WAUNAKEE, Wis. - It’s just another brown brick building in a suburban business park.
But Suite J at the Waunakee Business Center is about to turn into the animal cloning debate’s ground zero. Genetic Savings & Clone Inc. - the entrepreneurial outfit that introduced the first cloned pet cat to the world in December - is opening its doors in this small Madison, Wis., suburb this month. The company’s CEO, Lou Hawthorne, has promised that by year’s end, a dog will be born here.
In the eight years since Dolly the sheep’s birth was announced to the world, research into animal cloning has progressed in ways few dreamed possible a decade ago.
Scientists have now cloned barnyard animals and endangered species. They’ve created :eek: cloned cows from frozen steaks and cloned mice from cancer cells. They’ve talked about resurrecting extinct creatures - such as woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. And with the news on Thursday that soft tissue from dinosaurs had been discovered, re-creating these giant lizards does not seem so farfetched. Despite the scientific excitement, creativity and ingenuity that have inspired and driven this research, cloning remains uncomfortable - even freakish - for many people.
Who and what are the clones? Are they healthy animals or deformed monsters? How many animals are sacrificed in the pursuit of one healthy clone? And, in the end, what will it lead to?
As ethicists and scientists weigh the motivations for animal cloning - improving the food supply, fighting disease, saving endangered animals - the arguments for and against cloning mutate and evolve along with the research advances.
That debate is now moving to our backyard.
In December, Genetic Savings & Clone announced the birth of Little Nicky, the first cloned cat to be sold as a pet. The recipient, a Texas woman known only as Julie, paid $50,000 to have her beloved - but dead - kitty cloned. While some say she was swindled, Hawthorne believes she was given an incredible, if expensive, gift.
Our product is based on love,'' Hawthorne said. David Magnus, director of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics, scoffed at this claim. He said the high death rates and possible cruelty that go into cloning make Genetic Savings & Clone's product anything but loving.’’
Also, he and other critics said consumers are being duped: The animals they think they are getting - their original pets - cannot be reproduced.
And finally, they think Genetic Savings & Clone’s product is grossly frivolous in light of the number of animals in shelters who need homes.
Everything about this is objectionable,'' Magnus said. But Autumn Fiester, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said there isn't evidence to show that animals are suffering - at least any more than commercially bred dogs or cats. She added that the claim that pet owners are being duped is condescending. As for the frivolous argument, she says, Then you’re arguing against buying any luxury good.’’
Among those involved in cloning, she is in the minority.
Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology - a Worcester, Mass., company at the forefront of cloning technology - called it troubling.'' Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, called pet cloning ridiculous’’ and preposterous.'' Somatic cell nuclear transfer - the shop name for cloning - is conceptually a pretty easy process. A cell - such as a skin cell - is taken from an adult animal. The nucleus, and the DNA it houses, is sucked out and placed next to an empty egg cell - one that's had its nucleus removed. The new egg-nucleus combo is then jolted with electricity or bathed in a chemical cocktail. What you want to do is basically trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized by a sperm,’’ said Neal First, a retired professor of animal sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the first researcher to clone cattle.
If all goes well, the duped egg starts to divide, eventually creating an incipient embryo, which researchers implant into a surrogate animal.
While this may sound pretty straightforward, it’s actually a messy, hit-or-miss process that yields few successful clones.
Depending on whom you talk to, the number of successful clones - which survive beyond birth - can run as low as one-in-1,000 to as many as 15 percent.
Researchers believe this is the result of a host of molecular issues - some they can pinpoint, others they can’t.
The mystery is in the egg. There are molecules in the egg that allow the DNA to reprogram'' and start anew - so that it's read as the blueprint for an embryo, not an old skin cell, Lanza said. But what those molecules are and how they work remains elusive. There is also an issue of extra DNA in the egg. Even though the egg's nuclear DNA is removed, other genetic material remains floating around the egg cell - in a form known as mitochondrial DNA. No one knows for sure what effects this might have on a developing clone embryo - but it does mean that the clone, despite its name, is not an exact genetic duplicate of the donor. It has some other DNA that may or may not affect its development. Then there's the issue of imprinting. Mammals carry two copies of each gene: one set from their mother, the other from their father. But only one of these copies is active at any one time. In a clone, the normal battle between mom and dad’’ is not taking place, Lanza said. The end result: critical messages from the genes are being lost during an embryo’s development, potentially leading to cardiac problems, respiratory ailments and a messed up placenta.'' The hurdles don't end here. When DNA is in a quiescent state, it looks like spaghetti noodles with proteins attached to it. This means that when the skin cell DNA is sucked out, it's carrying a lot of protein baggage. It is possible these proteins may get in the way of the egg-skin cell DNA fusion. Researchers at Genetic Savings & Clone say they have solved this problem by using a new technique called chromatin transfer that cleans the DNA. The result, according to Hawthorne, is higher efficiency. Our losses are well under 50 percent,’’ he said, adding that such losses are typical in commercial breeding.
Magnus and others question these claims - scientists at Genetic Savings & Clone have not published their results. But Jim Robl, president of a South Dakota biotech company called Hematech and one of the developers of chromatin transfer, said he, too, had gotten good results using this method to clone cows.
Hawthorne said that when the process doesn’t work it’s generally because of an early stage mishap - something that happens before the embryos really develop into animals. As he sees it, a one- to eight-cell embryo is not a sentient being.'' It doesn’t matter if we put 100,000 of these embryos down the sink,’’ he said.
Yet, the battle over pet clones only partially hinges on technical and molecular hurdles.
These animals are behaviorally complex. They are not just products of a strict genetic blueprint - but of the multicolored and textured tapestry of their environment and experiences.
This means that a consumer - who’s paying thousands of dollars in hopes of getting the same dog or cat - will be getting an animal that behaves differently than the original.
That, said Magnus, is ``a rip-off.’’
Hawthorne said anyone who thinks a pet is going to be reincarnated is seriously deluded.'' But he does believe the cloned animals will tend to behave similarly, akin to a twin. Karen London, a certified animal behaviorist based in New Hampshire, said the environment plays a bigger role than Hawthorne suggests. She said three things go into shaping an individual's behavior: genetics, the environment and the interaction between genetics and environment. Nobody knows how much behavior is influenced by the environment,’’ she said, but early experiences could extend'' into the animal's personality. For instance, it’s those moments when you comfort your dog at just that critical moment’’ that help shape that dog’s behavior and relationship with you. Events such as these can’t be passed on to a clone, she said.
Hawthorne counters by saying every animal is going to have its first exposure to aggression'' and comfort. It's not so much the manner of the moment as the fact that it happened. Everybody - including London and Magnus - agrees that some behavior is genetically determined. For instance, different breeds have unique behavioral traits - such as herding in collies and retrieving in Labradors. It's exactly this kind of reproducible behavior Hawthorne promises to deliver his clients. He points out that the majority of requests he's received are from people who own mutts - a combination of genes that could not be replicated through conventional breeding. Millions of people believe their pets are one in a million,’’ he said. And that’s the paradox of the business: Taking that one in a million and trying to make two.
But London warned that Hawthorne and his researchers should pay close mind to the animals they are raising - particularly in the first few weeks of the clones’ lives. If there’s anything her experience has taught her, she said, it’s that dogs raised without litter mates are trouble.
Current technology has clones being born solo.
I'm not so sure about cats,'' she said. But when it comes to dogs, they have to have litter exposure to grow up normally. Fiester, the Pennsylvania bioethicist, shrugs this argument off. If the clones turn out to be animal monstrosities,’’ she said, that'll be the end of the pet cloning business.'' For pet-cloning critics, including Crystal Miller-Spiegel, a spokeswoman for the American Anti-Vivisection Society, there's the issue of the welfare of animals who are donating cells and carrying clones. Last month, the society petitioned the U.S. Agriculture Department to regulate pet-cloning companies as it does other animal research labs. She said there's no accountability; and no public record of the animals created, destroyed or used by the company. According to Miller-Spiegel, 245 dogs and cats were released for adoption as a result of a failed dog-cloning project at Texas A&M University. That’s a lot of animals,’’ she said. How many do you think they have right now?'' Both Hawthorne and the company's vice president of communications, Ben Carlson, declined to comment any further than Hawthorne saying animal welfare is a priority. The number of animals kept on-site becomes an issue because of the reproductive anomalies of dogs. Unlike most other mammals, dogs come into heat - or estrous - infrequently; maybe one or two times a year. They also have a unique reproductive system that is difficult to manipulate in a laboratory setting. That makes it difficult to conduct cloning trials without using a lot of animals. Despite these hurdles, Hawthorne is confident that his company will produce a dog clone by the end of the year. Finally, critics of pet cloning said there's the issue of the millions of animals who don't have homes that are living on the streets or housed in shelters. Magnus and Spiegel-Miller believe Hawthorne's business is minimizing the plight of these animals. They charge that the money Hawthorne's clients are willing to spend on a clone would be better used on these other animals, that Genetic Savings & Clone clients should head to a local shelter, pay $50 for a cat or dog that needs a home and donate the rest to the shelter. That would be a more ethical way to spend their money, they say. Fiester and Hawthorne dismiss the criticism as baseless. Why should someone who loves their cat be more obligated to donate money or help shelter animals than someone else?’’ Fiester said.
He also threw back the notion that cloning for agricultural or medical purposes is somehow more ethical.
In the end, he said, the future of the pet cloning business will depend upon the quality of the product.
If Genetic Savings & Clone can create animals that pet owners are happy with - animals that aren’t sick or compromised and behave in ways similar to the original - the business will succeed, Hawthorne said.
His scientists also are looking into how to enhance pets - how to make them live longer and healthier.
Our clones will be better than normal,'' he said. Clones are going to become the preferred pets.’’