Just in time for that last-minute holiday gift, a bioscience firm has announced the first sale of a cloned kitten, a male named "Little Nicky."

"Little Nicky" a successfully cloned cat was sold by Genetic Savings and Clone for $50,000.
Tony Gutierrez, AP



Genetics Savings & Clone (GSC) of Sausalito, Calif., reports selling the kitten to a Texas woman for $50,000. Genetically, the kitten is a twin of the buyer's Maine Coon cat "Nicky," who died earlier this year. The owner declined to be identified in print.

The kitten is reported to resemble the original cat in both temperament — mellow — and behavior, quickly learning commands and enjoying water play, as well as being identical in appearance.

The sale of the kitten, born Oct. 17 in an Austin lab, is the first of six similar transactions the cloning firm has in the works. More clone kittens are alive and are being weaned before delivery to their owners, says firm spokesman Ben Carlson.

The Humane Society and other pet advocacy groups have criticized pet cloning as wasteful, noting that 6 million to 8 million cats and dogs enter shelters each year nationwide, where 3 million to 4 million are put to death.

"We've gotten along fine for millions of years the old-fashioned way of breeding cats. We don't need cloning," says Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society. He also questions the decision to expose pets to an experimental procedure like cloning.

GSC says that while it hopes to eventually bring prices down, cat clones would only be for relatively few pet owners and shouldn't affect the number of adoptions. The firm also financed the first cloning of a cat — CC, a calico born in 2001 whose stripes differed from its genetic original.

The fact that Little Nicky and three other such kittens produced by the firm this year more closely resemble the animals being cloned is the result of a process called chromatin transfer, Carlson says.

Reproductive cloning works by fusing a hollowed-out egg cell with a cell — usually a skin cell — from the animal being cloned. The resulting fused egg begins dividing, creating a clone embryo that is implanted into a surrogate mother. Fewer than 5% of attempts typically result in a successful birth.

Chromatin transfer, a process that GSC licenses from a cattle-cloning firm, adds an additional step to cloning by exposing the donor cell genes more cleanly, in theory, to the egg cell. However, the firm has not published statistics on its findings in a scientific journal, leaving outside researchers uncertain about the claim.

How it works: Before cloning, technicians chemically remove extraneous genetic material from the donor skin cell. To do this, they make holes in the nuclear membrane of the skin cell, soaking it in a substance that dissolves the membrane.

This facilitates the removal of specific cell regulatory proteins associated with the skin itself, leaving behind the basic genetic material, or chromatin, inside the cell. The chromatin, rather than the entire donor skin cell, is then placed inside the egg cell.

GSC was originally co-founded by billionaire John Sperling in an effort to clone his dog Missy. The company hopes to start selling canine clones next year, Carlson says. Dog clones have proven harder to produce than cats because dogs ovulate eggs too immature for cloning until they are aged in the lab, a dicey process. "We think we're pretty close. It could be as soon as a few months," Carlson says.