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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.
It actually is cost prohibitive right now...
I doubt it will take long for it to become priced right for these companies.
The real question is, how long is it before the average consumer becomes apathetic about buying and eatting cloned meat.
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.
Yeah, I don't get it either. I mean, people being annoyed/apprehensive about GMO foods, that I get (the discomfort level, I mean, not the irrational fear that follows it). But clones? They're just twins, for goshsakes, a pretty common natural occurrence.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Without diversity, entire food supplies can be wiped out by single diseases.
If you ate a double yolk egg, it was certainly not a cloned animal. Assuming you didn't eat a Balut egg, the egg was unfertilized and thus not an animal at all.
I think you meant to imply that eating a twin is the same as eating a clone. It is not. A clone implies that the animal has identical chromosomes to an already existing (adult or otherwise) animal. Twins (identical) share the same chromosomes because they came from the same zygote and split off in early development.
You are right that some animals and plants are capable of cloning themselves, but no higher order animals and certainly no mammals. In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.
I would probably eat a cloned steak, but if given the choice, I would probably buy the un-cloned steak every time.
Customers are expecting non-cloned meat; they're not expecting meat from an animal who resides in a barn with a north-facing door. Accordingly, it would be reasonable for them to know the former, but not the latter.
I do hope that the FDA allow producers to label their meat non-cloned only if it isn't in fact cloned. Yes, scientific studies are important, but in the end, as with organic produce, the customer should at the very least not be lied to. For some, after all, they have an almost religious zeal in their choice. Would be accept non-kosher meat being sold as kosher? The health argument here misses the point.
Wikileaks, no DNS
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.
"have cloned meat than meat pumped full of growth hormones."
The two are not mutually exclusive.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They're not going to clone the animals they kill for meat. They'll clone a bunch of copies of a healthy cow/bull with good genetic stock then have it reproduce and use the offspring for meat. Way more cost-efficient.
But it is different from ordinary meat. The difference is you basically always eat the same animal. Where's the problem? Same as pesticides: in nature we were used to eat different fruit each developing its own chemicals (self made pesticides). Now we always eat the same chemicals. Next we'll eat the same few animals. I consider it a potential long term risk. Our body becomes accustomed to deal with a reduced variety of stuff.
And this in the best case scenario where the makers of the animal don't try to squeeze every penny from its genome by feeding us the meat of the beast that grows faster with the less food no matter how healthy it is.
Anyway, in a free state people would be free to choose, even if choice comes from silly reasons. Most of consumer choices are dictated by stimuli which are engineered by advertising and PR. Prohibiting to label the food as cloned or not is fascist.
What if Microsoft got the state to prevent laptop makers to say what OS is in their laptops, XP, Vista, Mac or Linux, so that people are forced to get more of Vista?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm afraid you aren't understanding the distinction -- or, you're in fact trying to pretend there isn't one with that analogy. Either way, it's specious.
A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it, because plants have evolved to propagate this way. Put the damned thing in water, and it grows. Hell, it's not even a clone, it's the same original plant essentially. We're cool with that.
However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals. We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology which is doing this. We think we know, but we don't.
Hell, new data suggests that by the time a man is in his 70's the DNA in his sperm has degraded substantially. Make a clone of a cow, clone that, and then clone it again. Short of doing a hell of a lot of research, there is no evidence to support the claim this is safe. There is definitely evidence to suggest there is degradation in the genes of clones and the animals aren't as healthy.
IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know. And, they're doing it to support an industry which doesn't want to be compelled to label the origins of such things.
There simply isn't enough long-term evidence to say it is safe, merely that we've not yet found any evidence that it isn't safe. For a lot of people, that doesn't meet the threshold of proof that we should be eating these things.
Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly. But, how many things used to be considered absolutely safe until it had been around a while? I seem to recall they used to use pesticides on people and entire towns under the belief that it was safe. You need real, long-term data to make the positive assertion it is safe. I don't believe we have that. By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.
By all means, eat your cloned steak. But, I think they should be labelling it, and people should have the choice to buy it or not.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Genetic issues are not confined to the animal. Cloning introduces many mutations, so many that most cloning efforts end up in non-viable organisms. Messed up genes produce messed up proteins. We already have diseases such as CJD/Mad Cow that stem from animal proteins - not a virus or bacteria - just an abnormal protein. Mad cow became such a problem because bad animal proteins were distributed to populations through feed. Just like the mad cow scandal, we won't find out until it's too late. One day, cloned beef experiment #1123, put in a million big macs, will be found to have a protein that causes another incurable brain disease.
...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
I don't think people object to eating cloned meat if that were the only factor. At least, not the people who understand some basic science. I think the larger objection is that this will limit diversity in the gene pool even faster than current breeding already is. And we've seen how well that worked out for the banana in the 50s, when it was effectively cloned by horticultural methods.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
And that's exactly the problem I have with this, issues of safety/quality aside. If they are so confident that products from cloned animals are okay, then what's wrong with full disclosure? If they're afraid that cloned products which are labelled as such won't sell, I would argue that the market (customers) has the right to decide whether or not they want to buy it for any reason or for no reason at all.
I just can't think of any good reason why you wouldn't label it (just as organic products are labelled as such) unless the intention is to sell it to people who otherwise would choose not to buy it. If that is the intention, I consider that deceptive and wrong whether the reasons why people won't buy it are sound or not. If food producers come up with something and the market does not want it, that is their problem and preventing this possibility is not the federal government's job.
Shit like this is why I don't exactly have a lot of faith in the industry's willingness to deal with any unforeseen problems that could arise. I notice a lack of that annoying "If you've got nothing to hide
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
your own example of fruit shoots you down, all fruit is transplanted on root stocks and cloned from the same tree's over and over.it's been done this way for hundreds of years with no ill effects, so there's your long term evidence.
not only that but through selective breeding and tigthly run farming you've pretty much been eating the same cow for decades anyway.
also i might add that while each cow has the same DNA, they will be different in many subtle ways influcened by their environment.
And they aren't prohibiting it, just not requiring it which IS free, unlike your own fascist solution of government mandated labels.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Okay, you've illustrated how cloning might be bad for the organism that is cloned, but where you--and everyone wringing their hands about this--falter is by then suggesting that this has some sort of health impact on someone who eats it.
Your stomach and small intestine have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the quality of food's DNA. It's just matter to be converted into glucose for cells to burn. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that your body somehow incorporates DNA, good or otherwise, into your body. If that were the case, I'd be a fish right about now, being that I eat some every single day (living in Japan). But last I checked, I was still a crap swimmer, and afraid of water to boot.
To sum up, of course cloned animals are safe to eat. So are GM products. Pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics... Not so much. But animals and plants that do not produce toxins or aren't full of rocks or whatever? Absolutely fine.
I simply cannot understand how so many people can problematize such a simple thing as digestion of organic matter. There are plenty of things to consider when talking about mass cloning and/or mass GM, but health most certainly is not one of them.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though. And chickens definitely "give a fuck" how they live - they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals, with a complex social structure and capacity for learning.
Once scientists have perfected vat-grown meat, you'll be able to eat meat without concern for the ethical implications. Until then, human consumption of meat will continue to cause unnecessary harm to living, feeling animals, among whom are included chickens and fish.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
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.
Until their hazards are disproven? I'm not sure that it's scientifically possible to do that...
coding is life
I don't care about cloned food. I care about genetically modified food.
How many programmers do you know who have never put a bug in their code.
We know how those languages work and can mathematically analyze their operation.
There are so many interactions going on within an organism that we have little idea
how the 'code' we decide to inject is going to behave. The significance of this is
not in the animal or plant being modified, but in their offspring.
The lack of restraint on GM food is ridiculous. Is anyone surprised the FDA allows
cloned food if they allow GM food?
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Please, please, PLEASE buy a fucking clue since you can't get one through common sense. Cloning an animal does not give you the original that you wanted to start with. It gives you precisely what you cloned, plus time it'll take for maturation before usable, and extra genetic damage while it matures. Repeat this process on clones for bonus genetic damage. Say if maturation age is 20 when the sample was taken, your cloned livestock when it's 20 will have a genetic age of 40, and would have all the normal birthing complications of a 40 year old livestock (and explanation that can't figure out genetics are your age). Not to mention the process of laboratory cloning which we are by no means anywhere near perfect at so we end up adding in extra damage of our own each time. Plus! PLUS! genetic homogamy. What a great way to make sure one bug can wipe out your entire livestock for sure. Cloning, and GMO are not without their tradeoffs. All actions have an equal, and opposite reaction. If you make something grow faster, it dies, and rots faster. If you decide you want green corn one day, you may find out the next that the crops are especially delicious to a bug that normally doesn't eat them. It's the law of unintended consequences. If you push somewhere, there will be a pull somewhere else on the other side guaranteed.
And yes I'll agree with you that there is ALLOT of irrational fear out there, but it's largely due to lack of education. The same can be said about the other side too on lack of education on the matter. Laboratory cloning is about the largest meat producing cow, and the bottom dollar. Not about providing you something healthy. Growth hormones, and all the other garbage they pump into livestock is bad enough without compounding even more problems into the situation.
I'm by no means opposed to cloning though. It has it's uses, just not in my personal food, and I will happily pay more to know my meat isn't part of this. If other people want to pump stuff into themselves that runs a very high risk of being worse for them I say let them. Just regulate it into it's own area. Once cloned? Not allowed near uncloned livestock again, and fucking label that the meat your getting descends from cloned livestock. If they have nothing to fear and stand behind it. Why would they honestly be trying to not have to label their cloned meat?
I think Schlosser was right. The crux of the matter is about having an intimate connection with the animal you kill for food. Imo, most americans would refuse if asked to kill and butcher a cow or a pig in order to cook and eat it, yet they wouldn't hesitate to order up some baby back ribs or a burger, not thinking twice about where the food came from.
People should ask of themselves what exactly they are capable of and comfortable with, and accept responsibility for what they eat. In doing so, I've become more mindful of where my money goes and what I put in my body, and I'm all better for it.
your own fascist solution of government mandated labels
That's not fascism, that would be requiring for-profit companies to tell you exactly what they are selling. Heaven forbid. If a car dealer is required by law to conspicuously label new cars with their estimated gas mileage (those fascist eco-terrorist lawmakers!), I think we can inconvenience the meat-packing industry (no offense) to tell us what they are putting into our bodies.
Wait a minute, that's crazy talk.
If GM food has been around for 13 years and nothing hugely alarming has come to light, then I'm siding with the scientists ("close to 150 governmental and/or industry-financed studies, and at least 47 peer reviewed articles in scientific journals have been published to attest their safety"). You have a good point - I'm sure someone's going to throw a bug in there at some point, and it will probably kill people. But it looks like the rate of that happening will not be higher than the rate of some random natural disease (of which there are infinite mutations) getting into non-GM food and killing people. The number of people that avoid starvation due to the increased output of GM food I think justifies the continued use too.
And lastly, I think I remember reading an article about scientists dismissing the public's worry over much-tested GM food, as opposed to real possible dangers where there's not enough testing like nanotechnology. The example (that I cant find now) was the idea of a company making current-conducting fibers used to make a sweater that you can plug your cell phone in. But like all fibers in all sweaters, microscopic bits wear off and you inhale them. What happens when enough of these get into your bloodstream. Do they interfere with your body's normal electric activity and screw up your heart rhythm?
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/
Those who object to genetically modified foods based on your argument are fooling themselves into thinking that this is a unique problem of GMOs. It is not. Firstly, we have been modifying the genes of foods for hundreds of years, through selective breeding, hybridization, mutation, and other techniques. Secondly, there are plentiful natural sources of genetic modification, from natural mutation to viral infection and natural hybridization to all kinds of other sources. Remember that nature created influenza, potato blight, anthrax, mad cow disease, AIDS, cancer, etc. It's only an irrational fear of industry and science which makes out the potential down sides of GMOs to be unique and uniquely damaging.
Many people complain that we don't know with 100% certainty what will happen with genetically modified foods. But it's a mistake to think that we have ever had that sort of certainty concerning our foods, modified or not. And today with GMOs we have at least as much if not much more knowledge about our foods and the changes we're making to them as we ever have had.
Also, I think many people discount the benefits of engineered foods too quickly. Without modern, engineered, high yield crops much of the world would be starving today.
Certainly there's room for caution and rational skepticism, but it's silly for educated people in the 21st century to be imagining that Frankenstein is going to grow out of a corn field.
"if cow A is good to eat, then a clone of cow A should be just as good to eat."
readers please observe the following disclaimer:
"clone" does not mean "exact copy"
"should": refers to ideal scenario only, and is not necessarily applicable to the real world
"just as good": does not necessarily refer to consumer satisfaction
IMO, the parent comment is just the sort of response you'd expect from a computer science crowd trying to comment on biological systems. Cloning a cow is not the same as cloning a partition on a hard disk.
From what I recall, the whole thing of GM crops was never to provide the well fed western world with extra food. We've already got more than we need.
The original idea was robust crops that would work in the third world, where death from lack of food is an everyday occurrence.
Alas for them the corporations discovered that it made cheap food that they could make good profits on, and the biotech companies realised this was an idea way to control farmers worldwide by forcing them to purchase a constant supply of (patented) seeds, not replanting with saved seeds as has been the practice since farming was first developed.
Basically it went from a wonderful idea to just another way for money to be made.
Someone else will have to find the cites for this if you want them.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, cloning is putting all your eggs in basket.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Though I don't think there is conclusive evidence yet, there are some studies that suggest organic food does have more nutrients:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/12-27/health-benefits-of-organic-food-article.htm
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/polyphenolics031203.cfm
The fact is, we don't fully understand nutrition yet (either for plants or humans). Reductionist explanations have repeatedly turned out to be wrong -- first we figured out fats, carbohydrates, and protein, and thought we had it solved. Then it turned out there were these things called vitamins, and they were important too -- but clearly that was the whole picture. Now we're finding out about things like antioxidants that are also important to health. It seems reasonable at this point to assume that there is still more going on that we haven't figured out yet.
The chemical composition of healthy soil is incredibly complex, and to assert that it's just a matter of nitrogen and carbon is absurd. We don't understand that whole picture yet, and it's certainly plausible (though not yet proven) that organic foods have certain health benefits.
Personally, what I think is dangerous is the idea that we can keep dumping poison (pesticides and chemical fertilizer) into the environment in massive quantities without consequences. Fertilizer and pesticides can increase yields, and in the long run we may need to employ them judiciously to feed a growing world population. But right now, yields aren't the problem. The first world has more food than it can eat, while people in the third world are starving mostly for political and economic reasons.
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.
Yea I get superbly annoyed at the people that don't like the idea of genetically enhanced food. I think it's a good idea. They can make crops immune to diseased insects, they can make them grow faster, and taste better. With continuing research in this area, maybe we can solve the fuel crisis, or solve hunger.
The idea of genetically enhancing food isn't new. It's been done for centuries - we just know a bit more on how it works. Selective breeding is STILL the number one way that scientists use to genetically enhance our food.
I don't have a problem with cloned food, or genetically modified food. If it's better for us, and it still gives us nutrients, I'm all for it.
What I'm really looking forward to is the ability to manufacture beef without growing an entire cow. Wouldn't it be great if they could create a delicious, juicy steak without having to murder animals to get it?
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