[tt] NS: Struggling to find an appetite for cloned meat

Mon Apr 28 18:04:36 UTC 2008

Struggling to find an appetite for cloned meat
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826531.300&print=true

26 April 2008
Sharon Oosthoek

LIVESTOCK auctions are not normally the stuff of headlines, but then
it's not every day that cows as unusual as Dundee Paradise and
Dundee Paratrooper are going under the hammer. The dairy cows were
due to be sold at Easter Compton cattle market near Bristol, UK,
last month, but at the last minute their owner withdrew them,
reportedly unsettled by negative media coverage and local
opposition.

The problem? The cows' mother was a clone, conceived in a laboratory
from a cell taken from the ear of a prize-winning Holstein in
Wisconsin. "A cow created in Frankenstein's lab," as one local
newspaper put it.

This episode was one of the opening skirmishes in what is shaping up
to be a battle on par with that over genetically modified food. This
time the issue is the production of meat and milk from cloned
animals.

On one side are the livestock producers, who stand to gain or lose
significant amounts of money depending on the outcome. On the other
are consumer groups and animal welfare organisations who say that
food from cloned animals is unwanted, unnecessary, possibly
dangerous and a catastrophe for animal welfare.

The battle began in earnest in January, when food safety authorities
in the US and Europe released reports that effectively opened the
door to the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals and their
offspring.

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a
968-page report detailing the results of a six-year investigation.
The document stated in no uncertain terms that milk and meat from
cloned cattle, pigs, goats and their offspring are just as safe as
food from conventionally bred animals. That conclusion was echoed in
a draft opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

"It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause
the food [derived from clones] to be unsafe," Stephen Sundlof, the
FDA's chief food safety expert, told reporters. In fact, so
confident is the FDA about its decision that it says there is no
need even to label food from clones or their offspring.

The controversy over meat and milk from cloned animals can be traced
back to the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996 (see "Cloning basics").
Livestock breeders immediately saw the possibilities: unlimited
copies of their prize animals. Imagine a bull that consistently
sires offspring with top-quality meat or milk. That bull has a
limited reproductive lifetime and there's no guarantee that any of
its offspring will inherit its qualities. But clone the bull and you
have an exact copy with the same reproductive capabilities.

"Cloning is the only artificial reproductive technology to take an
animal with proven performance and replicate it," says Mark Walton,
president of one of the world's largest livestock cloning companies,
ViaGen of Austin, Texas.

It's unlikely that anyone will clone animals simply for meat,
because they are expensive to buy - between $13,000 and $17,500 for
a cloned cow, compared to between $1500 and $3000 for a standard
cow. Prices, however, are expected to drop as the technology
improves, says Barbara Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry
Organization in Washington DC.

For now, clones will be used as breeding animals to produce
high-quality offspring for meat or milk. Still, meat from clones is
likely to find its way into the food supply eventually when the
clones come to the end of their reproductive lives, says Walton,
while milk from clones could be produced as soon as the animals
reach sexual maturity.

Proponents of the technique say cloning has many advantages for
consumers. "There's a whole laundry list of benefits," says Kenneth
White of Utah State University in Logan, whose lab produces clones
for research. This includes reduced cholesterol in meat and milk,
plus higher levels of good fatty acids and antioxidants.

Cloning has other advantages, too. For instance, it would allow
relatively easy reproduction of cattle genetically engineered to
lack the prion protein that makes them susceptible to mad cow
disease (Nature Biotechnology, vol 25, p 132). Cloning would also
make it possible to replicate animals engineered to resist illnesses
or with a smaller ecological footprint, such as the Enviropig, whose
waste contains less phosphorus - a problematic pollutant from pig
farming.

Yet those on the other side of the debate are not licking their lips
at the prospect of cloned meat and milk, citing their own laundry
list of concerns.

One of these is the issue of food safety, which critics say is beset
with niggling scientific uncertainties. "There are very few
peer-reviewed studies addressed to [clones and] food safety," says
Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned
Scientists in Washington DC. She points out that most of the studies
that exist were done by livestock companies themselves, who have a
vested interest in a positive outcome. "While it's good to do that,
it's not enough," she says.

Brussels-based animal welfare group Eurogroup for Animals goes
further, pointing out that the FDA report cites studies which
suggest some differences in the meat of clones compared to
non-clones.

For example, a team led by Xiangzhong Yang of the University of
Connecticut in Storrs found that, though the composition of meat
from cloned and non-cloned cows was "largely" the same, there were
higher levels of fat and certain fatty acids in the meat from clones
- though these were within in the normal range for human consumption
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 102, p 6261).

Other research has found differences in the fatty acid and mineral
content of milk from clones. Marie Walsh of Utah State University
examined the composition of milk from 15 cloned dairy cows and six
non-clones, and found some variation in levels of two out of 14
fatty acids - palmitic acid and linolenic acid - as well as in
levels of potassium, zinc, strontium and phosphorus. But her overall
conclusion was that there were "no obvious differences" (Cloning and
Stem Cells, vol 5, p 213).

Eurogroup for Animals doesn't claim that these findings mean meat or
milk from clones or their offspring is unsafe or unfit for human
consumption, but it says they suggest more research is needed. For
its part, the FDA maintains that none of the differences in
nutritional value are a cause for concern. It points out that there
are plausible explanations for the differences that are unrelated to
the cloning process. In the milk experiment, for example, the cloned
cows were housed on different farms and fed different rations.

The FDA position reflects the scientific consensus. The majority of
studies find no differences at all between meat and milk from cloned
and non-cloned animals, (for example, Cloning and Stem Cells, vol 6,
p 157, p 165 and p 172). What's more, in a recent review paper Yang
concludes that "studies on the biochemical properties of food
products from cloned and non-cloned animals have thus far not
detected any differences" (Nature Biotechnology, vol 25, p 77).

There is also the inconvenient fact that food from cloned animals
has been going into the human food chain for many years with no ill
effects. In the 1980s and 1990s around 1500 cows and bulls were
produced in North America by embryo cell nuclear transfer (ECNT -
see "Cloning basics"), almost all of which were eventually
slaughtered for meat. According to Yang around 300,000 kilograms of
meat and more than 2 million litres of milk from cloned cattle
entered the food supply this way.

Despite this, consumer groups including the Center for Food Safety
and the Consumers Union, both in the US, are pushing for mandatory
labelling of food from cloned animals. The problem is that there is
no test capable of identifying meat or milk from cloned animals, nor
from their offspring. Retailers would have to rely on voluntary
agreements with suppliers, who in turn could only identify clones
through a registry.

As it happens, two of the largest livestock cloning companies,
ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, created a
voluntary registry in December, which will allow slaughterhouses to
identify clones by scanning the animal's ear tag.

Consumers certainly seem in favour of labelling. According to a 2007
poll carried out by the Consumers Union, 89 per cent of Americans
want milk and meat from cloned animals labelled. Another poll by the
International Food Information Council found that the majority of US
consumers were unlikely to buy food derived from cloned animals.

Labelling, however, doesn't address the most heartfelt criticism of
cloned meat and milk - the greater incidence of serious health
problems afflicting cloned animals and their surrogate mothers. "We
believe the cloning process has the potential to cause unnecessary
pain, suffering and distress," says Nikki Osborne, a developmental
biologist with Eurogroup for Animals.

That view is shared by the European Group on Ethics in Science and
New Technologies (EGE), an advisory body to the European Commission.
In January it issued a report about the grave implications of
cloning for animal welfare. "Considering the current level of
suffering and health problems of surrogate dams and animal clones,
the EGE has doubts as to whether cloning animals for food supply is
ethically justified," the authors wrote.

It's hard to say for sure how much more common health problems are
among clones and surrogates, says Pere Puigdomenech of the Institute
of Molecular Biology in Barcelona, Spain, a member of the EGE.
"These kinds of numbers are not well known. It depends very much on
breeds." Even so, everyone involved in the debate freely admits that
health issues are more common in clones and their surrogate mothers
than in animals that aren't cloned.

Malformed and dysfunctional

According to the EGE report, fewer than 5 per cent of cloned fetuses
live long enough to be born; roughly 20 per cent of newborn clones
don't survive the first 24 hours, and an additional 15 per cent die
before weaning.

One of the main problems among cloned cows and sheep is "large
offspring syndrome", a potentially fatal condition characterised by
malformed limbs, livers, brains, urinary and genital tracts, and
dysfunctional immune systems. The problem is thought to be caused by
complications in resetting the genetic instructions during the
cloning process.

The EFSA, for example, cites a study which found that the incidence
of large offspring syndrome was 13.3 per cent for cloned calves
compared to 9.5 per cent for non-cloned calves (Biology of
Reproduction, vol 66, p 6). It also points to another study which
found that up to 47 per cent of cloned calves derived from skin, ear
or liver cells suffer from the syndrome (Journal of Reproduction and
Fertility, vol 120, p 231).

Large offspring syndrome is also a problem for surrogate mothers.
Cows and ewes carrying cloned offspring are known to have
significantly more late miscarriages and difficult births due to
large offspring.

Despite this, there appears to be little appetite for regulating
cloning on animal welfare grounds. The FDA report describes clones'
health problems as "of concern" but goes on to point out that once
the clones mature, they are as healthy as non-clones. Both the EFSA
and the FDA note that conventionally produced offspring suffer from
the same problems as clones, albeit at a lower rate.

Currently, there aren't enough clones around to create an uproar
about animal welfare. EFSA estimates the total number of clones
worldwide in 2007 was fewer than 4000 cattle and 1500 pigs. The US
is home to just over 600, including 570 cattle, 20 goats and eight
pigs. The EU has roughly 120 cattle clones - 80 in France, 30 in
Germany and 10 in Italy - and a smattering of pigs. Japan, China,
Argentina, Australia and New Zealand also have cloned animals.

But those numbers could increase substantially if consumers accept
meat and milk from clones, or have it foisted on them. If and when
that happens, expect a backlash. "There's no outcry on the part of
the consumer for this," says Mellon. "The question of why we're
doing this is really important. It's almost because we can."

Cloning basics

Scientists have been cloning animals since the 1970s using
blastomere separation, in which embryos are split into several cells
that are implanted into surrogate dams. But there is a limit to the
number of clones that can be made from an embryo, and their
characteristics are impossible to predict in advance.

In the 1980s blastomere separation was superseded by ECNT (embryo
cell nuclear transfer), which involves implanting the nuclei of
embryonic cells into unfertilised eggs that have had their nucleus
removed.

The birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996 ushered in a new and more
efficient technique - somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which
enables an unlimited number of copies of an adult animal with known
characteristics to be made. Scientists first remove the nucleus from
an unfertilised egg and replace it with the nucleus from an adult
cell. They then stimulate the egg with a mild electrical pulse. If
this is successful, the resulting cell divides and turns into an
embryo.

Cloned meat and the law

UNITED STATES

The position of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is that meat
and milk from cloned pigs, cattle and goats and their offspring are
safe to eat and do not need to be labelled. The FDA has not reached
a conclusion for sheep, citing a lack of evidence. The Department of
Agriculture has given the go-ahead for the offspring of clones to
enter the food chain but is asking farmers not to sell food derived
from clones until it has developed a regulatory scheme.

EUROPEAN UNION

The European Commission has asked two advisory bodies for opinions.
The European Food Safety Authority is due to report in May, but its
draft position is that food from cloned cattle and pigs and their
offspring is safe. The European Group on Ethics in Science and New
Technologies issued an opinion in January warning of cloning's grave
animal welfare implications.

The commission has indicated that it will not rush a final decision.
It has the option of making its decision binding on all member
states or simply offering guidelines.

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

There are no regulations in either country to prevent the sale of
food from cloned livestock and their progeny. The New Zealand Food
Safety Authority says there is no need for specific regulation;
Australia's Department of Health says it is still looking into
whether to regulate. The independent agency Food Standards Australia
New Zealand says that researchers in both countries have voluntarily
agreed to prevent clones from entering the food chain.

UNITED KINGDOM

The Food Standards Agency, which is responsible for assessing food
from cloned animals and their offspring, says it has received no
applications to market such foods.

CANADA

No food from cloned animals or their offspring is approved for sale.
Health Canada has asked those who want to produce such food not to
submit applications until it has a policy in place.

Related Articles

Cloned meat is safe to eat, says FDA
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325852.200
06 January 2007
After the hype: What Dolly the sheep really did for us
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125582.900
03 July 2006
Champion horse sires no fewer than five clones
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8932
01 April 2006
Classic article: Cloning: The point of no return
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225780.049
18 November 2006

Weblinks

FDA report on cloned meat and milk
http://www.fda.gov/cvm/CloneRiskAssessment_Final.htm
European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/DocumentSet/sc_opinion_clon_public_consultation.pdf
European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies report
http://ec.europa.eu/european_group_ethics/activities/docs/opinion23_en.pdf
ViaGen
http://www.viagen.com/

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.