Cloned Cows Are Fetching Big Bucks
Dozens of Genetic Duplicates Ready to Take Up Residence on U.S. Farms
URL: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/science/A51619-2001Mar24.html
Date accessed: 29 March 2001
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 25, 2001; Page A01
DEFOREST, Wis. -- One evening last autumn, stagehands lowered the lights in a crowded coliseum near here. Spotlights lit the stage. Fog billowed from machines. Speakers thumped with the heart-stopping orchestral music from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Emerging from a fog bank, a cow strutted across the stage.
Her name was Mandy, one of the world's prized Holstein dairy cows, worth about $120,000. She was on the auction block -- sort of -- that October evening at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis.
It wasn't Mandy herself who was being sold by auctioneer Tom Morris. It was her clone, yet to be born.
When the gavel fell, a cattle breeding syndicate in Minnesota had bid $82,000 for a Mandy clone. It is to be delivered in September. On a farm near DeForest, its exact location a secret, clones of Mandy are growing today inside surrogate-mother cows.
Four years after the debut of Dolly the sheep, cloned animals are a laboratory curiosity no longer. They are moving, slowly but surely, onto the American farmstead. One cloning company has returned at least a half-dozen cloned animals to American farms this year. Two of them, clones of a famed Holstein named Zita, are living on a dairy farm in western Maryland. Others born in recent months are nearing the age when they will be delivered to eager buyers.
Cloning animals is fast turning into a real business. At least two American companies are actively marketing cloning services to farmers and ranchers. Owners of the most valuable beef and dairy breeding stock may not all be ready to embrace cloning, but some are putting cells from their animals into storage, just in case.
For the moment cloning remains expensive, as much as $50,000 per animal when all costs are figured in. It is therefore worthwhile only for the most valuable breeding stock. But costs are falling. The era seems to be fast approaching when the offspring of cloned cattle will enter commerce as meat, and milk from cloned cows and their offspring will show up in plastic jugs at the grocery store.
No regulations prohibit the introduction of cloned animals into the U.S. food supply -- nor is there any public outcry for regulation. Farmers involved in cloning note that they have not altered the genes of their animals in the way that big seed companies have altered some crops.
They are simply making copies.
Research is underway to test whether the milk from cloned cows will be similar to that from regular cows. Scientific theory suggests it will be indistinguishable. The development of commercialized cloning has been discussed at the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, and the companies involved are keeping those agencies apprised. So far neither agency has seen grounds to intervene.
The cattle associations that safeguard the genetic purity of their breeds are discussing how to handle clones, and at least two have already adopted formal rules. The Holstein Association USA, perhaps the most influential of these groups, has begun registering clones and conferring on them a special designation that indicates how they were created.
"I can see the day when I could theoretically call up and order a thousand Mandys to be delivered to me at such-and-such a date for my big dairy," said Morris, a leading Holstein auctioneer for 30 years. "It could take a while, but I can see it coming."
Indeed, one of the two major cloning companies, Infigen Inc. of DeForest, is already setting up a "model dairy" with cloned cows to test how well the concept will work. Meanwhile, Infigen and Advanced Cell Technology Inc. of Worcester, Mass., are talking about initial public offerings of stock in the next year or two.
It may soon be possible, in other words, to buy shares in a company whose primary source of revenue is cloning farm animals.
Infigen claims to be further along than any other company at making cloning efficient and, thus, economical. During a recent tour designed to prove his point, President Michael Bishop took a reporter and photographer to several small, unmarked farms leased by the company in the rolling hills of Wisconsin dairy country. He showed off scores of clones.
The company has created 110 cattle clones and about 30 pig clones, he said. Numerous pregnancies are underway. Of the embryos it implants in surrogate cows in cloning attempts, just 17 percent result in live births. Still, that's an impressive figure when most laboratories are still reporting 3 percent to 5 percent success rates.
At one point in the tour, 10 identical clones -- part of the model dairy program -- were lined up. Bishop and his employees have taken to giving clone pairs whimsical names. One set of cow clones is named Cookies and Cream, and another pair is named Carbon and Copy.
"It's a little like Noah's ark," livestock manager Greg Mell said. "You've got two of this kind, two of that kind."
Bishop is shooting to get the company's efficiency up from 17 percent into the 40 percent range, a level that could make cloning economical for a wide swath of the nation's farmers and ranchers.
"You just came down a valley that has more clones in it than any place in the world," Bishop said after the tour. "We're pushing the technology to its limits to determine its commercial potential."
For decades, most scientists thought cloning was impossible. Nearly every cell of an animal's body has a complete copy of its genetic information, but as the animal matures in the womb, those cells become specialized as liver cells, skin cells and so forth. It was thought that once they had specialized, there was no way to turn back the clock and use them as the template for building a new individual.
But in 1997, scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland disproved this dogma. As they and their successors have developed the technique, cloning involves taking mature cells from an adult animal (usually from its ear), growing more cells in the laboratory and implanting the nucleus from one cell into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. Some ill-understood mechanism in the hollowed-out egg "resets" the adult genetic material and, in successful cases, the newly created "egg" begins dividing as if it had been fertilized normally.
The microscopic embryo is transferred to the womb of a surrogate mother. Much can go wrong over the next few months, and this is one of the most significant concerns to emerge about the cloning of farm animals. A large percentage of surrogate mothers spontaneously abort early in pregnancy, presumably because the fetuses are abnormal. Problems serious enough to threaten the life of the mother can crop up late in the pregnancy. And of calves born alive, a disproportionate number die in their first few days.
Animal welfare groups have cited these problems in arguing that cloning should be banned or at least developed more slowly.
Noting the potential for animal suffering, the Humane Society of the United States, for example, has raised sharp questions about the necessity of animal cloning. "Do we have sufficient knowledge to really improve upon nature?" said Michael W. Fox, a veterinarian and senior scholar in bioethics for the humane society. "There's an element of arrogance here -- that we have the technology so let's use it."
The companies involved say they are concerned about animal welfare and are working to minimize risks.
If a live offspring is born from a cloning attempt, it will be virtually identical, genetically, to the adult animal from which the original nucleus was taken. And if a newborn calf lives through its first few weeks, it seems to be fine from then on.
Healthy clones do not differ in any obvious way from other animals. Their behavior is the same. In fact, in cows and goats, genetically identical clones often don't look alike, possibly because the animal's coat markings are influenced to some degree by conditions in the surrogate mother's womb. Whether clones will be as healthy as other animals in the long term remains an open question.
Most Americans have never seen a clone in the flesh, but farm families have encountered them at livestock shows and auctions over the past couple of years. These observers always say they were struck by how normal the animals seem.
On a recent day, a friendly man named Ronald Bader strolled through a dairy barn in Illinois, a few miles south of the Wisconsin line. He wore ostrich-skin boots, a tan leather jacket and a tan cowboy hat. He is the grand old man of an empire: He founded one of the nation's largest advertising agencies focusing on agriculture. He and his children farm 11,000 acres across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
Among the holdings of Bader's Carrousel Farms is a champion dairy herd, and the cow formally known as C Lauduc Broker Mandy, registered Holstein No. 15638060, is one of his stars. Like fine wines and fine art, fine cows have provenance. They get complicated names that tell something of their ancestry. Their milk production records, performance in the show ring and various other data are tracked as carefully as a baseball player's statistics.
"Somebody says, 'My cow is better than your cow,' " Bader said. "You say, 'No, mine is better than yours.' You take them to the show to find out."
Mandy is 8, getting up in years for a cow, but she still wins awards. In her glory days she placed first or second in several of the most prestigious Holstein competitions. Cows at Mandy's level are valued principally for their genes. Their offspring can upgrade the genetics of an entire herd, improving a farmer's milk output and bottom line.
She gazed nonchalantly the other day as Bader and his hands pointed out some of the traits -- her wide hips, her taut udder with its bulging veins -- that make her a fine cow. "She's got a beautiful udder," declared the herd superintendent, Perry Phend. Some of her most important statistics hung on a placard above her head, looking like a job candidate's résumé.
The idea of cloning champion animals has been floating around since Dolly the sheep was announced, and Bader had idly discussed it with his employees. Still, when Morris, the auctioneer, called a while back to pitch the idea of selling a Mandy clone at the World Dairy Expo, the Olympics of the dairy industry, Bader was taken aback. "The first reaction is just a little bit of shock," he said. "Should we be doing this? Is this something we ought to be messing around with, any of us?"
He changed his mind when he saw Infigen's clones. He gave the go-ahead, resulting in the first sale of a clone at auction, at the Expo in Madison on Oct. 6. The Mandy clone is likely to become prize breeding stock for the Landox Syndicate of Minneapolis.
"We've been approached to sell some more," Morris said. "We're going to pick and choose very carefully."
The idea is starting to spread around the country. On a family-run dairy farm near Williamsport in western Maryland, Charles Wiles, his son Greg and their extended family have been celebrating the February birth of two cloned calves. They are clones of Con Acres HS Zita-ET, registered Holstein No. 14411844, a champion cow that was for a time the top-ranked Holstein in the country. She raised the Wiles family's profile sky-high in the world of Holstein breeders.
They decided last year to have her cloned, after seeing marketing materials from Cyagra LLC, then a separate company but now the agricultural division of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts company. By dire happenstance, Zita died from a spinal injury around the time her clones were born.
Greg Wiles planted his feet against a bitter wind the other day as the calves, held in a simple pen, mooed and licked a visitor's hands. They are named Genesis and Cyagra. "They're normal in every way," Wiles said. It is striking, he said, how much they behave like the young Zita. "They kind of take up where she left off."
The Wileses have saved cells from Zita and intend to create more clones. They recently sold a future Zita clone at auction in Hagerstown for $49,000. They may bank cells from other animals.
While clone auctions are splashy, a more common practice is likely to be a simple contract between a cloning company and a farmer or rancher. Advanced Cell Technology and Infigen are avidly pursuing what they call the "contract cloning" market.
Dairy producers are in the vanguard, but cloning could ultimately have an even greater impact on the economics of beef production.
People in the industry say a beef producer who got his hands on a prize bull might well decide to have it cloned, putting, say, 10 copies out on the range to breed with cows and upgrade the whole herd.
Cloning has certainly been an answer to an unusual problem encountered by Larry Coleman at his Limousin beef cattle ranch in Charo, Mont. A champion bull of the Limousin breed, a fine French breed popular in this country in recent decades, was born on his ranch. Limousin breeders were dazzled by Cole First Down 46D, which seemed to have every desirable trait in a bull.
But First Down was laid low by a severe infection of the scrotum before he reached his full potential as a semen donor. The bull was saved by medical intervention but never produced normal semen again. He later died. When Coleman sells what remains of First Down's frozen semen, a unit sufficient to impregnate one cow can bring $500, 25 times the usual price for top Limousin semen.
Coleman is paying Infigen to have First Down cloned, and two young clones have been born in Wisconsin. A healthy bull with desired traits can produce as much as $12,000 worth of semen a week even at normal prices, so Coleman is fired up. He confesses he had the same worries that everyone else has about cloning, but he got over them.
"Sometimes, sure, you have some doubt, wondering if you're doing the right thing," he said. "We just had to make a decision and not look back."
Category: 33. Cloning