Meat and milk from cloned bulls and cows should be safe to eat, a study suggests. The pilot study is the first to examine specific proteins and nutrients in the milk and meat from cloned animals and marks the start of efforts to plug an important gap in research that may one day lead to regulatory approval of clone-derived food.
In America and Japan, hundreds of elite animals, such as breeding bulls, already have been cloned, and there are more than 1,000 worldwide, said professor Xiangzhong (Jerry) Yang, director of the University of Connecticut's Center for Regenerative Biology. "We conducted extensive comparisons of the composition of milk and meat from somatic (adult cell) cloned animals to those from naturally reproduced comparator animals," he said. "We found no significant differences."