It is pretty likely that American Simon Brodie is a fink.

“In 1998, Brodie promoted Integra Information Technology, a Toronto company that recruited non-computer-literate people in England to pay 15,000 pounds, or about $25,000 at that time, to take a three-week Lotus Notes training course by promising them highly paid contracting work.”

You could buy the official Lotus Notes course for $US3300, and it took “months to complete”. The suckers were left to drown, broke, having completed half a course.

A year later he was back, with a company called Cerentis, which claimed to network “10 million PCs via the Web to analyze massive amounts of data for customers.” It was the SETI idea, stolen and rebadged to steal money. Exposed – why would you think it would not be sprung? – the company sank, but

“Other Brodie-owned or affiliated companies followed, including Integra Associates, Cerentis Broadcasting Co., Samba Wireless, Geneticas Life Sciences, ForeverPet, Genetiate, GeneSentinel, Cyntegra and Allerca.”

Why am I interested in this squalid scammer, fleecing people who are evidently not able to look after themselves? I am taken by the ironies of his latest venture.

He is selling cats. For $US4000 you can buy a cat from this ratbag which is hypoallergenic, and does not produce the specific protein which makes some people swell up and dissolve in their own phlegm. The problem is caused by a specific gene, which Brodie’s observant scientists have bred out of our feline friends.

They are not available yet. Of course, you have to pre-buy, and Allerca, the company, reckons it can move ten thousand moggies per year. In cat breeding terms, that is a fantastically huge enterprise – a vast techno farm of 2500 cats whacking out the kitties, all safely non-allergenic.

There is a website for this company. In the FAQ about delivery it says

“Your kitten will be delivered to the nearest ALLERCA authorized veterinarian via private air courier ready for collection.”

In other words, you send them four thousand dollars. If they feel like torturing you further, they send a cat to a nearby vet, which looks curiously like something which could have cost fifty bucks in a pet shop, and take it home. Hours later, you adenoidally ring them to take the beast back – “I wod du to dake der puthy away” – but they have mysteriously forgotten the whole transaction.

Leaving you with an alley cat and a puddle of snot.

The man is really twisted. But he has found one of the most unique and obscure groups of potential suckers I have ever read about – cashed up catarrhal cat lovers.

According to the devout Catholics at the The Pastoral Resources Institute, this story is even weirder than I thought. They link to the intrepid journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, from the end of 2004. Noting that ten percent of Americans are tormented by cat proteins, it discovered that Brodie claims that more than a thousand people had already sent into $250 deposits for the cats.

It claims to work by gene modification, not breeding. The protein gene will be disrupted, or “silenced” by a virus. The trouble is, no-one really knows what the protein is for, so the new cat could be bad, bad ju-ju for the owners.

The article uses the sad story of sufferer Dan Ghirardi, who lives with his girlfriend who won’t give up her cats, so he stumbles around in a haze of antihistamines. The Pastoral Resources Institute is thinking about this story in a wider framework:

“But surely they could have used people other than a couple shacking up to illustrate the value of the development?”

Even curiouser, this story has been peddled by the New York Times, this very weekend. According to the article, the company started to research the gene suppression mechanism, but discovered the mutant cats by accident. Hence, it is now a conventional breeding program, and all those people who would make with the rage and wampum about genetic engineering can relax.

Looking at the list of companies this droog has shuftied through in his quest for a deceptive buck, I came across

“ForeverPet, a division of Geneticas Life Sciences, today announced the launch of the ForeverPet cat cloning service for cat owners. Priced at $19,950 this new cloning service is the most economically priced of all cat cloning services currently on the market, and adds cat cloning to ForeverPet’s other services, including DNA cell banking and horse cloning. ForeverPet, under the slogan “For More Than A Lifetime”, allows pet owners to cryopreserve a tiny biopsy that safely preserves their pet’s DNA for future use in the production of an identical clone”.

So, for $US20,000 (fifty bucks off for cash) you can clone your cat, in grateful recognition that the creature finally forced you to decide that Mr Mucusface had to go, taking his boring medical condition with him? A cursory glance at the fine print reveals that the service only offers enough fridge space for a bit of cat leg muscle, for enough decades to perfect the science of cat cloning, still sadly deficient if you want an animal that actually lives a normal lifespan.

I suppose I should be touched by this felon, as a symbol of human hope. He clearly thinks that people with a large amount of spare cash will be confused sufficiently by the above paragraph to think he is offering value for money. After all, the New York Times has not been able to smell a rat, even though all the above material is freely available on the internet, along with a conspicuous lack of trained scientists involved in the program.

Via Boing Boing, which is obscurely exercised about the contract.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 11:40 pm and is filed under entertainments, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.