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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.
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
... 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.
You're thinking the Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
oh, but i only eat organic vegtables i hear you say? hate to break it to you but there's plenty of organic things that are deadly or more so then non organic....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No he isn't.
Ice Cream has no bones.
You mean like the Cavendish Banana?
...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.
Animals bred for food don't procreate anyway. They get cut from the herd, moved into feed lots, fattened, sold and slaughtered. In the beef industry, it is about a 18-24 month process. The males get neutered when they are a few months old.
Very few animals bred for food get to actually remain as breeding stock. The females have a better chance since they can produce better feed animals for years. The breeding process is very tightly controlled. Consider what the sperm from a champion bull is worth. Likewise for a champion dairy bull.
No diversity is present in the industry. Everything is bred for a purpose. Nature has nothing to do with it.
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.
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make install -not war
Yes, he is. Read your link. It may be on the FDA's web site, but it lists the responsibilities and powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture, who is the head of the Department of Agriculture, not the Food and Drug Administration (which is an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services).
No, I have no idea why the FDA has law that doesn't concern them on their web site.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.
My mistake, entirely fell prey to not rtfthing and simply assumed from the title.
Touche.
Ice Cream has no bones.
That said, in America, the cows bred are so pumped up on growth hormones and other meat-meddling stuff that they will no-doubt differ very greatly from their pre-Western civilisation ancestors above and beyond the immediate affects of traditional domestication: their bodies will be chemically very different from those your parents would've eaten (assuming they weren't vegetarian).
Thankfully the flesh of American cows and bulls is not allowed to be sold in Europe due to human health risk.
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.
Maybe these people know what they are allergic to. The problem with GM food being not labled at all (let alone with the details of exactly how it has been modified) is that they may think something is safe to eat when it isn't.
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? ;)
Why is this a problem? Why do you always assume that crops modified by nature are always safe to eat? They're usually subtly different with every generation.
Food that's been genetically modified by nature isn't labeled. You know, by radiation in the pistol or stamen. Or in the testes or ovaries. Or by all of a certain strain of food dying off because it was less resistant to disease.
And suppose they DID tell you precisely what was modified, I highly doubt you'd even understand what the changes made result in.
And suppose they DID tell you what those changes result in, you wouldn't believe them.
So just stfu.
If you think genetically modifying food is inherently wrong, why don't you volunteer to stop eating so that the rest of the world can survive on the meager crops of non-modified food?
Yeah, in case you didn't know, if we didn't have any genetically modified crops, a few billion people would starve to death. Naturally and organically grown crops simply do not yield enough food to support the entire world. Think on that the next time you protest "genetically modified" food. As if you understand the implications.
Question everything
As a research scientist myself I know some of the hurdles that are involved in bringing any new product to market, the kind of money that's involved, and the time required. The people at the USDA and FDA usually proceed from the point of view that new things are dangerous until their is a massive data set indicating that dangerous side effects are either non-existent or acceptably low. That's not to say that there haven't been errors, products that came to market only to be recalled later due to unforeseen problems. That a statistical certainty based on the number of products under review each year, the vast majority of which never make it to level of our awareness because the products are pulled as a result of the data being against it. It's not like these agencies rubber stamp every product that comes down the pipeline. If they did there would still be a lot of charlatans selling snake oil and cocaine derivatives as cure-alls.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Except this is patently false. Most of the crops we eat today (including certified "organic" crops) have been produced by mutation breeding. Meaning that the changes in the plant didn't happen over millions of years - They happened instantly, when the plant was subjected to intense amounts of man-made radiation, and/or highly toxic chemical mutagens.
GM technology isn't new, plants have been geneticly modified since the ancient Incas developed systems for antificially introducing mutations. And in the last few generations where it is easy to produce artificial radiation and create powerful toxic mutagenic chemicals, we have been in a golden age of genetic modification.
The only difference between the GM that you have a problem with, and the old school methods of genetic modification (like radiation and mutagens), is that modern GM involves deliberate modifications, vs. random modifications. If anything, the GM that you oppose is the safest kind of GM.
The main argument for cloning is actually very similar to that for artificial insemination and embryo transfer. I know several dairy farms that are based entirely off of the progeny of a single cow. The story goes that they had a farm and managed by luck to breed a cow that was a step above the rest. The farmer then breeds her to as many top bulls as possible and hyper ovulates her for embryo transfer to maximize the number of calves she can produce in a short period of time. This leads to a dramatic improvement in their genetics and possibly giving them a competitive advantage. Cloning is simply another technique used to preserve those good traits and distribute them as widely as possible through out their herd.
there won't be massive farms where every cow is an exact genetic duplicate of each other. However, there will be increased improvement in herd genetics, production, and efficiency with this new tool available to those that see it's value.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Not only that, but cover crop usage and conservation tillage practices were also prevalent long before Monsanto introduced their glyphosate-tolerant crop strains. The latter makes the former easier, just like inseminating a cow with a syringe is easier and more reliable than getting a bull to fuck her.Virgins taste better. Ask a dragon.
"diseased insects?" Care to give an example? Most what I know about insects and genetically-engineered crops is the BT toxin added to the corn genome. The corn emits Bt, which is then consumed by corn borer larvae, who die. It's a pretty interesting thing, except that you now have Bt toxin inextricably laced into commodity corn.
Aventis Crop Sciences patented a variant of Bt corn, called StarLink corn. It contained a variant of the Bt toxin that was considered potentially allergenic to humans - StarLink was banned by the FDA for human consumption, but StarLink corn was later found in corn taco shells at Taco Bell.
I like the idea of genetic engineering, and believe someday some serious good will come of it. However, when the FDA considers transgenic species "same-as" native, unaltered species, that's just too loose a policy for me. Many cases of pollen spillover have been documented, showing that transgenic plants are spreading. A side-effect is that wild plant species related to the transgenic species are picking up some of the new traits. So, there's no protecting wild species from our genetic fuckery, meaning we'll continue to see its effect over time.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Well, normally I tell smarmy dorks to type "mutation breeding" into Google, but that might be too complicated for you:
http://www.amazon.ca/Mutation-Breeding-Theory-Practical-Applications/dp/0521036828/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200536610&sr=1-6
https://www.vedamsbooks.com/no38082.htm
http://www.fnca.mext.go.jp/english/mb/mbm/e_mbm.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/jt5063wpq6673044/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w8651q494j1w6721/
http://crop.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/41/1/253
So now, when faced with incontrovertible proof that the use of radiation and mutagenic agents to produce viable food is widespread, will you change your position? Probably not, because once people have invested a certain amount of time and passion into hating and fearing something, they rarely change their minds for something as trivial as irrefutable evidence.
Unfortunatly, since mutation breeding is completly unregulated, I can't tell you specificly what crops are or aren't created with mutation breeding - There is no legal obligation for the breeder to report any such thing, as it is all grandfathered in as "safe", "organic", and "natural". But have no doubts when you pay extra for your "non-GM" food, that much of it has been artificially geneticly modified.