NYT: FDA approves cloned meat

By ANDREW MARTIN
After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores. The decision comes more than four years after the agency tentatively declared that food from cloned animals was safe, only to face a backlash from consumer groups and some scientists who said the science supporting the decision was shaky. On Tuesday, the F.D.A. declared that further studies had confirmed its earlier decision. Extensive measurement of nutrients in the meat and milk of clones found no cause for alarm, the agency said.
“Following extensive review, the risk assessment did not identify any unique risks for human food from cattle, swine or goat clones, and concluded that there is sufficient information to determine that food from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally bred counterparts," the agency said in a statement. The F.D.A. ruling was a major victory for cloning companies, which hope to use the cloned animals primarily for breeding purposes, selling copies of prize dairy cows, steers and hogs. The company putting the most effort into developing the technology is ViaGen, of Austin, Texas. That company and others have already produced scores of clones that live on American farmsteads, though the F.D.A. has asked the farmers to honor a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clone meat and milk.
No law prohibits such sales, and the document the F.D.A. issued Tuesday is essentially an advisory opinion to industry saying the agency sees no ground to seek a permanent ban.
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Consumer groups and some members of Congress have fought the decision, arguing that there was still not enough science. Some groups also object to the technology on animal-welfare grounds, noting that clones face an elevated risk of health problems early in life.
It remains to be seen how widely the technology will be adopted. Interest from the food industry has been tepid, with some companies declaring that they will not sell milk or meat from cloned animals or their offspring. Other types of reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination, faced resistance on farms when they were first developed, but eventually they became widespread.
Even if cloning spreads, it is unlikely that clones themselves will wind up on grocery shelves anytime soon, since they still cost thousands of dollars apiece to produce. A limited amount of milk from cloned cows might be sold, but mostly it would be the meat and milk of second- and third-generation clone offspring that would enter the food supply. The goal of the cloning companies and their clients is to use multiple copies of an animal to upgrade the genetics of entire herds.
Tuesday’s decision means cloning technology could move into commercial use a mere decade after the world learned of the existence of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in Scotland. To create Dolly, scientists took an unfertilized sheep egg and removed the genetic material. They then inserted the genetic material from an adult cell. Machinery within the egg somehow reset the clock on the adult genes, and the new cell, after implantation into a surrogate mother sheep, developed into Dolly.
This technique has since become routine in laboratories, with clones produced in numerous species — not including humans, so far as is known. In public discussion, the technology is sometimes confused with other techniques that involve genetic manipulation, such as by transferring genes into animals from unrelated species. But cloning is simply the creation of an identical genetic copy, with no tweaking of individual genes.
While most Americans have never seen a cloned animal, farm families have been seeing them for years at agricultural shows, and many have gradually grown comfortable with the notion of cloning as the next big thing in animal husbandry.