Would You Like Fries With Your Clone?

Would you order jambon cloné in a French restaurant? How about a cloneburger with fries? Few words are less likely ever to find their way onto a menu than clone. In the past week, however, government scientists in Europe and the United States took a big step toward allowing cloned meat and milk on the dinner table. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a report declaring that cloned livestock was safe to eat, and the European Food Safety Authority says meat and milk of cloned animals is nothing out of the ordinary.

The reports caused indigestion on two continents. Europeans harbor a deep revulsion toward any funny business with their food. They've demanded (and gotten) legislation requiring labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods and have steadfastly resisted importing GM crops from the United States, Brazil and elsewhere. Although Americans have been much less bothered about biotechnology and food—they couldn't seem to care less about eating GM crops—it's safe to say that few people outside the livestock business are thrilled by the prospect of putting a fork into a cloned porterhouse. Watchdog groups condemned the findings, calling for mandatory labeling. Given cloning's lack of gustatory appeal, a label might be all that's needed to kill the practice.

Aside from being unappetizing, is there any potential danger from eating the meat or milk of a cloned pig or cow? On principle, you'd expect not. Cloning, by definition, produces exact copies. The clone of a cow that produces great milk should itself produce great milk. Biology, on the other hand, is notorious for its disregard of such simplistic notions. Just because you make a creature that has the exact same DNA as a prize cow, does that mean the creature will also be a prize cow? Or could it be something else—something harmful to eat?

The livestock industry is counting on cloning making exact copies. On a U.S. farm, a good cow can fetch about $1,000 on the butcher's block. On such an animal there's no point in using cloning, which can cost $20,000 a pop. However, an elite cow—one whose genes are optimized for producing the healthiest, longest-living and most productive offspring—can fetch more than $100,000. With such a price tag, elite cows aren't allowed to bear calves at the natural rate of one per year. Farmers insist on a blistering 10 to 20 births a year. To keep up this pace, veterinarians employ an array of reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. Cloning is the latest, and perhaps the most powerful, reproductive tool in the vet's black bag.

In the United States farmers have agreed to adhere to a voluntary moratorium on introducing cloned animals into the food chain. There's little chance, anyway, that a farmer would throw away $20,000 on an animal that's worth only $1,000. But the moratorium doesn't include cloning per se. Farmers have already cloned "a few hundred" elite cows in the United States, says Dave Farber, a veterinarian and president of Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, which performs the operation as a service. The offspring of these cloned animals have already entered the food supply.

Should consumers be afraid? There is some evidence that cloned animals show a higher propensity for developmental problems, such as mental retardation. That would be tragic in a human, but the milk from a retarded cow is not necessarily any different from the milk from a smarter than average cow. Indeed, the European scientists found no compositional or nutritional differences in the milk or meat derived from clones, and "no evidence of any abnormal effects" in the progeny of cloned animals.