After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny was safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores.
The decision comes more than four years after the agency tentatively declared that food from cloned animals was safe, only to face a backlash of criticism from consumer groups and some scientists who said the science supporting the decision was shaky.
On Tuesday, the F.D.A. declared that further studies had confirmed its earlier decision.
“Following extensive review, the risk assessment did not identify any unique risks for human food from cattle, swine or goat clones, and concluded that there is sufficient information to determine that food from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as that from their more conventionally-bred counterparts,” the agency said in a statement.
The F.D.A. ruling was a major victory for cloning companies, which hope to use the cloned animals primarily for breeding purposes, selling copies of prize dairy cows, steers and hogs.
Consumer groups and some members of Congress have fought the decision, arguing that there was still not enough science to support such a decision.
It remains to be seen how widely the technology will be adopted. Interest from the food industry has been tepid, with some companies declaring that they will not sell milk or meat from cloned animals or their offspring.
Even if the technology is widely adopted, it is unlikely that clones themselves will wind up on grocery shelves, since they cost thousands of dollars apiece to produce. A limited amount of milk from cloned cows might be sold, but mostly it would be meat and milk from second- and third-generation offspring of clones that would enter the food supply.
Dolly is the first cloned animal.
When scientists explain the practice of cloning livestock, they describe clones as genetic twins born at different times. Cloning companies say it’s just another reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination.
Here is how cloning works:
Scientists take an immature egg, usually from a cow that went to the slaughterhouse, and remove the nucleus. They add DNA from a donor cow, often taken from the skin cell of an ear, and a tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to start dividing and grow into a copy of the original animal. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate animal for gestation and birth.
The first mammal cloned from an adult cell was Dolly the sheep in 1997.
Dolly was euthanized in 2003 at the age of 6, well short of her normal lifespan, after developing a progressive lung disease.
