High-production cows cloned at University of Tennessee

From the quiet of a high-security lab, away from the furore about human ethics and religious castigation, some of the world’s cloning experts have come together on a groundbreaking project.

Working to order, the scientists receive shipments of tissue from around the world, grow them and freeze them in liquid nitrogen, leaving the cells in suspended animation until word comes to revive them and create clones.

Bankrolling the effort is the US billionaire John Sperling, who owns tissue stored in the lab’s alarm-fitted “cryotanks”. The tissue was taken from his dead dog Missy, and sits alongside slithers of tissue from other pets, mostly cats and many from Britain, their donors the living, the lost and the run-over.

For those involved, this is the future of cloning. While the world’s attention is focused on whether scientists should be allowed to clone human embryos to make potentially life-saving stem cells, the cloning experts at Sperling’s company, Genetic Savings and Clone, have seen the future and decided it’s fluffy.

The cloning effort is more than amusement for exceptionally rich and sentimental animal lovers. By commercialising cloning, Sperling’s company is taking steps to turn the tedious, painstaking black art of cloning out of the hands of lab experts and into a high-throughput money-making process

The company has started charging for cloning. So far it has created six cats for pet owners who do not believe nine lives are enough. The first clients paid $50,000, a fee that dropped to $32,000 last year.

The “winners” in science — those who set cultural standards — often are those who figure out how to make a buck from leading edge research.