Cloned Animals Will Be Slipped into U.S. Food Chain Within 6-8 Months

[Guest guest]

In my opinion certain corporations and their employees need to be

eliminated(as in terminated) as soon as possible or we will all be

paying the price , but I guess the sheople will figure that out too

late.

 

karl theis

rebel and heretic til the end

 

Cloned Animals Will Be Slipped into U.S. Food Chain Within 6-8

Months

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

 

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>From drugs in your corn flakes to cloned beef in your burger,

America's food

chain is shaping up fast as the world's most exotic.

CLONED BEEF: " They will go into the food chain, no question, in six

or eight

months " - Don Coover, a vet and semen broker, quoted in the Los

Angeles

Times, Feb 10, 2005

A longish article on cattle ranchers getting impatient with delays in

approving the sale of cloned cattle for food consumption includes,

late in

the piece, this startling section:

'The calves will be sold to youngsters, who will raise them for a

year and

enter them in county fairs and farm competitions, collectively known

as the

club calf circuit.

The circuit has come to occupy an odd spot in the clone conflict.

Everyone

knows the club calves will be sold for slaughter after their last

turn in

the show ring. But no one likes to dwell on it.

Don Coover, a vet and semen broker in Galesburg, Kan., has promised

two

clone

offspring to kids to raise for the circuit. The FDA has no way to

track

them.

" They will go into the food chain, no question, in six or eight

months, " he

said.

And that's just the beginning.

" I'm selling hundreds - maybe thousands - of units of semen from

bulls that

were cloned, " he said. " They're going to be slaughtered, and the FDA

can't

do anything about it. " '

Thanks to Pete Shanks, author of 'Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide

for

Activists, Skeptics and the Very Perplexed', to be published in June

2005

by

Nation Books, for drawing our attention to this.

------

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-

cattle10feb10,0,622159

9

..story?coll=la-home-headlines The Beef About Clones

Los Angeles Times, Feb 10 2005

Ranchers with carbon-copy bulls are fenced in by the public's

distaste for

food derived from such animals and delays in FDA approval.

By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer

CHARLO, Mont. ? After 30 years of raising cattle the old-fashioned

way,

Larry Coleman decided six years ago to plunk down $60,000 to clone

the best

Limousin breeding bull these parts had ever seen.

First Down, a hulking black creature that died in 1999, produced

semen that

sold for as much as $700 a vial ? and he filled thousands of them.

Now a

new First Down, along with fellow clones Second Down and Third Down,

are

ready to kick off their careers as professional sires. Second Down

has

already been relocated to a semen collection facility in Billings.

Fliers have been printed. A three-ring binder contains orders from

eager

customers. Thousands of semen straws are waiting in a freezer.

And waiting - and waiting - and waiting.

" I thought for sure we'd have our investment back by now, " Coleman

said.

Blocking Coleman's leap into the cloning revolution is the Food and

Drug

Administration, which despite four years of study has yet to rule

that

products from cloned animals are safe to eat.

Thousands of other ranchers are in similar straits, holding back

prospective

steaks and milk as the FDA studies the issue, although some meat is

quietly

making its way to the dinner table.

The main concern is not the clones themselves, which are too

precious to

butcher for burgers. Rather, the government is worried that milk from

clones

or meat from their offspring might pose some unknown health risk.

The FDA did its own study in 2003 and found that " food products

derived from

animal clones and their offspring are probably as safe to eat as

food from

their non-clone counterparts. "

But the ranchers acknowledge there is an inescapable queasiness about

cloning

that complicates the government's decision. Even though the first

animal

clone - Dolly the sheep - was born nearly a decade ago, the public

still

has

a hard time grappling with the new science.

It's even harder to think about eating it.

According to a survey last year by the International Food Information

Council, a trade group, 62% of consumers said they would be " very

unlikely "

or " somewhat unlikely " to buy meat, milk and eggs from cloned

animals.

A separate poll conducted by Gallup found that 64% of American

consumers

believed cloning animals was " morally wrong. "

As Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of

America's

Food Policy Institute, explained: " The yuck factor is very large. "

Lounging in a slushy pen with a few dozen other cattle, First Down

and Third

Down don't seem like much of a threat to the nation's food supply.

Their faces and hindquarters caked in mud, they look pretty much

like all

the

other bulls & #8212; except bigger.

Coleman can't help but think of the original when he looks at the two

clones.

" Every wrinkle - everything about them, even the disposition and

character -

are the same, " he said nostalgically.

The spirit of the first First Down looms large on the Coleman ranch.

A metal cutout of his blocky silhouette is soldered to the family's

mailbox.

His jet-black likeness adorns the tan baseball caps worn by the

Coleman

clan. More than 5,500 calves are registered as his offspring.

When he was born on the ranch in 1994, First Down was small like a

puppy

dog,

hardly remarkable. But he soon outgrew his fellow calves. His

yearling

weight of 1,580 pounds made him several hundred pounds heavier than

many

adult Limousin bulls.

In the rating system for breeding bulls, First Down had phenomenal

stats. He

ranked in the top 1% of his breed in terms of growth, docility,

muscle

marbling and scrotum size, a measurement used to predict the

fertility of

his daughters.

" The genetics of a bull like that are of extreme value to our

population, "

said Kent Andersen, executive vice president of the North American

Limousin

Foundation in Englewood, Colo.

He declared First Down the " most influential " Limousin in the

country since

the first bulls arrived from France in 1971.

He couldn't have been born at a better time.

Coleman and his wife of 35 years, Anita, live a modest life in a

town of 439

where the lone grocery store sells farming magazines at the checkout

stand.

He manages about 800 head of cattle on land homesteaded by his

grandfather

in 1908. Larry's father, brother, nephew and one son all live within

a few

miles.

In the mid-1980s, a depressed farm economy forced Coleman's ranch

into

bankruptcy.

First Down saved them. Coleman entered 10 of First Down's sons in

the 1998

stock show and won the grand champion prize. Animals sired by First

Down

commanded a hefty premium at auction.

" He was our million-dollar bull, " Coleman said, exaggerating

slightly.

The idea of cloning First Down was not obvious to Coleman. The

technology

was

still experimental at the time: The first calves cloned from an

adult cow

were born in Japan in 1998. But as word of the breakthrough spread,

suggestions made their way to Charlo.

A few months before First Down died of natural causes, Coleman sent

a small

piece of the bull's ear to Infigen Inc., a biotech company in

DeForest,

Wis.

To clone an animal, scientists start with a piece of ear skin and

mince it

up

in a lab. Then they induce the cells to divide in a culture dish

until they

forget they are skin cells and regain their ability to express all

of their

genes. Meanwhile, the nucleus is removed from a donor egg and placed

next

to

a skin cell. Both are zapped with a tiny electric shock, and if all

goes

well the egg grows into a genetic copy of the original animal.

The first two clones died. It took a couple of years, but three

healthy

clones were delivered to Charlo in the spring of 2003.

Soon after, Coleman received a reassuring message on his answering

machine

from John Matheson, a senior regulatory review scientist with the

FDA's

Center for Veterinary Medicine. " A decision on whether or how to

regulate

them is probably going to be into the early spring of '04, " Matheson

said.

That would be just in time for Coleman's clones to reach sexual

maturity.

The spring breeding season passed without a decision. The first

batches of

semen stayed put in a freezer.

Now, the melting snow reminds him that spring is approaching again.

" The breeding season is coming upon us, " he said, " and if you don't

hit

that,

you got to wait a whole year. "

Cattle ranchers have long embraced advanced reproductive

technologies in

their quest to efficiently produce higher-quality milk and beef.

In the 1960s, they began using frozen semen and artificial

insemination.

Then, they employed in vitro fertilization.

Such techniques allow prized animals to pass on their desirable

genes - but

they don't ensure those genes will make it to the next generation.

" When you breed animals, they only donate 50% of the DNA, and it's

totally

random, " said Cindy Daley, a professor of animal science at Cal State

Chico's College of Agriculture. " Cloning takes the guesswork out of

it. "

A squad of First Downs, fathering legions of desirable offspring,

could

raise

the quality of the entire Limousin breed.

But as with any new technology, there are always unknowns.

Some scientists believe all cloned animals have subtle genetic

defects that

arise from their unnatural start to life. Dolly the sheep, for

example,

suffered from arthritis and died at an unexpectedly early age.

The Japanese have conducted the most thorough studies of cloned meat.

The scientists, from the Operation of Urgent Research for

Utilization of

Clone Technology, subjected meat from cloned cattle to a battery of

tests.

They compared its chemical composition to samples of regular beef.

They

analyzed amino and fatty acids. They subjected pieces to simulated

gastric

and intestinal juices to measure digestibility. They fed the meat to

rats

for 14 weeks and tracked their motor activity, reflexes, grip

strength and

other characteristics. Then they killed the rats and conducted

autopsies.

In a 2004 report, the researchers concluded that there were " no

significant

biological differences " between natural and cloned beef.

The U.S. FDA began studying the safety of food produced from cloned

animals

and their offspring in 2001. The agency commissioned a report from

the

National Academy of Sciences, which found that clones present " a low

level

of food safety concern " based on the limited data available.

The FDA issued a draft summary of its risk assessment in 2003,

concluding

that cloned animals and their offspring posed no increased risk to

food

safety.

However, the FDA emphasized that it had " made no policy decision

that these

products may be sold " and asked ranchers to voluntarily keep clones

and

their offspring out of the food supply until a final decision was

made.

FDA officials won't say when they expect that to happen or discuss

other

aspects of their deliberations.

The North American Limousin Foundation decided on its own to include

clones

in its breed registry only if their owners refrain from selling

semen until

the FDA signs off.

Everyone assumed it would be a short wait.

" We were pretty confident that science would prevail in a timely

fashion, "

Andersen said.

Time is relative in a place like Charlo. Nestled in a flat valley in

the

shadow of the Rocky Mountains, it is a landscape where life often

seems

measured more by season than by clock.

Downtown Charlo is little more than a widening in Montana Highway

212. There

is a post office, a fire department, a grocery store, a senior

center, an

Exxon station, Tiny's Tavern and the M Bar 7 Cafe.

Amber Doty, the cook, is a meat-eater in a community built on

cattle. But

the

thought of cloned beef is just too futuristic for her.

" It's just not right to clone anything, " she said.

Even if regulators declared the meat safe, she wouldn't eat it. " You

never

know how well science works, " she said.

Barry Ambrose, who guides tourists on the Lewis and Clark Trail and

prefers

to eat elk he kills with his own bow, hasn't caught up to the idea

either.

" I just don't like fooling around with nature, " said Ambrose, son of

the

late

historian Stephen E. Ambrose.

Such ambivalence in the heart of cattle country doesn't bode well

for those

anticipating a favorable FDA decision.

" The scientists and ranchers always want to say it's just about the

science,

but it's not, " said Foreman of the Food Policy Institute. " We have

all

sorts

of emotional attachments to our food. And to think that people are

going to

choose without this question coming up - it's just not right. "

Most ranchers are simply exasperated. Out on the plains, where tens

of

millions of cows graze each year, a steak is a steak is a steak.

Ranchers and dairy farmers are losing patience with the moratorium.

Frank Regan spent $65,000 to clone his prized Holsteins Dellia and

Deborah.

Now, he has five clones producing nearly 500 pounds of milk each day

at his

family farm in Waukon, Iowa.

He can't sell the milk so he's diverting it to a tank to feed

calves. All he

can do is wait for the FDA.

" It's kind of like taking a girl out for about 10 years and then

telling her

you're never going to marry her, " he said.

In August, Colby Collins of Frederick, Okla., will begin delivering

the

first

of 50 calves sired by a clone of Full Flush, a popular Chianina bull

from a

nearby ranch.

Collins could have bought semen from the real Full Flush for $50 a

straw.

Instead, he paid just $20 for semen from one of the five Full Flush

clones.

" When you can cut a dollar here and a dollar there, you've got to do

it, " he

said.

The calves will be sold to youngsters, who will raise them for a

year and

enter them in county fairs and farm competitions, collectively known

as the

club calf circuit.

The circuit has come to occupy an odd spot in the clone conflict.

Everyone

knows the club calves will be sold for slaughter after their last

turn in

the show ring. But no one likes to dwell on it.

Don Coover, a vet and semen broker in Galesburg, Kan., has promised

two

clone

offspring to kids to raise for the circuit. The FDA has no way to

track

them.

" They will go into the food chain, no question, in six or eight

months, " he

said.

And that's just the beginning.

" I'm selling hundreds - maybe thousands - of units of semen from

bulls that

were cloned, " he said. " They're going to be slaughtered, and the FDA

can't

do anything about it. "

There is no way to distinguish calves fathered by clones from those

fathered

by the original bull. A DNA analysis would reveal only that they have

different mothers.

" If this turns into a crime, " Coover said, " it would truly be the

perfect

crime. "