A scientific victory can quickly devolve into a public-relations disaster, as Lou Hawthorne, CEO of Genetic Savings and Clone (GSC), learned the hard way in February 2002. Researchers funded by GSC at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, had just produced the world's first cloned cat, CC. The achievement was a critical step toward GSC's goal of helping bereft pet owners duplicate their aging or deceased cats and dogs. The problem: CC wasn't a very faithful copy. She was a gray tiger tabby and looked nothing like her genetic donor, an orange calico named Rainbow.

The scientific explanation was simple. The color of a calico's coat is determined by genes on its X chromosomes, and in each cell of a calico's body, one of the two X chromosomes is randomly inactivated. In the cell scientists took from Rainbow's body to make CC, the orange-coat genes were apparently dormant. But disparaging newspaper reports didn't capture these details, and Texas A&M's communications staff didn't try very hard to explain them, says Hawthorne. "The line they used again and again was, 'We always said it was reproduction, not resurrection,'" he recalls. "Which could not be better engineered to damage our brand than if they had just said outright, 'Clones won't resemble their donors.' Who would want a cloned pet if the resemblance is not going to happen? That is what we are selling! It doesn't get worse than that for a pet-cloning company."