From the quiet of a high-security lab, away from the furore about human ethics and religious castigation, some of the world's cloning experts have come together on a groundbreaking project.
Working to order, the scientists receive shipments of tissue from around the world, grow them and freeze them in liquid nitrogen, leaving the cells in suspended animation until word comes to revive them and create clones.
Bankrolling the effort is the US billionaire John Sperling, who owns tissue stored in the lab's alarm-fitted "cryotanks." The tissue was taken from his dead dog Missy, and sits alongside slithers of tissue from other pets, mostly cats, their donors the living, the lost and the run-over. For those involved, this is the future of cloning. While the world's attention is focused on whether scientists should be allowed to clone human embryos to make potentially life-saving stem cells, the cloning experts at Sperling's company, Genetic Savings and Clone (GSC), have seen the future and decided it's fluffy.
The cloning effort is more than amusement for exceptionally rich and sentimental animal lovers. By commercializing cloning, Sperling's company is taking steps to turn the tedious, painstaking black art of cloning out of the hands of lab experts and into a high-throughput money-making process.
According to Ben Carlson, a spokesman for GSC in Madison, Wisconsin, beyond the US and Canada where the company focuses its marketing, Britons have become the biggest clients, followed by Japanese and Australians. Clients are advised cloning will not reproduce the pet but are reassured that genetically it will be identical. All of the British clients have so far opted to have tissue samples stored -- for a one-off payment of up to NT$47,500 plus a yearly fee of NT$4,750 -- so that in future they have the option to have their pet cloned.
The company has started charging for cloning. So far it has created six cats for pet owners who do not believe nine lives are enough. The first clients paid US$50,000, a fee that dropped to US$32,000 last year.
The business was set up shortly after Ian Wilmut's team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, UK, created Dolly, a cloned sheep, in 1997. In the wake of the excitement, Sperling, a university academic and entrepreneur, contacted the experts Mark Westhusin and Duane Kraemer at Texas A&M University to clone his own rare breed of dog -- a spayed collie-husky mix named Missy. The so-called Missyplicity project achieved a world first in February 2002 with the birth of Cc, short for Copycat, a cloned kitten. Five months later Missy died, the team stumped by the difficulty of dog cloning.
Although the Missyplicity project failed to clone Sperling's dog, GSC was spun out of the university to make money from storing pets' DNA, so it could be used to create clones in the future. Cat cloning services were offered in 2004 and researchers are now trying to crack dog cloning. To date, only one lab, that of the disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Woo Suk-hwang, has succeeded in cloning a dog, Snuppy, an Afghan hound who celebrated his first birthday last month. On board with GSC is a scientist from the lab.
According to Carlson, people approach the company to have their pets cloned for different reasons. Sometimes the pet is an unusual mix of breeds and sterile, and cloning is seen as the only way to replicate it. But sometimes people just want to see a dead pet's legacy continued. "Many of our clients are motivated by the wish to have a new pet that's related to their favorite pet, and that carries on its lineage."
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