Meat and Milk... From Clones.
 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7190305.stm

Yeah... Who is okay with this. I for one am not in the least bit and this doesn't effect me in any way as I live with a vegan diet.

I don't eat animal products because of all the genetic tampering done to them, and now they just went and cut out the middle man and started making these products from cloned animals. My #1 concern is that they will not even label said products as being made from a clone. Scary thought.

If they start doing this to "organic" vegetables, I may have to stop eating and live via IV... or not be so exaggerated and just move.

If you support this than let's discuss this, I want to know if you see something I don't.

Well, if I remember correctly, haven't they been selling cloned meat in Japan for a few years now? If it's worked for them without any kind of negative feedback, I don't see why it can't work here.

I suppose I just don't see the point of cloning for agriculture because it is much more expensive than normal reproduction for agricultural production. What are the advantages that outweigh the increase in cost? Environment is a major factor in producing an animal, so perhaps cloning one with the greatest genetic potential is a good idea.. but depending upon how it is raised, there are a lot of things that can go wrong or change. There are also a lot of potential problems with clones since they, too, also have to be in utero for a full term and must be raised to a certain age before they can be slaughtered or bred to obtain milk.

I think cloning can be a good thing, especially when it comes to understanding the effects of genetics, environment, stress, etc. but I'm not sure that it's really necessary to spend that much money for agricultural products that can still be produced pretty efficiently.

I have more to say on the issue, I think, but I might need more time to frame the response.

I think it can be a good thing to, but not for eating. IMO anyways.

What are the odds of a perfect clone every single time? there has to be some kind of risk involved. I can see this working in that less "animals" will be used, but by the same token cloning and raising an animal and killing it probably giving it the same drugs you would've given a regular animal. I don't see that as much better, although I know thats not really the general consensus as I still get the "You Dont Eat Meat? WHY?????"


as for Japan, I had never read anything along those lines. I'll look it up and get back to you.

I know how this ends:
http://intendo.files.wordpress.com/2...jango-fett.jpg

It should be noted that in the short term the price of cloning is very high. It costs over $10,000 per cow. This is a lot higher than the $1000 it costs now.

The industry is more likely to use the clones to replicate good breeders (i.e. cows that display the qualities most prized: good marbling, ability to survive on a diet of corn without getting too sick, etc.).

For the near future you will likely not be eating clones but rather the offspring of clones.

What are the risks or dangers of cloning or genetically modified foods? I know very little on this subject.

No, will.

It's actually a bit more like this:
http://www.ectomo.com/wp-content/upl...6_world5th.jpg


EDIT:
The photo above is actually possible. One of the major risks is that genetically modified flora and fauna can overtake and/or crash ecosystems by introducing new and "unnatural" problems such as new viruses (or immunity to existing ones). This can throw everything out of whack. It's basically a science experiment on the public.

I see nothing wrong with it besides it being expensive. Sooner or later the population of the human race will exceed our food and cloning will be essential for our survival. As soon as the cost goes down I hope to see cloned food in the grocery store. It's a sign that humans are progressing with science and technology and I like that. It's pretty dumb to not let a technology this advanced go unused because some people don't think it's ethical. I want our race to be alive hundreds of years from now.

I don't see the problem, as long as cloned foods are labelled, so that people who don't want to take the risk don't have to. I hope they won't stop investigating cloned foods, though.

It's like making an investment. The clones cost a lot of money, but their offspring cost the same as any other animal's. It'll just create more animals to produce more offspring.

I don't think this will end well at all.

This seems reasonable. Proper labeling and more research, testing and investigating.

What about social progress? Shouldn't that be the end that we use technology to get to?

So any technology advanced enough should be free of ethical considerations? I don't think you mean that.

To answer the thread, I don't really see the big deal with this. It's just another way to change the genetic make-up of animals and their secretions... something they're doing already without cloning. You don't have to eat them if you don't want to.

They won't be labeled supposedly.

Meat is meat. Can't be any worse than the chemically processed shit that you find in a supermarket. I'd eat it.

Yea pretty much.. just because its from a clone doesn't mean it will be any different from the meat and milk we have from non-clones. In fact it will be exactly the same. There's no reason to label it for this reason.

It isn't only what's in the product. It is the process we need to worry about.

I saw we had a Star Wars reference, but am I the only person who's mind started flashing "Soylent Green"?

Personally, as long as it is safe, it's fine to eat.

What's so worrisome about the cloning process? From your previous post I gather that you take issue with creating something novel that can harm the environment. While this is a valid concern with genetic engineering (e.g. gene splicing), with cloning you're not creating a new type of organism. Cloning is just copying a creature that already came to exist through natural processes, or old husbandry techniques such as selective breeding. If the original organism doesn't pose a threat, why do its copies?

Personally I see the "scare" aspect of this as little more than Y2K-style hysteria. Cloning isn't vastly different than normal breeding. In actual real breeding, there is STILL a chance of some serious genetic mutation occurring, right? Could this include immunity or lack thereof to a new virus? It's not any different in practice, just delivery. It also allows closer control over breeding. Farmers have bred "prize" animals since the dawn of agriculture. Now they can just turn that control knob to 11. *shrug*

As inBOIL mentions, the process isn't really an issue. These are not genetically modified animals (which the FDA still does NOT approve of, and which COULD cause serious repercussions), these are genetically CLONED animals. Not at all the same.

There is only one major danger from this and its not your health or safety.

The procedure is safe and won't make weird scary mutants that haunt the dreams of technophobes.

The problem is that by making so much of the food base basically identical it means a single disease or parasite could wipe out all the cattle or wheat etc. One theory which I subscribe to for genetic diversity, especially in reproduction is creating new ways to stay ahead of disease and parasites.

Now what the odds of that are I don't know, but its something to consider. I personally don't know if the risk is that great at this point, the prime breeder have been so interbred that my guess is there isn't that much diversity in domesticated animals to start with.

They've encouraged me to go "slow food" and local.

I don't know much on this subject, but if I had to guess; man playing God won't go well.

I just don't want to buy into the corporate food structure.

I prefer to buy my food from locally owned and operated sources, if at all possible. I imagine cloned meat is unlikely to ever become a part of that scenario.

It was bound to happen.

We're not playing God, as we would have to create the board-game from nothing, first.

The only thing that stood out was the we are out growing our food supply. Cloning, as of today, does nothing more but control bred traits. If you make clones (by impregnating the female), then you must feed the clones till they are large enough to make product. So the advantage is where?

The FDA has no authority to mandate labeling for cloned products because there is no difference between the meat and milk warranting such labeling.

The products could be voluntarily labeled... but since that only allows people to direct their hysteria, it's unlikely to happen.

As long as diseases and viruses play a role with these food products, the FDA has a responsibility to inform the public through adequate labelling.

This is exactly what I was thinking as I read this. It would be a disaster to go fifteen years down the road and discover all the bred animals in a particular region die of the same freak disease because the original animal their predecessors were cloned from had a particular genetic flaw.

The only reason you would need the FDA to label cloned food is if you wanted to protest it.

There is absolutely nothing more dangerous than any other cut of beef or apple.

Fear of cloned animals is about logical as being afraid of identical twins.

logical or not, it will be interesting to follow the reaction among consumers (if and when it hits the store shelves) and our trading partners.

The same day that the FDA approved the marketing of cloned beef, the USDA urged a voluntary moratorium to keep it off the market.....recognizing the hard sell ahead for the government, both at home and abroad.

We export like 10% of our beef to Japan, Korea, Canada....Will there be new demands in those countries for bans on US beef imports?

Sloppy or mismanaged cloning procedures have risks. Think BSE and other health risks related to meat. The public has a right to know whether their food was produced naturally or through cloning. They have a right to make their own choices based on health or ethics. Mixing animal cells isn't everyone's cup of tea.

I used to be against genetically modified foods, and cloned animals and produce by extension. These days, I can't see myself worrying as the only significant problem I've seen is the patenting of GM foods and sterilized seeds that must be bought each growing season (while it is within the companies' rights to do it, I disagree with the practice when seeds aren't resold.)

What I see happening with cloned beef is livestock breeders identifying bulls that grow large and meaty and have strong immune systems, cloning those few bulls, mating them with several cows, then identifying the offspring that received the stronger immunity, cloning them to breed, and reducing the need for growth hormones and antibiotics over several generations. This will reduce costs for livestock farmers and reduce the amount of potentially harmful chemicals that are added to what eventually becomes our food.
I'm pretty sure that's the point of cloning.
By your position on this topic, I would guess you're a vegan because of ethical reasons rather than medical. I suspect that an individual's view of the ethics of eating meat and animal products is correlated to their views on cloned meat. If you wouldn't mind expanding on it a bit to satisfy my curiosity, I'd appreciate it.

Whats a sloppy cloning procedure?

DNA isn't modified.

What's wrong with labeling? Seems very reasonable to me.

I meant the management of the animals, not the actual procedure. I should have wrote sloppy or mismanaged cloning operations. (In a business or project management sense, not a medical sense.)

Indeed. They'll be labeled "Grade A Beef" or what-have you just like any other animal products on the market.

In an ideal cloning procedure the DNA isn't modified. In a real procedure, especially how this is likely to be used to clone prize-winning adults to increase breeding stock, there are mutations that will have occurred in the source cells, there is potential for damage during the nuclear transfer, etc. Mitochondrial DNA will not come from the donor and may vary from clone-to-clone. Gestational environment will vary from clone-to-clone.

Some of these can be controlled, some can't. Some will become controllable with an available population of clones to use for source material and host mothers.

Sloppy or mismanaged husbandry procedures have risks. This is the entire reason that food production has health and safey regulations. I don't see how cloning is any different in this respect from feeding, veteranary care, or any other aspect of raising food animals.

This is what I'm referring to. Cloning can introduce new problems to this system. Read Ustwo's point about biodiversity. (Post #21.)

My surprise is that the FDA has concluded anything on this subject. Given all the retractions that have been issued for previously A-Ok'd drugs, etc, I personally don't have any trust left in an institution that is "supposed" to protect us American's.

I feel the same way about cloned animals and their offspring as I do about the drugs that were previously deemed safe; let me know when you are absopositively sure about that!

Ali

I am absopositively superdooper extracalifragalixpy sure cloned animals are 100% safe to eat. At least as safe as any animal is to eat.

This is completely different than a drug on just about every level.

I'm not a particularly big fan of the FDA. Most of the progress in food and drug safety has been more voluntary and economically driven than FDA mandated (e.g., sanitation and bacterial contamination testing exceed FDA requirements in many slaughterhouses because McDonalds will not buy beef from them otherwise.

Their ruling on "organic" labeling panders to an agrindustry trying to convert environmental "green" into financial "green" with little attention paid to the original function and purpose of organic farming.

The rules for "substantially similar" drug approval seems designed to help pharmaceutical manufacturers end-run patent law while avoiding the costly bother of ensuring their drugs are safe or effective.

They're basically a system in place to allow businesses to shit on the little guy with the big brother seal of approval. I'm sure they do a lot of less controversial stuff that's really beneficial to public health and welfare, of course, but we're a long way from street corner hucksters selling snake oil and laudanum.How do you feel about eating cloned plants?

You know that the FDA is a big part of why quack medicines aren't in the mainstream anymore, right? Sure, we get stuff like homeopathy, but at least it's just useless, not actively harmful.

Brose this Google book preview http://books.google.com/books?id=J5x...okg3qX5ljz5K98
if you have any interest in the topic, one of my professors used it as a textbook a few years ago, and it was quite fascinating. I wasn't aware of the history of the FDA or just how bad things used to be until I read it.

Oh wow the FDA approved it. That seem to approve anything. There are several known harmful agents out there that they have approved, anyone ever heard of Aspartame? There are probably hundreds of products out there that use the stuff and it is a known poison.

I am glad we get all my beef and chickens from organic farmers that we personally know.

I've heard of it, and I'm fortunate enough to not consume 20% of my body weight in aspartame daily, and not even 2% like some studies have claimed causes malignancy. The most recent report, in the Annals of Oncology, found no correlation between aspartame and cancer in humans (unlike the study of aspartame in rodents that started the panic) http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...urcetype=HWCIT

Aspartame panic is not substantiated by the facts.

You say 'genetically modified' but that's 100% incorrect. By definition, clones are ... genetically unmodified. So, if there's nothing new whatsoever introduced during cloning, what's the problem? And, if nothing is changed, it's not an experiment. Cloning is nothing more than copying. This has been done historically in the plant kingdom. Haven't you ever broken a branch off of your prize tomato plant and stuck it in the ground to make a new plant? That is cloning. It's really a whole lot simpler than the uninformed masses are led to believe.

Sorry, this would have been more accurately written as "genetically engineered." (i.e. cloning through genetically engineered processes as opposed to selective breeding.) Cloning is in many cases a high-tech form of selective breeding, but it can be much more than that depending on your goals.

The experiment is in bringing a number of lifeforms of invariable genetic traits into being. Sustainable ecosystems are dependent on variability--that is, biodiversity. It is an experiment because we still know far too little about the biology of mammals to be doing this sort of thing. Selective breeding is far safer than cloning for that reason. If you were to mismanage a cloning operation, you could essentially throw a beneficial genetic course off its path. The results could be devastating, for both mammals and plants alike. It is far too early to allow this technology to be used in the marketplace. The least that should be required is heavy regulation on both ends. Let consumers decide if they want to support this practice.

This is only a concern if the clones replace the other individuals of the species. As long as genetic diversity is preserved in a population somewhere, (either other domestic populations, or wild populations from which the domestic strain evolved) that diversity can be tapped to maintain the health of a cloned population. Even if the cloned population can't be saved, it's only a concern if the clones constitute the whole of the species. It doesn't seem likely that cloning will become universally practised for any domesticated species in the forseeable future. Also, it's not only cloning that results in the loss of genetic diversity; selective breeding has been doing this for hundreds of years. Diversity loss is not a cloning issue, it's a husbandry issue, and cloning is simply another tool with the potential to be used to our benefit or our detriment.
The same is true of mismanaging a breeding operation.

Just a note here too.

At this point the only clones would be the prime breeding animals, it would be far to expensive to 'eat' a cloned one.

This would be like having unlimited Secretariat's for breeding purposes, though I can see a nasty implication for horse races :)

To be specific, the FDA found no grounds upon which to claim any difference between cloned vs. non-cloned products and thus had no basis for regulatory oversight. They did request that the products of cloned animals be kept off market voluntarily. So far they have been.You're probably thinking of saccharin and it's "Known in the state of california to cause cancer in laboratory animals" statement. It causes an increased risk of bladder cancer in the male offspring of female rats exposed to chemical while pregnant in levels that would not be achievable by any rational means other than IV.

The publicized issue with aspartame was more than there were a lot of stockholders on the approval board. It also decomposes to produce methanol, though not in quantities large enough to be harmful (in humans) unless, again, you're eating it by the shovel full.Sure. FDA certified "organic" is pretty much meaningless.

Yes and no. It is too expensive to eat cloned animals. However in the not-to-distant future it won't be . At that point I expect we will be served 1st generation burgers. :-)

Did that effort to allow an "organic" label on anything carbon-based ever make progress?