Cloning goes commercial with auctioning of copied cow

Her chest is broad, her legs and backs straight, and she has an excellent mammary system, the owner says. Mandy may be one of a kind, but ...

Her chest is broad, her legs and backs straight, and she has an excellent mammary system, the owner says. Mandy may be one of a kind, but not for long.

An exact copy of the champion Holstein cow will be auctioned this week in what is believed to be the first time a farm animal has been cloned for commercial sale.

The first calf clone or clones — several are now growing in the wombs of surrogate cattle — are expected to bring 50,000 to 100,000 dollars at Friday’s auction at the world dairy expo in Madison, Wisconsin, the dairy industry’s biggest trade show.

The cloning is a project of Infigen Inc., an international leader in cloning technology. Infigen, based in deforest, wisconsin, owns its own herd of cloned cattle, which are used to produce genetically-engineered proteins for pharmaceuticals.

Until now, no one has tried to clone the animals for commercial use by farmers and breeders. “The reason it hasn’t been done before is that the technology hasn’t been there,” said Kenneth Olson, a specialist in animal genetics with the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Cattle embryos have been cloned before, but no one has made an exact duplicate of an adult cow and put it up for sale, said Xiangzhong Yang, director of the Transgenic Animal Facility at the University of Connecticut.