Open Writing

On February 22, 1997, at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Scotland, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell was born. Dolly, as she came to be known worldwide, was a Finn Dorset lamb, and lived at the Roslin Institute until she died prematurely at 6 years of age. Her death from pulmonary complications was attributed to the theory that a mammal cloned from an adult cell will not live beyond the age of the donor at the time the cell was harvested.

This theory is obfuscated by the fact that sheep raised indoors routinely develop pulmonary problems. Whatever the truth, Dolly’s early demise highlights the incidence of both early onset and mature clone failures; and of the, as yet, undefined dangers of this emergent science. My interest in this arcane field was triggered by a report in the New York Times by Andrew Pollack and Andrew Martin, that the US Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A) has announced that, “tentatively,” food from cloned animals is safe to eat.

This determination is coupled with the statement that meat and milk from cloned animals need not be labeled as such in stores. The pronouncement raises questions, in my mind at least, as to how it was determined that consumption of meat from cloned animals is safe, “tentatively” or otherwise, since ostensibly no such meat has yet been eaten.

I’m suspicious of such claims in the light of phenomena such as Mad Cow Disease. Presumably it was considered safe to feed farm animals meat and bones from other animals, some of which had died from disease, until human beings started to die, sometimes years after eating the tainted meat.

The Times report goes on to talk about the status of farm animal cloning today, and I was surprised and disconcerted to find out that the practice, while not yet commonplace, is pervasive in US agriculture. It is estimated that there are between 500 and 600 cloned cows and 200 cloned pigs in the USA. Thus far, chickens have not been cloned.

Like many dramatic and controversial scientific advances, once the ability to clone mammals was made public, the practice and its practitioners literally seemed to go underground, but the work continued far from the public’s gaze. The New York Times’ archives list only 35 articles on mammal cloning in the 9 years since Dolly was born.

At the present time, due to the cost of cloning, it is seen by farmers only as a way to reduce the cost of extending the progeny of prize animals. Clones go on to procreate by conventional fertilization, so the meat you eat and the milk you drink may not come directly from a clone, but from the progeny of one. Does that make you feel any less apprehensive?

Ever since the first experimental atom bomb was exploded I have held the view that scientists are a lot like mischievous boys, or girls. No matter what they are told they shouldn’t do, they will use all their ingenuity and guile to do, and there have been plenty of examples in the nuclear field alone since the Alamogordo test. When scientists are caught out they employ most of the naughty boy/girl disclaimers: I didn’t know you meant me, I just couldn’t help it, etc.

World renowned surgeons have performed operations such as mechanical heart implants that they were specifically enjoined not to undertake, claiming that the patient would not live long without the procedure. As it turned out, the patients didn’t live for long afterwards anyway. It seems clear that the real motivation to fly in the face of medical ethics has more to do with the desire to be first, than with humanitarian considerations.

The cloning of animals has never been illegal in the USA, and to be fair, the scientists involved called a voluntary moratorium on cloning in 2001, to give the FDA time to complete its deliberations in regard to food safety. But it isn’t clear how the FDA made use of that time period to arrive at their conclusion that cloned meat and milk is safe for human consumption.

Safe or not, it’s hard to imagine how the risks can be justified. Improved agricultural productivity doesn’t provide the justification, since US farmers have the capacity and capability to feed a good part of the world, and often have to be given incentives to scale back their production of certain commodities.

Alternatively, if the need to increase farm incomes is the motivation, I have a hard time swallowing that. Like the rest of the US working population, some farmers are very wealthy, some make a very good living, others get by, and some don’t make it. That’s the way it is, and putting the rest of the population at risk to make more money is not acceptable.

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