< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Scientists in Texas have recently cloned a common house cat, and they see great commercial potential in the process.
After all, America teems with people who have more money than good sense, and these folks might well pay handsomely for a genetic copy of Puff (although these critters will more likely have names like Reginald Oglethorpe van Schuyler XIV) as the beloved family pet enters its dotage.
We have two cats. One is only six or seven. She's
fluffy and gray and resembles a dust bunny more than
anything feline. Her name was Princess Joan
when
some friends gave her to us. I insisted we change it,
because I'd feel stupid standing on the porch calling out
Here, Princess
in the requisite falsetto.
Granted, a name is as irrelevant to a cat as the Bill of Rights is to John Ashcroft. Cats operate in blissful ignorance of anything you say, so the name is only for your own convenience. For several days, we struggled to rechristen this companion animal until Martha had a stroke of genius: The Cat Formerly Known As Princess.
It's a mouthful, but it works, since we seldom need to employ it because she turned out to be an indoor cat. Since she's perfectly useless, I can't imagine why anyone would want to clone her.
But it's different with our other cat, Hector. If they want to clone him, I want a piece of the action, because he's got some valuable DNA.
For one thing, he resembles a celebrity. He's mostly black with white paws and some white around his lower jaw and throat, which makes him almost a dead ringer for Socks, who was once the First Cat of the United States.
Socks hasn't been in the news much lately since the Clintons gave him away when they left the White House, but suppose Hillary runs for President in 2004. Republican propagandists will hasten to portray her as a witch; witches always appear with cats, and what better cat for the attack commercials than one that looks like Socks, which you could get from our Hector's DNA?
Or maybe not -- cat coloration, from what I read, is affected by factors other than genetics.
But there are other valuable genes in Hector. Few cats live even a decade, and he's 17. That's nowhere close to the longevity record, but consider this: He's an outdoor cat, and I just read that indoor cats live four times longer than outdoor cats. By this logic, a Hector clone, if you kept him inside, would live to be at least 68 years old -- pretty much a lifetime cat.
Hector's double helix contains another valuable genetic component, one that could restore Enron to financial health.
The colder it is outside, the longer he stands in the open doorway, trying to decide whether he really wants to go out. You can guess the effect on the utility bill.
An ailing natural-gas supplier merely needs to generate
several million Hector clones, and plant the resulting cute
little kittens in alleys behind homes with soft-hearted
children and soft-headed parents who eventually say
Okay, you can keep him
after the thousandth
heart-rending plea.
No matter how well those people insulate their houses and practice conservation, their gas bills will quintuple on account of the indecisive pet standing in the open door on subzero days and nights. I'd almost bet this was the topic of those meetings between Enron and Vice President Dick Cheney that the White House is refusing to talk about.
I've tried to get around this financial drain by firing up the air-tight wood-burner in the living room. However, I spend most of the day toiling in a back room, so I'm not devout about tending the front-room fire.
Or I wouldn't be, except that Hector functions as an ambulatory thermostat. If he wakes from a two-hour nap near the stove, and he's in the least bit chilly, he comes back and gently bites my ankles until I've restored the fire to a level that will sustain another two-hour feline siesta. Millions of other wood-burners would doubtless purchase Hector clones to maintain their home-heat levels.
And if some of his DNA could be transferred to humans, the stuff should sell better than Viagra. We got Hector castrated at the proper age. The veterinarian assured us he would henceforth be fat and lie around the house.
Instead, he's sleek and adventurous. In the years since his neutering, he's lost an eye, the tips of both ears and the end of his tail, and he's needed stitches for gouges on his scalp on several occasions. His post-midnight caterwauling with neighborhood females has awakened us on many summer nights. Some men would pay plenty for this.
For years, I've thought of Hector as a nuisance, as a marginal improvement on the mice we might have if we didn't have him (as opposed to mice, cats don't defecate in your cereal, but that's about the only way they're an improvement).
But after pondering the implications of a cat-cloning industry, I now see that Hector is a valuable collection of useful genetic traits, and I'm looking forward to a lucrative future of collecting royalties.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >