Puss ‘N Boots

Apologies to Ian Anderson

http://www.snowcrest.net/zepp/Sociology/cc.htm

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

02/17/02

When a private company, John Sperling's Apollo Group, financed a venture by another group, Genetic Savings and Clone, it was interested in making a profit from the cloning of pets. It bankrolled a Texas A&M lab into producing "cc." the first cloned cat. To this end, it sank $3.7 million into the project.

The response was both predictable and sad.

Paul Elias of Associated Press wrote, "Tundra died three years ago, but Susann Rivera never gave up hope that one day she would play with her furry friend again. Hear heart soared Friday after she learned that Texas A&M University researched had successfully cloned a calico kitten...

"‘Tundra’s coming back,’ said Rivera, the first cat customer of Genetic Savings and Clone, which charges people to store their pets’ DNA.

"The Burlingame woman – who has kept Tundra’s toys and Elvis Presley costume in anticipation of his resurrection – is on a long list of pet owners hoping cloning can bring back their beloved companions."

The Elias story isn’t the only one popping up in the paper in the wake of the kitty cloning. Another recounted how a woman had kept her dead cat, endowed with the mildly alarming name of "Stinky" in her freezer for three years against the day science could clone Stinky and bring it back.

A huge racket in the supposed resurrection of dead pets was getting ready to spring up, charging people hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring Bowser or Fluffy back.

Anyone who has ever owned a cat or a dog knows how deep a bond you can form with them, and operators are standing by to exploit the hell out of that bond.

The kitten produced at A&M will go a long way toward nipping this cruel exploitation of bereaved pet owners in the bud. You see, cc is a calico cc. Only the coat isn’t cc–it’s different from the calico cc was cloned from. As a result, CC doesn’t look exactly like her mother/sister/twin. She will have roughly the same build as her mother, and almost certainly the same color eyes, and she might have the same medical problems or lack thereof. But the coat is different because patterning of a cat’s coat is determined by interaction of the skin with the amniotic fluid. That’s why a litter of kittens will have different patterns, even though both parents are "purebred."

In another article by Gina Kolata, Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a cat geneticist at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., said that "coat color in cats was determined by how color_containing cells separate and replicate during embryo development, a process that was only partly genetically determined."

But CC certainly will not be the same cat as the original. Not only does she look different, but she’ll be more or less playful, depending on how she is raised (and a lab, no matter how well-intentioned its residents, is a bleak place to be a kitten), her taste in food will vary, depending on what she’s exposed to while her personality is developing, and she’ll have an entirely different personality. Nearly all the similarities will come from traits that are common to all cats, rather than from genetic imprint.

None of this is news to most folks. Most people are aware of the on-going "nurture versus nature" debate over what elements of personality, intelligence, temperament and preference does a creature (including humans) get from the physical and emotional environment, and how much is "inborn"?

Duane Kraemer, who did the nuclear transfer process that made the clone said, ``This is reproduction, not resurrection.'' Most people understand that, too.

Tundra and Stinky are dead, dead, dead. They’re gone, and they aren’t coming back, save through supernatural means. Cloning will get you a cat that looks sort of like Tundra or Stinky, and like Tundra and Stinky, will prefer chicken to asparagus, play with string, lick themselves, bump their heads up against you, get underfoot, and do the things that make them so unique. But Tundra II, raised with puppies, might like dogs, while Tundra I hated them. Or vice-versa.

Still, there are enough people who don’t understand that a very cruel industry is fighting for the ability (and disturbingly, the copyright) to reproduce dead pets. Quite a few people are going to be spending a lot of money in the not-too-distant future, and for many, the results will be quite sad.

The scam won’t be limited to bereaved pet owners, either. If you are a breeder, and you just won Best of Breed in the Westchester Dog Show, you are going to be obviously interested in cloning, since your dog won based mostly on physical attributes–skeletal development, strength of carriage, teeth, eyes, gait, coat, and proportions. These are all mostly genetic attributes.

Breeding is always something of a crap shoot. You might have a male who has good coat but is a bit swaybacked, and a female with a great spine line but a mediocre coat, and you breed them, hoping that one of the puppies will have a great back and a good coat. You could end up with a litter of swaybacked, piebald puppies. Or you might get a pup like what you wanted, only an unnoticed recessive gene means this particular puppy is cross-eyed. Or they all have the mothers’ traits. Dog fanciers can tell you with no hint of irony that breeding’s a bitch.

The allure of cloning should be obvious; most physical traits will carry though in cloning. If you have an AKC champion, you get to preserve those traits and are spared the hassle of finding homes for all the puppies that "don’t work out" or hitting them with a hammer or whatever it is breeders do with the less-than-perfect examples.

But an AKC champion is a champion because the dog stands out from all the other dogs in the breed. If they are all essentially the same dog, with the only variation being environmental, what criteria is a judge going to use to pick best of breed?

I have Samoyeds, and went to a few shows with my boy back about nine years ago, including the Nationals. It’s very strange being in a place with nearly 2,500 Samoyed dogs. It’s all white fluffy tails and big black-lipped grins and very noisy, and I was very afraid that if my dog got loose, I wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from the thousands of others in that cacophony of Sams. The distinctions among the Sams are pretty subtle to someone not very familiar with the breed. One inch extra in height, or ten degrees of curl in the tail can get a Samoyed disqualified.

(We finished in the top eight, which was reckoned pretty good. But my dog didn’t like the shows much, and I discovered that even the nicest people treat their animals as disposable assets, and we dropped out of the scene).

So a judge at a dog show might find himself looking at hundreds of replicas of the same damn dog, and deciding between one who ran 1.8 miles a day and one that ran 1.9 miles a day.

Cloning has other risks, too. It’s been a commonplace among plants for some time, and the timber industry, not surprisingly, was interested in developing a type of pine that grew faster and stronger than any other type of pine. They envisioned vast areas of monoclonal forests, with trees that had highly predictable growth cycles and characteristics, and would return a more uniform standard of "wood product."

But before the tech boys had a chance to screw up the whole damn forest, they discovered that if the original tree wasn’t resistant to a particular bug or microorganism, then none of its clones would be, either, and a single bug or fungus or germ could wipe would an entire forest and leave no survivors.

So now they’re dicking around with "variegated" or "serial" forests, which means that they are planting the same mix of conifer and deciduous, pine, cedar and fir, that the forest had to begin with. The only distinction is that they are choosing their own patterns of planting as opposed to the random course of nature. In other words, they’re paying UC Berkeley grads 75 large a year to do what the forest was going to do anyway. Ah, progress!

The worst is yet to come. How long will it be before we hear of someone seeing all the ads for "resurrecting your beloved pet" wanting to know if the labs can resurrect their beloved child who was killed in an auto accident a few months earlier?

Most reputable scientists and entrepreneurs would feel a pang of sympathy and send the couple on their way.

But eventually, some cash-strapped lab or sleazy con artist would go for it.

I don’t look forward to reading of such stories in the paper.

Still, I think cloning is a great thing. We’ll make mistakes, and con men will cheat the financially and emotionally vulnerable, it’s true. The same day that cc was announced, a couple in England told the press of the successful birth of England’s second "designer baby." Perfectly normal in all respects, but with one "addition"; a gene that will ensure bone marrow compatibility with her five year old brother, who is currently in remission from leukemia.

The possible pitfalls for designer babies are well known (I suggested once that if they find the genetic key to fundamentalism and eliminate that personality disorder, humanity will be ready to reach for the stars – needless to say, this stirred some controversy), but based on what we know now, genetic design, including cloning can be used for a myriad of results that will create healthier and happier human beings.

Still, I can’t help but think of Tundra, the cat referred to at the beginning of this piece. The article said, "The Burlingame woman – who has kept Tundra’s toys and Elvis Presley costume in anticipation of his resurrection – is on a long list of pet owners hoping cloning can bring back their beloved companions."

Elvis Presley costume. For a cat.

Folks, I don’t believe cloning has to be a bad thing, but in poor Tundra’s case, I’ll make an exception.

This is a dead cat that very desperately needs to stay dead.