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How Much Is That Doggy In The Vitro?

Move over, Dolly. Here comes Fido forever.

By Charles Graeber

In College Station, deep within the cinder-block bowels of a lab on the campus of Texas A&M University, Madeline the dog waits patiently on a metal table while a veterinary surgeon pulls green sterile scrubs over his pointy cowboy boots. Yesterday, Madeline's blood test revealed the telltale hormonal spike that signals ovulation. It's her turn.

The bathroom-sized preop room is crowded with onlookers, doctors, and nurses. One whispers soothingly in Madeline's ear while another shaves her leg, sucking the fuzz with a Dustbuster. She's a sweet little beagle, and the drugs make her sweeter. Buprenorphine to anesthetize, acepromazine to tranquilize, glycopyrolate to stop her drooling: She looks on passively as the surgeon measures a tracheal tube against her chest.

Deep doggy-sleep overwhelms Madeline in seconds. The tube is in now, her jaws tied around it with a bow of cheesecloth, and the surgeon presses down on her body until she pees into a metal bowl. A man in a surgical mask stabs in from a corner with a Sony digicam for the shot: On his tiny screen, a nurse squeezes an oxygen balloon, and Madeline's body inflates in rigid synchronization.

Under the lights, the nurses have abstracted Madeline's freckled belly to a square of shaved flesh framed by green cloth. The surgeon scalpels a thin red line through the square and stretches the incision with a retractor, O-ing a portal into her belly. Then, as if reaching into a pumpkin with its lid cut free, he pulls out the beagle's uterus and ovaries. Somewhere within his gloved fist are six microscopic dog eggs. For the moment, they are Madeline's.

Madeline is having her eggs harvested, a procedure that's only recently been perfected in dogs. The process is common for humans - the first step in making test-tube babies - but Madeline's surgery is special: The eggs will be used to try to make a clone.

Madeline and 60 other bitches are serving as doggy hens, egg machines that supply the raw materials for the world's only canine-cloning project, a joint venture between A&M and California-based Bio-Arts and Research Corporation (BARC). The $2.3 million effort, called Missyplicity, is privately funded by an anonymous Bay Area billionaire who wants to make an exact copy of his mutt, Missy.

Veterinary researcher Mark Westhusin leads the four-person team of scientists charged with carrying out the science behind Missy's cloning. For the past three years, Westhusin and his colleagues have been laboring at the frontier of canine reproductive biology. Before they could even dream of supplying their anonymous patron with his cloned puppy, techniques like this egg harvest had to be developed. In the process, surgeries like Madeline's have been repeated scores of times on dozens of lab dogs.

After Madeline's eggs are collected, they'll be retrofitted with Missy's DNA, cultured in vitro, and - if the embryo is viable - surgically implanted into another dog's oviduct for gestation. Right now, five Missyplicity dogs like Madeline are pregnant with potential Missy clones. None of their embryos have developed enough to have a perceptible heartbeat, but Westhusin is confident that this pregnancy - or another one soon - will stick. If everything goes perfectly today, Missy 2 will be born in 63 days.

Three years ago, Dolly the sheep was front-page news. Missyplicity was announced soon after, and sounded to many people like a biotech hoax - or, worse, a conspicuous waste of time and money at the expense of lab dogs like Madeline. But despite its cutesy aspects, Missyplicity is important. It brings the reality of cloning closer to home: Dolly was a scientific first, but she's hardly man's best friend. In Dolly's wake President Clinton signed a bill prohibiting the use of federal funds in human-cloning experiments. Four states took the clone ban one step further and made human cloning illegal regardless of who pays for it. The message seemed to be that cloning vegetables, or lab and farm animals is acceptable, but when cloning gets personal, it's illegal. Missy isn't human, but she's no farm animal either. A pet occupies a psychic middle ground. Even if Missy is never successfully cloned - and there's no guarantee that she will be - the very fact that people are trying is an implicit challenge to our legal and ethical comfort zones.

The man with the camera is Lou Hawthorne, an ectomorph with a full head of salt-and-pepper curls and a mischievous streak. A goateed sci-fi fanatic turned college hippie, then techie, and now Bay Area entrepreneur, he lives in Marin County and makes time every day for an hour of yoga. As president of BARC and middleman between Missy's billionaire owner and the Texas A&M cloning team, Hawthorne cuts the checks and manages Missyplicity's PR. Right now, he's shooting a documentary. He's having fun, too; there's a big grin beneath his surgical mask.

Since December 1997, Hawthorne has flown to observe Missyplicity about a dozen times. He's stayed at all the finest hotels and worn out the menus in all the best restaurants between College Station and Houston. But his latest trip is different. This time, Hawthorne is so sure of Missyplicity's success that he's arrived for something even bigger than the world's first dog-cloning project. He's here to launch the world's first dog-cloning company, a gene bank called Genetic Savings & Clone.

A three-way partnership among the scientists, Hawthorne, and the wealthy client, GSC is opening the door to a clone-on-demand future. As little as a thousand dollars puts your doggy's DNA on ice. If today's surgery on Madeline yields a Missy clone, all you'll need to clone your own Fido this year will be the firm's URL (www.savingsandclone.com) and $250,000.

There's no way to predict the demand for cloned puppies, of course, but it's likely to be high. Remember how you cried when you buried your childhood pet in the backyard? Hawthorne can, and right now he has 200 potential clients lined up who never want to endure that loss again. In Hawthorne's vision of the future, people will pass a clone of their beloved family pooch down to their grandchildren. Statistically speaking, a dog lives in every other American household: No wonder Hawthorne wears a grin.

Charles Graeber (cagraeber@hotmail.com) is a freelance writer based in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

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