Report From Our Visit to the National Livestock Breeding Center:

NLBC Researchers Recognize “Failure of Cloning”

By Koketsu Michiyo, CUJ/FSCW

Food Safety Citizens Watch visited the National Livestock Breeding Center (NLBC) in Fukushima Prefecture on September 9, 2009. This is the center that has been designated to continue the work that started in 1998 to improve the productivity of cattle breeding using somatic cell clone technology. In June, Japan’s Food Safety Commission stated that “somatic cell cloned livestock is safe for use as human food,” i. e. that meat and milk from from cloned cows, pigs and so on will be safe. However, among consumers, a strong sense of doubt and insecurity remains, as researchers have not been able to eradicate problems such as stillbirths and abnormal deaths among the cloned animals. In order to investigate the current status of the research, we visited the NLBC. 

First of all, we were surprised by the low success ratio of somatic cell clones, which is not even 3% among domestic animals. At the NLBC ranch in Tokachi, Hokkaido, researchers have so far attempted to create 1,509 cloned cattle, but only 391 were conceived properly, or around 26%. Among them, we were told that only 42 heads survived feeding and achieved normal growth, or 2.8%.  

During our visit, the center frankly admitted, “We have currently not achieved any rapid improvement.”

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