Debate Rises Over Cloning Farm Animals

Duplicate dinner
http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999752

New Scientist
17 May 2001

The unexplained health problems of cloned animals makes cloning for milk
and meat unacceptable, says leading expert

Exclusive from New Scientist magazine

Proposals to clone large numbers of farm animals to produce supermarket
milk and meat are not inherently wrong, says one of the world's best known
scientists - but the practice should only be sanctioned when cloners have
improved their record on animal welfare.

US cloning companies are busy making multiple copies of prize breeding
cows and claim cloning could soon become an economic way to routinely
produce dairy and meat animals.

Cloning currently costs between $15,000 and $25,000 per cow. But prize
animals can fetch $40,000 or more, making cloning economic, according to
Ron Gillespie of the Massachusetts company Cyagra. "Push the price down
to $10,000 and there would be 100,000 animals that it would be economic to
clone, and in the $5000 range, millions."

But Ian Wilmut, who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, says it is
vital that large-scale, controlled farm trials of cattle cloning are carried
out before any commercial production of cloned meat and dairy food is
allowed. "If companies start marketing this food and there are problems it
will bring the whole technology into disrepute," he told New Scientist.

Sceptical public

Wilmut says the cattle cloners "ought to be making systematic comparisons
between clones and animals produced by embryo transfer, looking not just
at their milk yield but also their health and lifespan."

He also says that in the wake of the genetically modified food furore,
cloners will have to prove to a sceptical public that food from clones and
their offspring is just as safe and nutritious as conventionally produced
food. Even small imbalances in hormones, proteins and fat levels could alter
the quality and even safety of meat and milk.

The warning comes as cattle cloners continue to uncover evidence of severe
pregnancy complications and defects caused by cloning. The current list
includes dramatically oversized calves, enlarged tongues, squashed faces,
intestinal blockages, immune deficiences and diabetes, says Jim Robl of the
Massachusetts company Hematech.

Even cloned animals that look healthy often have subtle defects or weird
physiologies that defy the textbooks. Herds of identical cloned animals
would be a "welfare disaster", says Joyce D'Silva of Compassion in World
Farming. "There would be a huge loss of genetic diversity with unforeseeable
results in terms of animal illness."

Error prone

The Wisconsin cloning company Infigen says it has amassed a huge database
of blood tests from its surviving cloned cows. "The data suggested to the vets
that some of them should be dead," says Infigen's Michael Bishop.

Meanwhile, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Ryuzo Yanagimachi is
looking in detail at the activities of genes inside cloned mice. In light of
the unpublished work, he says "all cloned babies have some sort of errors".

Britain's Food Standards Agency says that in Europe cloned meat and milk
would, like GM produce, be classed as novel foods so sellers would need a
special licence to market them. Unlike GM foods, though, there is as yet no
legal requirement for cloned produce to be labelled.

A full length version of this story is featured in the 19 May issue of New
Scientist magazine

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1100 GMT, 17 May 2001