3. Double Trouble

Futuristic fantasies come in all shapes and sizes. Some of us may look forward to the day when we can bring home animals engineered to perform astonishing feats – a cat that glows while resting quietly on the sofa or a cow that makes medicinal milk as it grazes in the field. For others, the dream might more closely resemble a hulking family man strolling into his local shopping centre to pick up a replacement pet for his bereaved daughter. That’s the scenario that plays out in The Sixth Day, a sci-fi thriller set in the near future. When Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character faces the sudden death of the family dog, Oliver, he simply heads to a shop called RePet, where a smarmy salesman offers to make an exact genetic duplicate of Oliver. ‘Your RePet Oliver will be exactly the same dog’, the clerk promises. ‘He’ll know all the same tricks you taught him, he’ll remember where all the bones are buried. He won’t even know he’s a clone.’

In 2001, just one year after the film’s release, a real-life version of this sci-fi scene sprang to life when the world’s first cloned housecat was born. Four years later, the first cloned dog arrived. Since then, animal lovers have welcomed Tabouli and Baba Ganoush (copies of a Bengal cat named Tahini), Lancelot Encore (the double of a yellow Lab named Lancelot) and a kennel-full of other cloned kittens and pups into the world. The owners of these animals did not want fanciful new animals – they simply wanted to re-create their old friends. It’s an understandable impulse, familiar to anyone who has lost a cherished pet, and though just a handful of wealthy owners have had their animals cloned thus far, as the science improves and the price drops, the market for creature copies will likely increase considerably.

If only bringing an animal back to life were as easy as that RePet salesman made it seem. Cloning is still a young, experimental technology – and one that raises serious animal welfare concerns. So before we order up our creature copies, we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions about what we can actually expect from a DNA double and what costs we’re willing to bear to get one.

We all know about the traditional, time-tested approach to baby-making: A sperm cell, bearing your father’s DNA, meets an egg cell, which carries genetic code from your mother. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, the DNA mingles, and the embryo that results – the baby blastocyst that grows up to be you – is a biological cocktail. Half of the genes inside your cells can be traced back to Mummy dearest, while the other half come via dear old Dad. Cloning takes the normal rules of reproduction and turns them on their head; clones receive their entire biological inheritance from just one donor. Scientists can take a single cell from an animal’s body – just the tiniest bit of skin, blood or tissue – and use the DNA it contains to build a brand-new embryo. It’s like taking the set of genetic instructions that gave rise to your mother, and plopping them, unchanged, into a foetus. A clone is essentially an identical twin born years after its genetic double.

The world of cloning changed forever on 5 July 1996, with the birth of a little lamb named Dolly. When Dolly was born, scientists had already cloned embryos, making exact genetic copies of unborn frogs, mice and cows, but Dolly was revolutionary because she was the first clone of an adult mammal. Ian Wilmut, an embryologist at Scotland’s Roslin Institute created her using a small tissue sample taken from a six-year-old ewe’s mammary gland. The ewe had died years earlier, but the researchers just happened to have some of her preserved cells on hand, and they transferred the DNA from these cells into new sheep eggs. One of these eggs developed into a lamb that the researchers named Dolly (an homage to another fine mammary specimen: the country singer Dolly Parton).

Dolly was proof positive that researchers could take a small bit of flesh from a fully grown animal and create its identical twin, and her birth ushered in exciting possibilities in the reproductive sciences. Farmers and ranchers are constantly seeking to extend the genetic reach of their highest-performing animals, breeding like with like to create offspring that they hope will inherit the same milk-swollen udders or speedy legs. Cloning raises the prospect of making exact genetic copies of known performers, of creating perfect replicas of champion steers or horses that have proven their talents on the racetrack.

When Dolly’s birth was announced, scientists at Texas A&M University immediately recognized cloning’s commercial potential. Like just about everything else, animal agriculture is bigger in Texas – the state has more cows than any other and the value of its livestock products ranks first in the nation – and A&M has an animal science department befitting this mammoth industry. The school has more than 280 hectares dedicated to raising and researching cows, horses, sheep and goats, and a dedicated Reproductive Sciences Laboratory, where scientists hone techniques – from artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization – that can help farmers manage the reproduction of their herds. When cloning came along, it gave the researchers a new tool for creating highly valuable livestock. In the years that followed Dolly’s birth, the scientists at the lab proved cloning’s potential, successfully carbon-copying a white-tailed deer, an Angus bull, a stallion, several litters of pigs and more.

Along the way, A&M’s researchers got involved in an endeavour they hadn’t anticipated. Six months after Dolly’s birth made international news, a man named Lou Hawthorne started recruiting reproductive scientists from America’s laboratories. Hawthorne represented a wealthy client with an ambitious request: He wanted to clone a spayed dog named Missy, a border collie mix with a white face and silky grey coat. (Hawthorne’s initially anonymous client was later revealed to be John Sperling, an eccentric billionaire who founded the for-profit University of Phoenix and who has also bankrolled human longevity research. Missy belonged to Joan Hawthorne, Lou’s mother and Sperling’s long-standing friend and lover.)

After considering a number of labs, Hawthorne picked a team of researchers at A&M for the dog duplication job. Mark Westhusin, a veterinary physiologist who ran the Reproductive Sciences Laboratory, would lead the cloning effort, and Sperling would fund the endeavour, to the tune of $3.7 million. When the Missyplicity Project was announced in 1998, pet owners flooded A&M with phone calls, asking about having their own dogs and cats cloned. It turned out that Sperling wasn’t the only one who thought he had a special companion. As Hawthorne would later write: ‘Millions of people believe they have a one-in-a-million pet.’

We no longer treat our pets as mere animals. We celebrate their birthdays and give them Christmas presents, let them lounge on the leather sofa and sleep on the duvet. Many of us consider our pets to be fully-fledged members of the family, and their deaths prompt huge outpourings of grief. We can seek the aid of pet bereavement counsellors and choose from specialized caskets, headstones and urns designed to send Fluffy off to the afterlife in style. So when word leaked out that researchers were trying to clone dogs, it naturally fuelled hopes that we’d never have to let go of that one special friend, recreating it – or at least its genetic double – over and over again.

The public reaction to the Missyplicity Project revealed a large potential market for copied pets, and Hawthorne and Sperling launched a company to make it rain cloned cats and dogs. On 16 February 2000, Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) was officially born. At first, the company funded research and offered tissue banking, allowing people to store their pets’ cells until cloning technology matured. (One page on the GSC website at the time suggested ‘a futuristic stocking stuffer: a gift certificate redeemable for the preservation of the animal’s DNA . . . It’s like a ticket to the future, today!’) The company was an instant sensation.

Only one small thing lay between a pet owner and his clone: getting the darn ditto machines up and running. Yes, the impetus for the entire endeavour was a well-loved mutt named Missy, but with both cat and dog owners clamouring for cloning, the A&M team decided to try replicating both species. Much to the disappointment of dog lovers everywhere, success with cats came first.

The lucky feline was a calico cat named Rainbow, and the first step in copying her was swiping a sample of her cells. When it comes to cloning, nearly any cell that contains a complete set of genes will do. (Recall that Dolly came from a mammary cell, and skin cells are also commonly used.) The A&M team knew that other scientists had had good luck with cumulus cells – the specialized, mature cells that surround a developing egg – so that’s what they harvested from Rainbow.

But you can’t simply stick a random cat cell into a uterus and expect a new feline to grow. Researchers needed to get Rainbow’s biological code into the proper vehicle: an egg. To do so, the scientists employed a method known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer, the same approach the Scottish team had used to create Dolly. The technique involves extracting the DNA from an unfertilized egg and replacing it with instructions for making a clone. (The procedure is not unlike removing the jam from the middle of a jam doughnut and refilling the doughnut with cream.)

Westhusin and his team harvested ova from a clutter of lady housecats. They poked a tiny, turkey-baster-like tool called a pipette into each egg and sucked out its nucleus, leaving the rest of the cellular machinery untouched. The scientists took one of Rainbow’s cells and placed it inside the newly ‘enucleated’ egg, between the inner and outer membranes. This cell-inside-a-cell was then shocked with an electric current that turned the membranes of both cells into Swiss cheese, creating holes that allowed the genetic contents of Rainbow’s cell to flow into the egg. The egg, thus ‘tricked’ into believing it had just been fertilized by a sperm cell, began to grow and divide, just like a normal embryo.

The researchers ended up with three cloned embryos, each of which contained Rainbow’s DNA. They transferred these embryos into the uterus of a brown housecat named Allie. Although only one of these feline foetuses survived to term, that was enough, and on 22 December 2001, Allie delivered a little, mewing kitten. Testing confirmed that the kitten was indeed Rainbow’s clone, and she was given the name CC, short for ‘Carbon Copy’.16

CC’s name aside, technically, clones produced through nuclear transfer are not quite perfect copies of their genetic donors. Though the overwhelming majority of genes reside in a cell’s nucleus, mitochondria – which produce energy for the cell and sit in the cytoplasm outside the nucleus – contain their own little genomes. Because nuclear transfer leaves the cytoplasm of an egg intact, CC had the mitochondria, and mitochondrial DNA, of her egg donor, rather than from her ‘twin’, Rainbow. Since the amount of DNA involved is so tiny, however, most discussion of clones ignores this small genetic discrepancy.

CC’s birth alone was a remarkable achievement, especially given cloning’s staggeringly high failure rate. Some of the embryos created by nuclear transfer do not divide properly, some fail to nestle into the warm and welcoming uterine wall, some spontaneously abort themselves. In creating Dolly, for instance, the Roslin Institute researchers had made 277 attempts to make cloned embryos and ended up with just 29 viable ones. They were all transferred to surrogate mothers, and as time passed, the numbers dwindled further, until only one cloned foetus was left – the lamb that would be Dolly.

The challenges associated with cloning go beyond low success rates. Dolly died at age six, well short of a sheep’s normal life expectancy. The lamb’s creators maintain that her demise had nothing to do with cloning, pointing out that four other sheep in the barn also came down with the same contagious lung disease that took Dolly’s life, but scientists are still plagued by questions about the health of cloned animals.

It’s impossible to draw definitive conclusions about Dolly – or any other single case – but since her death, biotech companies have cloned hundreds of farm animals, and we’ve amassed much more data on the health of clones. The evidence is troubling. Failures and defects are a normal part of reproduction – not every fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall, and stillbirths and birth defects can happen no matter how an animal comes into being – and assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, increase the risk of certain abnormalities. But clones, at least in some species, are more likely to suffer from birth defects and health problems than animals made by other means.

That’s what the US Food and Drug Administration concluded in a nearly thousand-page report, published in 2008, on the health of livestock clones. While the agency found no evidence of unusual health problems in cloned goats or pigs, it reported that cloned cattle and sheep do have an elevated risk of abnormalities. In particular, the animals are at risk for ‘large offspring syndrome’, which can cause respiratory and organ problems in the newborns and complications for their surrogate mothers. Cloned cows and sheep are more likely to die in the womb or shortly after birth than their conventionally conceived counterparts.17 However, the data reviewed by the FDA also showed that if the youngsters can be safely shepherded through the first six months of life, they seemed to develop into perfectly healthy adults, and when these clones reproduce the old-fashioned way, their offspring appeared to be normal. That said, the FDA also noted that ‘it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences associated with cloning due to the relatively short time that the technology has existed’.

Scientists believe that many of the poor outcomes seen in cloning can be traced back to a process known as genetic reprogramming. When a sperm cell fertilizes an egg, it initiates a cascade of changes. Some genes get turned on, while others are switched off, as the embryo grows and divides. Throughout the course of development, various genes are constantly being amplified or silenced, particularly as cells become specialized, or ‘differentiated’. The activation or expression of certain genes equips a cell to join the heart, for example; the expression of different genes turns a cell into part of the skin, or the blood, or the brain instead.

For years, scientists thought cellular differentiation was irreversible – once a skin cell, always a skin cell. Dolly’s birth smashed that assumption. Through the process of nuclear transfer, the scientists had managed to take the DNA from a differentiated mammary cell and turn it into something that a developing embryo could use. Cloning other adult mammals reinforced the discovery that nuclear transfer can reset genes contained in specialized cells back to their embryonic state. It was an astonishing accomplishment, turning back the genetic clock, but this process may not always go perfectly. As Westhusin explains, ‘An egg knows how to take a sperm cell, and the DNA that it has, and it knows how to reprogram it so that it turns some genes on and some genes off. A nucleus in a skin cell is not packaged like a nucleus in a sperm cell is. An egg knows how to reprogram a sperm to initiate life but it doesn’t know exactly how to reprogram a nucleus from a skin cell.’

Incomplete or flawed reprogramming can leave an egg with genes exhibiting an abnormal pattern of expression, which means that scientists might be creating a whole new cow with DNA that’s stuck on the wrong settings. Depending on what genes are expressed abnormally, the result can be everything from an egg that’s not even viable in the first place – and thus never develops into a foetus – to an array of birth defects. Though we don’t know much about the health of cloned cats and dogs (there simply haven’t been any large, long-term studies on the subject), errors in genetic reprogramming can affect any species.

Fortunately, CC was ‘vigorous at birth’, all her little feline toes intact. For about a year, CC, Rainbow and Allie lived at the lab, where the scientists monitored their health and showed off the trio to visitors. When the cats’ scientific duties were complete, the researchers decided to place the felines in adoptive homes. Duane Kraemer, a veterinarian and physiologist who was part of the cat cloning team, claimed CC, and one December day, I went to meet her.

As I pull into a hotel car park lot in downtown College Station, I am full of nervous excitement. I’m about to meet my first clone! I pause to collect myself before heading inside to meet Kraemer; I want to play it cool. (Blurting out, ‘So let’s go see the Frankencat!’ would be a tad unprofessional.)

Kraemer is one of the university’s senior scientists. He grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and had planned to spend his life there, milking his family’s cows. Then, as an undergraduate, he fell in love with research. He racked up five degrees – bachelor’s degrees in animal husbandry and veterinary science, a master’s in reproductive physiology, a PhD in reproductive physiology, and a degree in veterinary medicine – and joined Texas A&M’s faculty. He founded the Reproductive Sciences Laboratory and mentored dozens of students, including Westhusin. Now in his late seventies, he says he still gets a thrill every time he sees an embryo. He has a big smile, oversized glasses and protruding ears, with a soft voice that sounds like it could give out at any moment.

We hop into Kraemer’s car and my adventures in Cloneland begin. Over the course of the day, I’m due to meet CC as well as Bruce – a cloned bull that would rocket a blob of his very valuable snot onto my trainer – and Dewey, the world’s first cloned white-tailed deer.) It’s a short ride to Kraemer’s suburban home. He ushers me around to the back, and as we push through the chain-link gate into the yard, his wife, Shirley, comes barrelling out the door. I assume we’ll be following her back inside the house to meet CC, but the couple point me in the opposite direction, to what looks like a big wooden shed in the yard.

‘CC has her own house’, Kraemer says. ‘For her and her kids and her husband.’

Kraemer built the structure himself, and when he takes me inside, I am duly impressed. It’s a split level, with a living room, a kitchen and two small lofts. It has plumbing, heating and air-conditioning. Should the cats ever get the urge to read, there’s a set of bookshelves packed with the dissertations that Kraemer’s students have written over the years. The back door opens into a screened-in patch of yard – cluttered with toys and branches – so the felines can get some sun and fresh air. It is, I have to admit, at least as nice as my own apartment. (What’s a girl got to do to be reincarnated as a cloned cat?)

We find CC luxuriating on the landing. Kraemer walks over to give her a kindly stroke, but she wriggles away and goes to sit on the windowsill, where she gazes out upon her kingdom. Her back sports grey stripes, and her belly, paws and cheeks are bright white. She has green eyes and a small brown beauty spot, Cindy Crawford–style, just above her mouth. I stare into the face of pet cloning, and it stares back, twitching its soft pink nose. Despite not being a cat person, I have to admit that CC is – from a purely objective, scientific point of view, of course – pretty cute.

The Kraemers have given CC a good life – not only a house, but also a family. ‘We figured we should probably breed her because people would want to know whether clones could reproduce’, Kraemer says. The matchmakers introduced CC to a grey tomcat named Smokey, and in 2006, CC gave birth to four kittens. One was stillborn, but the others were perfectly healthy.

As I wander around the cat house, I keep tripping over various members of the cat clan. One hangs out on a shelf in front of the AC, another claws furiously at a scratching post, while a third lounges languidly in a chair. CC keeps watch over the brood from her perch.

‘I never thought I’d have a cloned cat’, Shirley confides.

No? I laugh. That wasn’t part of your life plan? ‘Is it strange?’ I ask.

She pauses, then says, ‘Not as strange as when we had the lion.’18

So far, CC shows no signs of health problems, cloning-related or otherwise, and a few months after I met her, she celebrated her tenth birthday. But there is something off about CC: She doesn’t look like her genetic twin. Rainbow was a calico, her white fur splotched with grey and orange. CC, on the other hand, doesn’t have a lick of orange in sight.

The most likely explanation for the discrepancy is a phenomenon known as ‘X inactivation’. Like female humans, female cats have two X chromosomes. In calicos, the gene that codes for black fur is on one of these X chromosomes, while the orange gene is on the other. In any given cat cell, only one X chromosome is active. Westhusin and Kraemer surmise that in the cumulus cell used to create CC, the X chromosome carrying the orange gene was turned off.

CC is a reminder that DNA sequence isn’t all that matters. An animal’s characteristics also depend on how a gene is expressed. All along the genome, little molecular tags act as dimmer switches, turning genes on and off, making them more or less powerful. Some of these genetic settings are inherited and others are modulated by the environment. The chemicals and nutrients that a foetus encounters in utero, for instance, can make certain genes more or less active. Clones, carried to term by surrogate mothers, develop in different prenatal environments than their genetic donors did. Even after birth, early life experiences can alter gene expression in a multitude of ways. These environmental differences could easily lead to discrepancies between Fido One and Two.¹⁹

If you could get a clone like CC, who didn’t even look like her donor, you could certainly get one with a different personality. A&M’s researchers saw that firsthand when they duplicated a Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was an unusually docile bull who’d starred in movies and on television, and his owner, a rodeo clown named Ralph Fisher, was desperate to have the bull replicated. In 1999, Westhusin made Fisher a clone, but as Second Chance grew up, it was clear that he was not the gentle giant his predecessor had been. Second Chance attacked Fisher. Twice. The second time, the bull pierced Fisher’s left testicle, fractured his spine and left the rodeo clown hospitalized with eighty stitches in his crotch. Second Chance had Chance’s DNA in his cells, but he had a different upbringing, training and life than his progenitor and became a different bull. (As for that RePet salesman’s promise that a cloned pet will know all the same tricks as its DNA donor – pure codswallop, at least in the real world.) CC and Second Chance are both illustrations of what became Westhusin and Kraemer’s mantra: ‘Cloning is reproduction – it’s not resurrection.’

For his part, Kraemer was thrilled by CC’s colour snafu. He had been worried that pet owners might be easy prey for scammers. ‘People can be taken advantage of because of their devotion to their animal’, he explains. CC was obvious, visible-to-the-naked-eye proof that even a genetic twin would not be a perfect replica of a special pet. But CC proved that cat duplication was possible, and in 2004, Genetic Savings & Clone launched its ‘Nine Lives Extravaganza’, offering to mimeograph the cat of anyone who could afford the £25,000 price tag. The company also made a dramatic guarantee: ‘If you feel that your kitten doesn’t sufficiently resemble the genetic donor, we’ll refund your money in full with no questions asked.’ Less than a year later, the company delivered a cloned Maine coon cat named Little Nicky to its first paying customer. (The Texas woman who’d ordered the kitten was impressed. ‘He is identical’, she told the media. ‘His personality is the same.’)

Despite the success that GSC and A&M had with cat cloning, the company and the university eventually parted ways, in part because the A&M team encountered failure after failure in their attempts to duplicate Missy, the mutt that started it all. The vagaries of the canine reproductive system made the project more difficult than expected. In cats or cattle, immature eggs can be harvested from the ovaries and matured in a petri dish in the lab. For reasons that scientists still don’t fully understand, this strategy doesn’t work with dogs, whose eggs simply seem to be fussier. That means that researchers have to wait until the precise moment a canine ovulates, then open her up and flush the mature eggs out of her body. ‘The logistics of it are just a nightmare’, Westhusin says. The A&M team managed to coax two canines to carry cloned embryos in their wombs, but one miscarried and the other gave birth to a stillborn pup.

GSC shut down in 2006 for financial reasons, but Hawthorne was soon back in business, at the helm of a startup called BioArts International. Still desperate for a Missy 2.0, he connected with Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean scientist who had created the world’s first cloned dog, in 2005, an Afghan hound named Snuppy (from Seoul National University, where the researchers were based, and puppy). Hawthorne told Hwang, now at a company called the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, about Missy and asked him to help give the dog a clone. Hwang, delivered – in triplicate – and by 2008, Hawthorne had three little balls of fur on his hands: Mira, Chingu and Sarang, all clones of Missy.20 The BioArts website announced, ‘Missy: Accomplished!’ and noted that like their genetic donor, all three pups had soft coats and a fondness for broccoli.21

Encouraged by this success, BioArts announced the ‘Best Friends Again’ programme, promising to have five dogs cloned by Sooam. The spots would be sold in a global auction, with bidding starting at $100,000. BioArts also announced a ‘Golden Clone Giveaway’, in which a deserving dog owner, as decided by an essay contest, would win a free copy of his or her canine.²²

However, the prospect of resurrecting pets didn’t prompt universal excitement. Instead, it spurred the same kind of apocalyptic fantasizing that greeted GloFish. Animal replication sparked fears of copying humans, and a handful of journalists, ethicists and politicians speculated about the potential for creating, say, an army of Hitlers. Some worried that cloning undermined individual uniqueness or that we were unleashing scientific powers beyond our understanding and control.

Other critics were concerned about animal welfare, an issue that deserves serious contemplation. Experts estimate that scientists worldwide use anywhere from 50 million to 100 million animals in their labs every year, and these creatures don’t always have good lives – think back to all those mutant mice, engineered to have cancer or Alzheimer’s, or the hideous Beltsville pigs. Researchers sometimes inflict physical pain on their lab rats, performing invasive surgeries or exposing the animals to toxic substances. Lab animals can also suffer from psychological or emotional distress, caused by a lack of social contact and mental stimulation or forced participation in stressful experiments. As Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies the inner lives of animals, explains: ‘Animals have the same desires that we have. They want to avoid pain, they want to just be content, they want to have their needs of food, shelter, friendship, sex or whatever satisfied, and they want to avoid pain and discomfort and stress and terror. There can be no doubt about that.’

Cloning tapped into long-standing worries about the burdens borne by lab animals, and the Humane Society of the United States and the American Anti-Vivisection Society joined forces to denounce the prospect of pet cloning. The Eurogroup for Animals, a European animal welfare group, also raised welfare concerns in its official 2008 statement on livestock cloning. As it wrote: ‘The cloning process is inefficient, wastes animals’ lives and has a huge potential to cause pain, suffering and distress at all stages of the process.’

As animal cloning opponents pointed out, cloning’s inefficiency is a big part of the problem. To duplicate one dog, scientists have to harvest eggs from a whole pack of anesthetized lady canines. Still more dogs are needed to carry the developing embryos in their wombs. (It takes a village. A furry, slobbery, tail-wagging village.) To create Snuppy, the South Korean researchers had implanted a total of 1095 cloned embryos into 123 female dogs. Only two dogs were born, and only one lived. Nature, the journal that published the paper on Snuppy’s birth, noted these sad statistics in an editorial: ‘It is unlikely that even the most obsessive pet owner would contemplate preparing more than 100 failed pregnancies for just one successful birth . . . In such circumstances, the cloning of dogs for pet owners remains ethically indefensible’.23

The animals used in cloning, and other kinds of research, are afforded some protections. The US Animal Welfare Act, which passed in 1966 and has been amended several times since, establishes basic requirements for the housing and care of laboratory creatures. It requires the use of painkillers and anesthesia when appropriate and stipulates that experimenters must consider both the physical and mental well-being of certain species.²⁴ The law also includes special provisions for canines, social animals that thrive on human interaction. The act encourages researchers to provide dogs with ‘positive physical contact with humans’, legally defined as ‘petting, stroking, or other touching, which is beneficial to the well-being of the animal.’ If the dogs are housed without any other canine compatriots, this extra human attention is mandatory.²⁵

From the beginning, Genetic Savings & Clone made an effort to address welfare concerns by writing up its own strict code of ethics. Among other things, the code stated that all cats and dogs would get at least two hours of daily playtime, and, once their lab duties were over, that all would be placed in ‘loving homes’. Any animal born with deformities would also be placed with adoptive families, unless the defects were severe enough to cause serious suffering, in which case the animals would be euthanized.

These promises weren’t enough to calm critics, who insisted that any harm caused by pet cloning was unacceptable. After all, zebrafish and mice and goats are one thing – the thought of scientists experimenting with cats and dogs is much harder for us to stomach. Surveys show that more people disapprove of pet cloning than agricultural cloning, with about 80 percent of Americans opposed to duplicating pets in labs. (The percentage of those who say they disapprove of livestock cloning hovers in the mid-60s.)26

Even the animal welfare laws reflect our preference for some species over others. While dogs are singled out for extra protections in the US, many kinds of rats and mice – the very animals used in most experiments – are explicitly excluded from these protections. So are farm animals being used for ‘food and fibre’. (Livestock being used for biomedical research are covered by the act, and the A&M team adhered to the federal law and additional welfare standards in its cloning work, according to Westhusin.)

Indeed, there’s an interesting contradiction in the rhetoric that surrounds pet cloning. We’re creating these carbon copies because we love our companions so much that we can’t bear the thought of living without them. And yet that’s also why the endeavour is so fraught – because we value cats and dogs above so many other species. People on both sides of the debate are driven by their devotion to these animals. The controversy over pet cloning is a debate over what it means to love an animal, and it involves values and judgments that we may never all agree upon.

Even the most stringent of ethical codes cannot guarantee that lab animals won’t suffer; experimental procedures, by definition, have unknown outcomes, and cloning is clearly capable of causing animal pain and distress. Though cloners are figuring out how to improve the procedure’s efficiency, they still have more to learn (particularly about the long-term health of lab-grown cats and dogs) before pet cloning is ready for prime time.27

Hawthorne ultimately came to the same conclusion, and on 10 September 2009, he announced that BioArts was getting out of the pet cloning business for good. In a statement that appeared on the company’s website, Hawthorne wrote that animal duplication remained unpredictable. ‘Cloning’, he acknowledged, ‘is still an experimental technology and consumers would be well-advised to proceed cautiously’. What’s more, he wrote, BioArts simply hadn’t been able to attract enough customers. The company had sold just four of the five spots in its dog cloning auction. (BioArts successfully delivered clones to these four customers, plus the Golden Clone Giveaway winner, before shutting down its pet cloning operation.) Despite all the theoretical interest in copying a pet – the thousands of calls and e-mails – only a few owners were ready to pull the trigger.

Perhaps that’s because the appeal of pet cloning is based an impossible dream, the fantasy put forth in The Sixth Day – the hope that through the miracle of science, we can bring a beloved pet back to life. Compare this motive with the cold, hard calculus behind agricultural cloning, which is not about love, but money. A cattle farmer simply wants to create twins of animals with superlative musculature or milk production. That’s an achievable goal. Several cloned cows, for instance, have won the World Dairy Expo, the largest dairy show in the US. Doc, the winning steer at the 2010 Iowa State Fair, was a clone of the animal that won the same competition in 2008. It’s not only cheaper and easier to clone a bull than a dog – $20,000 for the cow, compared with $100,000 or more for the pooch – but it’s also a better investment; a genetically gifted bull can bring in so much money that the cloning more than pays for itself.28 (What’s more, when cloning came along, farmers were also used to thinking about breeding in scientific terms and had grown accustomed to managing their herds with the help of reproductive technology, and the world of livestock breeding was already home to companies eager to commercialize the latest laboratory breakthroughs.)

There’s enough demand for cloned livestock that ViaGen, a company based in Austin, Texas, is cloning several hundred farm animals a year.29 Most of its customers are duplicating cattle, but horses are poised to be the next big thing. ViaGen has cloned a champion barrel racer, and an Argentinian polo player has had some of his high-performing horses copied. And in 2012, the Fédération Equestre Internationale, the governing body for international equestrian competitions, reversed its ban on cloned horses, clearing the way for such equines to compete in the Olympics. (Imagine a race in which all the horses are clones of a previous winner. Or clones of the same winner! What a challenge that would be for the odds makers.)

A pet owner who pursues cloning is motivated not by the desire to monetize a single physical trait, but by a devotion to a unique animal with a whole suite of characteristics and quirks. Though there’s more to producing a prizewinning cow than genetics, cloning is simply better suited to fulfill the more limited goals of farmers than the grand dreams of pet lovers. Even a biological double will never bring a pet back from the Great Kennel in the Sky. That makes it hard to justify paying six figures for a clone, especially while the technology is experimental and the results unpredictable.

The dream is still alive, however, and pet lovers haven’t given up hope of seeing old Rover again. What if GSC and BioArts failed because they were simply ahead of their time? Over the coming decades, it’s likely that cloning’s success rates will go up, the price will come down and public attitudes will soften.³⁰ Several animal gene-banking companies are betting on it; for a small fee, these companies are offering the same service that GSC did in its earliest days, letting pet owners put their animal’s DNA on ice until cloning technology matures.

One of these companies, PerPETuate, was founded all the way back in 1998, and it’s still going strong. The company’s website makes the hard sell, assuring prospective customers that it provides the opportunity to ‘produce extraordinary, matchless, one of a kind, physically superior, brilliant, and innately talented replacements for lost pets’. I called up the co-founder and president, Ron Gillespie, to find out how it all works. Gillespie guided me through the process. If I wanted to store my Cavapoo Milo’s cells, he told me, the company would send me a tissue collection kit. With the help of my vet, I’d take ‘two small punches’ of skin from the scruff of Milo’s neck and post the samples back to PerPETuate. In the company’s lab, technicians would isolate the skin cells, let them reproduce like crazy, and then tuck them away in a tank of liquid nitrogen. Milo’s cells would hibernate in this stainless steel ‘Bio-Kennel’, sitting in a deep freeze alongside DNA from other pet dogs, cats, birds and lizards.

PerPETuate plans to offer its clients the opportunity to transform these ‘frozen cells’ into clones of their furry friends when the technology becomes more reliable and less expensive. In the meantime, several of its customers have had their dogs’ cells sent to South Korea, the de facto capital of canine cloning. Sooam, BioArts’s former partner, continues to crank out dog doubles, as does RNL Bio, another South Korean cloning company.31 But few people can afford to shell out £75,000 for a Korean clone, and Gillespie says the price will have to drop considerably (to £5000 or less) before he adds cloning to PerPETuate’s list of services.

Still, animal lovers keep sending in DNA samples, eagerly awaiting the day when they’ll be able to order a clone. When we spoke, in fact, Gillespie had just received a call from a woman in Florida who had a rat – he emphasized this word when he told me the story: ‘a rat’, he said – that she wanted to preserve. Sadly, the rodent, dead by the time its owner had called PerPETuate, no longer had viable cells. The owner insisted the tissue be stored anyway, Gillespie said, ‘because it gives her hope’. As PerPETuate’s website reassures potential customers: ‘There is almost no fee that would be too much to ensure the possibility of replacing your beloved pet with a twin sometime in the future.’ After all, you can’t put a price on love. (But if you had to, it would be somewhere in the region of £800, plus a yearly storage fee. All major credit cards accepted.)

Despite the visions of mini-Milos scampering around in my head, I don’t think I’ll be sending my dog’s cells to PerPETuate anytime soon. Cloning simply wouldn’t give me another dog exactly like Milo, and even if it could, I wouldn’t want one. When Milo’s gone, I’ll want to start over with an unrelated dog, free of expectations and unencumbered by constant comparisons between the old dog and the new.

But if we understand cloning’s limitations – and researchers figure out how to create healthy, thriving clones with less collateral damage – I don’t begrudge pet owners the right to make their own choices. We all have different values when it comes to caring for animals, and our bonds with our pets are full of emotion. Must grieving dog owners have a logical reason for wanting Rover’s DNA to live on? Making pets in a lab is not strictly ‘necessary’, but when our shelters are jammed full of unwanted canines, most dog breeding is unnecessary, too. Is one method of creating new animals really more abhorrent than the other?

I hope cloning outcomes improve, because we have more to gain from the technology than a few doubles of dead pets. Westhusin, for instance, cloned a bull that had natural resistance to brucellosis, a common cattle disease. Lurking somewhere out there in the wider world may be cows that are resistant to mad cow disease or chickens that are immune to avian influenza. Cloning these genetic freaks could lead to populations of farm animals that are healthier themselves – and safer for us. We might be able to use the same approach to create healthier pets. Imagine starting a new breeding population of Labrador retrievers with clones of dogs that are free of the hip problems that often plague these canines.

Then there are the wildlife biologists who have been racking their brains for ways to boost the populations of endangered species. Zoos have been running breeding programmes for decades, but captivity makes it difficult for many animals to get in the mood. The work is arduous and the results inconsistent. So wildlife breeding specialists have taken note of the reproductive technology that’s revolutionizing livestock breeding. They have paid close attention as scientists learned to make DNA doubles of sheep, cows, cats and dogs. And they have decided to borrow the technique to help threatened critters make a comeback.