Here, Kitty, Kitty!

With her big round eyes, her button nose and her I'm-ready-for-fun expression, the kitten named cc (short for carbon copy and copy cat) has a face that's almost impossible not to love, which may help explain why the hostility that usually accompanies news on the cloning front was almost drowned out last week by the sound of the press corps cooing on cue.

Cc is the name the scientists behind the first cloned house pet gave their creation, a shorthaired calico that is a genetic (though not a visual) duplicate of her biological mom. Because she is so seductively cute--pulling at the same heartstrings an infant human clone would invariably tug--she lays bare the emotional subtext that has so far been missing in the great cloning debate. It's one thing to argue the merits of cloning when you're talking about uncuddly sheep, mice, cattle, goats and pigs. It's quite another when the clone is practically sitting in your lap, mewing and purring and begging for love.

And so it was last week that a debate that began in 1997 with the cloning of Dolly the sheep took on a new urgency. Public opinion was once again split along ethical fault lines, although this time pro-cloners were joined by pet lovers and anti-cloners drew support from the A.S.P.C.A. and the Humane Society. "We must question the social purpose here," said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society's U.S. branch. "Just because you're capable of something doesn't mean you should act on it."

Not that making cc was particularly easy. The work was overseen by Mark Westhusin, an associate professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and backed by Genetic Savings & Clone, a private company whose financial benefactor wanted to clone not a cat but an aging border-collie mix named Missy. Dogs, however, don't ovulate regularly, as cats do, and, for reasons not fully understood, dogs' ova don't mature well in laboratory dishes. So after almost three fruitless years, Westhusin and his colleagues turned their attention from canines to felines.

Working first with an adult male cat, they harvested cells from the animal's mouth and fused them with cat-donor eggs that had been emptied of genetic material. This created 82 embryos, which were implanted into seven surrogate mothers. The process yielded only a single fetal clone, and that one died in utero. Researchers then turned to cumulus cells from the ovaries of a female named Rainbow, creating five cloned embryos. These were implanted in Allie, another surrogate, and this time an embryo took hold and grew. The result was cc, born Dec. 22 and announced with a flourish last week by the journal Nature. "It was very exciting to witness," says Lou Hawthorne, Genetic Savings & Clone's CEO. "She's just such a cutie."

It was more than a mere scientific breakthrough. The news, which broke first in the Wall Street Journal, caught the eye of entrepreneurs. Each year millions of pets die in the U.S., leaving behind plenty of well-heeled owners who would be willing to pay top dollar to replace their beloved companion. Genetic Savings & Clone already offers to freeze pet DNA for future cloning, charging a one-time fee of $895 plus $100 a year for storage.