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The health profile of cloned animals

Nature Biotechnology volume 20, pages 13–14 (2002)Cite this article

The debate about human cloning, and now the animal welfare and food safety issues concerning animal cloning, have initiated a flurry of regulatory activity worldwide. In the United States, for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA; Rockville, MD) and Department of Agriculture (USDA; Washington, DC) are considering whether to regulate cloned livestock and/or their products entering the food chain, and legislation has been introduced in the Congress that not only would bar human reproductive cloning, but would also ban research that aims to produce genetically matched replacement cells to treat diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. These anticloning bills have been fueled by reports of cloning defects and abnormalities that have dominated media coverage, and by scientists in the field, who in their desire to portray human reproductive cloning as dangerous and irresponsible, have gone out of their way to accentuate the inefficiencies and developmental failures associated with cloning.

We have reviewed the published literature in this area (see Table 1), and in contrast to these horrific scenarios, one is struck by the fact that the majority of cloned animals were seemingly healthy at the time of publication; this is particularly noteworthy in those studies with convincing numbers of animals. Although data are limited in individual studies1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38, it is clear that there is extreme variability in the percentages of apparently healthy offspring produced from study to study. These differences in incidences of abnormalities in clones will generate testable hypotheses that likely will lead to procedures that reduce abnormalities and allow the identification of important variables in methodology, species/strain of animals, source of donor nucleus, and investigator skills. Also, it is worth noting that most of the work published in mammals using somatic cells as nuclear donors represents the first or second paper in this field from respective investigative teams, and that there have been no updates on the health of the clones in the majority of the papers cited. Results of subsequent studies, including our own, have continued to improve with time.

Table 1 Literature survey of developmental problems in cloned animals
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Cell Technology, Worcester, MA

    Jose B. Cibelli, Keith H. Campbell, George E. Seidel, Michael D. West & Robert P. Lanza

  2. Division of Biological Sciences, University of Nottingham, Loughborough, UK

    Jose B. Cibelli, Keith H. Campbell, George E. Seidel, Michael D. West & Robert P. Lanza

  3. Animal Reproduction and Biotechnology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

    Jose B. Cibelli, Keith H. Campbell, George E. Seidel, Michael D. West & Robert P. Lanza

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  1. Jose B. Cibelli
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  5. Robert P. Lanza
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Cibelli, J., Campbell, K., Seidel, G. et al. The health profile of cloned animals. Nat Biotechnol 20, 13–14 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0102-13

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