Prairie State Semen Inc. of Champaign, Ill., is active in breeding "show pigs." In an interview at his farm, the president, Jon Fisher, explained his decision to embrace agricultural cloning.
He's a merchant of boar semen, keeping about 80 valuable animals. Rural students, usually members of 4-H clubs or the Future Farmers of America, order semen from these champion animals at $50 to $150 a vial and use it to inseminate local sows in hopes of creating a winning pig.
Fisher's business took off in 1997 after he paid $43,000 for a top Hampshire boar. The boar died suddenly in 2001, but instead of mourning, Fisher sliced off an ear and sent samples to a Wisconsin cloning company.
He got back six clones, plus another clone from a different animal. He has a batch of clones on order now from ViaGen Inc. of Austin. Clones nowadays can cost as little as $6,000 apiece, far less than it would cost to buy the finest boars. Fisher and other producers have been sending semen from clones to students who breed pigs and cattle for the show circuit. Normal practice, once the shows are over, is to sell those animals for slaughter. Fisher said he has seen pigs he knew to be the offspring of clones sold to slaughterhouses that would have processed them as food. Reporting earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times showed the same thing is happening with show cattle born of clones.
The FDA's Sundlof said, in his written answers, that the agency had heard rumors of clone progeny moving into the food supply, but was "not aware of any proof."
While the number of clones on farms is low now, Fisher predicted that as soon as the FDA opened the door, producers would embrace the technique. "Within 18 to 20 months after that, there will be hundreds of thousands of clones growing" on American farms, he said.
One recent morning, two cloned calves pranced around a field outside Austin. Their progenitors were not living animals, but rather cattle that had already been butchered and hung on a hook in a slaughterhouse. The calves were selected for cloning after receiving high grades for meat quality and yield, judgments that couldn't have been made while the originals were still alive.
Priscilla, born in April, and Elvis, born in June, were created by ViaGen. They're destined to be bred together in an effort to create prime stock. If it works, ViaGen will clone a large population of once-dead cattle, aiming to sell them or their offspring for breeding. It's just one aspect of an ambitious plan to create a commercial cloning market.
While the company has gotten much of its practice cloning show animals, it's eager to expand into the far larger markets of production agriculture. And some big food producers are interested. ViaGen has a contract with Virginia's Smithfield Foods Inc., for example, to explore how cloned pigs could be used in that company's vast pork production operations.
Unlike other small companies that have come and gone in the field of cloning, ViaGen may have the deep pockets needed to turn its commercial vision into reality. The company's principal financial backer is John G. Sperling, founder of several for-profit educational establishments and one of the wealthiest men in the Southwest, with a net worth pegged by Forbes magazine this year at $1.9 billion.
Operating from spotless, light-filled offices in an office park in Austin, ViaGen hired Irina Polejaeva, one of the world's top cloning scientists, and has been pushing the technical limits of the field. In interviews recently, company officers said they had improved the efficiency of cloning and cut the price.
Cloning involves sucking the nucleus out of an egg, injecting a new nucleus from an adult cell and implanting the resulting embryo into a surrogate mother animal. Clones appear to be nearly identical genetic copies of the adult progenitor.
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