Preparing cloning for market

Ranchers are getting set, but are consumers ready?

ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. -- Nestled in the picturesque countryside, two subzero coolers on a farm owned by Cyagra Inc. keep a hope of livestock cloning alive. The tanks hold genetic material for a virtual Noah's ark of cattle species as their optimistic owners wait for consumers to embrace the idea of consuming meat and milk from the offspring of clones.

The Food and Drug Administration has already said it considers meat and milk from most cloned animals and their offspring safe, but the agency is months from allowing those products to be sold.

Clones are produced by using a snippet of genetic material from an animal to create an embryo that develops in a surrogate mother's womb. The clones allow breeders to produce genetically identical copies of prized animals, more quickly reproducing valuable traits -- such as better health, leaner meat, and higher butterfat content in milk.

While it is legal to clone domestic livestock, since 2001 the FDA has asked producers to refrain from selling milk or meat from such animals while it studies the food-safety question.

Now that a final answer appears near, people who raise such animals are fine-tuning business plans.

Like anyone trying to time the market, they're peppering Cyagra, a one-stop shop for ranchers seeking cattle clones, with questions like the one recently fielded by Steve Mower , a company spokesman.

"If I do this now, by the time I have progeny on the ground is the FDA thing going to be over with?" the caller asked.

If their timing is right, the ranchers' cloned calves will be a few months old and headed to the farm just as the FDA acts.

But judging from public comments filed with the FDA, consumers aren't quite ready for cloned products on grocery shelves.

"I cannot agree with any form of cloning," Deborah Cantara wrote to the agency, one of nearly 3,000 comments filed so far . "I would rather pay more for natural processed food [than] have what was cooked up in some science lab," Cantara wrote.

Representative Rosa L. DeLauro said she will seek corroboration of the FDA's safety finding by independent scientists in preparation for a push to label such products. "I would love to tell you that we should just take [the FDA's] word for it, but I'm not willing to say that," said DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and chairwoman of the House Appropriations Agriculture subcommittee .

The FDA says there is no scientific reason for consumers to fear eating cloned animals. But the agency and a cloning pioneer add that consumers are unlikely to ever face that choice -- clones are too valuable to grind into hamburger, they say.

Aside from the cost, clones tend to weigh a lot at birth and age quickly once they reach adulthood. But those problems don't apply to their offspring, which not only makes them attractive, but also marketable.

"The real promise of cloning is not to eat cloned cows. The promise is to make genetically altered animals . . . and breed them," said Rudolf Jaenisch , a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research . "The offspring is always normal."

Cyagra, which got its start in Worcester , expects its yearly clone production could leap from 60 to 600 with full FDA approval, a sizeable increase but a tiny sliver of the market.

Some ranchers now pay Cyagra $17,000 for a single cloned calf, and a Texas rancher last month paid tens of thousands of dollars for nine clones of an elite longhorn cow. Why? Simple math: People who sell the offspring of prized breeds already pocket far more than that. For instance, three partners last year bid $100,000 for the daughter of a famed Triple Twist longhorn, a vanishing breed. They now are working with ViaGen Inc., a Texas firm that, like Cyagra, produces genetically identical twins.

"We have acquired some of the best genetics in the longhorn," said Barbara Marquess , of Marquess Arrow Ranch , which is working with ViaGen to clone the $100,000 cow. Marquess said she and her partners have no intention of turning the cloned animals into food. "We're trying to save that genetics," she said.

In the northeast corner of Iowa , rancher Frank Regan projects potential revenue from the sale of elite offspring could far exceed his cloning investment. In particular, he is counting on livestock descended from a cow nicknamed Dellia .

Dellia produced high-protein milk used for making cheese , and gave birth to equally valuable offspring.

Regan sold one of Dellia's granddaughters as a calf for $6,000 . The new owners made a quarter million dollars selling that cow's offspring. Regan figures he can eventually get $40,000 to $50,000 for offspring of a clone from that same lineage.

"We've got people in Italy who want to buy embryos out of this clone. We won't do it," said Regan, who fears a lawsuit. "We're just going to lay low, and wait until it's approved."

But even with FDA approval, the big "if" is whether the industry can overcome the "yuck" factor.

Arthur Caplan , director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania , figures up to 40 percent of American consumers are "in play," meaning they are willing to try food derived from clones and their offspring. They're such indiscriminate eaters that they consider "a Slim Jim , a Slurpee, and pork rinds" a meal, Caplan said.

But safeguarding that trust will take more than simply adding "cloned" or "clone-free" labels to food products. Caplan said labels would need to be supplemented with educational brochures, websites, and recorded messages.

"You've got to use the label as an opportunity to educate," he said. "It's not 'Just choose.' It's 'Choose, plus learn.' "

Diedtra Henderson can be reached at dhenderson@globe.com.