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Months before the FDA's December announcement that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat, employees at Cyagra were carving into cloned steaks several times a week.

The Elizabethtown, Pa., company clones cattle, so it volunteered samples from 11 clones and 11 ordinary cattle for tests requested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. That left workers with a lot of leftovers, said Cyagra spokesman Steve Mower.

They started with the steaks. When those ran out, they ate cloned hamburgers, tacos, lasagna and meat loaf, most of it prepared by the company's receptionist.

But 100 miles away in Williamsport, Md., one of the company's first clones, named Cyagra-Z, was wasting away - losing 500 of her original 1,000 pounds. A veterinarian couldn't figure out what was wrong with her, said the clone's owner, Greg Wiles. Cyagra-Z died in late January.

A decade after Scottish scientists stunned the world with a lamb called Dolly, scientists still can't say whether cloning had anything to do with the premature death of Cyagra-Z at age 6, or of Dolly herself, who got arthritis and...