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How cloning works

Cloning is a method of asexually reproducing a genetic copy of an animal. Sexual reproduction involves the fusion of a sperm and an egg, each contributing 50 per cent of the genetic material.

In the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer – so-called "cloning" – the sperm is not needed. Instead, you take an egg and replace its own genetic material with genetic material from the animal you want to clone. You then place that egg into an animal, which carries it to full term and gives birth to the cloned animal.

There are welfare issues with cloning. Animals have been born overly large, which can cause problems for the surrogate mother, and some animals have been born with abnormalities. But looking at the data from around the world, there's been a reduction in abnormalities. The process has been modified and improved upon.

Cloning for consumption

We are not going to be producing cloned animals to eat anyway – the cloning process is too expensive. However, the addition of cloning to breeding programs can help accelerate the breeding process. If you've got one good animal, you're limited to the number of offspring you can produce from it. If you clone it, on the other hand, you can increase the number of offspring, meaning that you can disseminate those desired genes into the population faster.

Cloning is less efficient than other methods of animal reproduction, so the animal would need to be worth an awful lot. I suppose it rather depends on what the product is – a Japanese Black cow may be worth cloning, because it's an expensive product, but in terms of your average roast beef it's just not going to be worth it.

People worry that we are playing God by removing the reproduction process. But what cows mate naturally? Very few, whether in this country, Europe or the Americas. Artificial insemination is used. There was a huge furore back in the 1950s about the introduction of artificial insemination, but it is now accepted practice.

Cloning a cow is expensive; it costs around £20,000 per animal as against the normal £1,000 cost. So cloning to eat would not make commercial sense. But cloning prime beasts from which to breed is another story. Cloning is about trying to create whole new breeds that will give leaner meat, higher yields of milk and enhanced disease resistance for lower inputs of grain and soya. Biotech cattle-breeding companies will not be cloning scrawny cows that can live longer on the edge of African deserts as climate change advances.

That raises a different raft of questions about profits, who shares in them, and whether global warming is best served by cloned beef and dairy cattle eating soya from cleared rainforests or standard beasts eating grass that nothing else would consume.

Send in the clones? It might not be such a good idea for humankind to be losing our timing this late in our career. Copy-cow burger? I'll have the beans on toast, thanks.

Only between 1 and 5 per cent of clones survive to birth. Many have birth defects, including respiratory, digestive, circulatory, nervous, muscular and skeletal abnormalities. Some are so big that their mothers die giving birth. Some have a higher propensity for developmental problems, such as mental retardation.

I am not a Darwinian sentimentalist who believes that there is no moral difference between animals and humans. I think that language, grammar, philosophy, religion, poetry, painting, music, science, technology and the self-consciousness of history – all of which allow us to stand on the shoulders of our ancestors – give the lie to that. But it undermines our morality if we take a purely instrumental view of animals.