By Sharon Oosthoek

link to New Scientist

One hundred years ago in a lab at Harvard University, a young zoology student was busily overseeing the breeding of pair after pair of brother and sister mice. The “Mouse Man”, as he was known on campus, was trying to create the first inbred lab animal – a strain of mouse whose genes would be stable and identical. Such a mouse would allow biologists to reliably replicate their experiments for the first time. His professor said it couldn’t be done, but the Mouse Man proved him wrong. We are all indebted to those inbred mice and their descendants, which have helped researchers develop treatments for a wide range of human diseases.

IT BEGAN with one small mouse and a simple, if tedious, instruction. Clarence Cook Little was a Harvard undergraduate when his zoology professor thrust a live mouse across the lab bench and told him to learn everything he could about it. Little went one better.

Little, the great-grandson of America’s most famous patriot, the Revolutionary Paul Revere, would remain a champion of the laboratory mouse all his life. He was particularly interested in cancer and was convinced that the key to understanding the disease lay in the study of genetics and that the best way to study genetics was by using inbred mice.

In 1929, the student who had once sketched mice in the margins of his zoology notes founded the Jackson Laboratory, a centre for research into mouse genetics, in Bar Harbor, Maine. But even he could not have foreseen the enormous power of inbred strains, says Steve Brown, director of the Mammalian Genetics Unit at MRC Harwell in Oxfordshire, UK.

“The concept of creating inbred strains is fundamental to genetic studies,” says Brown.

Today, Little’s original lab mouse has been joined by thousands of strains. About 25 million mice are used in labs around the world each year, making it the most common animal research model. Tiny Mus musculus has helped clarify the nature of a raft of human illnesses, from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease and obesity.

Crucially, the lab mouse has been a stand-in for humans, testing treatments which have led to the development of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis, leukaemia and osteoporosis to name but a few.

While Little is indisputably the man behind modern lab mice, he was not the first to experiment with them. Researchers of yore recognised that mice share many physiological systems with humans. They are also easy to feed and house, have a three-week gestation, produce large litters and reach maturity in just 10 weeks.

They have one other big advantage, says Karen Rader, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, who has written the definitive book on lab mice, Making Mice. “The mouse is enough like us that results can apply to us, but not so much like us that people get upset about conducting experiments on them.”

In fact, the lab mouse might have got off to a much earlier start if Gregor Mendel – the father of genetics – hadn’t been thwarted by his bishop. In the 1850s, Mendel began his investigation of inheritance by studying coat-colour traits in mice. But he was a monk and his bishop decreed that a monastery was no place to experiment with copulating mice. Mendel switched to a study of peas.

Nor were biologists the only people to experiment with mice. Breeders of fancy mice had tinkered with mouse genes for centuries. Seventeenth-century illustrations show how people in Japan bred and collected unique strains, creating albinos and mice with spotted coats.

They also bred “waltzing mice” that seemed to dance, a peculiarity later discovered to be the result of an inner-ear defect.

By the 20th century, such breeders had established clubs and exhibited their prize specimens at mouse shows. As a student, Little often judged these shows at the behest of his professor William Castle, who saw it as way to scout for genetic mutants of interest to science. It was this link to mouse fanciers that ultimately led to Little’s lab mouse.

More specifically, it led to one mouse fancier, retired schoolteacher Abbie Lathrop. After a failed attempt at raising poultry, Lathrop hoped to make a living from the fancy mouse craze and began to breed popular strains on her farm in Granby, Massachusetts. She soon attracted scientific customers. “I know it sounds bizarre, in terms of genetics, that people would seek out this mouse breeder on a farm in Granby,” says Rader. “But she always had the best mice. She was a local celebrity.”

Lathrop was also a scientist in her own right. When she noticed some of her mice suffered from skin lesions, she sent samples to her scientific clients, including Leo Loeb, a pathologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He confirmed Lathrop’s suspicions that the lesions were cancerous and the pair spent the next five years publishing joint research on tumour transmission in mice.

Little, meanwhile, had recognised the potential in Lathrop’s stock. Lathrop had bred many generations of brother and sister mice to create unique strains, and such relative genetic similarity would make an excellent starting point for his work. Little began his project largely because he needed to do some independent research to qualify for Harvard’s doctoral programme, but he was also eager to prove one of Castle’s hypotheses wrong, says Rader.

Castle believed interbreeding could never create a stable and pure genetic strain. He also doubted that the mice would remain fertile after generations of inbreeding.

Indeed, Little soon found he had taken on something of a challenge. As fancy mouse breeders had already discovered, few progeny of brother-sister matings survive. Litters are small and the young sometimes sterile. But Little eventually found a strain that flourished.

He named it dilute brown non-agouti (DBA) – dilute because it had less pigment than its wild cousins, brown as opposed to the more common black, and non-agouti because it didn’t have the grizzled-looking fur of other mice.

By 1947, scientists understood the value of inbred mice. That year, the Jackson Laboratory was destroyed in a fire that consumed the town of Bar Harbor, killing 14 people and 90,000 mice. The following day, research institutes and individual geneticists who had acquired mice from the lab began sending back breeding pairs so that Little could re-establish his colonies, says Rader.

Little claimed to have received just one angry letter from an anti-vivisectionist women’s club, which suggested it might have been better if he and his scientists had burned instead of the mice. Anti-vivisectionists of the time were largely concerned with cats and dogs. The public’s sympathy rarely extended to rodents, which were regarded as vermin and carriers of disease.

The return of the mice paved the way for two important discoveries. George Snell’s studies of tumour transplantation and rejection in mice in the late 1940s laid the foundation for modern immunology. Without it, human organ transplants would be impossible. Another of the rebuilt lab’s scientists, Leroy Stevens, also made great strides with his own studies of tumour transplantation, which eventually led to the discovery of embryonic stem cells.

The decoding of the mouse genome in 2002 opened up still greater possibilities. We now know that 99 per cent of human genes have a comparable version in mice and many of them are located in the same place on the chromosome. That means scientists can work out the role of any human gene by creating mice lacking the equivalent gene. When the mice exhibit a defect, scientists can pinpoint the gene’s function and test treatments.

“Little wouldn’t have dreamed about this, but he would have been thrilled,” says Rader. Indeed, on his 80th birthday in 1968, Little drew a cartoon of a lab mouse on a pedestal. The drawing shows him looking up at the mouse which says: “You’re not so damn smart. You’ve had 80 years. Look what my family has done in 39 years.”

By Sharon Oosthoek

link to New Scientist

Nature 2.0

Preserving the status quo is no longer an option for conservationists, says Sharon Oosthoek

FOR nearly a decade the forests of British Columbia have been ravaged by an infestation of mountain pine beetles. In March, government experts announced that the pest would soon run out of food. Now comes the hard part – restoring the devastated ecosystem without allowing the beetle to make a comeback. To add to the problem, these forests have been fundamentally altered in recent years by warmer winters, drier summers and polices to prevent fires. Returning them to their former state is not an option – instead conservationists must find a way to create forests that can cope with change.

Their challenge is far from unique. More and more these days, conservationists are struggling like harried triage doctors to protect plants and animals in the face of rapid human-induced changes. This has led some to question the very essence of what they do. Conservation is, by definition, about maintaining the status quo, yet this may no longer be possible, given that pollution, climate change, exotic species invasions, extinctions and land fragmentation are altering almost every ecosystem on the planet. Earlier this year, ecologist Timothy Seastedt from the University of Colorado and colleagues urged conservationists to reassess their role. “The point is not to think outside the box, but to recognise that the box itself has moved, and in the 21st century, will continue to move increasingly rapidly,” they wrote (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol 6).

Seastedt is just one voice in a growing chorus of scientists who are recommending a radical shift in thinking about the role of conservation. Rather than trying to preserve nature in aspic, they say we should work with change. We need to focus on optimising genetic and species diversity with an eye towards helping plants and animals adapt, rather than trying to return ecosystems to their historic or natural state. It may sound like common sense, but some of the practical implications are dramatic. For a start, conservationists should not be afraid to “reassemble” damaged ecosystems to improve them, say some scientists. That may mean introducing non-native or genetically selected species. Others argue we must acknowledge that species will cross-breed to adapt and nurture hybrids as a means of protecting biodiversity and preserving the genes of endangered species.

The approach makes many people nervous, to say the least, and there have been charges that it is tantamount to engineering nature. Susan Lieberman, director of the species programme for the World Wildlife Fund in Switzerland, acknowledges some of the environmental damage caused by human activity may be irreversible, but says she cannot accept the idea of reassembling ecosystems. “There’s a certain arrogance to thinking we know what we’re doing,” she says. Seastedt counters that we are already engineering nature through our release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, for example – but with considerably less forethought. He recommends a scientific approach with small-scale experiments, allowing ecologists to compare reassembled ecosystems with controls.

Of course, many conservation groups already factor environmental change into some of their decisions in ways that are not too controversial. The WWF is among those that consider the likely impacts of changing environments before deciding where to direct its efforts. “I look at it as triage,” says Lieberman. “Where are we going to get a return on our investment?”

The Nature Conservancy, a worldwide conservation organisation with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, has gone one step further. “This is so much on TNC’s mind, that we are hiring a scientist to focus on revising our planning tools so we can deal with this pace of change,” says chief scientist Peter Kareiva. TNC has already started to overlay maps of predicted climate change onto sites where they plan to buy up land for conservation to see if those deals will make sense in the future. So far they have, says Kareiva. In addition, the group has started to target specific lands for conservation because it expects them to become more valuable as the climate shifts. For instance, in the south-eastern US, land slightly in from the coast is valuable for its potential. Rising sea levels may turn today’s nondescript inland habitats into tomorrow’s valuable marshes and wetlands, says Kareiva.

On the flip side, predictions of how environments will change have also left ecologists reluctantly accepting that they won’t be able to save some ecosystems. “Some places will be impossible to protect,” says Jim Harris, an ecologist at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, UK. “For example, tropical cloud forests may disappear as they move up mountainsides.” Harris also points to a study that suggests more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will allow trees to invade the grass-dominated ecosystem of Africa’s savanna (Global Change Biology Global Change Biology, vol 6, p 865) If so, restoring the savannas may not be possible either.

It is one thing to consider environmental change when it comes to choosing your conservation project, but working with change rather than against it may prove more controversial. Yet this is precisely the approach now being pioneered by some conservationists – including the British Columbian authorities whose task it is to regenerate forests devoured by pine beetles.

The forest covers more than half of the province – around 60 million hectares. It was originally about 20 per cent lodgepole pine – the most commonly logged species – together with a mixture of spruce, fir, hemlock, cedar and deciduous trees. Pine beetles are part of this ecosystem and cold has historically kept them under control, but in the mid-1990s increasingly warmer winters have allowed the pest to prosper. At the same time, mature stands of lodgepole pine – the beetles’ favourite food – increased significantly due to a deliberate policy to keep a tight control over naturally occurring fires. Beetle number soared and now the provincial government estimates that 76 per cent of the merchantable pine in the central and southern interior could have disappeared by 2015.

Not only are these woodlands a valuable source of timber, they also perform other important functions such as filtering water, which dilutes pollutants and reduces erosion. In addition, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – although a new study reveals that they are likely to change from a minor carbon sink into a major producer of carbon if the beetle onslaught continues (Nature, 23 April 2008, p 987). No wonder the British Columbia authorities consider restoration essential – but how to go about it? Clearly, reintroducing cold winters and setting fires that could threaten homes and businesses are not viable solutions: but selecting trees that can cope with the new conditions might just work.

With this in mind, the government is already planting lodgepole pine seedlings from its own nurseries chosen because their parents were faster-growing, bigger trees. If loggers can harvest these earlier than in the past, there would be no large stands of mature pines so beloved by the beetles. Government scientists are also studying lodgepoles that have somehow managed to survive the onslaught of beetles. These might have just the right mix of genes to resist attack, says the province’s chief forester Jim Snetsinger. Meanwhile, the province is upping the percentage of native spruce in some replanted areas because these are less susceptible to attack by the pine beetle.

In Australia, conservationists are pondering similar issues. In areas where over-clearing and fragmentation has occurred, researchers are considering how they might reassemble ecosystems, while at the same time making them resistant to the kind of drought that has raged across most of the country since 2003. In the south-west, where two-thirds of the vegetation has been cleared for farming, several NGOs are working to create a wildlife corridor by rehabilitating more than 1000 kilometres ecosystems that used to be connected. These range from the woodlands of the drier interior to the tall wet forests in the far south-west corner. “People are thinking of bringing species from drier areas. It is being discussed. There are research programmes underway to see if it’s possible,” says Richard Hobbs, a restoration ecologist with Murdoch University in West Australia. “Some would say it’s not nearly as valuable as the original ecosystem, but it is an ecosystem.”

This kind of large-scale rehabilitation raises the question of how conservationists would know when to try active intervention to improve the prospects of a struggling ecosystem. The spectre of rising salinity in south-western Australian farmlands makes a strong case for intervention – replanting deep rooted vegetation will help retain moisture, so reducing salt levels in the soil. But some experts feel that in other ecosystems a more traditional approach to conservation is preferable. “The best way to maintain diversity in the face of change is by protecting places that have all the working parts, that will be more resilient to change and allow species to move across the landscape,” says Jeff Wells, scientific advisor to the Pew Charitable Trust’s International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

The northern boreal forest is a case in point. Consisting of 25 million square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the Earth’s surface, it stretches from Alaska and northern Canada to Norway, Sweden and Finland, into Russia and parts of China, Korea and Japan. Wells and others argue that because this forest is relatively unfragmented, it may become a refuge for climate-stressed species – at least those that can move. Kept intact, it will also continue to act as a massive carbon sink that could slow down the rate of climate change. However, just 10 per cent of the boreal forest is protected and the rest is under growing pressure from developers. What’s needed here, according to Wells, is not ecosystem engineering but governments moving swiftly to protect species diversity.

Although Wells favours traditional conservation methods, he admits that the future will bring novel challenges. “Climate change is going to cause new combinations of species and communities that haven’t been seen in recent human history,” he says. “The question is how to develop conservation with the recognition that things are changing more rapidly than in the past.”

At least conservationists can all agree on one thing – the need to preserve the diversity of both species and genes. Not all species will survive higher temperatures or more precipitation but, when it comes to maintaining functional ecosystems, diversity provides an insurance policy. “It’s like a diversified stock portfolio. The more variety you have, the more likely you’ll be able to withstand a major shift in the environment,” says Brad White, a wildlife geneticist at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. Yet, even though this would seem uncontroversial the implications are dividing conservationists, as White’s research makes clear.

A decade ago, he was the first to use genetic testing to show that all eastern wolves in Ontario’s 7630-square-kilometre Algonquin Park have some coyote DNA. Today, the wolves are designated as “of special concern” because the 2000 or so individuals left in Canada could easily become endangered. A federal management plan for eastern wolves is in the works, and should be ready later this year. The trouble is that the outcome will partly depend on whether officials consider that the hybrids are as worthy of protection as a pure-bred species. White, for one, is in no doubt that they are. He points out that most North American wolves carry some coyote DNA and argues that hybrids are a natural consequence of environmental change. Instead of trying to prevent cross-breeding between endangered and non-endangered species we should allow them to evolve along with the changing habitats to which they are better suited, he says.

Genetic mixing between eastern wolves and coyotes began more than a century ago after settlers cut down forests to plant crops. Coyotes, who like open spaces, arrived in traditional wolf territory just as wolf populations were plummeting due to gun-toting settlers and deforestation. With so few of their own kind left to mate with, eastern wolves turned to the next best thing – coyotes.

More recent human-induced change is sure to create new hybrids too, as species change their habits in attempts to adapt. Some wildlife experts, for example, suggest that warmer temperatures in northern Canada could be prompting grizzlies to spend less time hibernating and more time roaming outside their traditional range, so coming into contact with polar bears more often. In April 2006, an American sports hunter shot the first documented cross of a polar bear and grizzly in the Northwest Territories. Bear hybrids are not nearly as common as wolf/coyote crosses, nevertheless, this single “grizzlar” has provoked discussion among members of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) who have to come up with a recommendation for dealing with hybrids. The group – made up of experts from universities, NGOs and government – expects to send its report to the federal government later this year. Marco Festa-Bianchet, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, who heads the group, describes the task as “godawfully complicated”. Hobbs agrees, but adds: “to say you shouldn’t think about it is like putting your head in the sand.”

Accepting hybrids as an inevitable consequence of ecosystem change and worthy of protection would be a new departure for conservationists. Nevertheless, Festa-Bianchet is wary of redefining conservation. The problem with focusing on adaptation rather than keeping things the way they are is that it becomes a “free-for-all”, he says. “It just becomes an excuse not to act.” Wells agrees. “People could say, ‘We have a lot of invasive species and things are missing from ecosystems, so let’s not worry about it.’ It could be translated into corporate policies that impact the environment with scientific approval.”

Others are more sympathetic to the idea that conservation should work with change rather than try to prevent it. Young Choi, an expert in botanical restoration at Purdue University in Indiana, likens the approach to a prosthetic leg: its purpose is to allow someone to walk rather than to restore the original flesh and bone. “Taking this analogy to our profession, a complete replica of the predisturbance ecosystem is not realistic because much of the damages in our environment are irreversible. All we can do for now is to rehabilitate certain ecological functions,” he writes (Restoration Ecology vol 15, page 351).

This rings true for Seastedt too. He stresses that he is not advocating a revolution in conservation, but instead pointing out that radical change may well be the only viable option given the damage we have already inflicted on the Earth. The status quo is not working, he says.

Sharon Oosthoek is a freelance writer based in Toronto

link to New Scientist

Livestock auctions are not normally the stuff of headlines, but then it’s not every day that cows as unusual as Dundee Paradise and Dundee Paratrooper are going under the hammer. The dairy cows were due to be sold at Easter Compton cattle market near Bristol, UK, last month, but at the last minute their owner withdrew them, reportedly unsettled by negative media coverage and local opposition.

The problem? The cows’ mother was a clone, conceived in a laboratory from a cell taken from the ear of a prize-winning Holstein in Wisconsin. “A cow created in Frankenstein’s lab,” as one local newspaper put it.

This episode was one of the opening skirmishes in what is shaping up to be a battle on par with that over genetically modified food. This time the issue is the production of meat and milk from cloned animals.

On one side are the livestock producers, who stand to gain or lose significant amounts of money depending on the outcome. On the other are consumer groups and animal welfare organisations who say that food from cloned animals is unwanted, unnecessary, possibly dangerous and a catastrophe for animal welfare.

The battle began in earnest in January, when food safety authorities in the US and Europe released reports that effectively opened the door to the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring.

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a 968-page report detailing the results of a six-year investigation. The document stated in no uncertain terms that milk and meat from cloned cattle, pigs, goats and their offspring are just as safe as food from conventionally bred animals. That conclusion was echoed in a draft opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

“It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food [derived from clones] to be unsafe,” Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s chief food safety expert, told reporters. In fact, so confident is the FDA about its decision that it says there is no need even to label food from clones or their offspring.

The controversy over meat and milk from cloned animals can be traced back to the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996 (see “Cloning basics”). Livestock breeders immediately saw the possibilities: unlimited copies of their prize animals. Imagine a bull that consistently sires offspring with top-quality meat or milk. That bull has a limited reproductive lifetime and there’s no guarantee that any of its offspring will inherit its qualities. But clone the bull and you have an exact copy with the same reproductive capabilities.

“Cloning is the only artificial reproductive technology to take an animal with proven performance and replicate it,” says Mark Walton, president of one of the world’s largest livestock cloning companies, ViaGen of Austin, Texas.

It’s unlikely that anyone will clone animals simply for meat, because they are expensive to buy – between $13,000 and $17,500 for a cloned cow, compared to between $1500 and $3000 for a standard cow. Prices, however, are expected to drop as the technology improves, says Barbara Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington DC.

For now, clones will be used as breeding animals to produce high-quality offspring for meat or milk. Still, meat from clones is likely to find its way into the food supply eventually when the clones come to the end of their reproductive lives, says Walton, while milk from clones could be produced as soon as the animals reach sexual maturity.

Proponents of the technique say cloning has many advantages for consumers. “There’s a whole laundry list of benefits,” says Kenneth White of Utah State University in Logan, whose lab produces clones for research. This includes reduced cholesterol in meat and milk, plus higher levels of good fatty acids and antioxidants.

Cloning has other advantages, too. For instance, it would allow relatively easy reproduction of cattle genetically engineered to lack the prion protein that makes them susceptible to mad cow disease (Nature Biotechnology, vol 25, p 132). Cloning would also make it possible to replicate animals engineered to resist illnesses or with a smaller ecological footprint, such as the Enviropig, whose waste contains less phosphorus – a problematic pollutant from pig farming.

Yet those on the other side of the debate are not licking their lips at the prospect of cloned meat and milk, citing their own laundry list of concerns.

One of these is the issue of food safety, which critics say is beset with niggling scientific uncertainties. “There are very few peer-reviewed studies addressed to [clones and] food safety,” says Margaret Mellon, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. She points out that most of the studies that exist were done by livestock companies themselves, who have a vested interest in a positive outcome. “While it’s good to do that, it’s not enough,” she says.

Brussels-based animal welfare group Eurogroup for Animals goes further, pointing out that the FDA report cites studies which suggest some differences in the meat of clones compared to non-clones.

For example, a team led by Xiangzhong Yang of the University of Connecticut in Storrs found that, though the composition of meat from cloned and non-cloned cows was “largely” the same, there were higher levels of fat and certain fatty acids in the meat from clones – though these were within in the normal range for human consumption (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 102, p 6261).

Other research has found differences in the fatty acid and mineral content of milk from clones. Marie Walsh of Utah State University examined the composition of milk from 15 cloned dairy cows and six non-clones, and found some variation in levels of two out of 14 fatty acids – palmitic acid and linolenic acid – as well as in levels of potassium, zinc, strontium and phosphorus. But her overall conclusion was that there were “no obvious differences” (Cloning and Stem Cells, vol 5, p 213).

Eurogroup for Animals doesn’t claim that these findings mean meat or milk from clones or their offspring is unsafe or unfit for human consumption, but it says they suggest more research is needed. For its part, the FDA maintains that none of the differences in nutritional value are a cause for concern. It points out that there are plausible explanations for the differences that are unrelated to the cloning process. In the milk experiment, for example, the cloned cows were housed on different farms and fed different rations.

The FDA position reflects the scientific consensus. The majority of studies find no differences at all between meat and milk from cloned and non-cloned animals, (for example, Cloning and Stem Cells, vol 6, p 157, p 165 and p 172). What’s more, in a recent review paper Yang concludes that “studies on the biochemical properties of food products from cloned and non-cloned animals have thus far not detected any differences” (Nature Biotechnology, vol 25, p 77).

There is also the inconvenient fact that food from cloned animals has been going into the human food chain for many years with no ill effects. In the 1980s and 1990s around 1500 cows and bulls were produced in North America by embryo cell nuclear transfer (ECNT – see “Cloning basics”), almost all of which were eventually slaughtered for meat. According to Yang around 300,000 kilograms of meat and more than 2 million litres of milk from cloned cattle entered the food supply this way.

Despite this, consumer groups including the Center for Food Safety and the Consumers Union, both in the US, are pushing for mandatory labelling of food from cloned animals. The problem is that there is no test capable of identifying meat or milk from cloned animals, nor from their offspring. Retailers would have to rely on voluntary agreements with suppliers, who in turn could only identify clones through a registry.

As it happens, two of the largest livestock cloning companies, ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center, Iowa, created a voluntary registry in December, which will allow slaughterhouses to identify clones by scanning the animal’s ear tag.

Consumers certainly seem in favour of labelling. According to a 2007 poll carried out by the Consumers Union, 89 per cent of Americans want milk and meat from cloned animals labelled. Another poll by the International Food Information Council found that the majority of US consumers were unlikely to buy food derived from cloned animals.

Labelling, however, doesn’t address the most heartfelt criticism of cloned meat and milk – the greater incidence of serious health problems afflicting cloned animals and their surrogate mothers. “We believe the cloning process has the potential to cause unnecessary pain, suffering and distress,” says Nikki Osborne, a developmental biologist with Eurogroup for Animals.

That view is shared by the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), an advisory body to the European Commission. In January it issued a report about the grave implications of cloning for animal welfare. “Considering the current level of suffering and health problems of surrogate dams and animal clones, the EGE has doubts as to whether cloning animals for food supply is ethically justified,” the authors wrote.

It’s hard to say for sure how much more common health problems are among clones and surrogates, says Pere Puigdomenech of the Institute of Molecular Biology in Barcelona, Spain, a member of the EGE. “These kinds of numbers are not well known. It depends very much on breeds.” Even so, everyone involved in the debate freely admits that health issues are more common in clones and their surrogate mothers than in animals that aren’t cloned.

Malformed and dysfunctional

According to the EGE report, fewer than 5 per cent of cloned fetuses live long enough to be born; roughly 20 per cent of newborn clones don’t survive the first 24 hours, and an additional 15 per cent die before weaning.

One of the main problems among cloned cows and sheep is “large offspring syndrome”, a potentially fatal condition characterised by malformed limbs, livers, brains, urinary and genital tracts, and dysfunctional immune systems. The problem is thought to be caused by complications in resetting the genetic instructions during the cloning process.

The EFSA, for example, cites a study which found that the incidence of large offspring syndrome was 13.3 per cent for cloned calves compared to 9.5 per cent for non-cloned calves (Biology of Reproduction, vol 66, p 6). It also points to another study which found that up to 47 per cent of cloned calves derived from skin, ear or liver cells suffer from the syndrome (Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, vol 120, p 231).

Large offspring syndrome is also a problem for surrogate mothers. Cows and ewes carrying cloned offspring are known to have significantly more late miscarriages and difficult births due to large offspring.

Despite this, there appears to be little appetite for regulating cloning on animal welfare grounds. The FDA report describes clones’ health problems as “of concern” but goes on to point out that once the clones mature, they are as healthy as non-clones. Both the EFSA and the FDA note that conventionally produced offspring suffer from the same problems as clones, albeit at a lower rate.

Currently, there aren’t enough clones around to create an uproar about animal welfare. EFSA estimates the total number of clones worldwide in 2007 was fewer than 4000 cattle and 1500 pigs. The US is home to just over 600, including 570 cattle, 20 goats and eight pigs. The EU has roughly 120 cattle clones – 80 in France, 30 in Germany and 10 in Italy – and a smattering of pigs. Japan, China, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand also have cloned animals.

But those numbers could increase substantially if consumers accept meat and milk from clones, or have it foisted on them. If and when that happens, expect a backlash. “There’s no outcry on the part of the consumer for this,” says Mellon. “The question of why we’re doing this is really important. It’s almost because we can.”

Sharon Oosthoek is a writer based in Toronto, Canada

From issue 2653 of New Scientist magazine, 26 April 2008, page 40-43

By Sharon Oosthoek

Pilgrims from England landed on the coast of present-day Massachusetts in 1620 to carve a settlement from a vast and forbidding wilderness. Living cheek by jowl with North America’s wolves, settlers quickly came to fear and loathe these formidable predators, which competed for deer and preyed on livestock. Spurred on by tales of werewolves terrorising the towns and villages of Europe, the Pilgrims and those who came after them set about wiping wolves from the face of the continent. In 1630, their young colony became the first to offer a bounty for every wolf killed. Nearly four centuries later, conservationists are trying to rescue red and eastern wolves from oblivion.

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