ViaGen in the News
Cloned animals deemed safe to eat
By Kate Carter, Athens Banner-Herald
August 22, 2002
This little piggy went to the market. This little piggy got cloned.
Athens-based ProLinia Inc., the nation’s only company concentrating solely on cloning animals for agriculture, received good news last week when a report prepared by the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council found that cloned animals are safe to raise and eat.
And ProLinia scientists are hoping that in the near future their work will be translated into choice meat displayed in grocery stores across the nation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioned the report nearly two years ago to glean possible risks of raising and consuming cloned or genetically engineered animals or their offspring. The committee found that cloned animals do not pose a food safety threat, although it warned against the risks posed by organisms that have been genetically engineered.
The committee that wrote the report found that the greatest concern surrounding genetically engineered organisms — organisms created through splicing genes of one species with genes from another species — is the ability of certain genetically engineered organisms to escape and reproduce in the natural environment, thereby threatening the existence of non-altered species.
But of cloned animals, the committee wrote: ”The products of offspring of cloned animals are regarded as posing no food safety threat because they are the result of natural matings.”
There is currently no food from cloned meat in U.S. grocery stores, according to Wendelyn Jones Warren, a pharmacologist with the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. The FDA contacted companies known to be developing the animals to ask them not to introduce to the market the cloned animals, or their offspring, or their food products, until the FDA has considered all the scientific information.
”We hope to make a decision by the end of this calendar year or early next year regarding cloned animals,” Warren said.
In preparation for FDA approval and in order to produce superior pigs and cows that will be able to supply the juiciest, highest-quality meat, ProLinia scientists do the following: they replace the nucleus of an egg with that of an adult cell, such as a skin cell. When protein is added to that egg and placed into a cow or a pig, the offspring is the exact genetic replica of the donor.
And, if the donor is a top-notch specimen, so will be the offspring and so will be the meat lining grocery store shelves in the future.
ProLinia Inc. is a private company funded by the state-run Georgia Research Alliance, a partnership of the state’s research universities, the business community and the state government. ProLinia, in turn, sponsors research at the University of Georgia. Steven Stice, a UGA professor who holds a Research Alliance Eminent Scholar chair in the animal and dairy science department, spends 49 percent of his time with scientists at ProLinia, working on maximizing the efficiency of cloning animals.
The report’s conclusions were unsurprising, according to ProLinia President Mike Wanner, who said the company is probably two or three years away from seeing its cloned animals widely used across the nation to breed animals that end up on grocery store shelves.
”We’re working on a small scale now,” he said. ”We’re building up efficiency so that we can do it on a larger-scale basis in the future.”
Wanner said today’s cattle and pork markets ring up $700 million annually, but with the introduction of pricier cloned meat, that market will rise to almost $2 billion — and Wanner said the Athens-based company and UGA expect ”to have a significant piece of the pie.”
ProLinia has filed for three patents dealing with methods of making the cloning process more efficient, said Wanner. The patents are owned by UGA, but ProLinia owns the exclusive licenses to those patents.
ProLinia currently has more than 20 calves, and its first pig was born over Memorial Day weekend. Experiments are ongoing, and the company’s major April accomplishment was cloning ”KC,” the first-ever calf cloned from the cells of a dead cow.
According to Wanner, the scientists waited until after the carcass’s meat was graded in the slaughterhouse, and then collected a cell from around its kidney.
Even though the carcass meat was graded high, Wanner said ”KC” turned out to be a middle-range grade.
”But the point was that we could do it,” he said.
Warren said that it is too soon to say whether the FDA would require labels on cloned meat.
”If milk or meat derived from cloned animals or their offspring is indistinguishable from other milk or meat, there is not a safety or quality reason to require a label,” she said, noting that in general, for the FDA to require a label, there needs to be a safety reason or at least a quality reason to do so.
Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, has an equity investment in ProLinia, and according to Wanner, ProLinia will clone animals in the future that are chosen by Smithfield to be stellar prototypes.
Wanner is emphatic about his, and the company’s, opposition to human cloning and said that cloning agricultural animals is extremely different.
”People aren’t really opposed to the technology, and if they are opposed, they’re opposed to the application of it,” he said. ”… The only thing that’s remarkable about (cloned animals) is that they’re unremarkable.”
Smiling, he added, ”They’re cute.”
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