Can Food From Cloned Animals Be Called Organic?

The Food and Drug Administration has concluded that milk and meat from cloned animals, such as these cows, should be allowed on the market. That stance has raised a debate over whether food from clones that are raised organically could still carry the organic label. (PRNewsFoto/ViaGen)

Now, like legal scholars poring over a Supreme Court decision, experts on both sides of the issue are examining the language of the department's six-year-old organic rule -- which, for all its detail, they are finding to be a squishy document open to interpretation.

Many clone-opposing readers of the rule are quick to note, for example, its clear statement that genetically engineered organisms cannot be organic. Surely, these opponents conclude, no animal is more engineered than a clone, which is conceived in a laboratory dish and has just one biological parent.

But the biotechnology companies that make cloned farm animals, such as Cyagra of Elizabethtown, Pa., and ViaGen of Austin, have for years been careful to distinguish between clones -- which are genetic replicas of other animals -- and genetically engineered animals, which have had genes added or subtracted to change specific traits.

The FDA has accepted that distinction and has emphasized that its preliminary approval of clones for food does not apply to gene-altered animals, which will have to pass more stringent safety tests.

Opponents also note that the organic rule excludes all animals made by "cell fusion." That technique is often the first step in making a clone, as scientists fuse a skin cell from the animal to be cloned to an egg cell whose DNA has been removed.

But cloning can be done without cell fusion -- by injecting the DNA from the skin cell directly into the egg cell, for example.

Other detailed exclusions in the organic rule fall similarly short of being slam dunk rejections of clones, several experts agree. That leaves opponents of organic clones falling back on some of the rule's more general language, such as the part that says an organic animal's growth and development must not be influenced by means "that are not considered compatible with organic production."

That language is sweeping, given the fuzziness of ideas about what "organic" means.

"For me," said Pouillon, "organic food means that everything goes through a sort of organic, natural process."

"Organic farmers work in harmony with nature, not to change it," echoed George Siemon, chief executive of Organic Valley, a farmers cooperative based in LaFarge, Wis.

But biotech industry leaders scoff at such language. If organic is so natural, they ask, why is it that the USDA allows organic cows to be conceived by in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination? If that is okay, why not cloning?

To which Pouillon responds dryly: "At least they still use sperm and an egg."