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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
...tastes EXACTLY like the one I had last week!
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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
WTF? Every topic on the main page has "25 comments"
Ahh... the cloning technology has arrived to Slashdot!
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.
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.
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
Actually I know how to clone a cow, but I'm a Hindu, so could someone show me how to clone a chicken? Thanks in advance...
Unfortunately, vegetarians aren't necessarily exempt from this.
If you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian (no meat at all, but haven't given up eggs and dairy) like me, then you need to be concerned. Potentially any dairy will now be able to use cloned cows to produce their milk and butter, which they can then sell to us without revealing that fact. I am already very concerned regarding what dairies I purchase from, simply due to my views on animal rights, but this will add yet another variable to the situation. I recommend that you not blow this off as something that will not affect you.
For the record, I currently buy what milk I do use from Organic Valley, an American organic coop owned and operated by the small family farms that make it up. They are quite open regarding their methods and the treatment of their animals, so I feel at least relatively satisfied in that respect.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
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
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....
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.
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? :-)
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.
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.
eeeeeeeh! wrong answer. taking cuttings and striking them is no different to cloning, and it's been done by humans for 100's of years.
"my very inexpert understanding of what cloning means"
I think this makes a point all on it's own.
"Good thing the fascist government is stepping in and regulating lead in children's toys."
nice going you even played the "Think of the children card". pity your confusing something known to be toxic with something that's known not to be....
oh and cloning is has nothing to do with genetically modified crops, if anything it's EXACTLY the oppersite since it's purpose is to get the exact same gene's over and over. as usual you people are confused about what your opposed to.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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
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.
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? ;)
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.
Labelling it implies there's something wrong with it? Yet you said yourself only "superstition" would make someone think so. So, this is again about depriving people of the choice. If people want to be superstitious you aren't going to solve that by not telling them how their food was raised. How much funding does it really require to add two or three words to a label, and how much of that was I asking you to come up with?
Again if the problem is that people don't understand cloning, this is an educational issue. You don't generally solve educational issues by refusing to call things what they are. You really begin to resemble religious people who want to use legislation to make others comply with their beliefs, because what you are saying is that someone who doesn't trust the safety of cloned meat should be kept ignorant so that they are, effectively, not allowed to make a choice. Why is that tactic acceptable when you want to do it and unacceptable when wanna-be theocrats want to do it?
I never asked you to "fund my superstitions" but you must claim this since you apparently have no real argument. If your position is fact-based and scientific, let it win out by virtue of its truth. It should, after all, have that ability where a more religious position would not. You seem to be very insecure about its ability to do so which is the only reason why you would want to remove the element of choice. All I am saying is that making someone buy something that they do not want to buy is never okay, whether you think their reason for not wanting to buy it is valid or not -- that is not for anyone but the buyer to decide.
You don't like the idea that maybe cloned meat won't sell (and who knows? maybe it will eventually be cheaper/higher quality and sell better)? Start a marketing campaign to inform people that it's safe. Point to the recent FDA decision that it's safe. Give scientific reasons why. All of these are perfectly valid because they rely on persuasion. But if persuasion fails, leave it at that. Be a man and let people make choices you disagree with when they aren't forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. Is that really so tough for you? That's the scary thing about freedom; the more choices people are allowed to make, the more likely it is that they'll do things you don't like. Guess what? That's perfectly acceptable so long as no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to do, but to insecure people that's very scary indeed.
By calling me superstitious you conveniently ignore the fact that I am making absolutely no claim about whether cloned meat is a good idea or a bad idea, or whether I would buy it or would not buy it. The ability to know what I am buying (be it meat, cars, Internet service, or whatever) and choose whether I want it or not, for any reason or for no reason at all, is far more important to me in the big picture than whether $business_venture makes a profit or not (whether anyone thinks it "deserved" to or not).
Now if you really want to amaze me, you'll actually respond to what I am saying. Tell me why customers of any market, be it food, insurance, cars, entertainment, whatever, don't have a right to know anything they want to know about said product before they buy it. I am taking the position that they do have such a right, whether this enables them to make choices you or I approve of or not. Tell me, without all the hand-waving, why they should be deprived of such a right and you will have actually addressed what I said. I'll give you a hint since you seem to be having difficulty with this: talking about luddites and superstition, or the cloning process, or food safety, means that you are failing to answer my very simple point.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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