Medical News

BARRON, Wis. (CBS) ― There's a 6-year-old cow at Indianhead Holsteins with the name of Black Rose. She looks like the other cows in the barn, but she's different, reports CBS station WCCO-TV in Minneapolis.

Black Rose is a clone.

"I walked in this morning and looked at her and thought her eyes look just like the original Black Rose," said owner Karyn Schauf. "There are so many resemblances."

"We call her a Black Rose's calf," explained Bob Schauf. "But really, she is Black Rose."

Of the hundreds of cows Bob and Karyn Schauf have owned over the years, they've cloned only one: Black Rose, a showstopper of a cow.

"If it was people, it would be a whole different story," said Karyn Schauf. "No, we're not in favor of that, but when you get a good cow, they don't come around everyday."

Bob Schauf recalled taking Black Rose to competition, "When we took her to World Expo, we couldn't hardly do chores because so many people wanted to see her because they heard about this cow."

So how did the old cow become the new one?

"Just take a snip of the ear," said Karyn Schauf. "And put it in a real cold packaging and we mailed it off."

In the lab, Black Rose's DNA was placed inside an empty egg. The egg was electrically stimulated, causing it to divide and grow.

The embryo was then put into a surrogate which carrieed the baby calf to term.

The Schaufs own Indianhead Holsteins in Barron, Wis. They're not dairy farmers, really. They're breeders.

Tiny straws contain embryos of genetic material they sell to customers all over the world, including Japan, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Holland and the United Kingdom.

The Schaufs' cows - massive, straight, strong animals - can produce around 30,000 pounds of milk each year. That is far more than the average cow.

Most of that milk they sell, but not if it comes from a clone. The Schaufs honor a voluntary moratorium on the sale of milk or meat from clones, which has been in place since 2001.

"We drink her milk," said Karyn Schauf. "I haven't noticed anything growing out of me lately."

"They tested for everything you could imagine -- content of the milk, the meat," said Dr. Gene Buchner, the Schaufs' embryo transfer vet who conducted tests on clones for the Food and Drug Administration. "I was the one who pulled a lot of the blood samples, hair samples and biopsies."

His work was part of the reason the FDA now said food from cloned cows is safe.

"All the testing came back. There was no difference from any other cow. So I would say there's no difference," Buchner said.

Would you be comfortable consuming meat or milk from cloned animals? In a recent study, 64 percent of Americans said they wouldn't be. For folks who own cloned animals, that's a problem.

"If we have clones in the barn and we can't sell their milk, there's this phobia that your clients take on and say, 'Well, what are we going to do if we've got an animal that we can't sell milk? People are going to shy away from this sort of thing,'" Bob Schauf said. "It hurts your market obviously."

"There's that little fear that's there, and that little fear builds into, well, do we really need something like this?" asked Ted Labuza, a professor of Food Science and Engineering.

Labuza predicts the FDA will take years to resolve the issue of food from cloned animals.

"I think they will move slowly," Labuza said.

Uneasiness about clones has created opportunity for the Schaufs. They know good cows when they see them.

"We could hardly pass up knowing what her genetic potential was," said Bob Schauf.

They paid $4,000 for Mandy, a steal considering what the clone went for as a calf - $82,000!

On a recent day, a red heifer arrived from out of state. She's the granddaughter of the Black Rose clone, another bargain basement special.

The Schaufs are banking that someday the FDA will treat these cows like any others.

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