The Copycat Of Last Resort

Everybody knows that cats don't really have nine lives. But in Dr. Betsy Dresser's New Orleans laboratory that may soon change. Dresser and her staff have managed to clone an endangered African wildcat named "Jazz" using techniques never before demonstrated on a wild carnivore. The feat, scheduled to be announced this week, has implications beyond the obscure animal, which is endangered in parts of Africa. Dresser, director of the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species and a biologist at the University of New Orleans, believes she and her colleagues have come up with a method of last resort to rescue mammals on the brink of extinction. "If a species goes extinct," she says, "this might be a way to bring it back."

The technique involved taking some of Jazz's skin cells, extracting the DNA and using an electric current to fuse the DNA to an egg. Unlike Dolly the sheep's creators, however, Dresser and her team had to come up with a way to deal with the dearth of host animals. They used the egg of a domestic cat and implanted it into the cat's womb. It took a year and a half and 500 embryos before they got their first successful Jazz clone.

The feat has started a catfight of sorts among scientists. Some think it would be more productive to study the breeding behavior of animals, like the panda, to figure out how to get them to mate in captivity. "There are 40,000 vertebrate species on the planet and in most cases we don't understand how they naturally reproduce," says David Wildt, senior scientist at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park. "When we do understand, we can often breed these animals using low-tech approaches. Frankly, cloning is a waste of valuable research resources."

Dresser says her techniques should be viewed as a "safety net" should more traditional strategies fail. Undeterred, she has already implanted two more copies of Jazz in the uteri of housecats. And she's planning to clone the rarer rusty spotted cat of Sri Lanka and an endangered species of antelope. They'll need nine lives, too.