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US FDA Deems Cloned Animals Edible
Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.
Will it cost half as much?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'd imagine the opposition groups will start losing much of their leverage given the fact that the meat's been deemed no different from ordinary meat.
And don't think you veggiesaurs are exempt. Have you ever eaten anything grown from a clipping of a plant? That's a clone.
And don't get me started on the beer drinkers who are quaffing yeast pee...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Edible like in snails, ants and blowfish edible?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Similarly to how "organic" labeling costs more at the store than non-organic, I imagine "non-cloned" meats will be labeled as such, and likewise cost more.
have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones.
if cow A is good to eat, then a clone of cow A should be just as good to eat.
When you find that one really *tasty* chicken... and you eat it... and its GONE?
And never *never* will you find a chicken quite so tasty...?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
... such that there are no degeneration of copies, then there are better things we can eat like HFCS filled foods..
Seriously there are worse things to eat that the FDA has approved. But still, considering gene therapy is at hand, it does make me hold caution to ingesting something that may contain genetic issues.
Next step: Approval of vat-grown meat
Considering the fact that I am a vegetarian, this just goes to show why I don't trust the FDA.
-- 42 --
I've been smoking cloned dope for years.
This is the same FDA that allows beef growers to feed the parts of other cows (minus the brains and spinal cords) to other cows while they are packed in tightly and standing in their own piles of urine and feces because they can't move anywhere.
:(
This is the same FDA that has permitted plenty of E. coli outbreaks because they refuse to put an end to unhealthy meat practices.
This is the same FDA that bends to political pressure instead of caring about the health of the American public it is supposed to protect.
What about hormones which possibly cause early puberty in girls? I could go on but I won't bother, we all know what we're putting into our bodies...
Cloned beef may be safe but it's the practices that they allow outside of this that really suck and I wouldn't trust a fucking thing they approve and neither should you. If only that beef didn't taste SO good
That's very nice of the FDA to decide that the American public doesn't need to be told they are eating cloned meat. I feel free, don't you?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
...when artificial insemination was first used for cattle, there was the same "moral panic" because, y'know, it was new and different and therefore SPOOOKY, and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
Hell, when the first smallpox vaccine was invented, there were very similair panics to what we see today over genetic engineering.
People are stupid, but they are also easily distracted and forget last year's MAJOR CRISIS in favor of this year's equally all-consuming disaster.
100 years ago, the FDA was an honorable organization that looked out for the public interest. Do they still have this function?
Cloned or not, as long as the animal in question lived a happy, healthy life prior to being slaughtered, I'll eat it. If I can't source it to a responsible supplier, I won't. /opinion
Great. Now restaurants will stop letting people take their left-over steak home, for fear of having their custom cow breed cloned.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Without diversity, entire food supplies can be wiped out by single diseases.
Dolly wasn't the first animal to be cloned, she was the first mammal to be cloned.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
...tastes EXACTLY like the one I had last week!
I don't have a problem with raising animals so that we can feed on them, but now we don't even need them have sex before going to slaughter? That's just cruel and inhumane.
Jhyrryl
groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning
If GMO grain and hormone-loaded-milk are any example, the industry is concentrating on keeping the FDA from requiring industry mark which meat is from cloned animals. *And* aggressively going after businesses that market food as NOT being cloned/GMO/hormone-loaded.
It's absolutely hilarious to listen to the logic: "If we labeled it, people wouldn't buy it." Ho, really? No kidding, sherlock! That's how capitalism works. And guess what? 1/3rd of America doesn't want anything to do with you.
I'm so tired of farmers and businessmen that are the first to yack about "freedom" but keep begging for the government to save them / prop them up. As more and more people start demanding organic foods, the non-organic foods will drop in price because demand drops. I'll bet anything that the non-organic agribusinesses will go running to Congress begging for larger handouts...
Please help metamoderate.
Food and Drug Administration officials today announced that food from cloned animals is safe to eat even as their counterparts in the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked producers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely
Apparently this is only for public perception--they do say (perhaps with a subtle irony), that "we conclude that meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones are as safe as food we eat every day..."
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
...it's just that like most people, you don't understand how "cloned" meat is produced. A cow clone can cost upwards of $5,000, but no one eats that cow. A highly productive cow is cloned, then used as breed stock, just like any other animal with good attributes. It's the offspring that are used to produce meat and milk. Really, the entire argument looks puerile and pointless when people flap their mouths without knowing even the basic information.
What's going on, and is there any way of stopping it? /. used to gracefully fall back to the classic system for non-Javascript-enabled browsers, and used to be usable from within on Lynx. It now fails... ungracefully.
Any chance we could revert whatever change happened today?
cloned humans? Or maybe just a kidney? Or rump roast? And aren't apple trees a clone?
What?
Cloning is so prohibitively expensive that it won't be an issue for years to come. It's just another copy of the same animal that will get injected with various growth hormones to achieve the optimal fat to meat ratio. Baseball has nothing on the feed animal industry. I'd question the "organic" labeling the FDA has approved rather than be worrying about something that isn't likely to hit your table anytime soon.
Ever eaten a double-yolk egg? You've eaten a cloned animal. Same if you've ever eaten the twin sibling of any animal. And don't think you veggiesaurs are exempt. Have you ever eaten anything grown from a clipping of a plant? That's a clone.
You're missing the point; we're not talking about single isolated cases of cloning. We're talking about ten years from now, having virtually every head of cattle genetically identical to the one next to it.
Think it through: why would the industry want to clone? Because they want to develop a "perfect" cow, steer, chicken, turkey. Then patent it. Then sell or "license" it to farmers.
Now, it's not very convenient for your product to be capable of replication, so they'd probably be sterile. Joe Farmer is now dependent on CloneCow Corp for his animals. And maybe it turns out that they're not QUITE 100% sterile, so the artificial population starts to mix into the natural gene pool? Think it couldn't happen? Wrong, because both have happened with GMO grains.
To top it off, there's no genetic diversity, so the entire population is identically vulnerable in terms of disease susceptibility, or defective in terms of their bodies.
Imagine that ten-year-off scenario. What if one day it's discovered that they're vulnerable to some strain of a particular virus that is rapidly spreading? And by "they", I mean ALL of them?
Please help metamoderate.
Cattle go on strike refusing to be eaten until their conditions dramatically improve.
rawr!
Now, I'm no biology major, but I did pay attention in high school. Seems to me that the whole concept behind sexual reproduction was to eliminate unfavorable traits and make way for better ones. Adaptation is the basis behind why life still exists after billions of years.
Now, if you take an animal and clone it over and over again, no improvement takes place. This means that every disease out there that affects said animal gets a "free pass" from one generation to the next, possibly never to be eliminated.
Furthermore, what are the standards going to be to deem which animals are "perfect" enough to clone? Are we going to be practicing some twisted new form of Bovine Eugenics here? Why do I picture cattle with Holstein swastikas?
So, would you rather eat a cow that died of natural causes?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Clone it's what's for dinner...
a coalition of cannibal tribes deemed cloned FDA bureaucrats edible.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I want to clear up a misconception about the Wha-Cha-Ma-Clone Sandwich. I used non-cloned meat from cloned animals!
I see this got tagged 'this is not irony'... Actually, it's the very definition of irony.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irony
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected
Sheep, despite being the first mammals (not animals, apparently) cloned, were not included on the 'safe' list. This is ironic since you would expect that the first animals would have had more time to be studied, and therefore more should be known about them... Yet they didn't get studied enough yet.
If you're going to nitpick the summary, at least be correct.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I for one welcome our cloned bovine overlords...
All the worlds indeed a
Well, maybe not. Heck, I'm not too worried. Modern breeders of every sort of food animal or pet already have plenty of experience with the effects of too much inbreeding on their stock, I don't think the addition of this tool to their kit will confuse them to the point that it damages the species or anything. If the stock becomes non-viable, they will discontinue the method and reintroduce other genetic lines.
In my opinion, absolute worst case scenario, world wide sheep production dips for a few years when some horrible side effect is first noticed. The price of lamb, mutton, and wool goes up for a while. Then wild and heirloom stocks are reintroduced, the problem is solved, and we move on.
But you have to admit, now there's a teeny tiny part of you that's worried about zombie sheep.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I don't deem dead land animal flesh safe to eat at all, cloned or not. And there are many studies to support this, including The China Study.
I'd worry more about the high proliferation of the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup, now used in nearly all process foods from Ketchup to cookies.
Not to mention the problems with Milk and other dairy products considering that 3/4ths of the world's population is lactose intolerant, just for starters.
But Mommy Government could never be wrong, right?
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
In a truly green society you wouldn't be eating meat at all.
Factories are great things. They make things. Farms are great things. They grow things. Put them together and you something ugly. I have no spiritual objection to cloning, but I question the wisdom of further mucking up our Food Works. I can reinstall my OS, I cannot re-install me. I'd like to move much more cautiously and intelligently than has been our record when it comes to food than we have with our gadgets and tools. Monocultures are bad. Putting all the eggs in one basket so to speak. We are rapidly narrowing our diet in terms of the species of the things we eat to our detriment. Cloning animals seems like the next step down a bad path to me.
When do they cross livestock with beetles? I want my Buggalo, damn it!
1/3 is totally against
1/3 is partially against
1/3 does not care
Who is being served by the decision that it does not need to be labeled when 2/3 are not fully for it and the remainder does not give a damn?
If it does not cause harm and people care about, it should be labeled but it won't sell to 2/3 - so... shuff it down their throat it's a free country!
The problem with all this "artificial" stuff seems to be that our bodies are accustomed for a very long time to most stuff "naturally" occurring on this planet.
Now there is food material introduced which our bodies have not seen in that fashion - hyrdogenated oil is one of those and determined as being bad. Our bodies don't know how to deal with it.
So far, it seems to be that cloned animals are not equivalent to naturally (or artificially inseminated) grown animals. They die earlier and seem to have other problems meaning they are not 100 % identical.
Is there a long term risk - only time will show.
For a change, maybe human guinea pigs should be given the freedom of choice to participate in experimenting?
They should name the first cow Jango Fett...
No, what I really want to know is if they can make a naturally spicy chicken, cayenne, garlic, maybe some basil. If some teenagers (with some help from MIT) can make ecoli that smells like mint or bananas, surely Tyson can make me a prespiced chicken. Or the obvious chocolate milk giving cow. How much harder can that be than the company that made goats that spin spider silk into their milk? The precautionary principle upsets me greatly. All the neo-Luddites and misguided religious zealots are stealing my chance at cool stuff like uploading and prespiced chickens!
"Yesterday is for mice and gods."
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
These clones are not genetically identical to uncloned animals. The newborn clone has the same depleted count of telomeres that the fully-grown animal had when the clone's original tissue was taken from the original animal. But not the amount that a natural animal has when it's born. The adult clone will also have fewer telomeres in every cell than a natural adult.
We don't know that those lowered telomere counts affect the tissue in any way that affects the eater. But we also don't know that it doesn't affect us. We do know that the animals die much younger, because telomere countdowns are directly reflected in the aging process. So a "middle aged" cloned sheep is really like an old natural sheep. And there could very well be many other effects, some of which are much more subtle, some of which could be unhealthy. The FDA should not even allow sale of these animals for food until their hazards are disproven.
But we won't even be able to tell the basic difference by looking at the label. Because the food industry doesn't want us to know, because they have their reasons for cloning that have nothing to do with our health or safety.
That's shows what's unnatural about our government that's protecting these industries, rather than letting us decide how to protect ourselves, when the FDA won't.
--
make install -not war
...that Variety is good. Keep mixing the gene pool, keep everything mixing as much as possible.
When that stops, trouble starts. It's that simple.
The sooner a steak is grown in a petri dish the better. No more farms = less deforestation, less farm runoff polluting rivers, less greenhouse gases etc
public class Cow implements Clonable
{
private int numMows;
private static int NUM_MOWS_PER_DAY = 69;
public Cow()
{
this.numMows = 0;
}
public Cow(int numMows)
{
this.numMows = numMows;
}
public void mow()
{
this.numMows++;
}
public int getAge()
{
return this.numMows / (365 * NUM_MOWS_PER_DAY);
}
public Object clone()
{
return new Cow(this.numMows);
}
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Cow cow = new Cow();
Cow clonedCow = cow.clone();
}
Animals (well higher order ones that we generally associate with food) do not. They reproduce sexually. There is strong evidence that cloned animals show earlier signs of aging http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0YUG/is_11_9/ai_n18608674 . THis might mean that the meat gets tougher quicker or whatever, and it raises ethical concerns too.
BTW a double-yolked egg is not a clone. It is two ova that got deivered down the egg packaging canal together (like fraternal twins).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
They can afford organic. This only effects the masses.
Can I be not the first no doubt to point out the horrible problems with the new interface. I realise that this is is coming from a long beta where I could have submitted my info, but the sheer appalingness of what has arisen takes my breath away.
How do I 'browse at 3'?
Where is the manual?
The very fact that the last question makes sense means there's something horrible wrong. I have not seen a less intuitive interface in a long time. And what's with that jump when you scroll?
ugh
The first written account of variolation describes a Buddhist nun practicing around 1022 to 1063 AD. She would grind up scabs taken from a person infected with smallpox into a powder, and then blow it into the nostrils of a non-immune person. By the 1700's, this method of variolation was common practice in China, India, and Turkey. In the late 1700's European physicians used this and other methods of variolation, but reported "devastating" results in some cases. Overall, 2% to 3% of people who were variolated died of smallpox, but this practice decreased the total number of smallpox fatalities by 10-fold. The History of Smallpox
It is a bit of a strtch to call the smallpox vaccine an "invention."
Jenner simply observed that those who survived the less dangerous cowpox were immune to smallpox. His test subject was an eight year old boy. The ethics and methodology of his experiment were questionable even in 1796.
Throughout the nineteenth century you could have a perfectly rational fear of vaccination.
There was no mature germ theory of disease before the 1860s. Late Germ Theory of DiseaseThere was no federal regulation of vaccination before 1902:
The Biologics Control Act was passed in the United States on July 1, 1902 after two incidents involving the deaths of children caused by contaminated vaccines. The first involved The horse named Jim whose tetanus contaminated serum was used to produce a diphtheria antitoxin which caused the deaths of thirteen children in St. Louis, Missouri. The second involved contaminated smallpox vaccine which killed nine children in Camden, New Jersey. Both incidents were attributed to failure of proper procedures and testing by local officials. Biologics Control Act
If God didn't intend for man to eat animals, why are they made of tasty cloned meat?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They're taking our jeorbs!
Can be? Have been!
Sibling poster is right to point out the banana. Agricultural bananas have no seeds, and are propagated asexually. Essentially, all banana plants are clones.
In the early 20th century, a single banana "clone" was used for almost all commercial banana growing in the Americas. It was totally wiped out by a fungus in the '50s, devastating the industry. So the banana companies switched to the Cavendish banana, which isn't as tasty, but was resistant to the virus. Today, this single "clone" is used for almost all commercial banana crops *globally*. And guess what? That same fungus from the 50s has mutated to a form that affects Cavendishes, and is beginning to wipe out banana plantations throughout Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
Genetically modified food, particularly meat from cloned animals, should be labeled if the FDA must approve it for sale.
This is a consumer rights issue.
All up and down this post, geneticists and biology teachers have been going on and on about telomeres and banana clones and blah blah blah...the fact is, meat from a cloned animal is NOT the same as meat from an animal born as a twin. The long term consequences of narrowing genetic diversity in biological food product (what cows have become) could have very nasty consequences.
The FDA did their studies and approved cloned meat. Fine by me, but we have the right to know WHAT we are eating...especially in regards to this issue.
Thank you Dave Raggett
They say "You are what you eat".
I guess that means if we eat enough pork from those genetically engineered pigs which are fluorescent, that we'll glow in the dark under UV too.
I don't give a damn. If *you* want non cloned meat *you* can pay extra to get it. You can die in a fire before you make me pay for labels to assuage your superstitious technophobia.
Here is an exceprt from a scientific paper regarding some of this process:
You're asking for a minor and irrelevant part of the meat's history. If you luddites want non-cloned meat, there is absolutely nothing preventing you from paying for it.
Don't try to force sane, reasonable people to do so.
You would be eating soylent green.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I asked people in my bio class what they thought of eating cloned animals and they overwhelmingly agreed that not only that cloning is wrong, but also that eating cloned animals will lead to genetic mutations and or 'cloning by association'. Granted I am in a school in rhinestone buckle of the bible belt, but students -bio students no less- should know, same DNA, same RNA, same RNA same protiens.
The only thing that bothers me about introducing genetically altered food of any kind into the supply, is, say 10-20 years down the road, what happens if some sort of genetically mutated virus/bacteria gets into the food supply from a genetically altered animal? Screwing around with DNA, when we simply do not completely understand the ramifications can be a little scary. Once altered, if you don't have a 100% pure strain to store, what happens if say, "cows" get to the point where they either die off completely, or are "not fit for human consumption"?
What about cloned human meat? Do you realize what you could charge for that stuff?
What?
Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. I think the first cloned animal (if you don't, not counting bacteria and other things that do it on their own) was a tadpole in the 1950s.
I predict that the long term effect of eating cloned meat will be the inexplicable affectation of a New Zealand accent amongst those who eat them. Perhaps a tendency to murder Jedi as well.
--
Toro
All in all, there's nothing to worry about, and labeling meat as 'CLONED' will just make it easier for consumers to boycott perfectly safe products. There's just too much mis-information about a lot of biotechnology and I don't think that enabling advocacy groups to spread a bunch of FUD is the best plan. If you feel that badly about it, buy a ranch and grow your own. I assume that you'll also go back to eating maize instead of corn -- octoploid genetic freak vegetables. It used to be that people were convinced that eating food contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) would not result in any detrimental effects on humans, now it seems you stand a chance of getting vCJD. Science has been wrong before and science will be wrong again. Personally I don't really care how safe you think cloned meat or food products from genetically modified life forms are. Personally, I don't want to eat any, and I seriously object to the idea that these products don't have to be labeled as what they are so I can avoid them. I am surprised to see that 1/3 of people in the USA share this sentiment, I'm pretty sure the ratio is even higher in Europe. You can call us irrational and you may be right but we still reserve the right not to eat gene manipulated food products and we fail to see why we should be happy about the fact that the FDA decided de-facto rob us of the right to choose what we eat by deciding these products don't have to be labeled.
Personally, i have no problem with cloning as such "hey, we managed to bread a perfect cow that produces perfect meat" - clone away. The downsides are somewhat limited really, sure it kills of the gene pool, but it'd probably not be that wide spread as such.
What i do find interesting is that people who object to cloning dont seem to have a problem with genetically modified. GM scares me half to death "oh, we created hardier wheat, but we found out (too late) that it makes humans impotent after 5 generations, if only we'd realized a little earlier" - bye bye human race.
Just look at nature, clones are very common. I can imagine in 100 years the USA has super cows all bred from the same gene stock then some foreign agent introducing a virus wiping the whole industry out in a week.
There is no scientific or technical reason to fear cloned meat any more than cloned fruits any more than any other food.
Claims of something being "natural" have no precise or technical meaning. It is just religious gibberish.
Meat is just a pile of chemicals. There is no significant difference between a cloned lump of meat and a "natural" one, other than in your mind. Or at least, as far as anyone knows.
By the time the "degraded" DNA gets through your belly, it has been ripped apart by the acid bath anyway.
Why are we even talking about this? I'll admit to not knowing much about the cloning process, but it seems to me that there is at least one major logic flaw. Aren't our cows willing to reproduce naturally? I've got family with bulls and they seem eager to hump anything that get into the pasture. Are the commercially raised beef not quite as enthusiastic? Do we actually have a shortage of breeding opportunities? :-)
Does nobody realize how much of our day to day food is produced in a lab anyway? Artificial sweeteners are called artificial for a reason. When it comes down to it, a cloned animal is still an animal. It isn't as though we are replacing any part of it with some artificial substance to make it a low fat diet cow. I mean... do you think twice when ordering that Diet Coke or when you add that Splenda to your coffee?
Let them eat CakeCakeCakeCakeCakeCakeCakeCakecAkecAkecAkecAkecAkecAke
Always have. Nothing new here. Twins, triplets, heptuplets, nothing new. Part of nature. Every once in a while a sheep or a cow will have twins, too. City people. They think food comes from grocery stores, and then get all upset when they read something that the reporter didn't understand.
On a side note, China has began cloning dogs.
if you were me, you'd think the same way
Exactly!
:) Like the Portia spider,
ALL animals have very similar thoughts and receptors to our own. Things like fear and pain are primordial and necessary for any survival. Other things that are necessary generally involve some sort of social structure in most animals, which involves, yes, thought! The only thing we think we have over animals is reason (though the lack of communication is probably what is the barrier here), though with some parts of the world as crazy as they are, I would not exactly say that many of us actually follow that reason.
Hell, even insects have pain receptors and think. They must adapt somehow.
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html
And an animal without pain cannot survive. People with a disorder that makes them unable to feel pain end up with giant burns, eat their cheeks out, etc. Nasty. Many do not survive long as they don't know when something is really wrong.
How much food do we eat on a daily basis that is a direct product of human medling. Grafting various stuff togeather making stuff grow better, faster..etc. The answer is pretty much everything.
There are also plenty of examples of 'natural' stuff we never mucked with that will kill you instantly.
Its not about *where* the food came from that matters. The question that really matters is *will it kill you* or worse yet turn you into a troll doomed to spend eternity under a bridge with a -1 IQ.
the government allows cloning but not stem cell research....
In the words of Peter Griffen... "WHY ARE WE NOT FUNDING THIS!?!?!?"
Sirs:
:(
Ill have the double lamb chop burger. They are calling it a Double Dolly!
( Opps, Dolly was the test tube sheep
I mean, I can imagine cloning being an advantage when it comes to breeding a particular pedigree of animal for pets or other kinds of show animals, but I don't see the advantage of cloning livestock over the old-fashioned method of making new livestock; more often than not, the latter requires little human intervention if any.
If a particular livestock animal has valuable characteristics, isn't it better to foster those characteristics in successive generations through selective breeding, which lets you improve the traits over succeeding generations, than to try to clone the animal and end up with more of the same and nothing better?
Then you must either grow leaves and conduct photosynthesis, or learn to eat methane. Even if you rule out natural selection, pretty much every food item we eat has been genetically modified over thousands of years by artificial selection. Have you ever seen a wild cow?
cloned beef #123 could simply produce a protein generating heavy allergic reaction. For example suddenly produce an analogue of what is in peanut and make people ill.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Frankly I've been countlessly surprised how does suppositions and... Merely Lies raise as Perfect Indestructible Truth. They come as fast as they vanish. The point seems to be keep the public calm. And nothing more. From decades to now, I saw the absurdity of common sense statement emphasizing margarine as healthy, far better substitute for milk butter. The recent controversy around trans fat twisted it all for reason's sake. Grandma was right again.
Any awake person should dismiss FDA statements at all.
In my place I have seen the benefits of food industry. Sure I AM happy because I don't have notice of any starvation menace among my fellows and so-called citizens. I appreciate the consciousness of living in a country that, despite social problems, have availability of food to anyone. Indeed obesity is an increasing issue. Credits to modern food industry, thanks a lot to USA based companies which have been coming out with nice tech innovations. Maybe clone stock are doing their fate as hybrid seeds did. Maybe mankind sometime will rely on this new trick to perform.
It is amazing how does people take weird choices concerning what they, given virtually infinite options, put through their organisms.
I see dead people.
I see slow painful death to them, sometimes interesting people with theoretic power of decision, who ruthlessly select to believe blindly in government agencies. I don't blame the agency, they have an agenda. The point is that their agenda is both tied to survival of citizens and survival of industry. Given a secure margin of risk they can happily lie with no consequences. They can put a margarine scam or two for centuries and the result as a whole is benefiting us all, or somewhat almost us all.
Grandma was absolutely right.
My personal supposition is that cloned beef poses no harm at all to eaters. The environmental concern, indeed, is a fact. Diversity has a key role in our world's life. So the matter, the relevant one, is the future of breed. The influence of engineered crops and their bounds through benefit and disgrace are yet to be known.
In this obscure meantime - and I am becoming old enough to say this - I recommend anyone to follow the inner sense of taste. There is no mercy form who, in a moment of patriotic illumination, takes the agencies word as drop-forged truth and stick stupidly to industry standards concerning to what to eat today. The industry is great and produces improvement to human life. The industry reports are undoubtedly biased whatever the industry needs and tied slightly as necessary to the limits posed by insurance companies. Aware of that, the rest of modern life is not complicated as it used to be to our ancestors (which experienced real shortage of goods in WWW2).
Labelling it necessarily implies there's something wrong with it. Besides, where do you draw the line? Should we require non kosher meat to be labelled so?
Of course not, we simply allow those who want it to buy from suppliers who voluntarily label. Don't ask me to fund your superstition.
1/3 don't want any part of it
1/3 think it's ok
1/3 are somewhere in the middle
And maybe 1 in 1000 know enough to have a meaningful opinion at all.
If people can be alergic to peanuts....
What's to say some variant of a protein created in a GM crop won't trigger massive alergic reactions in a very small proportion of the population.
How would you suggest that they test GM food against that ? Other than stick it on the shelves and see who dies?
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
Um, dude, I hate to break it to you, but cuttings of any sort, grafted to root stocks or planted on their own, are not cloned, but are rather in effect offshoots of the same original plant. As numerous other posters have noted, cloning is an entirely different process, which involves taking the genetic stock of an adult organism and creating an embryo using that same genetic material. This therefore means that the new cloned embryo includes all of the genetic damage and aging present in the adult. This is more relevant when dealing with animals (maybe even mammals more specifically?) rather than plants, given how protein encoding can become damaged over time, and given how telomeres regulate the lifetime of the organism. This is why clones generally do not live as long as regularly bred animals -- the shortened telomeres alone dictate a shorter lifespan, let alone any possible genetic damage inherited from the clonestock.
And, as other posters have noted, genetic damage = changes in protein manufacture. As we have seen with mad cow disease, the consumption of aberrant animal proteins can lead to some very nasty incurable diseases in humans. And we simply do not have the breadth of data truly required to be able to accurately and fairly judge whether the consumption of cloned livestock is truly safe.
Call me a cynic, but I rather suspect that this FDA ruling has more to do with business concerns than with sound public health policy.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Nice understatement.
The real heart of the matter isn't "frankenfood" (though it's a marketing issue, for sure) or the inevitable genetic damage carried forward by the clones; it's the way that the food industry is becoming more capital intensive through ideological progress, vertical integration and conglomeration, and through designing a complex chain of pharmacological dependencies. All these things undermine your food security by replacing family farms (and local processors) with giant corporate systems that DO NOT have you or your community's best interests at heart.
Cloned, monogenetic livestock herds will require Big Pharma to support them, they'll be susceptible to epidemics and genetic flaws. They will go hand in hand with methods of production that are over-scale and thus risky. They will be controlled by a very few corporate giants, and will further push farmers out of business, to be replaced by more of the same faceless institutions.
I'm all for mass international corporate production--of electronics. Food, however, is different. Our food security requires
well, that's as a start. Food security isn't about stockpiling or having enough or locking your roommates out of the pocket pizzas. It's about integrating the food system into the regional economy and seeking better quality and diversity, it's about reliability and nutrition, and minimizing risks.
Cloned livestock herds will work against food security, because of how they will be developed, produced, and owned. The so-called health issues are second to these concerns.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Fast food chains with "Repeat that burger!" Slogans? Elegant stake houses with "Be more familiar with your food!" as their version? Cross over commercials with talking wall mounted animal heads "We tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on..."? Open your heart to cloning, yes we do that too? [Cloning your heart that is] URLP!
ALL animals have very similar thoughts and receptors to our own.
No they don't. Are you suggesting that an ant has the capability for abstract thought?
Things like fear and pain are primordial and necessary for any survival.
Kind of. Any sufficiently advanced animal is likely to have mechanisms for avoiding damage and evading threats. That does not mean they are consciously aware of those things however. There are only a small number of species which we have good reason to believe have consciousness.
The only thing we think we have over animals is reason (though the lack of communication is probably what is the barrier here)
"Animals" is far too broad a term to discuss in this sense. "Reason" isn't a well-defined term, but as I would define it, there are animals which can reason to an extent (e.g. chimps), though I would guess that chickens can't. Your average fish can't "reason" -- they're just too primitive.
It seems no one pointed this out, but in the long run this will lead to less genetic diversity, and perhaps even death of some domestic species as we know them.
Meat producers will find one cow with desired genetic traits (huge, lots of lean meat etc), and keep cloning it, until everyone in the country keeps eating the same cow over and over again literally.
So, in the long run, there will be less genetic diversity, since very few cows live in the wild on their own.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Manditory labeling is a tricky issue, since it is a minor infrigement of the manufacturer's liberty, but a line is crossed when they can lie by degrees.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Was Dolly really the first cloned animal, or was she the first cloned mammal? It seems odd that out of everything that you could possibly clone for the first time, that somebody'd choose a sheep.
Actually, wouldn't cloning be putting the same basket in all your eggs?
People must know what they eat.
But the fact that FDA didn't deem it necessary doesn't mean that consumers cannot use the free market to implement voluntary labelling. In fact law is not the only way to implement social rules.
Just organise in consumer societies or coordinate your actions with blogs and wikis and announce your collective decision not to buy food unless it has a label "This food contains cloned parts" or "This food is free of cloned parts". If no food qualifies in the local market buy from overseas, don't buy at all, or buy in very small quantities. If providers don't cooperate, find a few richer members within your community then start a food business or cooperative and make detailed labelling your competitive advantage. You could also form a not-for-profit NGO with the goal of certifying that what labels companies put correspond to reality. Keep a list of companies that cooperate and a blacklist, then buy only from providers who maintain your standards.
Time to trot this out... Odd how things we write as kids come back to us, isn't it?
/yes, it's original. //yes, I'm warped.
Oh, my clone he has a first name
It's O S C A R
Oh, my clone he has a second name
Barcoded on his jar
We're just a like in every way
And if you ask me why I'll say
'Cause Oscar's makers had a way
With recombining DNA
The problem is not the cloned food deemed edible. The problem is that they producers do not have to label the product. The choice should be left up to the consumer. If they want cloned food--let them. If they do not want cloned food then they should be able to read the label to be able to make that choice themselves. We are in a society now where we rely on food producers. Very few of us have the ability to produce our own food so we should have the right to know what we are consuming. Recently in Pennsylvania the state government said that milk manufacturers do not have to label milk from cows that are given hormones. This is complete wrong--let the consumers know! Let us make the choice. Iknow my Coke Zero has Acesulfame Potassium. I am fine with that, but I still need to know. BTW, does any one know what Acesulfame Potassium is? ;)
"This is really Bhaaaaad news" --Dolly The Cloned Sheep
"The newborn clone has the same depleted count of telomeres..."
Which has absolutely fuckall to do with anything, as we don't eat the clones, we use them for breeding stock. The offspring of the clones have PERFECTLY NORMAL telomeres, so your ignorance has led you to raise a point that others have already debunked.
You don't know what you're talking about, and it's imbeciles like you who make debates on subjects like this impossible, because you'd rather inject your ignorant rant than actually bother to learn anything about the subject.
So, organisms will just take the traits from that make cells of the anti-biotic taking organism resistant to the anti-biotic. Problem solved.
This doesn't happen... the reason animal cells aren't killed by antibiotics is because of fundamental differences between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The ribosomes, used to make proteins are very different. Also, other antibiotics attack DNA gyrase and the formation of cell walls, which animals don't have.
Instead, bacteria can either mutate or readily swap/steal genes from other bacteria* to make proteins to destroy antibiotics (penicillinase), enable them to pump antibiotics out of themselves, or change the site of bacterial action just enough to make the antibiotic no longer work.
To get back on topic, one major problem with a "supercow" is that all the clones would have the same MHC. Genetic diversity at these genes ensures that at least some individuals in a population will be able to present an effective immune response to any pathogen.
*Specifically, pathogenic ones can obtain them from harmless bacteria that have evolved resistance through too much exposure to antibiotics.
Deja Moo: That strange feeling you get when you think you've eaten the same hamburger before.
I absolutely will not eat cloned meat, because I am afraid that it may cause my children to be clones.
Tastes like Science!
There is a reason for cloning meat animals that most people have paid little attention to. If you do genetic modifications either by breeding (The old fashioned way) or by genetic technology the process of producing enough copies of your animal for market use is prohibitively long for a patent to apply. As such the economics here are a bit out of the water to do this sort of work. UNLESS: You clone your resulting animal.
This allows you to produce a massive explosion in the population of animals with your genetic modification. In Cows the process to breed a new useful breed takes decades. The math is pretty simple. If you breed a cow and have a calf on the interval of every 3 years, the resulting doubling time to population is 4 years. We computer programmers are pretty familiar with the binary math here. In order to get one million cows (approximately) on the market will take 18 breeding cycles of 4 years or 4 * 18 = 72 years. By old cell cloning, you can develop say 1000 lines in one year and by the time the calf is born you are started in less than one year on your next step up. The result here is that once you have a breed that does what you want, you can really ramp up production to the market. Once you have say 1000 proved out clones, you can use stimulated ovulation at 2 years old and have each cow produce 7 to 8 embryos a month which you can split to close to 50 embryos (Normal embryos) per cow per month for Embryo Transfer breeding. The result is that in 3 years where you would be just getting your first viable calf by normal breeding, you are already able to produce 50,000 pregnancies a month. The math is really here for this.
The questions of genetic damage by Old Cell cloning methodology do come up. These are not esoteric questions. Another question comes to mind with animals or plants which are cloned. Identical Genetic Heritage leads to single point genetic failures. One of the most classic of these involved Potatoes in the 1840's in Ireland. Potatoes as a general rule reproduce by cloning. They don't generally flower. As a result 100% of the potato crop in Ireland at the time had little or no resistance to a fungus and well the rest shall we say is history. With the mad rush to crop optimization that is going on in modern agriculture the eventuality of a world wide famine as entire crop lines fail to disease is approaching 100% certain. For example: Corn is at the present time in the USA and around the world nearly 90% all of the same genetic set. As a result a world wide famine compounded by the Ethanol Lunacy that is going on is almost certain to happen shortly. Imagine the loss of 60% of the feed for our animals world wide. Fun isn't it. Similarly imagine losing almost all cows or pigs or such in a month or two world wide. Sort of makes a "Avian Flu" epidemic look like a joke doesn't it. It is very likely.
There is another serious problem with the genetic optimization of crops. Cotton for example has been bred to have resistance to Roundup by Monsanto. The crop now has no weeds. The farmers now see soil erosion in the winter at 5 to 10 times what used to be unless they plant and kill wheat as a cover crop. Imagine that, they plant their own weeds! Animals with such tight niche capabilities rapidly deplete their environment. Efficiency you see is counter to natural survival.
Chickens drop about 25% to 35% of their food on the ground as a waste they do not use. Farmers picked this up mixed of course with chicken manure and fed it to cows. It was called "Nutrient Enhancement." The result was the passing directly to cattle and back again because chickens were fed back in their meal cattle slaughter cast offs of diseases. This process has had to be stopped by law because it spread BSE and other diseases. It is now illegal to feed these slaughter cast offs to any animal. They have to be disposed of by strict process.
This issue of optimizing agriculture is a serious one that ordinary people need to be profoundly aware of because it c
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
The simple act of cloning an animal doesn't suddenly make the meat from it toxic or cancerous to the consumer. (We can thank the sci-fi community for those fears, more than anything...)
The problem with cloning is what happens to the cloned animals after the fact. Without genetic diversity, they become more likely to contract diseaases that could wipe out an entire herd of clones. Not that any animal is somehow safer from contracting disease in general, but keeping a wide gene-pool in play means you have far better odds of containing such diseases before it devistates the entire industry.
Overall, cloning our food resources is probably a bad idea in the long run, but that said, it's got relatively little to do with its effect on humans themselves.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Cloning seem wrong from an evolution standpoint because it does not support natural change. Am I wrong about that? Cloning also seems wrong from a religious standpoint because it is unnatural. Could this be the common ground between the two? I just want to know.
Sic Semper MicroSoft
Not to worry. Most "chemicals" in the body are actually made from a few basic components--fats, sugars, amino acids--and our digestive system is pretty good at breaking things down into those common components, so the animal to animal differences are not as great as you imagine. Moreover, there is no way the variability between different cows even comes close to the differences between cows and birds, or birds and fish, or any meat and vegetables. So even if all of the cattle we ate were genetically identical, it would make a negligible difference in the diversity of "chemicals" in our diet.
And the label says 'contains cloned critter' or 'came from cloned critter' - then fine.
Not that 'the free market' will be allowed to work.
I want vat-grown meat that you can produce in a unit you have in your home, like an herb garden for plants. Animal rights and all that doesn't really enter into it. It's more a question of knowing what goes into your food, without needing to own your own farm; and store-bought meat has been through dozens of hands and has picked up all sorts of pathogens in addition to the growth hormones and such that were originally put in it by the rancher.
Ancillary benefits are that you don't incur all the environmental costs of agricultural runoff, transportation, etc.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It's an artificial sweetener. --Usually used in conjunction with aspartame or sucralose in order to mask its somewhat bitter aftertaste. The general consensus is that it is safe to use, although, the studies that purport to show safety have been challenged by a number of individuals and organizations, most notably the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) in the USA. Their concerns have been countered by the EU's Scientific Committee which conducted a re-evaluation based on the CSPI's charges.
Unlike aspartame, acesulfame K is known to result in heightened insulin levels in the subject. This can lead to an artificially increased appetite.
Based on the available data, aseculfame K sounds like a minimal risk item to me, but my thinking has always been, "Why drink chemicals when you don't have to? There are just so many reasons to be skeptical about corporate and government claims of any kind." (Especially given the debacle surrounding the improprieties in the FDA with regard to aspartame; falsified safety reports for which Searle, aspartame's patent holder, was facing criminal indictments until Donald Rumsfeld's slick maneuvering around the matter during his time as CEO at Searle, --before the company was bought by Monsanto.) But you drinks your drink and you takes your chances. --My favored sweetener is maple syrup, (in coffee.) I love the taste and I trust the source, but each to his own, right? I totally agree with you in that the customer should be allowed to choose, but reliable information is the key. Knowledge protects, ignorance endangers.
-FL
So maybe we should also not eat meat from older animals, in case those crazy "telomeres" have gotten so short that they've turned into poison somehow?
No-one's done research to prove that eating shortened telomeres doesn't cause cancer/heart disease/spontaneous combustion so just to be safe we'd best assume that it might.
432 Comments and not a single attempt at "Where's the beef" humor?
The idea that we might all be chewing on the same steak is rather off-putting.
Squirrel!
Who cares - cloned meat just means there's more tasty animals for us to eat - yum!
You have a right to whatever you're willing to pay for. I'm sure you'll be able to find someone willing to sell you non cloned meat.
You managed to spew six paragraphs of verbal diarrhoea without addressing the real issue. Why should your superstition about biotech carry more weight than kosher superstitions?
Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Is just as safe as the original.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Happy cows come from California.
Don't people realize that if a cow has twins (real twins, not just multiple calves at the same time), and those twins grow up to be big, strong, healthy bovine, they will go into the food supply? Seriously, this is a silly thing for people to be worried about, and I'm glad the FDA has made the common sense decision here.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
The point the parent post made is that the reason for cloning certain animals is to make their specific geneset available far more widely for breeding purposes. In other words, they are cloning sperm/ova factories. As this practice takes off, it's entirely conceivable that certain trait clusters become widespread in the general population. Since viruses, fungi and bacteria are constantly mutating to find new niches to exploit, you significantly increase the likelihood that some pathogen with be able to not only exploit weaknesses in those traits but to become a worldwide problem extremely quickly.
We've been modifying grains for better yields etc., for millennia. We've been modifying cattle and sheep for better taste, more meat, tenderer meat, and better coats for millennia. "GM food is dangerous" is used as a scaremonger tactic to chill new methods of creating and producing GM food, not GM food itself. What do you think the Department of Agriculture does all day? They've been carrying on the eternal work of building a better barley. The only difference between traditional and modern GM is that modern GM does it faster, cheaper, and more extensively. It doesn't suddenly open a new technological door to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Now that's just wrong! Wait I dont care I dont eat meat. Do whatever you dont scare me. I will just stick to my cloned pesticide filled veggies.
Capitalism does not work without an informed consumer. If you enforce ignorance of the content and provenance of foodstuffs, consumers cannot make an informed choice. This is why in Pennsylvania a law has been proposed that will make it illegal to state that milk has been produced without BGH - because consumers prefer traditionally produced milk and are willing to pay for it. They see no reason to buy cheaper milk that was produced differently in order to maximize profit.
Similarly, many people would like to see it made illegal to label products are "california organic certified" or "oregon tilth" - because consumers will pay more for a product that has a lower profit margin to producers, and producers and government authorities are more than willing to subvert the fundamental basis of capitalism - the informed consumer - to get more profit.
Libertarians and Free Market Fanatics should be totally in favor of fair labeling laws. They make lassez faire capitalism worth considering, and not just another form of tyranny.
Allowing the sale of "frankenfood" with no special labeling, and penalizing traditional producers of foodstuffs, is not meaningfully comparable to anti-vaccination hysteria (which, of course, persists to this day). Preventing children from receiving vaccines is nothing like freely choosing to feed your children food you know that your ancestors ate with no ill effects.
On a mostly unrelated note, I noticed that most of the girls in my 8-year-old daughter's classes have breasts. I made a point of asking the parents of the flat girls what kind of milk they drink... like my daughter, they all drink locally produced organic milk. There was literally a 100% correlation...
No, we've been "doing the research" for thousands (millions) of years on older animals with shortened telomeres. We don't know what are the effects of eating animals with artifically shortened telomeres their entire lives, perhaps importantly out of sync with other genetic systems found in animals that chronologically young but (perhaps only in some ways, not others) genetically old.
--
make install -not war
"You don't know what is the effect of being born to an animal with the reduced telomeres and possibly other genetic anomalies untested as game stock."
Don't need to you fucking retard. All we need to know is what EATING THEM does, and we eat animals with questionable genetics every day. Owned.
"When you're too stupid to even notice that you could be wrong, which in fact you are"
What am I wrong about? You ARE an ignoramus, and everything I said is accurate. YOU on the other hand, not only lied but misrepresented facts. And I hate liars (like you) so I'm not holding my tongue.
So YOU fuck off trash, before you say something else that will inevitably be wrong and idiotic.
I'd take a sample from every lamb. Then I'd feed all the sheep the same feed for 2 years under the same conditions (ie: the same farm). I have no idea what the correct "harvest" date is for Mutton, but I'd make a mental note of the sheep that produced the most and best quality meat on slaughter day. Or the most and best quality wool. Whatever.
Then I'd clone that one.
Just takes one or two iterations to dramatically improve results. Farmers have been doing this for 1000's of years, but you can already imagine the impact cloning animals will have. (we've always been able to clone a lot of plants...)
Instead of having a large, cumbersome herd, I could have a smaller, more specialized herd and just selectively clone as needed. Now that I think about it, its like the farmers in the show "Weeds"....but with mammals.
Look on the bright side..if you liked the steak, you can eat the same cow again. And again...and again..and again....
Well, with 540 responses and counting, and this about to fall off the main page, what's the point?
Anyhoo, why wouldn't it be OK to eat? You all would eat a cloned Angelina Jolie, wouldn't ya, and think yourselves lucky?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Did someone forget cows can have sex? If you're a cow, you have to be thinking, oh shit, this means I'm NEVER going to get any! Poor cows...growing up too fast these days (thanks hormones!!) and for what? Can't even get their cow freak on.
Think of the cows scientists! You may be next!
From boycotting non labeled meat.
Demanding a label most certainly is making a statement about safety. If it's just about information, why not also label the astrological sign the animal was born under?
Instead of doing this every year (like right now), you only do this once or twice. Once you have "the best", you only need a herd if you want a new "best". Otherwise, you just keep using "the best" and making copies. There will also be a market for "bests" and you can probably purchase one without hasseling yourself with a herd and the selection process.
It's not expensive and difficult to take blood from 100 sheep and store it for 2 years. Perhaps farmers could start a Co-Op and offset costs (where have I heard that before...?)
How do you think we are doing things currently? That would be a vast improvement in yield (which is the ultimate goal)
Am I the only one who saw the mistyped title. Boy, you guys are slipping... I remember the days where you were tarred and feathered for a typo.
Is this the kinder gentler slashdot?
Where did the grammerazis go? Someone get started cloning some... but will their offspring will be edible?
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
You really don't understand the benefit of being able to produce an exact clone of a high-producing male/female? You must not have a very active imagination.
Methinks you are purposely not seeing it.
I still don't see how introducing genetically faulty copies. No - I said clones. As in, exact copies.
If you can't figure out how you could increase your yield by using clones (after you decide on a "master mother/father") then I can't help explain it any easier. Even if you took a mother/father from the 50% median and cloned that animal -- you'd still outyield the bottom 49% of your herd.
You might beat my yield the first year. We would be using the exact same methods. But the second year, my yield will FAR surpass your yield. Why? Because I can clone my best producer from year 1 and replicate a whole herd of them. And I can do that every year. Or, I can go back and refine my selection process (via your methods)...and get an even higher producing master mother/father.
Ohh, and you're so much more sophisticated than the rest of us, with such complex skills of reasoning. Gee whiz sir, thanks for sharing.
I didn't say "uh.. better at stuff" - I believe that research and development in this area could be very important the the survival of the the human race. Are there risks? Yes. Are there risks if we did nothing? You bet.
With an actual, real energy crisis looming in our lifetimes, I believe that the risk is worth taking. We may need abundant, easy to grow food for everyone. We may need a cheap crop that can be turned into fuel. When it comes to the survival of the human race, I believe it's worth it.
And even if we're just talking about food doesn't need to be covered in pesticides, I'm fine with that too.
You can go on and on with your hypothetical situations like you're smarter than the entire world (You apparently think that everyone is as dumb as in the movies. You should get out a little bit more.) In the meantime I'll live over here in reality. Good luck to you.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -