By Correspondent Brad Penner, STATEWIDE Correspondent.

[MC at Ceremony]"Tonight's presentation is titled The Future of Cloning. Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you Dr. Ian Wilmut."
If you want to know about cloning, if you want to know about new frontiers in biotechnology, Dr. Ian Wilmut is a good man to talk to. He was on the team that cloned Dolly the Sheep. He knows what the word clone means.
[Dr. Ian Wilmut] "So strictly what it means is a copy of an adult animal. So it's still true to say that Dolly is the only clone.
Dolly, living proof that what was once science fiction is now science fact. Her existence has forced scientists and society to think about the possibilities."
[Dr. Wilmut] "You might want to identify let's say a really good dairy cow which has very high milk yield, good protein content, low incidence of mastitis, high fertility. You would want to make a copy of an adult animal in that case."
[Dr. Randall Prather] "The application of these technologies is really limited by your imagination. That's the limit. Potentially, we can do so many things but your imagination is what's limiting us. "
Dr. Randall Prather is another expert on biotechnology. He came to Nebraska Wesleyan University for a seminar tied to Dr. Wilmut's speech. He is working on something called the nuclei transfer process. It's a way to change the instructions that tell a cell how to grow.
[Dr. Prather] "Initially what we want to do is just show that it can work, and the next step is to come in and specifically genetically modify those cells before we do the nuclear transfers so that we can create an animal that has the specific genetic modification we're after."
Eventually that technology could make its way to the farm or ranch. Livestock producers could pick the genetic characteristics they want their animals to have. The result might be an animal that needs less feed to put on more weight, and the meat from every animal in the herd would be the same quality.
[Dr. Prather] "I think it will be a more uniform carcass. That's something the pig industry has been striving for and has done a pretty good job at. Would still like more uniformity. The cattle industry has a long way to go. We can talk about uniformity of carcass. We can talk about feed efficiency, the efficiency of producing food. I think both of them are attainable goals."
For now cloning techniques aren't advanced enough to make it a practical way to produce livestock. But Dr. Wilmut foresees a time when cloned embryos can be implanted using a technique similar to artificial insemination.
[Dr. Wilmut] "It's a little bit more difficult but the same technicians could certainly be trained to do it and no doubt a farmer with a big group of cattle could learn to do it. Because the tract at that time has to be handled even more gently, because it's going to be the egg which lives in it directly as soon as it comes out of the catheter.Yes, it's essentially the same technique." How soon will this kind of technology be available on a commercial basis? That's hard to tell.
[Dr. Wilmut] "It could be 10 years. It could be 20 years. It really is very difficult. I would suspect it's nearer to 10 than two or three. It's several years into the future but you don't know. After all, Dolly took the whole world by storm just over a year ago. What we are talking about is another step of the same sort of order, a big increase in the effectiveness of a method."
At the Meat Animal Research Center near Clay Center, scientists are working on a different method of changing the characteristics of cattle.
[Dr. Tim Smith] "We don't alter their genetics in any way other than by selecting who we want to breed with who. That's, of course, what everyone does with their cattle worldwide."
These are the kinds of cattle Dr. Smith is working with. They're known as Belgian Blues. They have a trait called double muscling. They are bigger, meatier cattle, but that trait also makes it difficult for the cows to give birth. Dr. Smith says that problem can be avoided if the cattle have only one copy of the double muscling gene, something known as a heterozygous condition for that gene.
[Dr. Smith] "We are currently developing a test that you can run and say this calf is carrying one copy normal, one copy mutation. That allows you to make a production system that breeds for the heterozygous condition." Some calves resulting from Dr. Smith's research are being studied at the Meat Animal Research Center. They are, as he said, the result of a mutation.
[Dr. Smith] "It has a negative connotation to it. But in fact, everybody's accumulating mutations all the time. That's why you're not exactly like your parents. Things get shuffled around and these kinds of things happen. The difference in cattle is people look at a cow or a bull that has larger muscles and say, I like that bull, so you start selecting for that change. Some changes are good and some changes are bad. In terms of raising cattle, this one happened to be good. "
Smith uses natural breeding techniques that have been used for years to develop breeds with desirable characteristics. He says there may be reluctance to use some of the new technology for animal production.
[Dr. Smith] "There is some commercial interest, I know, in cloning complete animals just because then you can get multiple copies of your prize bull. But there, I think, is in general less interest in putting genes into cattle that improve their carcass characteristics for consumption, and I think that's because consumers are going to be somewhat wary of that. "
In fact, a survey done for the International Food Information Council showed that reluctance. It asked this question. On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is unacceptable and 5 is acceptable, how acceptable do you find the cloning of animals to make copies of food? Only 14% said it was acceptable. 54% said it was unacceptable. [Lisa Katic] "When you're speaking about science, it's important to avoid absolutes."
Lisa Katic works for the International Food Information Council. She says education is the only way to overcome consumer resistance."
[Lisa Katic] "Not only do they not know about biotechnology, they don't know about agriculture. It depends on where you come from in the country. People that come from certain ppers of the country think that food comes from the supermarket. That's their understanding and extent of their knowledge base on agriculture. So, of course, if they don't understand that, they're not going to understand and accept biotechnology. People have different ideas or visions about what biotechnology is. "
If it becomes practical to clone cattle or other animals, there will be questions about safety. Is there potential that then the meat from that animal could somehow have a side effect on the person who might consume it?
[Dr. Wilmut]" I can't think how there could be. Certainly in the strict genetic copy, I can't see that at all. If you were making a genetic change, which is a different situation, again, assuming that you're changing the cow's D.N.A., again I can't see any reason that it could."
But terms like genetic engineering and cloning can for some conjure up images of mad scientists in secret laboratories. For others it's simply an uncomfortable feeling that science is going too far in creating something unnatural.
[Dr. Wilmut] "This is a technique which has got a lot to contribute in medicine and in research. It will help us to understand some genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis, for example. I don't think we do create life. I think that's sort of misleading. We have been using animals and plants in slightly different ways for our own purposes for a long time. "
Gradually man learned the secrets of selective breeding.
[Dr. Prather]" In terms of altering genes, in terms of altering cells, we have been doing that since animals were domesticated. Animals have been selected for this or selected for that and that's modified the genes that are present, modified the expression of those genes. This is just going the next step and being able to do it much faster. "
[Dr. Clifton Baile, U. of Georgia] "It is a way to have a more rapid change, but these types of selections occurred forever and ever, so it is a different way to apply genetics and you get a quicker response."[Dr. Prather] "If we look at the potential impact that this can have in terms of feeding an evergrowing world population, in terms of alleviating human suffering, I think a lot of these experiments are very well justified. In fact, I think we're irresponsible if we don't pursue them to feed the world and to alleviate human suffering."
In the coming months and years, pigs may be altered so that their organs can be used for human transplants. Cows will be used as living factories producing lifesaving medicine in their milk. And perhaps a herd of cloned cattle will roam the Nebraska Sandhills.