The Creepy, Surprisingly Routine Business of Animal Cloning

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. Explore the July 2025 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More The technology existed. A couple of years earlier, in 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute, in Scotland, had cloned Dolly the sheep. La ... Read full article.