Looking for Perfect Chicks

In the future, when a baby chick asks another, “Who’s your daddy?” its response could be, “Multiple parents that had their embryonic stem cells injected into an unfertilized egg by a robotic arm on a mass assembly line.”

Such is the future of technology in the poultry business.

And you thought you were stumped with, “What came first — the chicken or the egg?”

First there was Dolly, the infamous cloned sheep in Scotland. But thanks to a $4.7 million research grant from the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology, there may soon be billions of cloned chickens clucking around the globe.

The study, performed by Origen Therapeutics of California and Embrex Inc. of North Carolina, is still in its infancy. And while the method of chicken cloning could offer many benefits, it poses even more questions.

Poultry companies, including those headquartered in Northwest Arkansas, are watching with much interest the cloning studies. But no one is risking verbal support of cloning until the study gets much further down the road.

Arkansas has more than 24 million commercial chickens with a 10-year average inventory value of $106.9 million.

“The companies are not making any judgments because they don’t have to make any judgments at this point,” said Richard Lobb, director of communications for the National Chicken Council.

Robert White, a microbiologist at Vaughn Coltraine & Associates engineering firm in Springdale, recently wrote an article for Poultry magazine regarding the upside of chicken cloning.

“[The companies] are probably all taking a wait-and-see attitude,” White said. “They’re saying, ‘Let these guys develop something, and we’ll see what they have in a couple years. At this point, they’re not working on it themselves, but there’s no doubt they’re keeping an eye on it.”

As expected, the subject has ruffled the feathers of animal welfare activists.

A release by the Compassion in World Farming organization stated, “The prospect of this happening is appalling. We need to change our farming practices, not change the animals by tampering with their genetic make-up.”

But there are more concerns for the poultry companies than just the sensitive nature of cloning itself. If the industry went with an almost purely genetically uniform bird, could a single virus or epidemic such as influenza wipe out the entire population, sending the industry into chicken Armageddon?

Walter Bottje, interim head and director of the University of Arkansas’ world-renowned Department of Poultry Science, said some of the breeding companies are excited about the possibility of developing a “biotech chicken.” But Bottje said there must be a high degree of caution with such optimism.

“Uniformity is great, but if [the biotech chicken] becomes susceptible to a disease, they’ll all be gone,” Bottje said.

Some scientists believe that a disease-resistant chicken can be developed through cloning. Diseases such as Avian Coccidiosis can costs the industry millions each year in both loss and prevention.

The pharmaceutical benefits of cloning are of great interest to poultry companies, but the companies also are excited about the prospect of developing a super bird at a cheaper cost. And with the grant awarded to the two Embrex and Origen, the poultry companies can sit back and watch with no financial gamble.

“As far as I know, no [poultry] companies are actively involved in the cloning study,” Lobb said. “And they don’t have to bankroll [the study] because of the grant.”

Peterson Farms Inc. of Decatur is known for its top-of-the-line breeding stock, which the company flies all over the world. Peterson geneticist John Tierce said the repercussions of a successful cloning study would be immense.

“There is a lot of optimism that there may be something really interesting come out of [the study],” Tierce said. “It’ll be determined by the economic value where certain traits are able to be incorporated into a clone. If a trait has a large economic value to the industry as far as breast yield or disease resistance, it would be a breakthrough. Then, breeders like ourselves would be real interested because it would make our product more competitive and more profitable.”

Tierce believes the biggest interest would be in developing a disease-resistant chicken.

“Those are traits difficult to manipulate domestically through conventional breeding plans,” Tierce said.

Cobb-Vantress Inc. of Siloam Springs, a wholly owned subsidiary of chicken giant Tyson Foods Inc. in Springdale, uses the cutting edge of poultry technology. And when Cobb-Vantress purchased Avian Farms USA Inc. of Maine in 2000, it appeared Tyson was a mere subsidiary away from cloning. Avian lists its basic objective as the genetic development of specific products for specific markets.

But Tyson spokesman Ed Nicholson quickly squelched that thought, saying Tyson would not “go into the laboratory and put a gene from another animal into a chicken or implant an egg with a gene. We let our roosters do that.”

Cobb-Vantress spokesman Steve Eisler said there are several new technologies that his company is studying actively, such as partnering with Embrex on a project where the sex of a chick can be determined before it hatches. But even Cobb-Vantress is letting Embrex and Origen handle the cloning studies for now.

The UA’s Poultry Science Center is involved in many research projects with chickens, but Bottje said cloning research is not something the UA is touching.

“It’s not that we’re not interested,” Bottje said of the cloning research. “It’s just a different approach that’s being used. We have a lot of people working on molecular aspects. And to do that takes a lot of technology to invest. So, we’re not devoting research to [cloning].

“I’m interested to see what comes out of this. They may find cloning may work, but it may not work in a commercial sense. Maybe there will be some valuable biological information come out of it. We’re a long way from being able to clone a billion chickens. Even getting a few that are very viable right now is very difficult.”

The problem with chickens that have been bred for large meat traits and grown at a faster rate is that they have produced smaller eggs. Companies have been forced to take the good with the bad. That is a problem Origen hopes to solve in its research.

“Our industry is always looking for efficiencies,” Lobb said. “Whether the companies feel it will be more economical to adopt a whole new technology like this remains to be seen.”

Bottje said the research should continue because of the unknown factor.

“Some people are scared of cloning and its ramifications,” Bottje said. “But, it’s going to happen. They’re already doing it. I’d hate for it to be stopped arbitrarily. [The research] may suddenly run across other things that would be very beneficial.”