Is the chop fried, with blood or cloned?

Tiffany Sharples, Time, Feb. 17, 2008
Translation: Inopressa

In January, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the sale of clone meat in the United States, ruling that products made from the meat of cloned cows, pigs and goats are as safe as products from their relatives born in the usual way. Supporters of cloning are happy: what cattle breeders have been doing throughout history, preserving the necessary genes, will now require many times less time. In addition, according to supporters of cloning, genetic engineering will allow in the future to create animals that can bring more benefits – for example, to produce nutrient-rich milk for people who do not have access to normal food.

Clone meat is indeed safe, but the FDA did not take into account the unscientific "disgust factor". Although cattle are often reproduced artificially – for example, by artificial insemination – and cloning is only a new form of this method, the public is very wary of this technology. "You can't cut off a part of people's brain so that they don't take morality into account in their scientific assessments," Sheila Yasanoff, a professor at Harvard University, said last week during a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

So far, clone meat products have not hit store shelves – they will not be sold for at least a few more months, during the "transition period" recommended by the government. However, when they do appear in supermarkets, you won't even notice it – they won't be marked in a special way. "The FDA does not require special labels if they do not concern food safety," Dr. Steven Sandlof, director of the Center for Food Safety and Practical Nutrition Issues, explained during a January press conference.

It is at this point that Dr. Patrick Cunningham, former director of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Program's Animal Breeding and Health Directorate and chief scientific adviser to the Irish government, steps in. His company IdentiGEN, established 12 years ago, specializes in tracking livestock products – his work is designed to save time, so valuable in the event of a recall of meat products. Recall that last Sunday, the US Department of Agriculture recalled 143 million pounds of fresh and frozen beef. Currently, IdentiGEN operates in Europe, where an all-encompassing system for tracking meat products was created after the outbreak of mad cow disease in the mid-1990s. For example, all pork and beef products that are sold in TESCO's UK supermarkets around the world are labeled and stamped with IdentiGEN DNA TraceBack. It is also present on 75% of beef and pork products that are sold in Ireland – the seal confirms where this meat came from.

Until now, the possibility of tracing the origin of meat has not greatly worried America. However, Cunningham believes that after the recall of a large batch of products by the Ministry of Agriculture and after the FDA approved the sale of clone meat on January 15, Americans will be interested in where the meat comes from in their stores. In 2007, the Consumers' Union conducted a survey and found that 89% of buyers would prefer that the meat of clones be marked with a special label. "I don't think that in the modern world it is acceptable that products are not signed and can come from anywhere, despite the fact that information about their origin is lost along the way," says the doctor. "People want (products) to be marked "not cloned".

IdentiGEN starts work by taking a DNA sample from an animal carcass until it has been processed. The sample is stored in a computer database, and from that moment on, at any stage, another sample can be taken from any product to confirm the origin of the meat. The whole process costs 0.5% of the cost of the animal, Cunningham says. If information about the DNA of cloned animals is published (now geneticists store them as their intellectual property), then, according to the scientist, it will be possible to establish in less than a week which animal a certain piece of meat is associated with. "Identifying a clone is a simpler task than what we usually do when working with all animals, since there are fewer of them (clones)," Cunningham explains.

Today there are about 4 thousand heads of cloned cattle in the world, 600 of them in the USA. They are used mainly for breeding and while products from clones are not officially sold anywhere – although there are incredible stories that "cloned" products have already hit the market in the past. Currently, cloned cattle and pigs are used in the USA, the EU, Australia, China, Japan and New Zealand. ViaGen, an Austin, Texas–based cloning company, produces 150 cloned animals annually, which it sells to meat producers- mostly for breeding. ViaGen claims to have created a system for storing information about each of the clones and tracking them. The animal is assigned a unique number, which is stored in an independent database (however, DNA information is not included there). The company promises to make every effort to prevent products from its clones from entering markets where they are not wanted. "We are voluntarily giving up on this," says Mark Walton, head of ViaGen. "We register each of our animals and put information about them in the database, so that this information is available."

However, marking in the form of a number is not enough, Cunningham argues and calls for leaving more than just a "paper trail". "This is not an adequate measure," he explains. "You can be sure only if the clone DNA samples are stored in an independent database." He notes that one cow can enter the meat processing plant, and come out of there in a thousand different products.

In any case, when clone products finally appear in the United States, they will occupy only a small share of the meat market. Breeding clones is not an easy and expensive process. A cloned cow costs from 10 to 20 thousand dollars, while a regular cow costs 50 dollars. The "cloned" meat will mainly belong to animals born from clones, and not to themselves. When the clones lose their ability to reproduce, Walton says, "they will be processed either into burgers or canned dog food."

IdentiGEN opened its American headquarters and genetic laboratory in May 2007 in Lawrence, Kansas. In October last year, the company received official permission from the Ministry of Agriculture to launch its DNA TraceBack system – today it is offered to American meat producers and traders. Cunningham himself says that he would love to eat a chop from a cloned bull, although he admits that there is a "general, unscientific feeling that a clone is something akin to Frankenstein."

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru21.02.2008