The Clones Are Here

Faster horses, superior cattle, immortal pets the big business of animal cloning

- Bianca Bosker

Twenty-seven years ago, Ty Lawrence began to be haunted by a slab of meat.

The carcass, which he spotted at a slaughterhouse while doing research as a graduate student, defied the usual laws of nature. The best, highest-quality steaks—picture a rib eye festooned with ribbons of white fat—typically come from animals whose bodies yield a relatively paltry amount of meat, because the fat that flavors their muscles tends to correspond to an excess of blubber everywhere else.

This animal, by contrast, had tons of fat, but only where it would be delicious. “In my world,” Lawrence told me, “people would say, “That's a beautiful carcass.”

As Lawrence watched the beef being wheeled toward a meat grader that day, an idea hit him: We should clone that.

The technology existed. A couple of years earlier, in 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute, in Scotland, had cloned Dolly the sheep. Lawrence lacked the funds or stature to make it happen, but he kept thinking about that beautiful carcass, and the lost potential to make more like it.

He was gathering data at another slaughterhouse in 2010 when, late one evening, he spotted two carcasses resembling the outlier he'd seen years before. Lawrence—by then an animal-science professor at West Texas A&M University—immediately called the head of his department. It was nearly 11 p.m. and his boss was already in bed, but Lawrence made his pitch anyway: He wanted to reverse engineer an outstanding steak by bringing superior cuts of meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you're crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me.