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When it comes to Elvis Presley, some fans have always refused to let go.

Now with advances in biotechnology comes the intriguing possibility of turning Elvis into the once - and future - king.

No one has initiated a cloning of the rock icon, but at least one devoted collector of Elvis memorabilia said last week he has one of the “ultimate” keepsakes - and a necessary ingredient for a cloning attempt. “I think everybody wants a piece of Elvis, and you can’t get any closer than his hair,” said Tom Morgan, a friend of Elvis’s late hair stylist and heir to roughly a half-pound of Elvis hair saved by the stylist.

The chief executive officer of Elvis Presley Enterprises and a spokesman for Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. say there are no cryogenically preserved living tissue samples of Elvis that could be used in a cloning attempt. But with the hair, cloning experts say, science now could stage the ultimate Elvis comeback through tedious DNA sequencing procedures so risky, a new Elvis could be literally all shook up.

“We can do it. The only problem is that there’s a tendency for genetic abnormality to occur. We’d get an Elvis, but maybe he would just want to deliver the mail,” says Dr. Dan Goldowitz, a member of the mouse genome project and director of the Center of Excellence for Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Tennessee.

At the University of Kentucky, controversial cloning expert Dr. Panos Michael Zavos, preparing cloning attempts for six childless couples, agrees it is technically possible to re-create Elvis. Geneticists hope to use DNA sequencing to re-create a prehistoric woolly mammoth unearthed in Siberia. “But they’ve never seen a woolly mammoth, so if you come up with one, you say, `Well, that’s a woolly mammoth.’ But it’s very different to come up with something like Elvis.”

Morgan, an acquaintance of Elvis, says he was given a Taystee Bread bag with a “baseball-size” clump of hair saved through the years by his friend, stylist Homer `Mr. Gil’ Gilleland. Gilleland collected the coal-black hair, which he dyed and styled while working for Gould’s Styling Salon, as he watched his client grow from a Memphis phenomenon into one of the biggest and most enduring superstars on the planet. Morgan said that when he was given the hair after Gilleland’s death in the mid-1990s, he had no idea it eventually might be used to make Elvis even more enduring than the Energizer bunny.

Morgan, 60, general foreman of property maintenance for the City of Memphis, says Gilleland traveled to movie sets, Las Vegas hotels and anywhere else on call to Elvis for a dye job or haircut. And like many in Elvis’s entourage, Morgan says, Gilleland succumbed to the temptation of becoming an “opportunist.” He discarded any hair that fell onto the floor, but saved hair clippings that fell onto a towel around Elvis’s neck. “When he finished, he folded the towel, put it into a satchel with his tools and shook it out later.”

Elvis memorabilia experts are combing through the possibilities of marketing the hair. Auction house consultant John Heath in Marion, Ark., says an Indiana auction house estimates it could sell the hair either in small lots or in bulk for $50,000 to $100,000.

In Port Townsend, Wash., memorabilia expert Jerry Osborne, co-author of the Presleyana series of Elvis price guides, says auction houses sometimes overestimate values in hopes of “getting some business out of the deal. My hunch is it is worth nowhere near $100,000.”

Elvis Presley Enterprises CEO Jack Soden said the company “has a pretty good handle on what the real artifacts are, but we don’t know the going rate for hair.” It would first need to be verified as an actual match to Elvis, he said. “Then, even if you determined it was Elvis’s hair, it would still be a bag of hair.”

For scientists, there is no hair-splitting about the worth of the hair. Its real value would be as a necessity in any attempt to reproduce Elvis, a legend so familiar to the world that any variation would be immediately apparent.

EPE, which owns Elvis’s name, image and likeness, conceivably could try to legally block such an attempt.

“The question is so laden with all sorts of philosophical and theological issues, and, if I’m correct, the whole efficacy of cloning humans is still in doubt,” Soden says. He said Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, ultimately would have to make the decision whether to take legal action.

Dr. Goldowitz at UT says even dead tissue, including hair clippings, contains the one-of-a-kind DNA of its owner. With live tissue, scientists would simply stimulate a living cell to divide. He describes a DNA sequencing attempt as “dead cell vs. live cell” cloning or “inactive vs. active” cloning.

With DNA sequencing, the first step would be to fully map the DNA. “You would take several samples and get a consensus sequence. It’s difficult, but we could do it.” Even then it would take “several years” to come up with a final sequence, which would become the nucleus of a living cell.

In Kentucky, Dr. Zavos says the problem is that a single cell of human tissue contains 30,000 genes. “That’s millions of DNA molecules. To try to re-create that without aberration would be a miracle. Nobody has done that. We’re talking about imperfections. Elvis may come up with the wrong color hair, not the nose he had and not the eye color.”

The new Elvis might have to take his cue from Elvis impersonators around the world, grooming himself just to look like himself.

Goldowitz is even more pessimistic about the outcome. Genes in a DNA strand would have to be mechanically arranged. Even minute variations in angles of placement might create problems. “My biggest worry is he comes out with two heads. Who knows? Or maybe he has only three fingers on his guitar-picking hand. We can’t fix that. Or his hips don’t swivel, or he doesn’t look as good.”

Even with live-cell cloning attempts, Goldowitz says problems have not been overcome. “Something happens to the genome that makes the resulting clone not exactly the same as it should have been. Dolly (the sheep) died. Cows died. The mouse died. There’s evidence that bunches of genes get turned off that shouldn’t be turned off, and some get turned on that shouldn’t be.”

Those problems eventually will be overcome, he predicts. “The nature of science is that failures lead the way to success.” But at that stage, Goldowitz says, the nature vs. nurture question enters the picture. “What was the environment that made Elvis? You don’t have the shotgun shack in Tupelo. That environment is really important.”

In that scenario, the cloned Elvis would need a compound with a shotgun shack, cottonfield workers singing the blues, a gospel choir singing in the distance and shop windows with gaudy costumes to dream about.

-Michael Lollar: 529-1793