Dot and Ditto, 2 1/2-year-old Holsteins living quietly at UC Davis, are among California's longest-living cloned dairy cows -- symbols of both dramatic scientific advances and their accompanying thorny ethical questions.
Dot and Ditto, 2 1/2-year-old Holsteins living quietly at UC Davis, are among California's longest-living cloned dairy cows -- symbols of both dramatic scientific advances and their accompanying thorny ethical questions.
Although the federal government appears poised to declare meat and milk from cloned cattle safe for human consumption, it's likely Dot and Ditto could remain an unusual oddity in the state.
California's beef and dairy industries are worth more than $5.6 billion in revenue annually, but many industry officials say the high costs and low success rates of cloned cows offer few advantages.
"If we learned a particular part (of their milk) prevents colon cancer, we'd be interested," says Joseph O'Donnell, executive director of the Davis-based California Dairy Research Foundation.
The foundation contributed to early calf cloning research at the University of California, Davis, in hopes of producing more nutritional milk from California's 1.7 million dairy cows. But it has no immediate plans for more until it better reads consumer reaction.
!ADVERTISEMENT!
Indeed, some UC Davis researchers suggest the real business implications for cloned animals may not be in food, but in long-term medical research for human health.
Organic milk advocates also question the need for milk from clones.
"I don't think this sounds like a very good thing for farmers," said Theresa Marquez, chief marketing officer of Organic Valley Family Farms, a Wisconsin-based co-op with 750 members. "I have to ask the question: 'Do we really need this?' Are we doing this to say we can do it or what?"
Cloning involves removing all the genetic material from an egg and replacing it with a new genetic code from a desirable parent animal. Offspring are near-identical copies of the parent. Since a Scottish institute successfully cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists have cloned calves, pigs, buffalo, cats, dogs and other animals.
California cloned its first calves in 2001 at UC Davis and at California State University, Chico. There was talk among cloning advocates of supercows producing 45,000 pounds of milk a year and of superior cloned marbled steaks.
But ranchers say cloning -- at prices of $10,000 and up per calf -- is too expensive compared to effective breeding methods, such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer and in-vitro fertilization.
"We are still quite a ways off from any real-world application of these cloning technologies," says Benjamin Higgins, executive vice president of the Sacramento-based California Cattlemen's Association.
California, for all its vaunted status as a hotbed for innovators, has not proved itself a major player in the difficult science of cloning farm animals, say state university and industry officials.
California likely has a handful of cloned cows. Since 2001, two researchers at UC Davis and CSU Chico -- Cindy Batchelder and Cindy Daley -- have overseen 11 births of cloned calves. The calves, believed to be the sum total of the cloned calves born in California since the first were born in Japan in 1998, have met the same high death rates that plague the industry elsewhere.
Only Dot, Ditto and a 4-year-old Charolais calf, Martie, are still alive.
Should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration give its long-awaited nod of confidence to the safety of cloned animal meat and milk, Batchelder and Daley expect no surge of research funding afterward.
Nor is calf cloning likely to become a higher priority at UC Davis if the FDA vouches for its safety, says Neal Van Alfen, dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
"We certainly are doing research in that area, but as far as being a high priority and being first among many others, it's not like that," he says.
Cow cloning research in the United States has been dominated by a handful of private companies in Texas, Kansas and Iowa, and by a few public institutions, such as the University of Connecticut, Texas A&M, University of Georgia and University of Wisconsin.
No firm numbers exist of the number of cloned cows alive nationally, but estimates put them in the hundreds.
In California, Batchelder has made UCD the premier center of cloning research, cloning eight calves for her doctoral thesis. Her lab work created 1,800 cloned embryos and implanted 239 of them in surrogate mothers. They produced 63 pregnancies. All but eight pregnancies ended in miscarriage.
Five of the eight cloned offspring died within three days to two months of birth. Another lived two years and died unexpectedly.
Dot and Ditto survived.
At CSU Chico, two of the three clones born in 2001 died within 15 days.
"This is where embryo transfer was 30 to 40 years ago," says CSUC animal science professor Daley.
"We need to do more to enhance efficiency."
"We need to understand why we're having such high rates of fetal loss and is there a way to reduce that?" adds Batchelder. "You can't handle them like a normal calf. They have their own set of unique characteristics when they're born. We need to understand how to best manage them and how to improve their chance for survival."
Batchelder claims frustration that "there's not a lot of funding available to do that kind of work."
Researchers also need to dream up bigger questions now that cloning has proved itself, she says. "Once you get past 'it's so cool that we can do this," we need to ask how it's really beneficial for mankind."
Scientists, Batchelder says, don't yet know the answers for how cloned animals might contribute to breakthrough developments in human medicine.
Agricultural industry officials, meanwhile, still hold out hope for milk with special nutrients that fight particular diseases or contribute to weight loss.
Small 50-cow herds could create niche milk products containing high levels of protein or anti-carcinogens. Cloning could produce a type of cow that contributes fewer of the gases said to contribute to smog in California.
Cloning would make it easier to create large numbers of certain specimens more precisely.
"The cow you could breed would have genetic characteristics to boost cheese production, actually get more milk of the specific quality that you need for different uses, butterfat or nonfat dry milk solids," says Michael Marsh, executive director of Modesto-based United Western Dairymen, a trade group for milk producers.
"The potential probably exists to feed more people with fewer animals," he says.
UC Davis animal science professor Gary Anderson, who supervised Batchelder's cloning work, says there's little doubt the FDA will soon declare cloned food safe.
"Many of us are surprised, and many disappointed, that the ruling hasn't already come forward," he says, noting there is "no biological justification" to expect health problems from clones in the food chain.
But milk and meat producers remain wary of funding cloning research until they can believe they can sell it, he says.
"You've got all these balls in the air until the consumer is receptive to the technology," says O'Donnell of the dairy research foundation.
To see more of The Sacramento Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sacbee.com.
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
