bobo
05-27-01, 07:08 AM 05-27-01
If this is possible, will you go for it?
Cloning could recreate family pets
Sharon Schmickle
Star Tribune
Published Saturday, May 26, 2001
First there was Missy, the mutt so loved by her owners that they gave Texas A&M University samples of her tissue and $2.3 million dollars in 1998 to try cloning the dog.
Now cell banks are collecting tissue from hundreds of pets in anticipation of a not-too-distant day when families can turn to cloning to replace deceased or lost dogs and cats.
A tissue deposit at one bank was plucked last year from Nikita, a cat in Milwaukee whose owner regrets having her spayed and hopes to make amends by cloning her.
Another batch of cells came from Annie, a German shepherd who died last November. Her grieving owner, Kay Graff of Orlando, Fla., sees cloning as a "second shot at living with your best friend."
The deposits -- coming from Minnesota to Texas, California to Massachusetts -- are investments in mere hope at this point. No one has reported cloning a cat or a dog.
But three research teams are racing to clone a cat as early as this year. And scientists at Texas A&M in College Station say they are making significant progress toward cloning dogs within the next few years.
Meanwhile, at least three companies are offering -- for initial fees of $600 to $900 -- to preserve cells from pets.
The notion of duplicating a beloved Fluffy or Fido is so controversial that Paul Rasky of Milwaukee said his veterinarian insisted on remaining anonymous as a condition for extracting Nikita's cells for eventual cloning.
Still, cloning is rapidly moving from the barnyard to the living room. Techniques for cloning sheep, cows and other farm animals have advanced to a point where there is little doubt that pets also will be cloned, said Prof. Alan Hunter, an expert in animal reproduction at the University of Minnesota.
Even though Hunter is not affiliated with the cloning ventures, grief-stricken Minnesotans have begged him for help in cloning pets who had come to be seen as real family members, he said.
The same Fido?
The first question families need to consider is whether a clone could truly replace the lost loved one, said Hunter, who is an associate dean at the University of Minnesota's College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences.
A pet, like a person, is much more than the sum of its DNA. Its personality reflects experiences that often cannot be replicated. For example, the time and energy that a family could devote to a puppy a decade ago might be dramatically different today, and those are important factors in a dog's character.
"I could see the heartbreak coming when the dog or the cat doesn't develop the personality that the original pet had," Hunter said. "Maybe it would look like that pet, but how it behaves could be very different."
Scientists who are leading the cloning projects express similar reservations.
"We cannot reproduce a family's animal, we can only give them a genetic copy of the animal," said Philip Damiani who leads a cat-cloning project at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass. The company has been prominent in cloning livestock.
"It would be nice to grow old with the same animal over and over again," he said. "But would you truly get the same satisfaction as from that original animal? Whoever gets the first cloned cat really needs to consider these consequences."
Waiting for Annie
Such warnings haven't dampened Kay Graff's enthusiasm for cloning Annie, a dog given to her by her father six months before he died. Annie and Graff were constant companions through the years when she left home, went through college and settled in Orlando, where she works as an embryologist.
"I know that a clone would not be her, but things like personality are very heritable," she said. "This would be the closest I could come to having the very same dog."
Two years ago, when Annie was 12, Graff had some of the dog's cells processed and frozen in liquid nitrogen at Lazaron BioTechnologies LLC in Baton Rouge, La., which is affiliated with cat-cloning research at Louisiana State University.
Other cell banks include PerPETuate, which is affiliated with Advanced Cell, and Genetic Savings and Clone, which is linked to cat and dog cloning research at Texas A&M and also has a California office.
Now, Graff and others who have banked their pets' cells are waiting for the science to catch up with the hope.
Missy's owners launched the dog cloning research the year after scientists in Scotland announced that they had created a lamb named Dolly from an adult sheep. The cost of the dog-cloning venture, dubbed the Missyplicity Project, has grown from the original $2.3 million donation to $3.7 million, said Lou Hawthorne, the official liaison between Texas A&M and the donors who have remained anonymous.
The goal has proven more elusive than expected. One reason dogs are particularly difficult to clone is because relatively little was known about their reproductive systems.
Huge sums had been invested in the reproduction of farm animals because the payback could be billions of dollars worth of milk, meat and breeding stock. And the debut of test-tube babies in 1978 had given rise to a lucrative industry in creating, storing and implanting human embryos.
But there had been relatively little financial incentive to tinker with the reproductive systems of pets. The cloning process involves obtaining mature eggs from females, replacing the genetic material in the eggs with DNA taken from the animal to be cloned, and implanting the resulting embryos in surrogate mothers during the right time in their fertility cycles.
Among other obstacles, female dogs go through fewer fertility cycles per year than most other mammals, which means there are fewer opportunities to obtain eggs and also to implant them.
Cats, it turns out, are easier to clone. Scientists at Advanced Cell have fine-tuned the process of creating cloned cat embryos and implanting them in surrogate mothers, Damiani said. So far the pregnancies have failed to hold for the 60 days it normally takes to produce kittens. Research teams who reached that point in cloning other animals overcame the final problems by repeated trial and error.
Endangered species
The cat research projects at Advanced Cell and Louisiana State are funded, in part, by groups seeking to preserve endangered species of wild cats. A team of researchers led by Damiani announced in January that it had cloned the first endangered animal, a baby bull gaur, a wild ox. The overall goal is to preserve genetic diversity in a species by making copies of animals who for one reason or another don't reproduce naturally, he said.
Even after the first cloned kittens are born, however, studies will be needed to make sure they develop normally. Although some cloned animals appear to be thriving, others have immune system deficiencies and other problems.
Costs also could stop many families from cloning pets. Estimates range up to $20,000 for the first few cloned dogs and $3,000 to $5,000 for cats. But scientists say the prices would drop substantially as the process is streamlined. In order to be commercially realistic, prices would need to settle at the levels buyers expect to pay for top pedigreed animals, Damiani said.
Rasky in Milwaukee has staked $5,000 on cloning Nikita within the next year, said Ron Gillespie, president of PerPETuate. Rasky said that he might spend such a sum on a special vacation, and a clone of Nikita could provide far more pleasure.
"I look into her eyes, and I'm just amazed how loving they are," he said.
Cloning could recreate family pets
Sharon Schmickle
Star Tribune
Published Saturday, May 26, 2001
First there was Missy, the mutt so loved by her owners that they gave Texas A&M University samples of her tissue and $2.3 million dollars in 1998 to try cloning the dog.
Now cell banks are collecting tissue from hundreds of pets in anticipation of a not-too-distant day when families can turn to cloning to replace deceased or lost dogs and cats.
A tissue deposit at one bank was plucked last year from Nikita, a cat in Milwaukee whose owner regrets having her spayed and hopes to make amends by cloning her.
Another batch of cells came from Annie, a German shepherd who died last November. Her grieving owner, Kay Graff of Orlando, Fla., sees cloning as a "second shot at living with your best friend."
The deposits -- coming from Minnesota to Texas, California to Massachusetts -- are investments in mere hope at this point. No one has reported cloning a cat or a dog.
But three research teams are racing to clone a cat as early as this year. And scientists at Texas A&M in College Station say they are making significant progress toward cloning dogs within the next few years.
Meanwhile, at least three companies are offering -- for initial fees of $600 to $900 -- to preserve cells from pets.
The notion of duplicating a beloved Fluffy or Fido is so controversial that Paul Rasky of Milwaukee said his veterinarian insisted on remaining anonymous as a condition for extracting Nikita's cells for eventual cloning.
Still, cloning is rapidly moving from the barnyard to the living room. Techniques for cloning sheep, cows and other farm animals have advanced to a point where there is little doubt that pets also will be cloned, said Prof. Alan Hunter, an expert in animal reproduction at the University of Minnesota.
Even though Hunter is not affiliated with the cloning ventures, grief-stricken Minnesotans have begged him for help in cloning pets who had come to be seen as real family members, he said.
The same Fido?
The first question families need to consider is whether a clone could truly replace the lost loved one, said Hunter, who is an associate dean at the University of Minnesota's College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences.
A pet, like a person, is much more than the sum of its DNA. Its personality reflects experiences that often cannot be replicated. For example, the time and energy that a family could devote to a puppy a decade ago might be dramatically different today, and those are important factors in a dog's character.
"I could see the heartbreak coming when the dog or the cat doesn't develop the personality that the original pet had," Hunter said. "Maybe it would look like that pet, but how it behaves could be very different."
Scientists who are leading the cloning projects express similar reservations.
"We cannot reproduce a family's animal, we can only give them a genetic copy of the animal," said Philip Damiani who leads a cat-cloning project at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Worcester, Mass. The company has been prominent in cloning livestock.
"It would be nice to grow old with the same animal over and over again," he said. "But would you truly get the same satisfaction as from that original animal? Whoever gets the first cloned cat really needs to consider these consequences."
Waiting for Annie
Such warnings haven't dampened Kay Graff's enthusiasm for cloning Annie, a dog given to her by her father six months before he died. Annie and Graff were constant companions through the years when she left home, went through college and settled in Orlando, where she works as an embryologist.
"I know that a clone would not be her, but things like personality are very heritable," she said. "This would be the closest I could come to having the very same dog."
Two years ago, when Annie was 12, Graff had some of the dog's cells processed and frozen in liquid nitrogen at Lazaron BioTechnologies LLC in Baton Rouge, La., which is affiliated with cat-cloning research at Louisiana State University.
Other cell banks include PerPETuate, which is affiliated with Advanced Cell, and Genetic Savings and Clone, which is linked to cat and dog cloning research at Texas A&M and also has a California office.
Now, Graff and others who have banked their pets' cells are waiting for the science to catch up with the hope.
Missy's owners launched the dog cloning research the year after scientists in Scotland announced that they had created a lamb named Dolly from an adult sheep. The cost of the dog-cloning venture, dubbed the Missyplicity Project, has grown from the original $2.3 million donation to $3.7 million, said Lou Hawthorne, the official liaison between Texas A&M and the donors who have remained anonymous.
The goal has proven more elusive than expected. One reason dogs are particularly difficult to clone is because relatively little was known about their reproductive systems.
Huge sums had been invested in the reproduction of farm animals because the payback could be billions of dollars worth of milk, meat and breeding stock. And the debut of test-tube babies in 1978 had given rise to a lucrative industry in creating, storing and implanting human embryos.
But there had been relatively little financial incentive to tinker with the reproductive systems of pets. The cloning process involves obtaining mature eggs from females, replacing the genetic material in the eggs with DNA taken from the animal to be cloned, and implanting the resulting embryos in surrogate mothers during the right time in their fertility cycles.
Among other obstacles, female dogs go through fewer fertility cycles per year than most other mammals, which means there are fewer opportunities to obtain eggs and also to implant them.
Cats, it turns out, are easier to clone. Scientists at Advanced Cell have fine-tuned the process of creating cloned cat embryos and implanting them in surrogate mothers, Damiani said. So far the pregnancies have failed to hold for the 60 days it normally takes to produce kittens. Research teams who reached that point in cloning other animals overcame the final problems by repeated trial and error.
Endangered species
The cat research projects at Advanced Cell and Louisiana State are funded, in part, by groups seeking to preserve endangered species of wild cats. A team of researchers led by Damiani announced in January that it had cloned the first endangered animal, a baby bull gaur, a wild ox. The overall goal is to preserve genetic diversity in a species by making copies of animals who for one reason or another don't reproduce naturally, he said.
Even after the first cloned kittens are born, however, studies will be needed to make sure they develop normally. Although some cloned animals appear to be thriving, others have immune system deficiencies and other problems.
Costs also could stop many families from cloning pets. Estimates range up to $20,000 for the first few cloned dogs and $3,000 to $5,000 for cats. But scientists say the prices would drop substantially as the process is streamlined. In order to be commercially realistic, prices would need to settle at the levels buyers expect to pay for top pedigreed animals, Damiani said.
Rasky in Milwaukee has staked $5,000 on cloning Nikita within the next year, said Ron Gillespie, president of PerPETuate. Rasky said that he might spend such a sum on a special vacation, and a clone of Nikita could provide far more pleasure.
"I look into her eyes, and I'm just amazed how loving they are," he said.