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FDA Decides Cloned Animals Safe to Eat
friedo writes "After five years of research, the Food and Drug Administration has decided that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat. From the article: 'The government believes meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. Meat and milk from the offspring of clones is also safe, the agency concluded. Officials said they did not have enough information to decide whether food from sheep clones is safe. If food from clones is indistinguishable, FDA doesn't have the authority to require labels, Sundlof said. Companies trying to distance themselves from cloning must be careful with their wording, he added.'"
That would be genetic engineering, not cloning.
A clone is an identical twin.
That's the theory. In practice, they weren't really sure how exact the cloning process duplicated the original genetics. That's the issue -- there may have been some DNA damage in the process that caused some weird interactions.
We apparently got the expected result, but it's definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If cloning was anywhere near the point of producing a genetically stable animal, this might be a fair ruling. The fact is, cloning introduces measureable defects. Most of those defects will impact the animal's health, rather than the safety of the meat. Some, and there's currently no way to know how many, will produce meat that is hazardous to humans. If geneticists aren't even sure why such defects exist at all, then you cannot ask them to quantify how many would be hazardous. How on earth could they possibly know?
Cloning might well be safe, once more of the variables have been quantified and the techniques refined to the point of being reliable. Once we are at that point, if the science showed that the risks to human health were comparable to the risks from non-cloned animals, the FDA would have a case. As it stands, this is a political decision that has zero credibility and should be reversed. You shouldn't try to run before you can crawl. (Walk? Stand up? We're nowhere close to those points.) The fact that labelling is to not require any mention of cloning is proof of that. If the market cannot overcome the objections of consumers except by lying to them, then the market has no goddamn business selling the time of day, never mind products where safety is critical.
(Personally, I'd prefer looser rules on what can be sold, tied to clearer markings on what is being sold. By play-pretending rigorous standards that really don't exist, and denying the information required to obtain any quantification of that risk, the consumer relies entirely on absolute trust in the divine wisdom of the FDA theocracy. Yes, it is a theocracy - it is driven entirely by faith, not facts from the ground or accountability from those affected. The FDA's methods are dubious - they were recently questioned with regards performing illegal human experiments on Africans - and their underlying principle seems to be one of worshipping themselves as Gods. The entire department should be closed as a hazard to human health.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Are you sure you don't mean "Protein is Protein"? Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. (I wonder if anybody will get that reference).
BTW, I thought this might spawn a funny thread, but I like the serious direction it's taken.
Finally, AFAIK prions are proteins with the same basic chemistry (same exact number of atoms and linkages between atoms) as their healthy counterparts, but folded differently. Thus, "a protein folded properly is a protein folded properly". Maintaining things like that across generations of cloned copies? Do we really want to stake our lives on it? Cloned monoculture meat? Very serious issues. It's one thing when I, as a programmer, crash somebody's box. It's quite another to crash the food supply. I think we should be a lot more cautious with this stuff. We have redundant power supplies in those servers. Where's our redundantn food supply? If somebody's going to experiment with my food, I want a backup.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The nuclear reactor reference is from a clasic one-time Saturday Night Live skit. Ed Asner was hosting and played the part of a retiring nuclear engineer. His last words to the people in the plant were "just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor". After he leaves, the reactor overheats. An argument ensues over what he meant. With lines like: "We should flood the reactor core, because hey, you can't put too much water in a reactor" being countered by "we should drain the reactor core! You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. There must be too much in there. That's why it's overheating."
The team is split, so they put it to a vote, and "drain the reactor" wins.
The final scene is Ed sitting on the beach, sipping a drink. A nuclear explosion appears in the distance. The waiter aks about it and he explains that it must be a test or something. His advice to the waiter? "just remember, you can't look too long at a nuclear explosion".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Unlike a carnivore, if you were to attempt to feed a herbivore only meat it would become very ill (typically weak, and blind) and soon after die from malnutrition. Of course, even by feeding them some meat (which they are not biologically equipped to deal with), it also makes them prone to diseases they wouldn't otherwise be at risk of - which can then be passed on to anything that in turn eats them. If cows are such herbivores, then why do they favor meat over grass when offered meat? They don't. Given a choice between a dead sheep or another dead cow and some grass, they will pick grass every time - like other sheep, they will stay well away from a dead sheep carcass in a field. They won't so much as nibble at the corpse. I'm guessing your not that familiar with cattle (I grew up in a house in the country and have seen enough dead sheep savaged by dogs).
Just as many cats will fight over chicken flavoured Quorn, they will only do so when tricked into thinking what they are eating is really something else (try getting a cat to eat a mushroom). Hardly surprising, as you can of course fool people that way too.