Boston ? If they ever discover the gene that produces pet fanatics, I suspect it will be perilously close on the genome to the one for making puns. How else to explain the penchant for wordplay that runs like a bizarre family trait through the inbred colony of pet cloners?

Consider the names in the business. Like PerPETuate. Or the slightly more biblical Lazaron (as in Lazarus) Bio-Technologies. Or my personal favorite: Genetic Savings & Clone.

Genetic Savings & Clone was originally established to clone dogs, or more specifically, dog, or even more specifically, the beloved dog of a wealthy family, Missy. The owners invested some $3.7 million in something named I did not make this up the Missyplicity Project.

But on the way to missypliciting, the company turned toward the easier feline side and started something dubbed Operation CopyCat. Now, the Texas A&M scientists funded by GSC have successfully cloned the first cat named ta da CC, as in Carbon Copy.

Before you use this column for Kitty Litter, here is where the cloying ends. Yes, our little CC is cuddly, cute and kittenish. Yes, those photos of CC playing in front of the mirror image get it? are adorable. Yes, she is the cat’s meow and yes, this wordplay is contagious.

But, Carbon Copy isn’t really a carbon copy. Just because she has identical genes doesn’t mean she’s really identical. In this case she doesn’t even look exactly like the original. It turns out that the calico pattern of a cat is partly determined in the womb.

And herein lies just the teensiest possibility that even the most bedazzled human companions and consumers will get a bit of perspective on commercial cloning. Or should I say conning?

It turns out that pets are the real, um, growth potential for the business of cloning. The marketing is based on the idea that DNA means never having to say goodbye.

Of course, in theory, pet owners all understand that a dog clone would not come into the world wagging his tail at the same ball and digging up the bones buried by the original.

But assorted companies are happy to keep hope alive at a hefty price by harvesting and storing and, soon, cloning the DNA. As the customer who bought a cell harvesting kit on caninecryobank.com said, “now I have a chance at possibly having HER back!” A Lazaron customer seconds that, “By preserving his DNA, we feel that we haven’t lost our beloved boy forever.”

However, as one of the Texas A&M scientists put it, the very un-CC-ness of CC is a reminder that “cloning is reproduction, not resurrection.”

CC’s calico markings are just superficial differences. But it’s well known that clones can be genetically the same and physically as different as healthy and sick. In a recent Japanese study of mice, most of the clones died young of liver and lung problems.

In this case, moreover, the researchers used 87 cloned embryos transferred into eight “recipient queens,” aka surrogate mother cats, to get one apparently healthy cat. As an attempt at immortality, those odds are worse than nine lives per cat.

Hilary Bok, a Johns Hopkins bioethicist and owner of two cats, looks at the whole venture with skepticism. “If there actually was a way to deny mortality, that would be one thing,” she says. But clone merchants who know they can’t really resurrect a pet, says Bok, “are taking advantage of people who have just lost something they loved and have the world’s most comprehensible thought: I wish I could get it back.

“It causes needless suffering in pursuit of an end that isn’t worth pursuing, and does so at enormous expense.”

It would be one thing if cats were an endangered species. But at last count there were 113 million cats in the United States, and 40 million of them were homeless.

The irony is that Missy of Missyplicity was herself adopted from a shelter.

No, I don’t think you have to be a weird cat lady to believe that your own pet is irreplaceable, unique, one of a kind in a land of 113 million. Love is like that. But love is no more an ethical rationale for cloning a pet than for cloning a child.

Here is one other thing to learn about humanity and mortality from those “animal companions” called pets. It’s the difference between what you can replace and what you have to mourn. You can replace a chair, a tulip bulb or a shoe. You can’t replace a relationship.

Cloning is coming closer to home. Sheep, cows, cats. It’s said that pets are the warm and fuzzy way to get clones out of the lab and into the living room, to make human clones seem less frightening. But this calico cat gives us pause. No pun, I swear, intended.