Cloned beef already on dinner plates. To the untrained eye, Pollard Farms looks much like any other cattle ranch.
Similar looking cows are huddled in similar looking pens. But some of the cattle here don't just resemble each other. They are literally identical - clear down to their genes. Of the 400-some cattle in Barry Pollard's herd of mostly Black Angus cattle there are 22 clones, genetic copies of some of the most productive livestock the world has ever known. Pollard, a neurosurgeon and owner of Pollard Farms, says such breeding technology is at the forefront of a new era in animal agriculture.
"We're trying to stay on the very top of the heap of quality, genetically, with animals that will gain well and fatten well, produce well and reproduce well," Pollard told a reporter during a recent visit to his farm. Japan, the European Union, and others have followed suit. By 2030, that was expected to rise to 37 kg per person. Milk and dairy product consumption has made similarly rapid growth. Naeac-news-24. NZORD - Cloning and Stem Cell Technology. Modern Biotechnology: Medical Uses of Biotechnology / Gene Therapy / Xeno-transplantation / Genetic Modification in Medicine / Cloning and Stem Cell Technology Cloning This expression has two distinct meanings.
One is the creation of a genetically identical animal by replacing the nucleus in the egg, with the nucleus from an adult animal that is to be copied. This is the process that produced Dolly the sheep, and made the new-born animal genetically identical to its parent. This process is used in animal breeding in agriculture, but it is specifically prohibited by all existing legislation relation to human reproduction, including New Zealand legislation. The other use of cloning techniques is known as therapeutic cloning and does not involve the production of a foetus. Stem Cell Technology Stem cells are those cells which have the ability to continuously divide and develop into various kinds of tissue.
Useful Links. Lifting the Veil on Animal Experimentation Secrecy. The starting point for the Green Party's policy on Animal Welfare is that animals have an intrinsic worth, beyond that of a human resource, or indeed human property.
Animals are fellow creatures that we share our home, the planet earth, with and, as such, we should treat them with compassion and respect. We acknowledge that animals experience pain and pleasure, and ought to be able to live without having to endure suffering inflicted on them by humans. Indeed we believe that humans have a responsibility to ensure animals live in ways that allow them to display natural forms of behaviour and which do not cause them to suffer. More and more people, in New Zealand and around the world, are questioning that view as well, and animal welfare is becoming a major concern in New Zealand as well as with our trading partners. This means that economics, as well as ethics, requires us to adopt a more respectful and compassionate attitude to animals.
This raises the question. Location. Cloned animals dying at AgResearch. By SIMON COLLINS Almost a quarter of the calves and lambs cloned from adult animals by Government-owned AgResearch have died within about their first three months of life.
AgResearch's cloning programme leader, Dr David Wells, said "errors in the pattern of gene expression" had produced some animals with deformities that made them "not viable at birth". The institute had also aborted some calves before birth, and slaughtered some cows acting as surrogate mothers when foetuses grew too big to be born normally. Scientists performed caesareans to deliver others. But he said that in 35 cases so far where cloned calves had lived and produced their own calves by normal sexual reproduction, there was no evidence that defects had been passed on to the next generation.
The Hamilton institute said yesterday that it had begun work on genetically modifying cows' milk to produce potentially valuable medical drugs, in line with a controversial permit granted in September. Ag_Guide_3rd_ed. Food from Cloned Animals. Background The New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) administers food-related legislation and provides independent policy advice on food and related issues.
NZFSA applies a risk management framework to ensure any response or regulation is proportional to the risk a situation presents. This is consistent with the New Zealand Biotechnology Strategy which promotes innovation to benefit the wealth, health and environment of New Zealanders. Cloning Fact Sheet. Ethics of Cloning. The ethical issues surrounding the topic of cloning mainly focus on human cloning, although some people have explored ethical issues in animal cloning.
(Because very little could be found free on the Web about the ethics of animal cloning, that is not included here for now). One distinction to keep in mind when reading ethical statements about human cloning is the difference between reproductive cloning (to produce a new human being or animal) and therapeutic cloning (now often referred to simply as somatic cell nuclear transfer) which creates an embryo for research or therapeutic purposes, such as to create stem cells, but not to implant into a mother. General Resources: Primer on Ethics and Human Cloning by Glenn McGee, Associate Director for Education, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Center for Bioethics. Articles on ethics and cloning can be found on Bioethics.net which includes articles published in the American Journal of Bioethics.