Here kitty, kitty: Scientists clone first cat

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

Born Dec. 22 by Caesarean section in a university laboratory, the apparently healthy cat is the sixth species of mammal to be created asexually from a single adult cell — after sheep, mice, cattle, goats and pigs — and the first "companion animal" to be cloned. Scientists said the ability to clone cats eventually could 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?" asked Mark Westhusin, 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 advocates, who 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 Beth 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 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 to term. Parallel work on cats went faster, Westhusin said, in part because cat eggs grow and mature in culture dishes better than dog eggs do.

To commercialize the work, Sperling two years ago created a Texas company called Genetic Savings and Clone, which holds 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, suggested yesterday that there are tens of millions of dollars to be made through companion-animal cloning services. But the new work, to be published in the scientific journal Nature next week and posted on the journal's Web site yesterday 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 DNA had been removed, creating 82 cloned embryos that were transferred to the wombs of seven cats. One pregnancy resulted, but it ended in miscarriage, as so often happens in clonal pregnancies.

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. CC arrived 66 days later. Her name is an abbreviation for "copycat" and also 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 quite different than that cat's. That's because calico markings are the result of random molecular changes that occur during fetal development.

Westhusin denied that cat cloning would exacerbate the domestic feline overpopulation 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.

But the potential benefits of cat cloning are great, Westhusin said. The work has shed much light on reproductive endocrinology in cats and dogs, he said, and some findings are being applied to development of new pet contraceptives. Moreover, he said, if populations of cloned cats become available for lab research, it could lead to an actual reduction in the numbers of cats needed for research, since it would eliminate complications that arise when lab animals are too genetically diverse.

Researchers hoping to expand populations of endangered species said they found the work inspiring.

"It now proves that this technology does work in cats and we can now try to apply this technology to some of the smaller endangered cat species such as the African wild cat, the fishing cat and the blackfooted cat," said Philip Damiani of the Audubon Nature Institute's Center for Research of Endangered Species.

But those arguments did not convince opponents.

"They ring pretty hollow," said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, the nation's largest animal-welfare group. Contraceptive research has been going well without having to create clones, Pacelle said, adding that spaying and neutering is simple and effective. Others have questioned whether clones would offer the genetic variety needed to save endangered species.