Paul Rasky Hopes some one will clone his cat. He has sent little Nikita's tissue to perpetuate Inc. and is paying around $100 an year to store her cells while the company works out a method to clone cats.

He's thinking about sending tissue to Genetic Savings & Clone.

His motivation for cloning, he says, is not to recreate Nikita, but to give her a gift he stole: her ability to have kittens.

It was Bob Barker, he says, who inspired him to take away Nikita's birthright. The game show host campaigns to neuter and spay all pets, and Rasky took heed.

Now he's sorry for it. He hopes a cloned sister will provide Nikita with the kittens he says he stole from her.

He's not happy about the $ 32,000 price tag - the latest asking perice - but hopes that in the next few years the price will come down to a more reasonable level - may be between $5,000 and $7,000.

Marijo kent-first, a world - renowned researcher at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and accomplished equestrian and horse breeder, was floored at her reaction to the illness and subsequent death of her beloved horse. Moscow, a few years ago.

She wanted him cloned.

"I was in Switzerland at a conference" when Moscow fell ill, she says. Her husband, Neal First - a pioneer of cloning technology - had been trying to reach her for days.

"I was incommuni -cado," she says. Moscow's veterinarian finally got through to her. She was standing on a train platform in Geneva.

"I was told they were taking him to surgery," she says.

She took a breath and told the veterinarian: "I want samples taken. Be careful with them. Wash them in saline an put them in PBS solution."

The veterinarian told her that her husband had already done that.

"Neal had taken the cells back to his lab, cultured them and frozen them."

Moscow's still there , on a shelf, she says. She has decided not to clone him. "It was an eye-opening and soul-searching time. I mean, we're both scientists. We're both pretty rational." Yet, her first reaction had been: clone him.

In retrospect, she raises the option of cloning allowed her to close the door on grief at her own pace - "It didn't slam shut on me".