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WASHINGTON - Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday.
Now, will people buy it?
Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious enough that several major food companies, including the big dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods Inc., say they aren't planning to sell products from cloned animals.
And the industry says most Americans would never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000 to $20,000 per cloned cow — compared with $1,000 for an ordinary steer — they're too valuable. They would be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers would eat.
But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won't have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones' offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.
"We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal," FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. "It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe."
Still, the government asked producers to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat or milk from clones for a little longer, for marketing reasons. The Agriculture Department said it needed a transition period to get the safety findings to foreign trade partners and food companies.
"This is about market acceptance," USDA Undersecretary Bruce Knight said, adding that he expected this period to last months. The two main U.S. cloning companies, Viagen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, already have produced more than 600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders, including copies of prize-winning cows and rodeo bulls. They agreed to USDA's call for a continued moratorium Tuesday, but stressed that it applied only to clones themselves, not those animals' conventionally produced offspring, which can begin selling immediately.
The FDA spent six years tracking the safety of cloning, and its decision was long expected, but it came after an emotional fight by opponents. Congress passed legislation last month urging further study of the issue, a call echoed by consumer advocates who also asked that foods from cloned animals be labeled as such.
Their objections aren't just about food safety but also include animal welfare since many attempts at livestock cloning still end in fatal birth defects.
"If you have moral objections to a particular food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying, 'Tough, you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.
"The FDA did not give adequate consideration to the welfare of these animals or their surrogate mothers," said Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States.
This was a day forecast since Scottish scientists in 1997 introduced the world to Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal. Ironically, sheep aren't on the list of FDA's approved cloned animals; the agency said there wasn't as much data about their safety as about cows, pigs and goats.
The FDA isn't alone in calling cloned food safe. European regulators last week issued a draft report reaching the same conclusion, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has found no cause for concern.
By its very definition, a successfully cloned animal should be no different from the original animal whose DNA was used to create it. Still, FDA isn't surprised by the outcry since it pored over 30,500 comments from the public — many of them negative — before issuing Tuesday's ruling. A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups, it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned animals, while another third weren't worried and the rest fell somewhere in the middle.
The public should understand that cloning is just another form of breeding, like the artificial insemination that ranchers widely use, Trans Ova President David Faber said.
"Our farmer and rancher clients are pleased, because it provided them with another reproductive tool," he said, pledging to "be a good steward of the technology."
But cloning technology isn't perfected. Aside from birth defects, Dolly was euthanized in 2003, well short of her normal lifespan, because of a lung disease that raised questions about how cloned animals will age.
The FDA's report acknowledges that, "Currently, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences" for the animal.
But the agency concluded that cloned animals that are born healthy are no different than their non-cloned counterparts during their prime food-producing years, and go on to reproduce normally as well. Moreover, it is working with a group of international scientists that will issue guidelines later this year on how to clone, to minimize risk to the animals.
In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005 file picture, Priscilla, a cloned calf, left, stands near her surrogate mother, right, in a pasture owned by Viagen, outside of Austin, Texas. Viagen cloned Priscilla from a tissue sample obtained from a slab of Prime Yield Grade 1 Beef from a slaughterhouse. On Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as that from their counterparts bred the old-fashioned way. But the government has asked animal cloning companies to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales for a little longer - not for safety reasons, but marketing ones.
By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News
Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company.
Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal's meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.
US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities.
These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.
"The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it"
Scott Simplot JR Simplot Company
These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US.
There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning - Dolly the sheep being a case in point.
The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock.
The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef.
But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed.
That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.
Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully.
"The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter," he told BBC News.
"We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it's too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal."
Steak (BBC) Supporters of cloning want to improve the great American steak
These "resurrected" animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.
Ranchers at the Simplot company also clone from live animals that are particularly productive or fertile.
The driving force behind the project is the head of the company, Scott Simplot, who firmly believes that cloning can be used to improve beef production. His stated aim is to raise the standard of the great American steak.
"The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it," he said.
"So (if we are successful), every time we have a steak at a restaurant it will have that memorable taste."
But the idea is not to everyone's taste. The leading whole food chain in the US, Whole Foods Market, has banned the sale of products of cloning.
According to its global vice-president, Margaret Wittenberg, although meat and milk from cloned animals has been allowed to go on sale in the US, most Americans have never heard of it.
"A lot of customers in the United States are oblivious of it," she said.
"You don't hear about it in the media. And when you do tell people about it they look at you and say 'you're kidding! They're not doing that are they? Why would they?'" Ban bid
Mark Walton, president of the leading US animal cloning company, ViaGen, says livestock farmers have a very good reason to use his services.
He says scientists in many countries are trying to find ways of using the technology to boost production and quality.
Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake.
"If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I'd be concerned about losing all access to it," he said.
It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd.
The idea is to pick the best animals and use them to breed from. ViaGen charges cattle farmers $17,000 to clone an animal.
It would cost them around $4,000 to buy a high quality bull to breed from. So for cloning to be worthwhile, the technology has to produce animals that are substantially better than the ones that can be obtained via traditional methods.
At the moment, the technique is at an experimental phase. Beef, pig and dairy farmers are all trying to establish whether cloning is an economic proposition.
Two years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals were safe to eat. Ever since then, products from the offspring of cloned animals have entered the food chain
Supporters of the technology say that costs will come down - and as farmers become better able to identify their exceptional animals, cloning technology will begin to pay big dividends.
Mark Walton believes that the use of cloning in agriculture will eventually become the norm - not just in the US but across the world.
The norm is for livestock to be cloned from live animals.
FDA says Cloned Meat OK to Eat
Cloned Animals are Safe as Food
Yahoo News Article
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Tue Jan 15, 5:16 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday.
Now, will people buy it?
Consumer anxiety about cloning is serious enough that several major food companies, including the big dairy producer Dean Foods Co. and Smithfield Foods Inc., say they aren't planning to sell products from cloned animals.
And the industry says most Americans would never eat a cloned animal for sheer economic reasons: At $10,000 to $20,000 per cloned cow — compared with $1,000 for an ordinary steer — they're too valuable. They would be used primarily for breeding, to produce a steady supply of cattle that are particularly tender, for instance, or for prize dairy cows. It would be offspring of clones that consumers would eat.
But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won't have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones' offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.
"We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal," FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. "It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe."
Still, the government asked producers to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales of meat or milk from clones for a little longer, for marketing reasons. The Agriculture Department said it needed a transition period to get the safety findings to foreign trade partners and food companies.
"This is about market acceptance," USDA Undersecretary Bruce Knight said, adding that he expected this period to last months. The two main U.S. cloning companies, Viagen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, already have produced more than 600 cloned animals for U.S. breeders, including copies of prize-winning cows and rodeo bulls. They agreed to USDA's call for a continued moratorium Tuesday, but stressed that it applied only to clones themselves, not those animals' conventionally produced offspring, which can begin selling immediately.
The FDA spent six years tracking the safety of cloning, and its decision was long expected, but it came after an emotional fight by opponents. Congress passed legislation last month urging further study of the issue, a call echoed by consumer advocates who also asked that foods from cloned animals be labeled as such.
Their objections aren't just about food safety but also include animal welfare since many attempts at livestock cloning still end in fatal birth defects.
"If you have moral objections to a particular food, or ethical objections to them, FDA's saying, 'Tough, you've got to eat it,'" said Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America, who pledged to push for more food producers to shun clone-derived ingredients.
"The FDA did not give adequate consideration to the welfare of these animals or their surrogate mothers," said Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States.
This was a day forecast since Scottish scientists in 1997 introduced the world to Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal. Ironically, sheep aren't on the list of FDA's approved cloned animals; the agency said there wasn't as much data about their safety as about cows, pigs and goats.
The FDA isn't alone in calling cloned food safe. European regulators last week issued a draft report reaching the same conclusion, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has found no cause for concern.
By its very definition, a successfully cloned animal should be no different from the original animal whose DNA was used to create it. Still, FDA isn't surprised by the outcry since it pored over 30,500 comments from the public — many of them negative — before issuing Tuesday's ruling. A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups, it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned animals, while another third weren't worried and the rest fell somewhere in the middle.
The public should understand that cloning is just another form of breeding, like the artificial insemination that ranchers widely use, Trans Ova President David Faber said.
"Our farmer and rancher clients are pleased, because it provided them with another reproductive tool," he said, pledging to "be a good steward of the technology."
But cloning technology isn't perfected. Aside from birth defects, Dolly was euthanized in 2003, well short of her normal lifespan, because of a lung disease that raised questions about how cloned animals will age.
The FDA's report acknowledges that, "Currently, it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the longevity of livestock clones or possible long-term health consequences" for the animal.
But the agency concluded that cloned animals that are born healthy are no different than their non-cloned counterparts during their prime food-producing years, and go on to reproduce normally as well. Moreover, it is working with a group of international scientists that will issue guidelines later this year on how to clone, to minimize risk to the animals.
In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005 file picture, Priscilla, a cloned calf, left, stands near her surrogate mother, right, in a pasture owned by Viagen, outside of Austin, Texas. Viagen cloned Priscilla from a tissue sample obtained from a slab of Prime Yield Grade 1 Beef from a slaughterhouse. On Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as that from their counterparts bred the old-fashioned way. But the government has asked animal cloning companies to continue a voluntary moratorium on sales for a little longer - not for safety reasons, but marketing ones.
Cattle 'cloned from dead animals'
12 August 2010 Last updated at 10:58 GMT
By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News
Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company.
Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal's meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.
US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities.
These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.
"The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it"
Scott Simplot JR Simplot Company
These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US.
There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning - Dolly the sheep being a case in point.
The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock.
The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef.
But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed.
That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.
Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully.
"The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter," he told BBC News.
"We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it's too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal."
Steak (BBC) Supporters of cloning want to improve the great American steak
These "resurrected" animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.
Ranchers at the Simplot company also clone from live animals that are particularly productive or fertile.
The driving force behind the project is the head of the company, Scott Simplot, who firmly believes that cloning can be used to improve beef production. His stated aim is to raise the standard of the great American steak.
"The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it," he said.
"So (if we are successful), every time we have a steak at a restaurant it will have that memorable taste."
But the idea is not to everyone's taste. The leading whole food chain in the US, Whole Foods Market, has banned the sale of products of cloning.
According to its global vice-president, Margaret Wittenberg, although meat and milk from cloned animals has been allowed to go on sale in the US, most Americans have never heard of it.
"A lot of customers in the United States are oblivious of it," she said.
"You don't hear about it in the media. And when you do tell people about it they look at you and say 'you're kidding! They're not doing that are they? Why would they?'" Ban bid
Mark Walton, president of the leading US animal cloning company, ViaGen, says livestock farmers have a very good reason to use his services.
He says scientists in many countries are trying to find ways of using the technology to boost production and quality.
Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake.
"If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I'd be concerned about losing all access to it," he said.
It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd.
The idea is to pick the best animals and use them to breed from. ViaGen charges cattle farmers $17,000 to clone an animal.
It would cost them around $4,000 to buy a high quality bull to breed from. So for cloning to be worthwhile, the technology has to produce animals that are substantially better than the ones that can be obtained via traditional methods.
At the moment, the technique is at an experimental phase. Beef, pig and dairy farmers are all trying to establish whether cloning is an economic proposition.
Two years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals were safe to eat. Ever since then, products from the offspring of cloned animals have entered the food chain
Supporters of the technology say that costs will come down - and as farmers become better able to identify their exceptional animals, cloning technology will begin to pay big dividends.
Mark Walton believes that the use of cloning in agriculture will eventually become the norm - not just in the US but across the world.
The norm is for livestock to be cloned from live animals.