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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.'"
I can't wait till they can clone meat without that unnecessary nervous system, what will those vegans say then?
I don't like the way they used indistinguisable here. I'm not sure, but I was under the impression current clonning technology left us with gimped out calfs.
Isn't it the case that all cloned animal have a shortened life-span? Although genetically the same, I don't think clones are the same developmentally. I think there are some really horrible congenital defects that happen during cloning.
I think this indistinguishable bit might be BS. Also, I would like to have a label stating "cloned meat". Many people refuse to buy knock off Rolexes, even though they can be indistinguishable from the original. It's a matter of principal to some.
I can't say I like all the tampering science does to our food supply. It's too easy for stuff to get approved and too hard for it it get banned after approval (e.g. Sodium Nitrate). But what are arguments against this? The only real problem I see is the whole patent mess.
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The idea is to replicate a particularly desireable trait without the constraint inposed by traditional breeding. Currently your best bet at that is to breed the desired animal with another high quality animal, and hope the trait is not lost. With cloning you can create a larger breeding pool of animals all with the same desireable trait. This dramatically increases your chances of creating a strain in which the desired trait breeds true.
I don't think the point is to create an entire herd of clones. That will be prohibitively expensive for the forseeable future and would have some severe implication for disease resistance. But if Bessy produces 10% more milk than any of your other cows, and only 25% of her offspring have that trait, it's going to take you awhile to produce a herd with this trait. Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three clones of Bessys?
I'd appreciate it if someone who was more knowledgable in these matters that I am could comment on the premise: "is a cloned animal actually indistinguishable from its donor?"
For example: On average, do cloned animals live just as long as non-cloned animals? (i.e. same average lifespan, standard deviation, confidence level, etc.) I ask this because I remember reading that some cells can undergo only a finite number of replications and that there were some concerns about telomere and aging that figured into this.
So, are there ANY genetic differences between donor and cloned animals? That we might not have noticed a difference between the donor and the clone does not necessarily mean that there IS NO difference -- only that we HAVE NOT SEEN any difference... yet.
Indeed!
First we had the geniuses who went ahead with the money saving plan "Let's feed sheep's brains to cows!" which resulted in mad cow disease (which, when infected meat is eaten, can cause incurable and fatal neurological disease CJD in humans). Feeding meat to cows was clearly bad and wrong in ways that don't (shouldn't) need explaining to anyone and *blammo*, well what do you know, karma bites.
OT: Interestingly, Wikipedia says that in the US testing kits for BSE are banned (and presumably only conducted by the FDA then), and states "US Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of concerns that U.S. testing lacks sufficient rigor. As a result, exports of U.S. beef declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the US, to $1.4 billion in 2005.". Per head of population, CJD incidents in the US seem to be lower than in Europe/UK though, as US cattle seem to be typically fed on soya (which is at least vaguely sensible, it's a plant for starters - though oddities like artificial 'fish' proteins in GM soya give some cause for concern).
If feeding sheep to cows can screw people up through contamination of the food chain, there has surely got to be some grounds for being seriously concerned about the prospect of problems that might come from consuming cloned meat (specifically if it's on a regular basis - e.g. the same clone being eaten by people all over the world every time they go to a McDonald's, one nasty defect and *blammo* (again)).
As with the BSE crisis, if/when something goes wrong, I suspect the people and companies responsible for producing the goods will not even be investigated or in any way penalised (in fact, they will probably get huge subsidies as cattle farmers in the UK did to make up for the subsequent drop in the market, even though it was their own mess and it was public money that was spent cleaning it up).
Not as big a problem as if one of the clones had a cellular mutation that ended up giving it superpowers (telekinesis, invincibility, the ability to make chocolate milk, etc.) but still, I suspect This Will Not End Well.
It could of course be a much more humane way way to produce veal, dairy cows (without having to drag calves away at birth and feed them supplements) and healthily beef cows without resorting to steroids (though I suspect the industry will keep using them), so it seems not to all bad from a consumer perspective. Ultimately, it would be great to be able to produce meat without having to produce real living animals in the first place. Transmetropolitan 'human foot on a stick' anyone? I hear it's toe licking good...
The real impetus behind cloning is castration.
The majority of bulls destined to become meat are castrated well before breeding age, which means no offspring. If one of them turns out to be a prize specimen, you're SOL. With cloning, you can take a blood sample from the prize-winning bull and use it for breeding later.
Since castration is also common in race horses and working dogs, they would presumably also benefit.
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Great point! Prions defintely show that harmless proteins can turn deadly without any mutations in the gene itself. Could be caused by an interaction with proteins from genes other than the one that expresses the prion itself... sort of like the novel interactions you may get by splicing fish genes into soy...
:)
"No, protein is NOT protein." Or maybe, "PrP-C is not PrP-Sc"...
Actually, I was going to post that the original prion/BSE post was a bit manic, but I agree, it has become interesting
""Mad cow" disease is a basically a media hoax. "
While not a hoax, it was certainly hyped up by the media - but it was not the media that caused the political storm of other countries using it as an excuse to protect their markets (France in particular IIRC, though they were by no means alone) which lead to a 'collapse' of the export market (and subsequent subsidy handouts, which in the UK are greatly reshaping - for the better I think - the way we manage land).
That was a big part of the story that was hyped up (and was a big deal), as was the poor way in which the government handled the 'crisis' (which was the biggest story of all IIRC). It is true that BSE is much more common in other countries, and even seen as nothing unusual (though always a problem if it is detected in a herd) and it may well have blown over if the government hadn't handled it so oddly, though I think your right to implicate the media as bearing responsibility too.
"How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening."
Oh for sure. Though if they had kept at it for years and we hadn't changed the practice, it could easily have been a much bigger problem further down the line, and it's entirely possible we'd discover other long term issues too (even things we might be passing on, and that might impact over generations, for example).
It seems a slim risk, a bit like a (bad) far fetch sci-fi movie plot, but the BSE/CJD has shown weird ass stuff like that can happen, with globalised food production it could represent a greater and entirely unnecessary risk.
I don't avoid GM foods particularly (personally, I like the big, round juicy fruit sprayed with no-doubt cancer causing pesticides more than the small, knobbly Organic stuff) and I think globalisation is generally a Good Thing (for political and economic reasons), it doesn't seem prudent to get cocky about this sort of thing though.
We've been there before with so many other products (e.g. if you are pregnant be sure to (not) take some Thalidomide to help with the morning sickness and as an anti-inflammatory for your swollen ankles). It just seems crazy to rush headlong and 'assume' it will all be fine and no one will get hurt.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal.
If you eat one once, I'm sure it's just fine, maybe even safer than eating a random cow you don't know the history of (if the cloning process was of very high quality and all things being equal). That doesn't describe a very likely future scenario though.
If millions of people effectively eat that same cow for decades, and it turns out there is something funny about it's genetic makeup that has a knock on effect for even a small percentage of the population, then a lot of people could find themselves with some serious problems. It might be increase susceptibility to certain cancers, it could make people more prone to Alzheimer's, it could be another neurological condition, we just don't know, but we do know it can, and has happened before. And for what? To save a couple of pence on each hamburger sold (*literally*). Not worth going in for all guns blazing IMO.
I'm not try to be melodramatic about it, but think about how many screwed up two-headed, six-legged or three tailed goats get created for every decent quality clone that goes in front of the camera and even the 'good' clones don't last long - a clone is, in many ways, the age of the original PLUS it's own age (never mind the other problems under the surface due to damaged DNA).
That is, if you were to take a 35 year old human, and clone him, at 15 they'd have medical complaints (including cancers) you'd only expect to see on a 50 year old. Even with a impossibly perfect cloning process, the individual would be lucky to live to be 35 themselv
Yes, in principle, it may be just barely possible that cloning could result in a mutation that causes overproduction of a protein with no noticeable ill effects in the animal, yet survives proteolytic conditions in the stomach and digestive tract, and results in a rare neurodegenerative disease in humans.
Of course, none of this really has anything to do with cloning, which is not particularly prone to produce mutations. Such a mutation could just as well occur spontaneously and be propagated by selective breeding. For that matter, it may have already happened. Such a mutation might be naturally present in any food that we are already eating. There are a number of rare neurodegenerative diseases. It is certainly possible that some of them are due to a protein that is present in wheat or potatoes or corn (all of which have limited genetic variability). If you are really paranoid about this sort of thing, you could avoid eating any food with low genetic variability.
But wait! Who knows how big a dose of the deadly protein it takes to induce the disease? Maybe it takes only a single dose! It is certainly theoretically possible. In that case, eating foods with high genetic variability is precisely the worst thing you can do, because it would increase your risk of exposure to the deadly protein! To be safest, you should be eating only cloned foods and other foods with low genetic variability!
Of course, hardly anybody is going to worry much about the possibility that there might be a harmful prion in the foods that they already eat. It may be a theoretical possibility, but next to other food related risks, such as heart disease and food-borne infections, it is fairly obvious that prions in the diet (which in the worst known case cause human disease only very rarely) are far, far down on the worry list. But tie it to a new technology, and suddenly it is seen as horribly plausible. Fundamentally, however, it is merely another rationalization for fear of change--an unreasoning paranoia about anything that is new and different.
Those who think as the above can go fuck themselves, as they are living in a fools paradise if they think that cloning the same animal over and over again will be without cost. We do not let first cousins marry. We do not marry our brothers and sisters. Yet we are going to put an animal on the marketplace and make billions of copies of it. Let's say that this is akin to farming the same crop on the same field year in and year out. They do just that near where I live. It is called seed corn. Farmers here are under contract to do it in the face of the fact that doing this is known bad farming practice to the soil. This takes nutrients, the same nutrients out the soil year after year wearing the soil out. The result is the now necessity of using great quantities of chemical fertilizer in order to bring a crop. That is not all. Parasites, insects, and crop diseases just love this kind of farming as it presents a constant table running over with joy...for them and not for the farmer, for prices, or us. So it will be the same for clones. These critters will be so susceptible to certain diseases that they will have to be packed with antibiotics all of their lives in order to even survive to get to your table. As a result, all manner of resistant disease bacteria and protozoa will be bred into the fabric of our society. These antibiotics will stay in the meat and we will consume this meat, becoming dosed with them ourselves. Thus we will be taking part, involuntarily as no 'responsible' meat company will let its customers know that they are being screwed, in a great experiment leading to a huge pandemic that will sweep all the clones and most of the humans that eat them in a charnel house of death of the industry's making.