Copied cat gives pause at veterinarians’ convention

Molly Ball

Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

Mango looks to the right.

Peaches looks to the right.

Then they close their eyes in unison, their faces settling into cats' particular look of determined satisfaction.

These cats don't just look alike. Peaches is Mango's clone.

The two are showpieces in the repertoire of a California-based company that has achieved both fame and notoriety for cloning housecats.

The marmalade-mantled, white-bibbed pair are on display at the world's largest veterinarians' meeting, the 77th annual Western Veterinary Conference, which began Sunday at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and ends Wednesday.

As 14,000 veterinarians, veterinary workers, merchants and family members browsed booths hawking pet food, medication and equipment on Monday, Genetic Savings & Clone's small exhibition space stood out.

The booth attracted a crowd throughout the day, with some eager to argue the ethics of cloning and others merely curious.

The company hoped to enlist vets to refer customers and defuse misconceptions about the cloning service. Four vets in Las Vegas are currently part of the referral network, and two Las Vegas residents are paying an annual fee to store their pets' genetic material.

Dr. Kimberly McKee, a veterinarian who manages an animal hospital in Orange County, Calif., said people's willingness to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a cloned pet was no surprise in an atmosphere where pet owners spare no expense.

"In the Orange County area, we have MRIs and CAT scans for pets," she said. "We have dog and cat dialysis, where you have to adopt the cat or dog that donates a kidney.

"Money is not an object for these clients. I just had a client spend $10,000 for a dog that needed a transfusion."

McKee said she had no problem with pet cloning. At the price of a luxury car, she pointed out, people are getting something that means much more than a mere material object.

Many do object to the cloning company. Chiefly it is accused of playing God, of contributing to the overpopulation of animals that clogs shelters everywhere, and of leading science down a slippery slope to human cloning, resulting in clone armies and mobs of malevolent mutants.

Whatever you think of those issues, Genetic Savings & Clone's attitude is evidenced by the groaner pun of its name: Lighten up. If someone wants Fluffy Redux and human ingenuity can make him, why not?

And also: Wook at de itsy-witsy cutesy-wutesy kitty-cat! It is difficult to look at Peaches, curled up and purring, and see a monstrous abomination.

"I'm going to need you to tell me which is which," Ben Carlson, Genetic Savings & Clone's communications director, said to the cats' owner, Leslie Ungerer, as he approached the pen that holds the two.

Ungerer, who manages the company's feline surrogate mothers, says she can still tell them apart, but it's getting harder now that Peaches is six months old and nearly full grown. Mango is 2. Ungerer estimates that the pair's markings are 95 percent identical.

"They definitely have individual personalities, but they have a lot of similarities in terms of behavior," Ungerer said. "They both hate to be picked up. And they're both talkers. Peaches complains a lot."

The company has now made six cat clones, and one of the unknown factors the scientists are discovering is how much personality the animals tend to share. Quite a bit, it turns out, although the company is careful to make customers understand that the clone they're getting won't be exactly the same animal -- more like an identical, but younger, twin.

Of the six clones, two have been created for paying clients, with the latest, a blue-eyed part-Siamese named Little Gizmo, delivered to a Texas investment counselor in December.

Last week, the company lowered its rates for cat cloning from $50,000 to $32,000. Meanwhile, the company's gene banking service -- storing tissue samples from living pets for potential cloning later -- is "skyrocketing," said Mike Hodnett, senior vice president for sales and marketing. Nearly 700 people are paying at least $295, plus $100 per year, to store pets' genetic material.

The gene bank also houses samples of a few direly endangered species that environmental groups hope to preserve, Hodnett said.

Still to come is pet cloning's Holy Grail: a cloned dog. Since 1997, an Arizona businessman named John Sperling has put up millions of dollars toward the effort, hoping to create a carbon copy of Missy, a spirited mutt who died in 2002.

Dog cloning has been far more challenging than cat-copying for a variety of scientific reasons -- for example, dog eggs are opaque, not clear like cats' or humans', so it's difficult to extract the genetic material from their center.

But Hodnett said most of the obstacles have been surmounted and the breakthrough could be in the coming months. The company is opening the first laboratory of its own in Wisconsin next month, and scientists hope to clone Missy there soon after, he indicated.

"The demand for dogs far outstrips our availability to offer it," Hodnett said. "The price could be ridiculously expensive and it doesn't seem to deter people."

From a business perspective, pet cloning has been an obvious opportunity ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, said Hunt Lambert, who teaches the business side of veterinary work at America's No. 2 veterinary school, Colorado State University.

"The technology exists, therefore the business will exist," Lambert said. "The question is, are regulators yet equipped to deal with it? The answer is 'no.' "

No legislation has yet been proposed in America to ban pet cloning, although Carlson said one California assemblyman has announced his intention to introduce such a bill. Carlson said he thought it was more likely that legislation would be passed establishing standards for safe and humane cloning.

Most of the vets at the conference Monday evinced little shock or horror at the prospect of pet cloning. Witnessing pet owners' intense devotion to animals on a daily basis, they sympathized.

"A vet in my town had a champion show dog, and he wants to clone it," said Dr. Robert Jackson of Jacksonville, Fla. "I certainly would like to have some of my dogs back. But it's too late."