa State Fair, was a clone of the animal that won the same competition in 2008. It’s not only cheaper and easier to clone a bull than a dog—$20,000 for the cow, compared with $100,000 or more for the pooch—but it’s also a better investment; a genetically gifted bull can bring in so much money that the cloning more than pays for itself.
*
(What’s more, when cloning came along, ranchers were also used to thinking about breeding in scientific terms and had grown accustomed to managing their herds with the help of reproductive technology, and the world of livestock breeding was already home to companies eager to commercialize the latest laboratory breakthroughs.)

There’s enough demand for cloned livestock that ViaGen, a company based in Austin, Texas, is cloning several hundred farm animals a year.
^†
Most of its customers are duplicating cattle, but horses are poised to be the next big thing. ViaGen has cloned a champion barrel racer, and an Argentinian polo player has had some of his high-performing horses copied. And in 2012, the Fédération Equestre Internationale, the governing body for international equestrian competitions, reversed its ban on cloned horses, clearing the way for such equines to compete in the Olympics. (Imagine a race in which all the horses are clones of a previous winner. Or clones of the same winner! What a challenge that would be for the odds makers.)

A pet owner who pursues cloning is motivated not by the desire to monetize a single physical trait, but by a devotion to a unique animal with a whole suite of characteristics and quirks. Though there’s more to producing a prizewinning cow than genetics, cloning is simply better suited to fulfill the more limited goals of farmers than the grand dreams of pet lovers. Even a biological double will never bring a pet back from the Great Kennel in the Sky. That makes it hard to justify paying six figures for a clone, especially while the technology is experimental and the results unpredictable.

*   *   *

The dream is still alive, however, and pet lovers haven’t given up hope of seeing old Rover again. What if GSC and BioArts failed because they were simply ahead of their time? Over the coming decades, it’s likely that cloning’s success rates will go up, the price will come down, and public attitudes will soften.
*
Several animal gene-banking companies are betting on it; for a small fee, these companies are offering the same service that GSC did in its earliest days, letting pet owners put their animal’s DNA on ice until cloning technology matures.