COPY CATS.

• Author: Wee, Sui-Lee

Pet cloning has started to move from the realm of science fiction to reality. It is ethical?

Garlic was dead, and there was nothing Huang Yu could do about it--or so he thought. Hours after burying his cat in a park near his home in Wenzhou, a city in eastern China, the 22-yearold recalled an article he'd read on dog cloning. What if someday he could bring Garlic--who had died in 2018 of a sudden infection--back to life?

"In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable," says Huang, who dug up his British shorthair and put the 2-year-old cat in his refrigerator in preparation for producing a clone, an exact genetic copy. "Garlic didn't leave anything for future generations, so I could only choose to clone."

That thought led him to Sinogene, a pet-cloning company based in Beijing. Roughly seven months later, for the price of $35,000, Sinogene produced what China's official news media declared to be the country's first cloned cat.

Pet cloning might soon be the latest fad to take over China, but it's not confined there. People in South Korea and even in the United States have also had their pets cloned. A Texas-based company called ViaGen Pets offers dog cloning for the hefty price of $50,000 and cat cloning for $35,000. (Cloning cats is cheaper because the process is simpler.)

But is cloning pets a good idea?

Cloning Controversy

That's a question previous generations never had to grapple with. It wasn't until 1996, when Scottish scientists produced the first clone of a mammal--a sheep named Dolly--that most people began to think of cloning as something other than science fiction. Since then, scientists have cloned other mammals, including rats, cattle, horses, and deer. South Korean scientists cloned the first dog in 2005. Soon, they began cloning pet dogs (see "Key Dates: Cloning").

Cloning pets is still relatively rare; Sinogene has cloned only about 40 dogs. But China, with more than 73 million pet owners, may be the place where it really takes off. The barriers to cloning pets are especially low there. The nation doesn't have any laws against animal cruelty, and using animals for medical research or cosmetics testing isn't seen as problematic.

China's genetics know-how is also growing rapidly. Just last year, Chinese scientists succeeded in producing the world's first primate clones, and another Chinese scientist announced that he'd created the world's first genetically edited human babies (though he was recently sentenced to three years in prison...