Nine lives just the start
for tomorrow's cats

By Chris Ayres in Los Angeles

CATS really can have nine lives. Or ten or 11, or however many their owners choose, after a Californian firm began offering the world’s first cat cloning service for $50,000 (£27,700) per animal.

Nine cloned kittens are expected by November, five of them for paying clients. A similar service for dogs is likely to follow.

Genetic Savings & Clone began as a tissue bank for those who wanted to clone their pets in the future. It was founded by an eccentric octogenarian, John Sperling, who decided to use the fortune he made founding the University of Phoenix in Arizona to research the cloning of his dog, Missy. So far his “Missyplicity project’ has failed to reproduce his husky cross pet, which died in 2002, aged 15. The company did, however, manage to produce Copycat (CC), the world’s first cloned cat, and has since been inundated with cloning requests. “We’ve had people say they have a ball that their dog used to play with and it’s covered with saliva and can we clone from that,” said Ben Carlson, the company’s vice-president of communications. “We get a lot of poignant requests.”

Research shows that 15 million families in the US would consider cloning their pets. Clones will not be replicas of the originals, but instead share some of their physical and behavioural traits.

Genetic Savings wants to dispel the myth that pet cloners will primarily be batty billionaires. “Although cloning is sometimes conveyed as a kooky thing to do, our clients actually tend to be intelligent, articulate and well-informed,” its website says.

Animal welfare activists question the safety of cloning after Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, born in 1997, was put down because of a virus-induced lung tumor. But at the age of two, CC remains in rude health. “The proof,” said Mr Hawthorne, chief executive of Genetic Savings, “is in the puddycat.”

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