Word: westhusin
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...cloning a dog is possible, not that it's easy. Indeed, billionaire John Sperling, who co-founded the cleverly named Genetic Savings & Clone (GS&C), of Sausalito, Calif., has spent seven years and more than $19 million trying in vain to clone a dog. Texas A&M researcher Mark Westhusin, whose team cloned a cat on its second try in 2001, abandoned the dog-cloning project several years ago. When the company approached reproductive physiologist George Seidel Jr. of Colorado State, he wouldn't even...
...implant them at will in a surrogate bitch. Cows, goats and sheep can be thrown into estrus--readiness for pregnancy--by giving them a hormone shot. Not dogs. "You have to monitor hundreds, if not thousands, of dogs every day to figure out when they come into heat," says Westhusin. That's why Hwang's team--which stays on the job seven days a week for 18 to 20 hours a day--was well matched for the task. "We had to be ready to collect oocytes at any time of day, even midnight or early morning," says Hwang, adding...
...that making cc was particularly easy. The work was overseen by Mark Westhusin, an associate professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and backed by Genetic Savings & Clone, a private company whose financial benefactor wanted to clone not a cat but an aging border-collie mix named Missy. Dogs, however, don't ovulate regularly, as cats do, and, for reasons not fully understood, dogs' ova don't mature well in laboratory dishes. So after almost three fruitless years, Westhusin and his colleagues turned their attention from canines to felines...
...molecular changes during development. Temperament too is a toss-up, since it's hard to tease out how much of an animal's personality is genetically scripted and how much is shaped by environment. "The fallacy is that cloning provides a duplicate," says the Humane Society's Pacelle. Concedes Westhusin: "This is not a resurrection. People need to understand that...
...fate of the dog samples will depend on Westhusin's work. He knows that even if he gets a dog viably pregnant, the offspring, should they survive, will face the problems shown at birth by other cloned animals: abnormalities like immature lungs and cardiovascular and weight problems. "Why would you ever want to clone humans," Westhusin asks, "when we're not even close to getting it worked out in animals...