In January this year a calf named Dundee Paradise was born on a farm near Wolverhampton. She was no ordinary heifer. While her father was a normal bull, her mother was a clone, created from the DNA of a prize dairy cow. Though not a clone herself, she was the first progeny of a clone to be born in the UK.
Dundee Paradise is safe from the slaughterhouse and will never even be milked for human consumption, but she is intended to represent the farmyard of the future. This week scientists predicted that in as little as two years burgers from clone-farmed cattle will be approved in the US. It will take much longer before anything similar is approved in Europe, but researchers believe cloning could become an important tool for animal husbandry.
The aim is not to produce herds of clones for milking or slaughter, but to use the technology to reproduce the highest-quality animals for breeding. Husbandry programmes already rely on a handful of prize specimens, and cloning could multiply them. Their offspring – whose meat has been shown to be no different from that of normal livestock – would then make up beef and dairy herds. Farmers would gain economically, consumers would get leaner meat, and even the animals could benefit: stronger or disease-resistant livestock would suffer less in their stalls.
This prospect provoked strong reactions. The Daily Mail spoke of “Frankenstein farming”, and the Soil Association, the lobby group for organic farmers, described the technology as “profoundly unnatural”. As with genetic modification, the idea of meddling with food has left many people feeling queasy.
Meddling with food, though, is the essence of agriculture.
Advertisement
The entire purpose is to produce food more efficiently than can be done from the wild, and every one of the farmed plants and animals we eat is in some respect a human invention, manipulated by selective breeding. The undeniable fact that cloning is unnatural is no reason to be against it. If only natural food were allowed, even organic farming would be out. We would all have to return to hunting and gathering.
That said, there is still cause for caution. First, there is the animal welfare issue. It is true that the technology may eventually be able to produce breeds that cope better with farmyard conditions, but there are plenty of problems to be conquered. Cloning has improved since it took 277 eggs to produce Dolly, but it is still inefficient. More animals are miscarried or stillborn than in natural or artificially inseminated pregnancies, and birth defects are more common.
Most have subtle genetic abnormalities, even if they appear outwardly normal. Science has yet to prove satisfactorily that cloning is not cruel to the animals it creates.
This matters in its own right, but it is particularly important because there are few signs that the public is ready to embrace clone farming.
Much of the negative reaction to GM food can be attributed to the way that the technology was introduced when it had plenty to offer farmers and biotech companies, but few obvious benefits for the consumers who were being asked to eat it at the end of the day.
Advertisement
The same is true of cloning: there is no evidence that it is yet contributing to products that are healthier or substantially cheaper. Even if there is no safety issue for human beings, the impression is that risks are being taken with animal health for returns that appear speculative and even unnecessary.
Cloning may well have potential for agriculture, but if that is to be realised scientists must tread carefully. It is irrational to fear the unnatural, but the public sometimes has to be convinced that there are sound reasons why such technologies should be adopted, not simply that there are no reasons why they should not be.
Mark Henderson is Science Editor of The Times