There's No Monkeying Around With Cloning

NEW YORK — Wanna clone a cow? A Massachusetts company guarantees a healthy calf for $19,000 -- and two for $34,000.

Wanna clone a cat? A California-based company says it's gearing up to offer that service soon, maybe next year.

Wanna clone a cute monkey? Good luck.

Almost seven years after the birth of Dolly the sheep shocked scientists and the public, cloning has shown mixed progress. Scientists have achieved it in more than a dozen mammal species, including mice, rabbits, goats, pigs and horses. They've cloned a calf from a slaughtered cow. They've even cloned a wild sheep from a carcass found in a pasture.

But an efficient cloning process still eludes them. Clones are more prone to physical defects than regular animals are. And researchers haven't been able to duplicate monkeys from adult or fetal tissue, a goal that could help medical research.

Hovering over these biological challenges are two other issues. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is pondering the safety of consuming meat and milk from clones and their progeny, a matter of obvious importance to ranchers contemplating cloned pigs and cattle. The FDA recently said such food doesn't appear to be hazardous, but the agency wants more public comment. Because of a voluntary industry moratorium, no products from clones have been allowed into the food supply.

And the big hot button -- the prospect of making human babies through cloning -- still glows. Would that present a breakthrough for treating infertility and provide parents a genetic duplicate of a dead child? Or would it be ethically repugnant and unacceptably risky?

The United States recently campaigned unsuccessfully for a United Nations ban on human cloning. But the international body voted Thursday to put off any decision for two years.

Member nations are divided over how far such an agreement should go. Some say it should only ban cloning to make babies. Others, including the United States, also want to outlaw so-called "therapeutic cloning," which produces and then destroys week-old embryos to harvest stem cells. Scientists hope to use stem cells for treating such illnesses as diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

Meanwhile, Clonaid, a company founded by the leader of a religious sect that believes space aliens created life on Earth, claims that it has produced five babies through cloning. Clonaid grabbed headlines in December by announcing the first such baby had been born, but that claim has been dismissed by scientists for lack of proof.