Science > Clones in the Supermarket
Clones in the Supermarket
A Q&A with an animal geneticist
By Marni Ginther
There’s been a lot of buzz about the FDA’s approval of food products from cloned animals. Scott Fahrenkrug is an animal geneticist at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Animal Science and shared some thoughts on the pros and cons of introducing cloned animal products into our food supply.
digest: Will we be eating meat, eggs or milk from cloned animals any time soon?
Fahrenkrug: The fact of the matter is, it’s too expensive to make a clone and feed it to people. Only their offspring would potentially be on the market. But [cloned animal food products] are probably not going to hit the market because it’s too expensive right now.
d: Why is that?
F: Even if a clone looks normal, if you look close enough, essentially they’ve got problems, like reproductive or musculoskeletal problems. Right now that problem is there and it makes cloning expensive and it means you can’t use that first generation. Their offspring are absolutely normal.
d: If cloned animal products are so expensive that they won’t hit the market any time soon, then is the debate over labeling cloned food a moot point?
F: I think it is. All this money that’s getting thrown at all this political action, I think is ill-spent. The other very important point is that labeling is impossible to enforce. There’s no test that’ll tell you whether something is from a clone. You take meat from a clone and take meat from a normal animal and compare them, you can’t tell the difference. If you can’t tell the difference then how are you going to enforce labeling?
d: Currently, cloning is expensive and can produce animals with problems. What was the original intended benefit of cloning animals for food?
F: Right now we have this process called progeny testing where you make an animal and you look at how well its offspring does, then you determine if you’re going to continue to breed it. Because that process is slow, you have people entertaining ideas like cloning, where you just clone an animal you already know is superior.