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Here, Missy, Missy, Missy

Dog owners have been known to spoil their pets in all sorts of ways. Some owners put bows in their dog's fur; some feed them fancy foods; some even polish their pooch's nails!

But for the owners of Missy, an 11-year-old mixed border collie and husky, spoiling their pet is not enough. In fact, just one Missy is not enough! Missy's owners, a very rich couple who have kept their names a secret, think that their dog is so special they are trying to create an exact copy, or clone, of her.

A clone has one parent, not two. Scientists take a cell from one animal and "grow" an identical animal. Some Scottish scientists cloned a sheep two years ago. Cattle and mice have also been successfully cloned. Missy's owners have given more than $2 million to scientists at Texas A&M University to produce the first dog clone.

Wait a second! Two million dollars... for a dog? "I thought it was a joke," says Lou Hawthorne, manager of the "Missyplicity" cloning project. But after spending time with Missy, he began to take the project more seriously. "She really is an incredible dog," he says. "She's beautiful, smart and extremely athletic."

Still, Hawthorne insists that the project is not just to benefit Missy's proud owners. If their experiment in cloning Missy succeeds, scientists hope to use the same method to clone endangered dogs and wolves.

Texas A&M scientists have already taken tissue samples from Missy's mouth and belly. Those samples contain cells that scientists will use to try to grow a Missy clone. If all goes well, the first litter of mini-Missys will be born by 2000.

But even if a clone has Missy's same bark and bite, there is no guarantee it will have Missy's delightful personality. There are still some things money can't buy.

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