Got Cloned Chicken?
U.S. Firms to Clone Chickens
Aug. 16 — Two U.S. companies are attempting to clone chickens on a huge scale, moving factory farming into a new era, but alarming animal welfare activists, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.
A breakthrough is some way off but the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology has given Origen Therapeutics from California and Embrex in North Carolina $4.7 million to fund research.
Factory farming of chickens, which are often pumped full of antibiotics and kept in cramped conditions, already causes outrage within the animal welfare lobby.
But the poultry industry would welcome disease-resistant birds that grow faster on less food.
"Producers would like the same meat quantity but to use reduced inputs to get there," Mike Fitzgerald of Origen told the magazine.
The company aims to breed or genetically engineer a chicken with the required traits and then "bulk-grow" embryonic stem cells taken from fertilized eggs as soon as they are laid. Those cells will then be injected into the embryo of a fertilized recipient egg.
Origen has a patent on the process still at the application stage. Embrex produces machines that can inject vaccines into up to 50,000 eggs an hour, the magazine said. If the process ever reaches fruition, Origen plans to freeze stem cells from different strains of chicken, allowing millions of eggs to be produced in months.
"Billions of clones could be produced each year to supply chicken farms with birds that all grow at the same rate, have the same amount of meat and taste the same," the magazine said.
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