Cloning And Genetic Engineering In The Food

Animal Industry Essay, Research Paper

INTRODUCTION

When the Roslin Institute’s first sheep cloning work was announced in March 1996 the papers were full of speculation about its long-term implications. Because of this discovery, the media’s attention has focused mainly on discussion of the possibility, of cloning humans. In doing so, it has missed the much more immediate impact of this work on how we use animals. It’s not certain this would really lead to flocks of cloned lambs in the fields of rural America, or clinically reproducible cuts of meat on the supermarket shelves. But it does force us to ask questions about the way we are using animals with new technology, and the kinds of assumptions we make. To create Dolly (the cloned sheep), Scottish researchers simply took an unfertilized sheep egg and removed its genetic material. They then placed the empty egg in a dish with a cell from an adult sheep’s udder, which contained a full complement of the adult sheep’s genes. Finally the scientists applied an electric spark, which caused the two cells to fuse and begin dividing. The embryo was then transplanted into the womb of a surrogate mother to grow. The original aim of Dr Wilmut’s nuclear transfer work was to find better ways to make genetic modifications in animals, by growing live animals from cell culture. It is very possible that cloning was only a side effect of the investigation and not what was supposed to be the center of this research project. But the ability to clone opens up a range of questions of its own. We can already do it to a limited degree by splitting embryos, without ethical concerns. It has been practiced only to a very limited extent, mostly in cattle. At the moment there is only one set of results in one breed of sheep, and rather little is understood of how it has happened. Different farm animal species differ quite markedly in embryological interventions like artificial insemination and embryo transfer. So it remains to be seen whether this same method would work in any other animal, and without adverse effects. But assuming it could be applied more widely, what are the potential applications in animals. PPL (PPL Thearaputics Ltd, 1997) gives the example that it might be used, say, to clone 5-10 animals from a single genetically modified

animal. These would be bred naturally, thus becoming the “founders” of a set of lines of genetically modified animals from whose milk they would extract and purify the relevant protein.

But these medical applications tend to be small-scale affairs. The amount of animals and the amount of milk is very small compared with conventional meat or bulk milk production. Imagine you are a commercial breeder of cows or hogs, and over many generations you have bred some fine and valuable animals with highly desirable characteristics. One possible application of Roslin’s work could be to clone such animals from the cells of one of them, and sell the cloned animals to “finishers” – those farmers who simply feed up the animals for slaughter, rather than breed them to produce more stock. Again, the breeder might want to clone a series of fast growing, highly productive animals in a breeding program, in order to test how the same “genotype” responded to different environmental changes.

ANALYSIS

Would cloning narrow genetic diversity too far. Before we look at the ethics, there are some practical problems to consider. One of the fundamental rules of selective breeding is that you must maintain a high enough level of genetic variation. The more you narrow down the genetic “pool” to a limited number, the more you run two risks. One is that you could also have accidentally selected for some other not-so-desirable characteristic along with the one you wanted. (Klug, 1996) The selected lines could have certain disadvantages in some other genetic trait. These would be evened out in normal genetic diversity of selective breeding, but if animals were cloned, there would be no selection. The second risk is that a limited genetic pool is also much more vulnerable to having all its lines wiped by some virus or infection, as happened with the potato famine of Ireland, many years ago. (Klug, 1996) Supposedly, embryo freezing and gene banks could offset this, but the fact that this type of “gene storage” would need to be used indicates that we would be doing something wrong. (Morisson, 1996) Thus, I think that even animal production has its own limits on how far cloning would be worthwhile, as the Roslin Institute pointed out (Campbell, 1996).

Is cloning contrary to something fundamental about life. For the Christian, the world around us is God’s creation, filled with variety. Throughout the Bible, in commandments and stories, the overall theme is of diverse creation. I begin to wonder if we are not simply reducing ourselves to genetic blueprints. “The very fact that selective breeding has its limits reflects something about the need for natural diversity of things” (Basker, 1994). I do believe that cloning is acceptable in limited research, where the main intention was not the clone but rather growing an animal, where natural methods would not work. What would be unacceptable would be its use in routine production, where natural methods could be used but have been side-stepped on the bases of economics or convenience. What would be ethically wrong with this, you might ask, since we already in