SYDNEY, Australia – The future has arrived. Milk and T-bone steaks from cloned cattle or from herds boosted by cloned animals are just a blink away.
A herd of cloned cattle in the rolling dairyland of Wisconsin in the United States has been brought into milk production.
China is expected to give birth to its first cloned cow in January.
And an Australian-New Zealand company aims to run off copies of top breeding bulls for export to the world, as well as copy elite animals from Britain and elsewhere to guard against gene destruction because of foot-and-mouth disease.
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Cloning promises to revolutionize the multi-billion dollar beef and dairy markets, advocates say.
Critics urge caution and voice worries about the health and welfare of the cloned animals.
The Australia-Asian company, Clone International, which is backed by a group of entrepreneurial scientists, bought an exclusive licence for the technology that in 1997 produced the world’s first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep.
Cattle will be first off the production line. But Clone International also hopes to clone the world’s first horse.
“Most people … say, ‘so you’re going to produce 50 Phar Laps are you?’ ” Clone International chief Richard Fry said, referring to the champion Australian racehorse of the 1930s.
Not quite. The Dolly technique requires live tissue, and Phar Lap is long dead. Cloning horses is also, so far, extremely hard.
But cloning cattle is here and now.
“We think it’s a huge market,” Fry said.
The company’s first cattle clone, an elite Holstein dairy bull, will be born in a month or so. A couple of top cloned bulls are due to be born every month from then on, from 15 pregnancies now in progress.
This puts it at the forefront of commercial cloning.
The proven Dolly technology, purchased by U.S. biopharmaceutical giant Geron Corp in 1999 from Scotland’s Roslin Institute, is otherwise licensed to only a few in the United States and Britain.
In partnership with New Zealand cloning company AgResearch, Clone International expects to produce every year about five elite animals for dairy bull semen production for the Australian and New Zealand domestic markets.
Initial demand for exported clones is seen at 10-20 a year.
The potential is huge. China alone has 4.5 million genetically poor Holstein dairy cattle, Fry said. And China’s government is keen that schoolchildren drink more milk.
Poor genetics is also an issue with millions of cattle in India and Bangladesh.
“Access to elite genetics straight away … would have a huge impact on their industries,” Fry said.
As well as selling the genetics of Australian cattle, among the best in the world, Fry’s cloning company aims to export the purity of disease-free Australian farmlands.
Fry believes developing countries in Asia, the Indian subcontinent and South America, as well as developed countries in Europe and North America, will be attracted by the low costs of clones.
It costs around $165,000 Cdn to clone a bull, compared with a market price of $400,000 to $2 million for an original elite Holstein.
But will clones sell for the same price as elite originals?
“I can’t answer that until the market makes an assessment,” said Keith Steele, chief executive officer of AgResearch, adding that he sees cloning costs falling dramatically.
Clone International will be creating banks of cell lines from tissue samples of elite animals as an insurance policy.
“If something happened to the animal over there, you’ve got a copy here,” Fry said.
“I’m sure that people in the U.K. wish they had done that in the past now, before they had to wipe out a lot of studs (because of foot-and-mouth disease).”
Part of the plan is to establish cell banks of Australian and New Zealand elites for herd re-building should a dreaded outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease ever occur down under.
AgResearch has already saved threatened cattle in this way.
Over a century ago, cattle were placed on Enderby Island, well south of New Zealand’s main islands, for shipwrecked fishermen.
The cattle lived in isolation for more than a century and developed disease-resistant characteristics. But the last living female of the herd aged beyond her reproductive life in the late 1990s. So AgResearch cloned her.
Cloning has come a long way quickly since the Scottish scientists beat New Zealand by a few weeks to clone the world’s first sheep five years ago, and since New Zealand trailed Japan, again only by weeks, in producing the world’s first cloned calf in mid-1998.
Critics worry the loss of genetic diversity of livestock, by producing multiple copies of animals from certain cell lines, would be a step backward.
“The loss of biological diversity is a serious question,” said Bob Phelps of the lobby group GeneEthics Network.
Cloning farm animals was “clearly driven by a desire to squeeze more out of animal production systems,” he said.
“These animals will be so valuable that they will be feedlot animals, kept for breeding in confined spaces,” he said.
“There’s generally more pressure for industrialization of agriculture, which is not environmentally friendly or in the long run, sustainable.”
Environmental worries don’t seem to overly concern most cloning experts or impede their plans.
Fry hopes Clone International will produce the world’s first cloned horse in about five years. It has already established cell lines, frozen in liquid nitrogen, of legendary 23-year-old Australian pacer Gammalite.
The process is similar with cattle and horses. Thawed cells created from horse tissue can be planted in a host egg to produce an embryo.
But horses produce fewer ova than cattle. For attempts to clone horses to work, scientists will have to improve on the two to four percent success rate that Fry has achieved with cattle.
“I can’t see any reason why it won’t work.”
