ViaGen in the News
Cloning is graspable value
By Rod Smith, Feedstuffs
May 21, 2007
he benefits of cloning will be easily recognized by producers and will be felt across the food system all the way to consumers.
ONCE the Food & Drug Administration issues its final rule that meat and milk from animal clones and their offspring are safe for human consumption, livestock producers are expected to adopt cloning technology to increase the influence of their best-performing animals.
Cloning is “a highly intuitive value proposition” to livestock producers “that they can quickly wrap their minds around,” noted Blake Russell, vice president for business development and sales at ViaGen, the leading specialist in the technology.
Producers will grasp this proposition when they identify those animals that have exceptional genetic value and see cloning as a means to multiply that value very effectively without taking the chance and time required for natural breeding, added company president Dr. Mark Walton.
The benefits will be felt all the way “down the line” from farm to table, he said.
Russell, Walton and director of industry relations and policy Leah Wilkinson talked with Feedstuffs during an interview at ViaGen’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Second in a series
Cloning is a form of assisted reproduction that can be traced to Arab chieftains who began using artificial insemination in 1332 to breed superior horses, and cloning itself has been discussed for more than 100 years since U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Herbert Webber coined the word “clon” to describe asexually produced cell or organism copies.
Scientists first cloned frogs in 1952, and scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland produced “Dolly” the sheep in 1996, the first mammal cloned from a cell of an adult animal. A number of other cloning successes followed, including clones of endangered species.
Last year, after more than five years of study — the most exhaustive food safety study it has ever done — FDA concluded and issued a preliminary rule that meat and milk from clones and offspring are safe (Feedstuffs, Jan. 1). The agency took comments on the rule until May 3 and is expected to issue its final rule later this year.
Cloning benefits
It’s expected that all kinds and sizes of producers will clone livestock, but early on, seedstock producers will be especially involved, Walton said.
Producers will identify their animals — females and males — whose genetic impact is highly regarded and clone them for a number of reasons, he said. By having multiple “copies,” or “identical twins,” of a top-performing dam, for instance, a producer not only could increase the number of offspring from the cow but could mate her twins to multiple sires at the same time to quickly find the “magical mating” that produces the next generation of exceptional genetics.
By having additional copies of a top-performing sire, a producer could ensure that he or she has a semen supply sufficient to meet demand and could expand business opportunities in natural-service sires.
By cloning, producers could quickly improve the consistency and quality of their herds and the consistency and quality of the meat and milk from their commercial herds.
Accordingly, producers could quickly expand the number of top-performing animals in their herds and, therefore, their marketing opportunities, Walton said.
Other reasons to clone include preserving the genes of one’s top-performing animals as insurance against unexpected injuries or losses and selecting for disease and insect resistance. The latter possibility is important for countries where disease and pests keep producers from building high-quality, large herds to improve food sufficiency, Wilkinson said.
These benefits would apply across all livestock, including beef, dairy and exotic cattle, swine, horses and rodeo and show animals, Walton said.
Cloning “can disseminate desired genetics very quickly,” he said.
Cloning time to market
Specifically for beef and dairy cattle and swine, Walton said producers would have animals that consistently grade at levels that pay premiums, packers and processors would have meat and dairy products consistently high in quality and restaurants and retail stores would be able to consistently feature and merchandise meat and dairy products with the quality and value traits consumers demand.
Cloning can drive value across the food system, he said, noting that the application of cloning technology is not about “more” but about “better” — better breeding animals, better commercial animals and better food.
However, “better” is not right around the corner, he said. Assuming that the FDA process will not be concluded until the end of the year and using cattle as an example, he explained first that the cloning process is expensive — $15,000 for the first bovine, with additional copies at incrementally lower rates — and producers will channel clones into their breeding herds rather than commercial herds.
In this scenario, then, producers would order clones of desired animals next January, and ViaGen would get the bovine pregnancies underway in February (clones are carried to term in surrogate mothers). There would be a standard nine-month gestation period, after which the calves would be kept on ViaGen-leased ranches for 30 days to seven months before being delivered to their owners.
The calves then would need to be raised to sexual maturity and bred — conventionally — after which they will need to carry to term and give birth, and now the newly born calves would need at least one year to be grown to harvest weight.
Accordingly, the first beef from the cloning process that would begin early in 2008 would not be available in the meat case until 2011 0r 2012, he said, emphasizing that it would be beef from conventionally bred cattle and not from clones (Feedstuffs FoodLink, May 14).
The math would be shorter but arrived at similarly for swine, he said. (The first copy of a porcine animal, for which cloning is better documented and more straightforward, is priced at $5,000, and the first copy of an equine animal, for which cloning is documented less, is priced at $150,000.)
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Part three in this series will focus on the cloning process and its environmental footprint.)
Here’s the point
A NEW technology — cloning — will effectively and efficiently improve the American food supply once the Food & Drug Administration issues its final rule on the safety of meat and milk from animal clones and their offspring.
That rule will come from the agency’s most comprehensive food safety study in its history — a five-year review of approximately 400 scientific reports, an analysis of the health records of meat and milk from clones and their progeny and public comments. FDA, in its preliminary rule, determined that there are no differences in food from conventionally bred animals and clones. It is healthful, nutritious and safe.
Besides, with one exception, clones will not be harvested for meat and milk because clones will be channeled into breeding herds and bred conventionally, and it’s the food from those conventionally bred animals that will be marketed.
The one exception is when a clone is past its reproductive life, but cloning companies already have established safeguards to prevent any harvested product from entering the food supply at restaurants or retail stores where there are concerns.
The benefits that will come from this new technology are enormous and will stretch all the way from producers to consumers, according to the top people at cloning company ViaGen, who were interviewed for this series.
Producers will be able to “copy” their best animals and, by doing so, improve the consistency of their herds, increase marketing opportunities and raise animals that will capture premiums; processors will be able to harvest and process high-quality food with the traits consumers want, and restaurants and supermarkets will be able to offer that food to consumers, the ViaGen people said. Consumers will have “better” food, according to ViaGen president Dr. Mark Walton.
These are important messages livestock producers and processors and foodservice and supermarket managers need to share with consumers in their engagements and by referring them to www.FeedstuffsFoodLink.com.