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Cloned BullThe bum rap on cloned food.

By William Saletan
Updated Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007, at 1:24 AM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have puzzled over that question for at least 2,000 years. In the eternal cycle of natural reproduction, they saw no answer. But the cycle turns out not to be eternal. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively approved the use of cloned animals to make food. Natural reproduction is giving way to artificial reproduction. And with the new era comes a new question: Which came first, the steer or the steak?

Case in point: Elvis. He's a 19-month-old Angus calf. You can view him on the Web site of ViaGen, a cloning company. In a recent slide presentation from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the caption below his photo reads, "Elvis was cloned from a side of Prime Yield Grade 1 beef."

No joke: The calf came from the beef. And Elvis is no freak show. He's a business plan. "Some of your animals have more income potential than others," ViaGen reminds farmers. "Our services help you identify, preserve, and reproduce the genetics of those animals." If a steer is already dead, no problem. In fact, the best way to judge its steakworthiness is to cut it open and hang it on a hook. That's what happened to the original incarnation of Elvis. "Biopsy samples should be collected from your animal as soon as possible," ViaGen advises. If you like that side of beef and want another just like it, we can grow it for you.

A steer from a steak from a steer. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has re-entered the building.

The political fight over animal cloning is just beginning. It's a lot like the fight over human cloning, except that the roles are reversed. Right-wing groups and Republican senators fanned fear and ignorance about human cloning; left-wing groups and Democratic senators are fanning fear and ignorance about animal cloning. Moderates on both sides get trampled. So do principles. The same liberals who demand stem-cell research using human embryos and who blasted the FDA for delaying approval of emergency contraception now accuse the FDA of recklessly approving cloned food.

The left-wingers want the FDA, Congress, and President Bush to keep clones off the market. Their case, laid out in a petition to the FDA, is a mess of anecdotes, obsolete data, speculation, and ideology. Like right-wingers in the human cloning debate, they expect the government to honor even their "religious" objections. But their strongest argument is that cloned food is unsafe, since cloning, unlike fertilization, often fails to reprogram genes for normal embryonic development.

It's a sensible worry, but the facts don't bear it out. The FDA's review, based on exhaustive and fully disclosed analysis of scientific journal articles, health records, blood samples, and meat and milk composition, found no "food consumption risks or subtle hazards in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats." The agency concluded that "food from the sexually reproduced offspring of clones is as safe as food that we eat every day."

Why don't reprogramming errors taint your food? Because if they're serious, they kill the animal before it's old enough to be milked or eaten, or they cause defects that make the animal flunk federal food safety inspections. They don't carry over to a clone's offspring, since fertilization, like rebooting, cleans up programming errors. And the offspring are where the milk and meat will come from. ViaGen charges $15,000 to clone a steer. You don't butcher a $15,000 clone. You use it for breeding.

Critics say cloning often causes health problems for cloned animals and their surrogate mothers. That's true, but less so in some species, and the rate of complications is falling as the technology improves. Opponents of cloning also suggest we should ban it because it's unethical "to alter the essential nature of animals." Essential nature? We've been breeding animals for 15,000 years. We've been artificially inseminating them for nearly 700 years. Most apples, bananas, grapes, peaches, and potatoes are clones, and a lot of meat sold today was produced through in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, or embryo splitting.

The silliest rap on cloning is that it offers "no consumer benefits." That's insane. Cloning means total genome control. It bypasses the uncertainties of breeding. It also improves breeding, since five clones of your best bull or cow produce five times as much sperm or eggs. Theoretically, you can target any trait for cloning: more muscle, less fat, more omega-3 acids. You can even help the environment by cloning animals that eat grass instead of grain.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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