CANYON, Texas -- At the end of a dirt road 20 miles outside of Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, four scientists in cowboy hats and boots stand watch over a very special bull.
Alpha, a 2̶½̶-̶t̶o̶n̶ 2,500-pound* clone, impatiently paces in his pen. Nearby, his calves discover the energy to play as the scorched day gives way to dusk. The summer days are long here at Nance Ranch, teetering on the edge of Central time. It's 9:30 p.m. and the sun hasn't set.
Dean Hawkins, who despite the heat is wearing his long-sleeved West Texas A&M University shirt, leans on the paddock's white fence as he describes his researchers' 6-year-long quest to scientifically manufacture a more perfect steak.
"This is biotech at its best," said Hawkins, who heads the agriculture and natural sciences school here.
Alpha was cloned in 2010 from DNA plucked from one of the most exclusive and tastiest steaks money can buy. These cattlemen scientists hope he has superior genes that can be passed onto his calves, and their calves, and so on, until someday the highest-quality beef available can end up on your plate at a fraction of what you'd pay today.
For West Texas A&M University, the revenue and prestige gained from even just attempting to create a better steak could be priceless.
Soon, an exclusive group of Texans will taste the first batch of results. Alpha is far too valuable to be on the menu.
On campus recently, students are in the school's meat lab slicing Alpha's offspring into hamburger patties.
Dru Lust, 20, is in the meat locker, wearing an extra layer under his white lab coat. The junior, a nephew of one of the team's lead scientists, talks excitedly about being involved in his Uncle David's project.
"If he blows everything else out of the water, this thing will get very big, very fast," he said, smiling under the hairnet that covers his thick, black beard.
Alpha is a clone, a genetic twin, derived from a Prime 1 rib-eye.
Diners pay a pretty penny for Prime 1 steak. Such beef is rich in tasty fat and replete with savory meat but lacks the inedible back fat the butcher cuts off and throws away.
Just three in 10,000 cows produce beef that good.
"Choice" beef, the quality grade just below prime, ends up in lesser, chain steakhouses and some nicer markets. Below that is "select," the grade of meat sold for less than $10 a pound at supermarkets.
Meat from cloned animals is OK for humans to eat, the Food and Drug Administration said, but it's unlikely most people have had any because it's far too expensive to clone an animal to make it practical to mass produce it. Plus, past polls have shown most people are wary of eating cloned animals, a stigma that has stuck around even as Americans consume other commonly cloned foods, such as wine from cloned grapes.
In a backroom next to the lab's meat locker, Trent McEvers pulls out the captive bolt pistol that renders an animal unconscious before the slaughter. He teaches an animal welfare class here when he's not helping run the lab.
"My gosh, no one wants to cause pain," McEvers said, explaining how slaughterhouses can face fines or worse if their workers fail to render an animal unconscious the first time, every time. As for the cloning project, and any other research the school undertakes, he said, "Welfare is the No. 1 concern."
Seven of the offspring Alpha sired hang nearby, stamped with the blue FDA choice and prime grades. McEvers spins the carcass slowly to show off the marbled fat before pointing to steaks on a nearby table.
Some of them will be eaten by the VIPs -- McEvers will swap his lab coat for a chef's hat that day -- and the rest will be grilled up and fed to other prominent donors and industry representatives over the next several months.
The public, for now, can buy only the hamburgers.
Six years ago, Ty Lawrence stood in a different slaughterhouse grading carcasses. It was late -- all of his research students had already left -- and he was about to clock out.
Then he stopped short. In rapid succession, Lawrence saw two of the best prime cuts he'd ever seen go by, one after another. It was like watching lightning strike the same place twice in the same night.
In that moment, his career took a sudden turn. He called Hawkins, then Lawrence's department head, and told him his idea.
"He wanted to clone the steer," Hawkins said. "And I said, no, let's clone a heifer and a steer."
With the help of ViaGen, a Cedar Park, Texas-based company that holds the cloning patent, local rancher Jason Abraham and veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen, the team from West Texas A&M University used the same technology used to clone the world-famous Dolly the Sheep in 1996 to reverse-engineer Alpha and his female counterpart, Gamma, from two of the best steaks in the country.
By mating two cows they knew had quality meat under their hides, they hope to produce higher-quality offspring that grow faster naturally and require less energy -- food, water and other resources. In short, a cow with the fuel economy of a Prius but the looks of a Cadillac.
If this quality is tied to genetics that can be passed on, Lawrence hopes a better breed of cow could result within decades, a wish even he admits is a bit out there. Until then, the team is in America's slaughterhouses on the hunt for the next Alpha, and for now, they may soon start selling the bull's semen and Gamma's eggs to cattlemen as a way to boost the quality of their herds -- that is, if they can prove there's something special about them.
The basic idea isn't unique. Breeders have been trying to breed higher quality, more efficient cows for generations, and some have used cloned bulls to do it. But the team at West Texas said they're the first to mate two Prime 1 clones and judge the results.
Mark Westhusin, a West Texas A&M University professor who was instrumental in several cloning breakthroughs, said many scientists think breeding better cows through cloning is old hat, and too expensive, and have moved on to genetic modification in the quest to create a better steak.
"I'll be interested to see the data, but there's nothing really new or innovative about it," said Westhusin, who added he wasn't upset he didn't know about the project because he had "bigger, better things to do."
"Cool" was the word geneticist Darrh Bullock of the University of Kentucky used to describe the project, but he said he needed to see hard data to know whether the team at West Texas was doing something a regular breeder could not do on his own.
Such a study is coming, maybe next year. The scientists will have more data then, when they see how Alpha's other offspring -- he's been mated with other non-clone cow populations elsewhere -- stack up to those of three of the country's top bulls.
For now, the sample size is small, but the results good, the team said.
All seven of Alpha's calves had high choice or prime meat, with 16 percent less of that bad back fat that goes to waste. The rib-eye cuts were 9 percent bigger than an average cow -- even though these were smaller when they were slaughtered -- and there was 45 percent more marbling.
They didn't get a Prime 1 calf, which Lawrence said disappointed some on the project. But they're not done.
"This is our first at-bat," said Lawrence. "We hit the ball and got more than a base hit out of it. We'll see what will happen in our second attempt, our third attempt."
SundayMonday Business on 07/10/2016
*CORRECTION: Alpha, a cloned bull raised by West Texas A&M University staff, weighs about 2,500 pounds. The animal’s weight was incorrectly described in this story.