Bioengineers Breeding a Race of Superpigs

A knot of young pigs sniffed eagerly at Matt Wheeler’s shoes as the University of Illinois researcher showed off the results of five years of genetic engineering.

These pink-skinned, curly-tailed porkers are bearing cattle genes that Wheeler hopes will eventually help boost pork production in the United States.

“As you can see, they don’t look any different from any of the other ones,” Wheeler said as he stood in a pen surrounded by the brave new pigs. “That’s the point of this technology. Unless you do a DNA analysis, you won’t know they’re any different.”

The nine young pigs at a University of Illinois research farm are the second and most crucial generation of a genetic engineering project designed to create strains of livestock “better than the average pig,” as Wheeler puts it.

Wheeler’s research team took a gene that increases milk production in dairy cattle and injected it into hundreds of pig embryos, only one of which survived with the new gene intact. That boar--nicknamed “Al” after the a-lactalbumin gene he carried--sired 19 piglets, nine of which have the cattle gene.

When Al’s daughters have their own litters this fall, Wheeler will get the first indication of whether they will produce more milk than the average pig. If they do, the resulting breeding line could nurse larger litters that gain weight faster before weaning.

For producers, that would mean more pigs and more profits.

“These are real tentative figures, but if that is true you’re talking about probably an extra $25 million per year in the pockets of Illinois pork producers,” Wheeler said. “If you take that over the U.S., it’s probably in the neighborhood of $250 million or more in improved efficiency.”

The University of Illinois pigs are just a small part of a recent explosion of biotechnology in the agricultural industry. Genetically engineered farm products already available include tomatoes altered to have a longer shelf life, soybeans engineered to be resistant to certain herbicides and a hormone injected into dairy cattle to boost milk production.

But surveys show that many people are uneasy about the prospect of manipulating the genes of the food we eat, experts in bioethics say. A 1993 survey of New Jersey residents, for example, found only 28% of them approved of genetically engineering animals.

“Because biotechnology is new and associated with religious concerns, it’s right at the forefront of the public’s skepticism with science,” said Paul Thompson, director of the Center for Biotechnology Policy and Ethics at Texas A&M; University.

Genetic engineering of agricultural products raises a number of moral questions that agriculture and academia are just beginning to address, bioethicists say. Those ethical issues include whether the genetic engineering will cause more suffering among the newly created animals and what effects the new organisms will have on the environment.

Agriculture is years behind professions like law and medicine in addressing such ethical concerns, said Gary Comstock, coordinator of Iowa State University’s agricultural bioethics program.

“I think it’s because agriculture has done a wonderful job of fulfilling its mission for us. In this century we’ve seen massive gains in productivity and efficiency in the industry,” Comstock said. “We never have had to worry about food. These issues just haven’t surfaced in the past.”

At the University of Illinois, such issues are addressed by a committee that ensures the humane treatment of laboratory animals and oversees the ethical implications of research projects. Before any of the pigs with cow genes could be released for general use, they would have to be approved by both the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration, Wheeler said.

The University of Illinois team also plans years of intensive studies of the genetically engineered pigs to make sure they are healthy and truly offer advantages to pork producers, Wheeler said.

Humans have genetically manipulated farm animals for centuries through breeding for certain traits, Wheeler said, and genetic engineering is a quicker and more precise way to do that.

“You can change the genetics in one generation, rather than 20 generations,” Wheeler said.