A Glassful of Cloned Milk

We all remember Dolly the sheep - the first cloned animal that was announced to the public. Who can forget the whirlpool of debate and concern surrounding Dolly's creation? Virtually everyone had an opinion on Dolly and her creators, from the most established and credentialed scientist to Joe Moe on the street. Then, with the introduction of genetic engineering and custom-created organisms, cloning issues were demoted to the back seat while genetic manipulation took the wheel. Now, years later, cloned farm animals such as pigs and cows are reaching maturity, and farmers are anxious to reap the benefits of their prized clones.

The first products of cloned animals may be on supermarket shelves as early as next year! Currently, the FDA has issued an informal request for companies such as Infigen Inc, Advanced Cell Technology and PPL Therapeutics (the creator of Dolly the sheep) to refrain from selling milk, meat and products from cloned animals until further research on their safety is complete. What does this mean? Simply put, there are no laws or regulations in place that forbids companies or farmers with cloned animals from selling their milk or meat for public consumption. It is up to the companies and farmers to decide whether they will heed the FDA's request to temporarily keep products of cloned animals out of the food chain.

Pressures are mounting for individual farmers. As their prized cloned animals reach reproductive maturity, it is becoming financially necessary for these animals to prove their worth. Farmers are anxious to cash in on their investments - each clone typically exceeds $25,000 to produce. It is because of the expense of cloning that there are relatively few clones living on American farms today - less than 100, but their owners are developing itchy milking fingers.

Cloning companies, on the other hand, are able to produce clones in larger numbers. Many of their cows are already producing milk. The companies report that they are pouring out this milk to comply with the FDAs request, but that the milk is healthy and is no different than traditional (non-cloned) milk. The cloning giants are anxious to reap the financial benefits of their cloning efforts as well, and are "working with the FDA" to complete necessary testing on the animals and their products that may help pass regulation allowing their sale to the public. Stephen Sundlof, Director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicines, has said that the FDA is indeed leaning toward approving cloned products such as beef, pork, chicken, milk and eggs, but that they may require companies to prove that their clone-derived products are identical to food from naturally-bred animals.

Large companies who have substantial financial interest in a product being approved for sale have an enormous history of manipulating scientific data in their favor. We've seen it with BGh (the artificial hormone that many dairy cows are routinely given by injection to drastically increase their milk supply), aspartame (NutraSweet) and fluoride. Is the FDA working to protect consumers by relying on studies done by huge corporations who have an enormous interest in their outcome?

Mike Wanner, president of ProLinia Inc (a Georgia based company that is cloning cows and pigs), estimates that the cloning business will account for $1.8 billion annually in the next five years. He hopes to have Pro-Linia cloned food on the market next year.

Jon Fisher, the owner of Prairie State Semen Inc of Champaign Illinois, paid $43,000 for a Hampshire boar. Fishers business is to sell semen from champion boars to breeders who produce other champion pigs. Fisher was preparing to get his prize boar, named 401-K after the retirement account, cloned when he suddenly died of intestinal blockage. Several hours after the pig died, Fisher salvaged ear cells from the dead animal and shipped them to Infigen Inc, a cloning company in Wisconsin. Fisher now has six clones of his dead pig.

Greg Wiles of Willimasport Maryland once owned the top-ranked Holstein cow in the country: ConAcres HS Zita-ET. Zita was worth over $150,000 in her prime. Zita is now dead, but her two clones, Genesis and Cyagra, live on. Genesis and Cyagra set Wiles back about $70,000. The two clones were produced with the help of the Massachusetts cloning company Cyagra, a subsidiary of Advanced Cell Technology, the same cloning company that announced last year that it was attempting to clone a human embryo. The two clones have reached sexual maturity and Wiles has used embryos from these two cows to produce seven new pregnancies by embryo transfer to recipient cows.
Other breeders who have not jumped headfirst into the cloning scene are still preparing for the day that it becomes a normal part of agriculture. Breeders will pay several hundred dollars to freeze cells from their best animals that could eventually be used to make clones.

Cloning Basics

Clones are made by taking DNA from an adult cell and placing it in a female egg that is stripped of its own genetic material. The embryo is later placed in a surrogate mother, who carries the animal to term. The resulting baby animal is a clone of the animal that donated the adult cell.

It is the large cloning companies who can afford to clone animals in large numbers at this time. A cloned cow comes with a ticket price of over $25,000 per cow. Because of the cost of cloning, very few farmers have the resources needed to clone their best animals. The ones that are cloned are valued as breeding stock, not as meat.

It is most likely that the first introduction of cloned animal products that may be introduced to the food supply will be milk from cloned animals and their offspring. Breeders estimate that it is very likely that first or second generation offspring of clones will wind up in the meat supply in large numbers.

Are Cloned Foods safe?

Beef-cattle producers and pig breeders are expected to use clones to help improve the genetics of their herds. As the technology becomes less expensive, more farmers will be able to afford the procedures. Keeping the best genes in their herd would give the farmers and breeders better profit margins, and first or second generation offspring of clones will most likely be sold for meat.

Scientists speculate that the offspring of clones should present no risk to consumers because they are the product of natural sexual crosses. Many scientists see the offspring of a cloned animal as a normal animal.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous reports of health complications in cloned animals themselves. A University of Missouri study reports "a high mortality rate among cloned piglets" and states that five out of ten cloned piglets either died very shortly after birth or were destroyed by researchers because of defects such as heart failure, lameness and anemia. Other studies show that cloned animals suffer more than natural animals from arthritis, obesity and other diseases.

Scientists have overwhelming evidence that cloned animals are not normal. Cloned mice have developed into extremely overweight animals, cloned cows have been born with abnormally large hearts and lungs. Even Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal (who turns 5 years old today), is inexplicably overweight.

By tracing specific genes in cloned mice, Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues, found that while clones showed no clear flaws in their genetic make-up, the animals did reveal problems in expressing their seemingly normal genes. Mark Westhusin, a cloning expert at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, points out that problems with genetic expression - the way information in genes is manifested in the body - are difficult to detect and this makes the practice of cloning even more dangerous.
Cloning has also been known for causing severe pregnancy complications as well as a wide range of defects caused by cloning. According to Jim Robl of the Massachusetts company Hematech, some of these defects include: enlarged tongues, squashed faces, bad kidneys, intestinal blockages, immune deficiencies, diabetes and shortened tendons that twist the animals feet into useless curves. Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a researcher at the University of Hawaii, has found numerous subtle genetic abnormalities in cloned animals. Yanagamichi says he is surprised that any animals survive the cloning process at all.

While the cloning companies and their scientist and government friends wish us to believe that cloned animals, their products and offspring are probably safe to eat, we must not be so naive. Even tiny imbalances or changes in hormones, proteins or fats could alter the quality and safety of meat, milk and other products. If cloned animals are showing genetic abnormalities or difficulties, it means that these same genes and genetic predispositions to illnesses, immune weaknesses, and other abnormalities will be passed down to its offspring as well.

It is a dangerous game that cloning companies and officials are playing with our lives, yet most of the population knows very little about these issues. Laws will be passed, regulations will be formed, and it is likely that milk from cloned animals will enter our food supply very soon. As consumers, we have few ways of protecting ourselves from the long-term consequences of these changes to our food supply that even the most intelligent of scientists can never completely understand. We must educate ourselves rather than blindly swallow what the huge corporations and their government friends feed us.