Will they continue to count backwards?
Yuval Dror, Haaretz, voila!
Pictured: Sissy the cloned cat. The company refused to comment when asked if they would provide the public with information on the number of cats that died in the cloning attempts
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/cc50k.html
Some say that cats have nine souls. One American company believes that this is not enough. "Genetic Savings&Clone" offers people who are emotionally attached to their cats, to clone them for 50 thousand dollars. So far, five Americans have accepted the offer, who hope to receive by November a perfect copy of their beloved cat.
The company was established in February 2000 as part of the initiative of billionaire John Sperling from Arizona. Three years earlier - after hearing about the cloning of Dolly the sheep - he asked to see if it would be possible to clone his beloved dog Missy, and even transferred more than 3.5 million dollars to scientists at Texas A&M University to test the idea.
The company's website (www.savingsandclone.com) claims that the public's reactions to the idea were so warm that it was decided to establish the company. Two years after the establishment of the company, the university scientists reported that they succeeded in cloning the first cat. They called her "Sissy" or Cc (acronym for Carbon Copy - "copy" in English).
Sissy was a genetic copy of "Rainbow", another cat. During the cloning, a cell from Rainbow's body was inserted into the egg of another cat, from which the genetic material was removed. An electrical signal caused the genes from Rainbow's donor cell and the egg to come together, and start dividing like a normal embryo. After a few days in which the embryo was grown in the laboratory, the researchers implanted it in the uterus of a surrogate cat. The fetus continued to develop in the womb and the researchers delivered Sissy by caesarean section.
The company, which estimated that by the end of 2002 it would launch a commercial service for cloning cats for about 200 thousand dollars, did not meet the schedule. Now, a year and a half late, the company has announced that it is ready for commercial activity and that five first customers have already agreed to pay the required amount of money - about 50 thousand dollars - for the cloning of their cats. The CEO of the company, Lou Hawthorne, said in an interview with the BBC network that it is possible that the first successful pregnancies will be registered as early as this week.
According to him, research conducted by the company indicates that about a quarter of the 60 million Americans who own pets would be interested in the cloning service. In an interview with the "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper, Hawthorne said that he hopes the price for a clone will drop to about $10,000. According to him, the company will soon be able to develop a technology that will allow it to clone dogs for about 20 thousand dollars.
But cloning comes at an additional cost: most of the cloned animals suffer from serious health problems. The company's spokesperson claimed that tests conducted show that 77% of the animals cloned by them were born without special health problems. However, experts doubted this, and noted that the company did not check the health status of the animals for some time. In attempts to clone Rainbow, more than 80 embryos were implanted in the uterus of cats, but all the embryos died in the womb already in the early stages - until Sissy was born. Although company officials claim that they have succeeded in perfecting and improving the cloning technology, they refused to comment when asked if they would provide the public with information on the number of cats that died trying to give birth to a cloned animal.
Even Hawthorne admits that while he offers an exact genetic copy, the cat's owner does not accept the same animal: "Genetically it is a kind of resurrection, but in terms of personality these are different animals."
They knew how to clone animals
For news at the BBC
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