Inside the Creepy, Surprisingly Routine Business of Animal Cloning
7th June 2025
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
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.
A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better than that—superior, even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls.