The FDA just announced that they will not require tracking of cloned beef and have approved its sale to consumers. They basically have washed their hands of the entire debate.
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with eating cloned meat products. There are no new chemicals introduced into the food chain by cloning an animal and clones are produced from naturally existing genetic material (no additives or enhancements).
Those approximately 30 percent of U.S. adults who say they won’t eat cloned meat regardless of FDA approval are simply objecting to science getting involved with creating a living ‘something’ that only nature should be allowed to create.
No disrespect is intended regarding these people’s choice but, a cloned animal provides the same edible meat as its progenitor.
The question of finding cloned meat in our food supply may be moot anyway because food producers say the process of creating cloned animals is too expensive and inefficient. Of course, the cost may come down in the future much like electronic products seem to get cheaper over time. Due to some unforeseen event that adversely affects our ‘natural’ food supply, cloning may become the best alternative and we will end up eating cloned meat anyway.
Once an animal has been cloned it’s offspring are just as natural as those from non-cloned animals, so, again, where’s the problem?
A senior member of the agricultural advocacy group, Center for Food Safety, said there is no way for the consumer to know they’re getting cloned meat or their offspring.
The process involves removing the nucleus from an egg and inserting the nucleus from the egg of a more desirable animal. The desirability of the animal can be based on several factors. If, for instance, you have a race horse that consistently wins races or a stud animal that generates a hefty revenue stream for the purposes of artificial insemination then these animals would be worth cloning. In the food chain, the desirability would be for an animal that can produce heavier weight or more milk (therefore creating more financial benefit). Likewise, if you have a chicken that is a mega-producer of quality eggs then why not make several hundred or several thousand of them?
Cloning came about to improve the chances over the old methods of selective breeding and artificial insemination.
The process, however, is far from perfect. The road from freshly cloned embryo to birth is fraught with errors. That's why so few implanted cloned embryos are actually born, and why so many of those end up dying young.
Dolly, for example, lasted just six years before dying from a progressive lung disease. Cloned pigs have a nasty habit of dropping dead from heart attacks. Cloned cows sometimes die shortly after birth -- and those are the lucky ones.
Washington Post's Rick Weiss described the outtakes of livestock clones this way:
Many are monstrously overweight -- several times their normal size -- and filled with fluids to the point of looking like they're about to burst. Others are born with normal bodies but big, hideous, so-called ‘bull heads.' Others look okay on the outside but have peculiar abnormalities of the heart, lungs or other organs -- including livers that are mysteriously filled with fat -- or defective thymus glands that blunt normal development of the animals' immune systems.
Those animals that are the result of successful cloning will not pass any genetic alterations to their offspring. So the question arises, why bother? Aside from show animals and fast horses there really isn’t any economical benefit for cloning. This is simply another aspect of science that some scientist feel the need to conquer. In other words, because we can do it, let’s perfect it. Perfection has not yet been achieved and it doesn’t look like it will be in the near future.
The biggest concern I have in creating herds of cloned, genetically identical cattle, or any other animal, is that any disease can wipe out an entire herd. Nature has many fail safe mechanisms in place to prevent the domination of one species over another and we, with our limited understanding of these natural rules, cannot begin to understand how and when a disease becomes ‘necessary’ from nature’s viewpoint.
This whole process subverts natural selection. Mankind has now stepped in and declared himself as the authority on which genetic material best suits our needs. In doing so, we are diluting the genetic diversity that is natures realm.
Cloning may have its place in reproducing show animals and sports animals, but it will never equal in-vitro fertilization for producing a better quality food product.
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