US company offers to clone cats

Pet cats could soon have more than nine lives thanks to the world's first commercial cloning service.

An American company claims it can clone cats for £30,000, and is expecting to implant its first cloned kittens into surrogate mothers within days.

The technique used by Genetic Savings and Clone (GSC) was developed by researchers at the University of Texas, and was used in 2001 to create the world's first cloned cat, Missy.

GSC has already created one cat called CC. It employs a similar technique to the one used to clone Dolly the sheep as well as horses and donkeys.

DNA from the cat to be cloned is placed into a hollowedout donor egg, and the two chemically fused together. The resulting embryo is placed inside a donor cat, where a pregnancy continues as normal.

GSC's current project, called "nine lives", is the first to commercialise cloning. It aims to create nine cloned cats this year, with dozens more next year, along with the first cloned dogs.

Five customers have already paid for the service, with three company employees also having their pets cloned. The company says it still has one space left for a well-off pet owner.

GSC chief Lou Hawthorne is having his six-month-old cat cloned.

He said: "We may have pregnancies right now. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, there are ultra sounds going on all this week."