000502 Cloned Cattle to Beef Up Australian Herds

Sydney, Australia - Hundreds of identical superbulls could soon be set loose to breed in the vast Australian outback thanks to a frisky young calf called Suzi.

Four-week-old Suzi is Australia's first proper cloned calf, reproduced from developed cells much as Dolly the sheep was born in Scotland three years ago. Scientists announcing her birth this week said the cloning technology could transform one of the world's biggest beef and dairy industries.

“Technology is now starting to reach levels of efficiency where we're within five years of commercial reality,” Suzi's creator, Dr Ian Lewis, told Reuters. “In five years time there would be hundreds, up to thousands of cloned animals, I would think. It's a big step forward for Australian agriculture.”

Suzi was produced from fetus cells that were removed, grown in the laboratory and cloned as in the Dolly procedure, which involved electrical impulses fusing cultured cells with unfertilized eggs. The resulting embryo was then transferred into a surrogate mother cow, which carried the pregnancy.

Lewis said herds of cloned Australian dairy cattle could be produced in the same way. For beef cattle, which roam the remote Australian outback, the method is seen as involving the production of multiple copies of the very best breeding bulls to be let loose among the herds.

Consumers May Beef

As a result, said Lewis, Australia could produce the world's first cloned dairy and beef cattle herds. “We've certainly got a chance of being up there as one of the first. We can do agricultural things cheaper because of the nature of our agriculture.”

This would give Australian dairy and beef cattle producers an edge over competitors such as Argentina, he said. But the big cattle industry, with more than 25 million animals, is wary of a consumer backlash against gene engineering.

“It's something we'd have to assess. Overlaying the commerce will be legislative and community considerations,” said Justin Toohey, executive director of the Cattle Council of Australia.

“Consumers are going to be pretty skeptical about the safety and appropriateness of (food products from cloned cattle),” said Australian Consumers Association spokesman Norm Crothers.

Lewis, who works for Melbourne company Genetics Australia, which is a leader in artificial insemination, does not believe consumer resistance will stop development of a cloned cattle industry in Australia but he concedes it could do so.

“Since man domesticated animals they have been trying to breed better animals. Cloning is part of the process of spreading better genes,” he said.

Next Comes Milk With Drugs

Suzi, a black-and-white Holstein, was produced by joint research between the Monash University Institute of Reproduction and Development, Genetics Australia, the Victoria state Institute of Animal Science and the Dairy Research and Development Corp.

The immediate aim is to produce higher protein milk from cloned cows, but the Monash group also plans to produce milk with pharmaceutical and special nutritional uses. Cloned animals in the United States are already being produced that secrete pharmaceuticals in their milk.

“The long-term implications for improving human health are enormous,” Professor Alan Trounson, deputy director of the Monash Institute, said.

Australia produced cattle cloned from embryonic cells in 1997, but Suzi is the first calf cloned in the fully accepted sense from a developed cell.

Cattle-cloning from developed cells has already been performed in Japan, the United States, Italy, France and New Zealand, but only recently and in small numbers.

Suzi, described as “healthy and frisky” by her proud creators, is expected to be joined in a few weeks by a genetically identical twin sister made from the same cell line.

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