War of the clones

In the same week that a leading pet cloning company announced the sale of another cloned cat and dropped its price for the service by more than a third, animal activists stepped up efforts to ban or regulate the practice.Last week, California Assembly Member Lloyd Levine said he would be introducing a bill to ban the sales of cloned pets. On Saturday (February 12), Genetic Savings and Clone said it had delivered "Little Gizmo" to the former owner of Gizmo, a mixed breed Siamese who died in March 2004. The company also announced that it was reducing its price for cat cloning from $50,000 to $32,000.And on Tuesday (February 15), the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) sent a petition to the US Department of Agriculture asking that the agency require Genetic Savings and Clone and other companies to register as research facilities under the Animal Welfare Act and that it "issue an interpretive rule to alert companies creating or attempting to create cloned or genetically engineered pets that they must register as a research facility under the Animal Welfare Act."Wednesday was a bit of a duel between the opposing sides, as the AAVS released a report critical of pet cloning during a teleconference and unveiled www.nopetcloning.org. Genetic Savings and Clone responded with a teleconference of its own—which featured David Magnus, director of Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics and one of the panelists from the AAVS teleconference—and www.yespetcloning.org. Genetic Savings and Clone Chief Executive Officer Lou Hawthorne said his company would welcome additional oversight if it was needed and if it made sense. "Our internal welfare protocols have higher standards than those required by the Animal Welfare Act," he said on the teleconference call. "I find it impossible to imagine that government oversight would constrain our activities."The company has sold two cloned cats and also offers gene banking ranging in cost from $295 plus $100 per year of storage to $1395 plus $150 per year. In 2005, it hopes to clone about 40 cats and three or four dogs, although no one has successfully cloned a dog yet.In an earlier statement responding to news stories about the proposed California bill, the company said it "believes this bill will do nothing to protect animals or consumers and will inhibit vital research contributing to the well being not just of consumers, but also of both domestic and endangered animals."AAVS criticized cloning methods, which its representatives called cruel, and suggested that large numbers of cats were euthanized to create each clone. They said that surrogate cats underwent multiple surgeries.AAVS Senior Policy Analyst Crystal Miller-Spiegel said the society was not singling out a particular company for criticism. "We see them all as part of the problem," she said during her organization's teleconference call. "I think they should abide by federal law to begin with."But Hawthorne said that the company does not euthanize any animals and that surrogates only undergo what is essentially a spaying procedure twice during the cloning process. They are then adopted into loving homes, he said. "It's a progression of wealth for these surrogates." Hawthorne said that the "overwhelming interest and movement" of the company is toward nonsurgical techniques."We've also never had a miscarriage," he said, which he attributed to the company's use of chromatin transfer instead of the older method of nuclear transfer. In chromatin transfer, donor cells are treated with streptolysin to make their membranes more permeable and mitotic factors to make the chromatin more accessible to oocyte factors. Hawthorne declined to go into specifics on how many transfers were required to create a healthy clone, but said that the company's scientific team would be publishing "a detailed analysis of every fetus that shows up on ultrasound" in a scientific journal in the next few months.AAVS also said that cloned animals often suffer from serious health problems and die soon after birth, that cloning would exacerbate the animal overpopulation problem in the United States, and that the industry is misleading clients.Hawthorne repeatedly used the word "ridiculous" to refute these arguments and said the company was operating in a "fishbowl," with thousands of stories written about it per year. "The mechanism of cloning itself reduces the population of unwanted pets," he said. "We buy eggs from spay materials, and we've paid more than $300,000 to spay clinics, which makes us one of the biggest funders of spaying in the country." "We make it clear on our Web site what is and what is not possible with cloning," Hawthorne said. "Our clients believe that we underpromise and overdeliver" in terms of physical and even behavioral resemblance.

War of the clones

US firm and anti-vivisectionists in a PR cat fight as the price of a cloned kitty drops

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