US scientists clone cat

Scientists in Texas have successfully cloned a domestic cat, raising the prospect of the cloning of pets – but alarming ethicists, who have questioned its usefulness and the welfare of the clones.

The breakthrough was made at the end of last year by researchers at the A&M University in Texas, where it had been an open secret that researchers on campus were striving to replicate a domestic pet within a research programme dubbed CopyCat.

It is funded largely by John Sperling, an 81-year-old philanthropist with an enduring enthusiasm for cloning. He has created a company, Genetic Savings and Clone, also based in Texas that could begin to market the new science if it proves safe and reliable.

The cloned cat, called "Cc:", is "almost two months old, appears healthy and energetic, although she is completely unlike her tabby surrogate mother," the researchers noted in a paper for the scientific journal Nature, which was released six days early last night, after their success was made public by the Wall Street Journal.

Cc:'s fur is not the same as her mother's, because that is partly determined in the womb.

But the researchers also revealed that Cc: was the only one of 87 implanted cloned cat embryos which survived. With Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal in 1997, only 29 implanted embryos were needed.

- INDEPENDENT