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GENETICALLY DESIGNED PETS TO FIT THE OWNER´S TASTE - Page 2

© Juan C. Mendible

The point is that nobody can guarantee that one particular superespecies will not escape or that there will not be ecological consequences of such an event. What seems to be a given is that those consequences will not be of benefit to humanity.

Back to the cats. The project is based on the fact that they produce a protein to which some people are allergic. Thus, the scientists plan to eliminate the gene that codes for that protein and produce allergen-free cats. For the purpose of this article, let me walk you through the procedure.

To start with, they will clone a cat in the same way that Dolly the sheep was cloned. They will introduce the nucleus of a cell of the cat the client wants into the ovum of a female from which the nucleus has been eliminated and in vitro fertilize it. After a few rounds of cell multiplications, the cells will be genetically manipulated so as to knock out the gene in question and implanted into another cat, and a few months later an allergen-free cat will be born. Sounds simple, does it not?

Well, no. First, nobody has ever cloned a cat, so it is not known if it is possible or not or how complicated or simple it will be. However, the experience with other animals indicates not only that the efficiency of the process is too low -- less than 5% -- but that a high percentage of the offspring are born up to 60% overweight and with anatomical and physiological defects that cause them to be aborted, die early in life or be put to sleep because they are monstrously deformed. Also, there is excessive growth of the placenta, which endangers the life of the mother. Thus, a lot of cats will have to die or be sacrificed before cat cloning is an everyday process.

On the other hand, it is not known exactly what the function or functions of the allergenic protein is. This means that the GM cats could be born with deficiencies that make them weak or easily infected with parasites that will kill them when they are just kittens.

To emphasize this point, humans have, according to the Human Genome Project, about three times fewer genes that was originally thought, which possibly means that an unknown number of genes have more than one function. Since nothing is known about the cat genome, we cannot be sure if it is the same with this animal, but we have two examples that strongly suggest that in animals it will be the same: mice and monkeys.

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