Medford Couple Plan To Clone Their Beloved Pet — Would You Clone Yours?

The question of cloning has come to a neighborhood near you. It arrived almost exactly a year ago, when Roland and Mary Ann Daniels moved from Costa Mesa, Calif., to Medford’s east side.

The pair arrived without their 20-year-old cat, Smokey, who died on Aug. 26, just as they signed papers on their new Oregon home.

"The vet called and said he wouldn’t last until we got there," said Mary Ann Daniels, 58, an accountant. "We were devastated."

Grieved as they were, the couple took comfort from the fact that they’d paid about $1,000 three years earlier to have Smokey’s cells harvested and stored at Genetic Savings and Clone Inc., the Texas-based firm that bills itself as the world’s leading pet cloning company.

"We wanted to be on the forefront of this," said Mary Ann Daniels, who read about the procedure in a Time magazine article.

"We wanted to be one of the first."

Smokey was not just another cat, the Danielses explained. The Blue Russian with the huge green eyes showed up on their patio when he was a kitten. For the next two decades, he monitored every move his owners made — and the attachment was mutual...


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