Missy, a dog owned by an unknown millionare, may become the first dog whose cells will be cloned to create a new pet for her owner.

By Faye Flam INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Mark Westhusin admits that, while his goal is science, his quest to be the first to clone a dog will result in an indulgent new service for rich people enamored of their dogs.

Speaking at a conference in Philadelphia yesterday, the Texas A&M University veterinarian said he envisioned people debating whether to buy a new BMW or clone their pet.

"You have to admit it's a damn luxury," he said of the clients already lining up.

Westhusin is the scientist in charge of an effort to clone Missy, a 12-year-old mutt belonging to an anonymous billionaire. Several dogs at Westhusin's Texas A&M laboratory are now pregnant with what could become Missy's clone. While those pregnancies may not come to term, Westhusin said he expected to achieve success within five years and possibly much sooner. The project started shortly after the announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997.

While Missy's owner is paying close to $2.5 million, the price is sure to come down.

Many people apparently would pay thousands to clone their dogs.

"We've had so many calls I couldn't take care of the demand," said the self-described farm boy who had been working on cloning cattle at Texas A&M before he was asked to join the Missy team - a collaboration between Texas A&M and a private company, Bio-Arts & Research Corp. - BARC.

The BARC project has had so many requests that it has started a cell bank for dogs called Genetic Savings & Clone, where owners of a healthy dog can pay $1,000 to have tissues preserved for possible future cloning. If your dog is terminally ill or recently deceased, you can get the "emergency service" for $2,000.

Westhusin said he was not sure why he was asked to speak at yesterday's meeting, a dialogue between scientists and religious leaders titled "Extended Life, Eternal Life," at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The rest of the meeting focused on research into extending the human life span.

But the forum gave Penn medical ethicist Art Caplan a chance to question the motivations behind the dog-cloning effort, which has been dubbed Missyplicity by those working on the project.

Caplan suggested that Westhusin and colleagues were selling pet owners "a bill of goods" based on the faulty notion that cloning is a form of resurrection. "They want the same pet back," Caplan said.

"It's a problem," Westhusin said in response. "I sometimes struggle with that."

Westhusin concurred that what cloning can achieve is a different dog that will look and probably act something like the original. "They're not getting Fluffy back," he said.

Westhusin said that he hoped his work would eventually lead to something more worthwhile than the cloning of family pets.

Because the cloning project has forced him to delve into the intricacies of dog reproduction, he said, he thought perhaps the research would lead to a birth-control vaccine that could cut down on the tragic destruction of 15 million unwanted pets every year.

Cloning of Missy involves a kennel of other dogs, some used for the "harvest" of egg cells and others used as surrogate mothers.

Westhusin takes the eggs harvested from these other dogs, removes their own DNA, and inserts the DNA from one of Missy's skin cells. Then, with a technique akin to that used for Dolly the sheep, Westhusin coaxes the egg to begin development. If those steps work, the resulting pre-embryo gets implanted into a surrogate mother dog.

Dogs are more difficult to clone than cows, sheep or mice, the three currently clonable mammals, Westhusin said, partly because mature dog eggs are difficult to get, while slaughterhouses can provide an almost infinite supply of cow eggs. Beyond that, the dog fertility cycle is more difficult to work with. Cats he said, are easier to clone and will probably be cloned even before dogs.

While Westhusin is willing to clone a dog or a cat, he said he drew the line at humans. "I've never met a human I thought worthy of cloning," he said, joking.