After three years of study, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is about to say there's no food safety issue in eating meat or drinking milk from a cloned animal. The announcement could come this month, Barb Glenn, director of the animal agriculture section of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, told a telephone news conference last week.

Not that Glenn or other scientists think cloning will be used to directly produce meat animals or turn out milk cows. The procedure, which jumped into the public eye with the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep, remains very expensive.

"This process is for breeding, not eating," said Blake Russell, who handles sales for Viagen, a Texas firm that did the largest experiment yet in safety of meat from cloned animals.

It's so expensive, despite advances since the Dolly birth just 10 years ago, that Blake and others know markets must be assured before any commercial breeders move into the field.

Source: Tam Moore, Capital Press Staff Writer