The dream led to a cat named Cc, whose birth might help define the role cloning plays in American business and culture.

When researchers in Texas announced recently that they had cloned a house cat, and that they planned to offer cloning to pet owners for a hefty fee, they chased the national debate about cloning from the fuzzy abstract to the fuzzy lump at the foot of the bed.

Sheep have been cloned for the past six years. Cows, goats and pigs soon followed. But the creation of the copied cat marked the first time scientists have demonstrated the mass-market potential of cloning technology.

Fluffy meets a speeding car? Meet Fluffy's genetic copy.

It's not that simple - yet. Genetic Savings & Clone, the playfully named company that financed the cloning of Cc, acknowledges that the science remains unpredictable. But that hasn't stopped potential customers from lining up with cash and a genetic sample of their pets.

Kara Clarke, 29, of New York hopes to clone her standard poodle, Jacques Cousteau, which died last August.

Jacques was smart and loving, stately and obedient, and losing him to cancer at age 12 1/2 was like losing a relative, she said.

"But there was that comfort knowing that an animal with a similar genetic makeup would be possible in the future," Clarke said. "And I'm kind of counting on it."

Cc is the clone, or genetic identical, of a living cat named Rainbow. Her birth was engineered by scientists at Texas A&M University with funding provided by Genetic Savings & Clone, a private firm established to clone pets and livestock.

Leading bioethicists don't quite know what to think about Cc. Although human cloning is widely reviled by the American public and is expected to be banned soon by Congress, some believe Cc's birth might lead us that way: The cute, fluffy kitten makes cloning seem far less threatening, they say, and it's bound to raise our comfort level with the technology.

Dr. Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist at a Christian think tank in Washington and a Bush administration appointee to a new United Nations panel on cloning, sees good and bad in Cc's birth. He's not sure on which side it falls.

"On the one hand, plainly this has focused the issue afresh for us in a very helpful way," Cameron said. "They've cloned all sorts of animals in between Dolly the sheep in 1996 and this cat, but they've been laboratory animals, farm animals. A cat is a different thing.

"On the other, it's a stepping-stone: You begin with a sheep, then you have a cat. What is the next step? Well, the next step is a child."

Too far out? Don't forget, Cameron noted, many controversial procedures started in animals and "jumped the firebreak" to humans. Think in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and euthanasia.

Genetic Savings & Clone plans to begin cloning pets on a limited basis by the end of the year, at a likely price of more than $100,000. As the process is refined, the company hopes to offer the service to the general public at prices "in the low five figures," spokesman Ben Carlson said.

There are no guarantees. But the company will store a DNA sample of your dog or cat for future cloning for about $1,000.

Dr. David Magnus, director of graduate studies at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, often participates in public discussions about human cloning, and he has been approached by grieving parents who believe cloning could bring back their dead children.

Selling the public on the notion that they can replace a beloved pet with its clone could encourage the same flawed notion about replacing humans, he said.

"If people are allowed to be fooled into thinking they could bring back their dead children, you can imagine the same (pitch): 'Make sure you have your kid's DNA stored with us, only $19.95 a month, we'll bring them back,"' Magnus said.

"I think that would be unscrupulous. But is it foreseeable? I could see it."

Genetic Savings & Clone is the offspring of John Sperling, 81, a wealthy Arizona businessman and founder of the University of Phoenix, a chain of for-profit colleges. Three years ago, he and his family decided they wanted to clone Missy, then 12, a much-loved German shepherd mix they had adopted from a shelter.

Sperling hired a business manager to solicit bids from leading research institutions. The veterinary school at Texas A&M, with a vibrant animal husbandry program and success in cloning cows and goats, won the contract.

They called the project Missyplicity.

"When word of the project came out, people began calling and saying, 'I want to clone my dog, I want to clone my cat,' and some livestock owners were interested," Carlson said.

Roughly $3.7 million later, Missy has yet to be cloned; dogs, it appears, are more difficult to clone than cats and other mammals because their reproductive systems are more complex.

Cloning makes sex unnecessary because it bypasses the mingling of DNA that usually occurs when sperm meets egg. But cloning requires an egg, and a womb ready to receive it. Dr. Duane Kraemer, professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M and one of the founders of Savings & Clone, said the ovulation cycle of dogs is proving hard to predict.

The cycles of cats are more predictable, and those of bovines more predictable still. Like Dolly the sheep, Cc was cloned using a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer: Basically, scientists took a cell from Rainbow and removed the nucleus, which contains the DNA. They put the nucleus into a hollowed-out egg taken from another female cat.

The egg was treated with chemicals to make the cells start dividing. The egg was then implanted into the uterus of the surrogate mother, a cat named Allie.

Cc was born 66 days later, after a normal pregnancy.

Although DNA fingerprinting confirmed Cc is the genetic double of Rainbow, Cc does not have Rainbow's orange and black calico markings.

The clone of any animal with multicolored fur will never have exactly the same pattern, although most will be closer than calicos, Kraemer said.

This finding has several implications. For one, the company's business model depends on persuading pet owners to pay thousands of dollars to replicate a pet. That Rainbow and Cc look nothing alike poses a bit of a marketing challenge, Carlson acknowledged.

And Cc and Rainbow's differences illustrate, in a very visual way, that a clone is not a reincarnation of the original. It might not even be a great copy.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)