Tomorrow’s Cat Could Be Nothing to Sneeze At

In this age of gene mapping and human cloning, of cows constructed to produce more milk and rabbits created to glow green, there comes a science project that could actually curl up at the foot of your bed.

An upstate New York company wants to create a genetically altered cat that won’t make allergic people snuffle, sneeze, wheeze or itch.

In the kingdom of animal lovers, a debate already is raging about the possibility of such a made-to-order pet.

“It’s a tofu cat,” said Peter Perez of Here Kitty Kitty, a cat boarding house in Manhattan. “It is so much about what’s going on in our society: I don’t look good, I get a tummy tuck. I sneeze around my cat, I alter her for my needs. Horrible.”

A New York City columnist thinks science should not bother with cats but concentrate instead on creating dogs that do not bark or defecate on sidewalks. A shopper at a fancy pet store on Lexington Avenue who loves opera thinks science should serve the arts first by breeding birds that could learn arias.

But Michele Slung, author of a National Geographic book on cats, is excited by the prospect of what could be whipped up in a lab to suit the needs of a passionate cat person like herself.

After commuting for years with her cat, Minnie, wrapped around her neck, Slung says, “If genetic engineering is possible, we could split the driving.”

But nevermind the cranks and the comics--or even the ethicists who worry about harming the puss in the process.

For Jackie and David Avner, both allergic to cats, this is serious business and maybe even a profitable one.

The Avners started Transgenic Pets a few years ago out of their home in Syracuse, N.Y., where 31-year-old David is an emergency room medical resident. They secured a patent for the idea and contracted with an animal cloning expert, Dr. Xiangzhong Yang at the University of Connecticut, to research and develop the cat in his lab. (He’s also allergic to cats.)

Now the Avners are shopping for investors to loan them $2 million to pay Yang, who is confident he can create the first allergen-free kitties within two years. The Avners would then have them bred the old-fashioned way but spayed or neutered before putting them up for sale to control “unwanted cat litters” and to protect their investment.

The initial price would be high, but the Avners predict that after several years a non-sneeze-inducing cat probably would sell for $750 to $1,000, about the cost of natural purebreds.

“That’s not a lot when you think of the millions of people who suffer from cat allergies,” says Jackie Avner, 32.

One in every three cat owners in America is allergic to the pet, according to a Cornell University study. The majority of these allergic people are reacting to a protein that is secreted by glands that help keep the cat’s skin moist.

“Cat allergies are a major issue when people who love cats fall in love with someone who is allergic to them or have children who are,” says Keith Bush, managing editor of Cat Fancy magazine.

But should people adapt or should cats be reshaped, asks Bush, raising one of several ethical questions associated with this science experiment.

“Just eliminating a certain protein seems harmless,” Bush says, “but do we know enough about genetics to know it won’t harm the animal in other ways or harm people?”

David Avner says research has found that the protein is not needed for any other function than keeping a cat’s skin moist. But there are other proteins that do the same thing, he says. As for harming people, Avner says: “No one plans to eat the cat, so it won’t be ingested.”

Still, Bernard Rollin, a professor of philosophy, physiology and bioethics at Colorado State University who studies the human-animal bond, would want the researchers to keep numerous generations of the allergen-free cats under experimental conditions so that the animals could be destroyed if something goes wrong.

He gave several examples of both natural breeding and genetic tinkering that have caused suffering in animals, including breeding that created a bulldog with air passages that are too small for its body so it cannot walk more than a few steps without wheezing and pigs that were genetically altered to grow faster but then developed diseases in all their organs.

“The problem with these gene engineers is they think: one gene, one trait,” Rollin says. “They’re focused on what they’re interested in. But ought we to produce harm to animals for our benefit?”

The Avners and Yang’s associates say absolutely not. But they do not plan to wait out several generations of cats to find out.

“After Dr. Yang produces the first dozen or so allergy-free cats, they’ll just breed together in the conventional manner and the business will go from high-tech to low-tech,” David Avner says.

His wife quickly interrupts: “Listen, David and I are both animal lovers, and we would not allow anything to go on if we thought there was a danger to cats.”

Jackie Avner grew up on a farm but was allergic to all the animals and had to take shots once a week; David, the son of a Denver allergist, also had animal allergies that developed into asthma. Now their 3-year-old daughter wants to tickle and stroke every dander-shedding feline in their Syracuse neighborhood, and they are worried she will develop allergies.

“It’s no small thing for people not to be able to have pets,” says Jackie Avner. “They bring so much joy and fun to families.”

With that in mind and after working on allergy research in a University of Virginia lab, David Avner came up with the idea a few years ago to pair two technologies--genetic engineering and cloning--to develop the allergen-free cat. It’s something that has been theoretically possible for years but has yet to be tried.

In fact, while animal cloning has been going on for many years now, this is the first project aimed at developing pets with brand-new traits.

Probably the trickiest aspect of the Avners’ business is the cloning. For while scientists have cloned cows, goats, mice and sheep, the best efforts of several research teams have failed to produce a cloned cat.

“There is very little known about cat physiology,” says Dr. Cindy Tian, who works with her husband, Yang. (She too is allergic to cats.)

But she is confident.

“We have had 20 years’ experience with cloning, and so far we’ve had much better results than any other group trying with cats,” Tian says. “We’re very close.” Yang is best known for producing Amy, the first cloned calf in America.

Producing the new brand of cat would involve deactivating the gene that produces the protein that causes the allergy. The allergen-free cells would be put together with egg cells without genetic material. The new eggs would then be developed into embryos, which would be planted in a surrogate mother cat.

“It’s not easy to do,” David Avner says, “but people are getting better at it by the week.”

If all goes well, the Avners are considering engineering allergies out of dogs, which are even tougher to clone than cats.

“Who knows what comes next?” Avner says. “This is not something everyone can do in their basement.”