About 129km east of Austin, out where the fire ants bite and men still doff their baseball hats when greeting women, 20 cows pregnant with calves cloned by ViaGen Inc have just arrived.
Stampeding down a chute from a tractor trailer, the cattle join a menagerie of cloned pigs and cows that include Elvis and Priscilla, calves cloned from cells scraped from sides of high-quality beef hanging in a slaughterhouse.
The cloning of barnyard animals has now become so commonplace and mechanized that ViaGen says it's more than ready to efficiently produce juicier steaks and tastier chops through cloning.
PHOTO: AP
It now looks like federal regulators will endorse the company's plan to bring its cloned animal products to America's dinner tables.
No law prevents cloned food, but ViaGen has voluntarily withheld its products pending a ruling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Over the past three years it has worked to create elite bovine and porcine gene pools that can produce prodigious "milkers," top quality beef cattle and biotech bacon. It has aggressively gobbled up competitors and locked up patents, including the one granted to the creators of Dolly the sheep.
PHOTO: AP
All that currently stands in ViaGen's way, besides a nod from the FDA, are squeamish consumers and skeptical food producers.
The FDA is widely expected to soon endorse the findings of a 2002 National Academy of Science report it commissioned that found the food products derived from cloned animals do not "present a food safety concern."
Acknowledging the many critics who have raised ethical objections as well as safety concerns, the FDA commissioner said on Sept. 19 that "within weeks" the agency was prepared to publish results of its examination of the issues in a scientific journal -- a rare move for the agency, which used a similar forum to make public its position on genetically modified crops in 1992.
But then the commissioner, Lester Crawford, abruptly resigned, leaving the top ranks of the FDA in turmoil.
FDA spokeswoman Rae Jones said in an e-mail sent on Wednesday that Crawford "was talking about a draft risk assessment that the FDA is now preparing to release. This release was not related to commisioner Crawford or his recent resignation."
But Jones said "we do not have a timeline" for the assessment's release.
So, without a government cloning endorsement, the deep-pocketed corporate customers ViaGen hopes to court are staying on the sidelines.
"The National Milk Producers Federation does not at this time support milk from cloned cows entering the marketplace until FDA determines that milk from cloned cows is the same as milk from conventionally bred animals," said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the trade group, which represents the US$23 billion dairy industry.
Dairy farmers worry that without federal government's blessing, US consumers will blanch at pouring milk from cloned cows on their breakfast cereal.
Beef and pork producers have similar concerns.
A March survey by the International Food Information Council, an industry trade group, reported that 63 percent of consumers would likely not buy food from cloned animals, even if the FDA determined the products were safe.
Rapid advances in genetic technology are increasingly being applied further up the food chain.
It's one thing for traditional crops like corn to be engineered to be pest-resistant, and people already eat genetically engineered soy beans in all manner of processed food.
But biotech companies run into what bioethicists call the "yuck factor" when they begin tinkering with animals.
An application to market salmon genetically engineered with genes from other fish to grow faster has been formally pending with the FDA for more than two years.
That's why ViaGen insists that its work has nothing to do with combining genetic material of two different species. It likens it to now common reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination.
To clone, scientists replace all the genetic material in an egg with a mature cell containing the complete genetic code from the donor. Cloners argue that the resulting animal is simply the donor's twin, containing an identical makeup, yes, but destined for its own distinct fate influenced by environment and chance.
The coat of the first ever cat cloned, for instance, was a totally different color than that of its genetic donor.
So there are no guarantees that the cloned calf Elvis will yield the highest quality beef -- the USDA's "prime yield 1" designation -- that gave him his life, but it certainly increases the odds he will produce prime meat.
As it stands, "prime yield 1" ratings come along once every 12,000 cows.
ViaGen's founder Scott Davis says knowing which cow is likely to yield premium beef could demand up to a US$250 premium per heifer, a big markup in the notoriously low-margin industry.
He said the price of a cloned cow continues to drop and, depending on the order volume, can cost as little as US$8,000 per animal.
"Cloning is at a commercially viable place now," Davis said.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique