Customized pets

By LINTON WEEKS
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Genetics Savings & amp; Clone, a pet-cloning company based in California with labs in Wisconsin, is considered the leader in the industry -- if you can call a few far-out and flaky-named companies an industry.
Over the past couple of years, GS & amp;C has cloned several kittens and delivered two to customers. The company also reports that it plans to clone a dog this year. Though GS & amp;C says the clones' owners prefer anonymity, it does provide a videotape of what it describes as its cloned kittens romping and rolling and pouncing around. In one segment, Lou Hawthorne, the firm's honey-voiced chief executive officer, holds one of the kitties, Little Gizmo, while telling the camera that he offered Little Gizmo's owner, Dan, $100,000 in exchange for his just-delivered clone. "He just laughed," Hawthorne said.
In another segment, Hawthorne presents a newly minted clone, Little Nicky, to its owner, who is identified only as Julie. The cloning was completed in December, he said, and GS & amp;C refers to Little Nicky as the first cloned pet ever sold to a paying customer. Julie tells the camera that the offspring is identical to the donor and she is overcome with emotion. Hundreds of pet lovers, who have banked DNA with GS & amp;C, are waiting for just such a magical moment, says company spokesman Ben Carlson.
At the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans -- a public-private facility that also has reported successful cloning -- Director Betsy Dresser is collecting DNA samples from endangered species that are losing their habitats to human development. Dresser and her group have cloned a number of African wildcats and an antelope. Her work is intriguing because her techniques may be used to clone exotic -- and not-so-exotic -- pets in the future.
Difficult dogs
Philip Damiani, chief scientific officer at GS & amp;C, is the former senior scientist at the Audubon cloning center. He's toiling away to meet a 2005 deadline for cloning a dog, which is more challenging than cloning a cat. It's more difficult to work with a dog's egg to produce cloned embryos and to coordinate the transfer of a cloned embryo with the infrequent estrus cycle of the surrogate mother. Dogs go into heat only once or twice a year; cats have a more frequent cycle. "I feel the pressure every day when I come to work," Damiani said. The price for a cloned pet is $32,000.
But to Martha Armstrong of the Humane Society of the United States, pet cloning is just plain wrong. "Spending $32,000 to purchase an animal is to me an outrageous sum of money," Armstrong said. She suggests pet adoption. "There is a perfectly healthy, perfectly nice animal just waiting for a home."
Cloning, she says, "doesn't guarantee that an animal is going to have a nice personality."
The real tragedy of cloning, she says, is the pain and suffering that results from the process. "Dolly had a gazillion ones before her," Armstrong said of the historic cloned sheep from Scotland. "They all died."
Carlson says GS & amp;C is using newer technology that reduces the risk of cloning mishaps. However, he says, "the efficiencies are not very good. It varies by species."
He says, "You are not getting one live born for every clone embryo. Most are not going to take, or abort early. That's one of the reasons cloning is so expensive."
Cloning, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, "may in some ways be overhyped." Bringing back your dead pet is not all it's cracked up to be, he says. "The new dog won't know the old tricks."
And, Caplan adds, it's way too expensive for most people.
Adapting pets
"Genetic engineering is the wave of the future," Caplan said. People will be in the market for animals that can live in apartments and are easier to take care of. And for pets that are more obedient, quicker to learn and, Caplan says, "in some instances even nastier than some pit bull situations."
We are seeing early signs of these lab-modified pets. The GloFish, a glowing zebra fish imbued with a fluorescence gene, arrived in pet stores last year. Allerca, a California-based company, is advertising the near-future development of "lifestyle pets" -- such as a short-haired cat bred for allergy sufferers -- using genetic technology. Time will tell if their techniques work.
There is nothing inherently wrong with pet modification, Caplan says, if it produces "pets that leave a smaller footprint on the environment." Or a pet with some worthwhile purpose. Increasing the life span of a cherished pet or curing its hearing defect or hip dysplasia is a noble cause, Caplan says. "But the debate will center in another direction."
He believes there is an appetite for "freakish traits" in pets and he sees an ominous coming day: the eight-legged dog, for example.
"Using genetic engineering to create freaks or oddities is wrong," he said, "in pets as in humans."
And the world will be divided between the natural-pet group and the engineered-pet group. "They'll probably coexist and sneer at each other," he said.
Armstrong of the Humane Society is dead set against frivolous modifications. "If someone is creating a designer dog or cat that fits your lifestyle so you don't sneeze," she believes you might not be cut out to be a pet owner.
She says, "Who are we doing this for? Certainly not for the benefit of the animal. Healthy dogs and cats are being destroyed. Someone wants to manipulate a dog or cat to make it fit into their lifestyle, or clone a new animal simply because they want a replica, they are not going to get what they are looking for, and there are going to be a lot of discards as a result of trying to."
Armstrong said all of the talk about cloning and gene-manipulation reminds him of a Mark Twain witticism: "If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."