Is it safe to eat dairy or beef from a cloned cow?

NO

Food Standards Agency (FSA) research found that most British people think that cloning animals is interfering with nature, and that the only winners would be organisations like biotech companies and food retailers, with no benefit to consumers. The public are worried about the animal welfare horrors that cloning involves, and concerned about the safety of food from cloned animals. Yet FSA boss Tim Smith says he has ‘no concerns’. Who is right?

Cloning and GM crops takes farming in a direction which the public rightly distrust. The only major international scientific assessment of the future of agriculture, in the face of climate change and increased population, supports the public.

Some 400 international scientists concluded that in future we must farm in ways which increase diversity of cropping to improve food security, and rely less on artificial fertilisers (made from fossil fuels), as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive. The development of cloned animals dramatically narrows the genetic base on which our food production relies, just when we need to widen it. Cloned dairy and beef cattle are designed for maximum meat and milk output, but that requires massive inputs of grain and soya. Cattle should eat grass we can’t eat, not grain we can. Soya increasingly comes from cleared rainforests.

This is the wrong direction not just for farming, but for the planet. For human health, no evidence of danger is not the same as safe. There’s been no long term safety testing of meat or milk from cloned cattle – if business interests get their way, there never will be. It is a scandal that we’re even considering cloning animals, given that we already know that terrible suffering it imposes on surrogate mothers and the many cloned offspring where things go wrong. On this, the public are right.

Peter Melchett,
Policy Director, Soil Association



YES

In order to make their assessment of the safety of food from cloned animals the U.S. regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration, completed a detailed analysis of all of the cloned animals born in the USA before the time of their study in 2007.

Detailed independent analyses were made of the composition of milk and meat from cloned animals and their offspring. As a measure of the basic metabolism of the animals they also monitored blood composition. These measurements in clones were compared with measurement from genetically very similar animals raised on the same farms. They also took note of all of the relevant information available from other countries.

After extensive analyses, they concluded that they could find no difference between healthy cloned animals and genetically similar animals produced by normal reproduction. (see http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/AnimalCloning/ucm055513.htm for a summary).

This evidence, combined with our understanding about the basic biology of cloning, would support the conclusion that food from clones or their offspring is safe to eat. By contrast, there is a clear reason to be concerned about the use of cloning in animal breeding.

The production of cloned animals with the present procedures is associated with a greater than normal death of foetuses during pregnancy, difficulties at birth and death of animals after birth. The precise frequency and nature of these disturbing effects varies from one species to another and may vary with the cloning procedure that is used.

The significance of these abnormalities is viewed differently in the USA and Europe. In this country and the rest of Europe it is judged that the benefits in animal breeding that are gained by the use of cloning do not justify the risk of causing suffering to the animals. By contrast, in the USA cloning in agriculture is accepted. Hence embryos from cloned animals, such as those that were used in the present case, are available for import into the UK.

Thus, while the scientific evidence seems to confirm that cloned meat and milk are safe, large-scale agricultural cloning raises troubling ethical concerns about animal welfare.


Professor Sir Ian Wilmut,
the creator of 'Dolly the sheep'