Cloning beef cattle for meat quality sparks debate

Ty Lawrence still talks about it as his “lightbulb” moment. He was in a Texas slaughterhouse in 2010 when two absolutely beautiful beef carcasses rolled by. Each was the pinnacle of USDA grading: “Prime” and “Yield Grade One.”  Only 2 to 5 percent of U.S. beef is graded Prime, and Yield Grade One meant there was lots of it. By Lawrence’s estimate, only 1 in 3,300 beef carcasses will have those two attributes simultaneously. And here went two of them within a couple minutes of each other.  What happened next was either scientific breakthrough or unnecessary genetic fiddling, depending on your perspective.  Lawrence, a professor of meat science at West Texas A&M University, called his department head that night and proposed forming a research team. Here’s what he wanted to do: Clone a herd of superior cattle by working backwards from superior beef.  ViaGen created a bull, named Alpha, from the steer carcass, and three heifers — Gamma One, Gamma Two and Gamma Three — from the cow carcass. Artificial insemination of the Gammas with semen from Alpha has resulted in 13 calves, the first bovine offspring of two cloned parents. Seven of the offspring, all steers, were raised in a conventional manner, including finishing time at a grain feedlot, and slaughtered. Lawrence said the results are promising, especially given the small sample size. The offspring tended to produce better grade beef than average, and yield grades were ones and twos. The carcasses had 9 percent larger ribeye steaks than average and 45 percent more marbling, the desirable white specks of intramuscular fat. They had 16 percent less “trim” fat, the waste fat that doesn’t improve taste. The work is continuing.