PETA’s Hypocrisy on Cloning Cats

A California company, Genetic Savings & Clone, became the first company in the country to offer cloned animals private individuals. Cloned animals have been available for commercial livestock and some endangered species, but Genetic Savings & Clone is the first company to my mind where anyone can walk in, put down their money, and at some point walk out with a cloned animal — in this case, cats.

The service is not cheap. The company charges $295 to $1,395 plus annual charges to store the genetic material of cats. Producing an actual clone from said genetic material will run more than $30,000 (initially the company charged $50,000, but apparently reduced that due to lack of demand).

Of course such services have produced an inevitable backlash, especially given how many unwanted cats there are out there. The California legislature is considering banning cat cloning, the American Anti-Vivisection Society has petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to regulate it, and even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is getting in on the action with a very odd argument.

In a report on the cat cloning business on the website of Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper, PETA’s Mary Beth Sweetland is quoted as saying,

It defies logic to think that somebody can feel right about paying $50,000 for a cat when 17 million dogs and cats are killed in shelters every year. That money could be put towards the support of innumerable homeless animals if these people truly care about animals.

Huh? Has Sweetland check out any of PETA’s Form 990s lately? For example, according to its 2002 Form 990, PETA had total expenses in 2002 of $21,484,419. How much of that went to helping alleviate the issue of pet overpopulation? Exactly $208,598 for a spay/neuter program. In contrast, that same year PETA sent almost $4.8 million to the Foundation to Support Animal Protection which is a front group PETA uses to contribute money to Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine while pretending the two are independent organizations.

How much good could PETA have done by spending that $4.8 million on helping shelters? Yet Sweetland has the gall to complain because someone might spend 1 percent of that amount to clone a favorite pet?

I personally think spending that much to clone a cat is a bit silly, but then again I also do not understand why anyone would pay $35,000 for a Mickey Mantle rookie card or $200,000 for a Lamborghini. To each his own.

Source:

‘Frankenkitty’ or priceless duplicate? Howard Witt, Sun-Sentinel.Com, March 6, 2005.

Researchers Clone Rat

In September researchers from China and France announced they had managed to clone rats, adding it to the growing list of animal species that have been successfully cloned.

Figuring out how to clone the rat took considerably longer than the mouse (which was cloned in 1998) due in part to the speed with which rat embryos develop — the eggs would start to develop before researchers could swap genetic material to produce the clone.

French researchers solved that problem by using an inhibitor to delay the development of the fertilized rat egg long enough to insert the clone DNA material.

Rats are used in a number of animal models where they are closer analogues to human physiology than mice (such as diabetes for one), and the ability to clone rats and make gene knockout rats will greatly aid research into a variety of human ailments.

Sources:

Rat Clone Is New Big Cheese of the Lab. Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2003.

Rat is latest clone. The BBC, September 25, 2003.

NIH Renews Grant for Primate Cloning Project

In August the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year, $6.4 million grant to the Pittsburgh Development Center to continue its research into cloning monkeys and other primates.

In 1998 the NIH awarded funding to PDC developer Gerald Schatten to pursue issues surrounding the cloning of non-human primates. Schatten is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.

According to Schatten, the ability to clone monkeys and other non-human primates would allow for the creation of new and more accurate models of human disease while also reducing the number of animals needed for such research. Actually cloning primates, however, has proven difficult.

Most animal cloning has involved variations on that used to clone Dolly the sheep — the nucleus of a fertilized cell is remove and replaced with one from an adult cell. That works relatively well in sheep, mice, rats and other species, but in primates the removal of the nucleus also has the unfortunate side effect of removing the mechanism responsible for separating chromosomes during cell division. The upshot is that when the cell divides, the resulting cells have the incorrect number of chromosomes.

Schatten told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that in efforts using this method of cloning on 700 fertilized eggs from rhesus macaques that they were not able to produce a single pregnancy.

Schatten and his colleagues will use this latest NIH grant to explore alternative methods, such as inserting the adult nucleus before removing the fertilized egg’s own nucleus.

Sources:

Pitt gets $6.4 million to clone monkeys. Anitra Srikameswaran, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 30, 2003.

NIH renews $6M grant to study monkey cloning. Pittsburgh Business Times, August 29, 2003.

African and Dutch Researchers Clone Cow

Africa produced its first cloned animal in April when researchers in South Africa successfully cloned a cow.

The cloned cow was named Futi, which is Zulu for “replica.” Futi was cloned from DNA taken from a cow that holds the African record for milk production at 20 gallons per day.

Researchers at the South AFrican Embryo Plus center and the Danish Agriculture Institute collaborated to clone the animal. The researchers used a zona-free cloning method which has a number of advantages over the method used to initially clone Dolly the sheep, including that zona-free cloning cuts the time involved in half and can be done with simpler equipment and procedures.

Sources:

S. Africa scientists ‘clone cow’. Associated Press, May 7, 2003.

Cow becomes Africa’s first clone. The BBC, May 7, 2003.

Researchers Produce Clone from Dead Endangered Cattle

Researchers at the Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts took a giant leap toward one of the hallmarks of science fiction depictions of genetic engineering by producing two clones from cells of a banteng that had died years earlier.

Back in the late 1970s the San Diego Zoo began preserving cell and genetic material from animals. Tissue samples from animals were stored within plastic vials and then preserved in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Centigrade.

One of the animals that they took tissue samples from was the banteng, a wild species of cow of which there are believed to be only 8,000 individuals in existence, and most of those at a single place — the island of Java.

The San Diego Zoo sent tissues samples from the banteng to Advanced Cell Technology which fused the genetic material from the skin of the banteng into cow eggs that had already had their own genetic material removed. Another company, Trans Ova Genetics, then implanted 30 such eggs into cows. Of the 30 implanted eggs, only two resulted in live births, and one of those animals had to be euthanized shortly after it was born.

The second animal appears to be thriving, however, and at least provides a proof of concept that this sort of thing is possible. ACT had previously used much the same procedure to clone a wild ox a few years ago, but the only live birth from that experiment died only two days later. Italian researchers in 2001 reported they had cloned an endangered wild sheep.

The major question left now is assuming the cloned banteng survives to the breeding age of six, will he be able to mate and produce offspring.

Oliver Ryder, a geneticist with the San Diego Zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, told Reuters that, “The fact that it can happen at all just astounds me. . . . At the time we did not know how this resource might be used, but we knew it was important to save as much information about endangered species as we could.”

Conservationists had mixed feelings about the success of the experiment, with some lamenting that it wouldn’t do much good to clone banteng if their natural habitat were not preserved as well. Karen Baragona of the World Wildlife Fund told CBS News,

If you don’t deal with protecting habitat and dealing with the root causes of endangerment, it doesn’t matter how many animals you’re able to produce in a lab and try to sort of fling back into the wild, they’re going to face the same fate as their wild counterparts.

Sources:

Scientists clone long-dead animal. CBS News, April 8, 2003.

Endangered animal clone produced. The BBC, April 9, 2003.

Dolly to Go on Display

Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, will go on display at the Royal Edinburgh this month as part of an exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and return again in September as part of a permanent display at the museum.

Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 and euthanized 6 years later after it was discovered that she suffered from a progressive lung disease. National Museums of Scotland director Dr. Gordon Rintoul told the BBC,

Dolly is a striking reminder of Scotland’s record of scientific achievement and her contribution can now be recognized for many centuries to come.

. . .

She will prove an important focus for future new science displays in the Royal Museum.

Dr. Ian Wilmot, who lead the team that cloned Dolly, said,

She will go on reminding people of the fact that scientific progress was made in Edinburgh which is making people think very differently about this aspect of biology.

It’s stimulating people to do research which one day will help to provide cells needed to treat very unpleasant human diseases.

Source:

Dolly goes on display. The BBC, April 9, 2003.