US company in Iowa churns out 100 cloned cows a year
Date: 2.7.2014
In the meadow, four white-haired Shorthorn heifers peel off from the others, raising their heads at the same time in the same direction. Unsettling, when you know they are clones.
From their ears dangle yellow tags marked with the same number: 434P. Only the numbers that follow are different: 2, 3, 4 and 6.The tag also bears the name of the company that bred them and is holding them temporarily in a field at its headquarters in Sioux Center, Iowa: Trans Ova Genetics, the only large US company selling cloned cows.
A few miles away, four Trans Ova scientists in white lab jackets bend over high-tech microscopes in the company's laboratories. They are meticulously working with the minute elements of life to create, in Petri dishes, genetically identical copies of existing animals. Each year, the company gives birth, using the cloning technique, to about 100 calves. It also clones pigs and horses.
The specialist in reproductive technologies for livestock began to become interested in the 1990s in cloning, a niche market. The birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996—the first clone of an adult mammal—had seemed at the time like something straight out of science fiction.
And the advanced technology raised ethical concerns because it deviates from normal reproduction that marries genetic material from two parents. Still, the controversial technique has spread and is used in a number of countries, including the United States.
