FDA Is Set To Approve Milk, Meat From Clones
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; A01
Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals, prompting public reactions that ranged from curiosity to disgust, the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601337_pf.htmlIn sum, a 2004 NAS report states, “Since there is no evidence that food from cloned animals poses any increased health risk to the consumer, it could be concluded that food from cloned animals should be approved for consumption. However, the paucity of evidence in the literature on this topic makes it impossible to provide scientific evidence to support this position.”
Consumer Attitudes
One aspect of clones that is clear is that people do not want to eat them. A 2004 Gallup poll found that 64% of Americans think that cloning animals is “morally wrong.” In October 2005, a poll conducted for the Pew Initiative found that 66% of adults are “uncomfortable” or “strongly uncomfortable” with animal cloning. In fact, in six major polls, a majority of people in each survey were against animal cloning. In a recent industry survey, 62% of consumers said they would be “very unlikely” or “somewhat unlikely” to buy animal products from cloned animals. The International Dairy Foods Association is so concerned with potential consumer backlash, they do not want the voluntary FDA ban on cloned animals lifted. None of the survey results bode well for the consumption of cloned animals, except for the fact that such meat and milk products don’t need to be labeled.
Cloned animals and their offspring may be for sale on the marketplace already, making people unwitting consumers of meat and milk they want to avoid. Consumers should have the opportunity to make informed choices about their food, which necessitates labeling meat and milk from clones and clones’ offspring. And prior to these animals being fed to the public, there should be public discussions about the related ethical issues, since there is such widespread opposition to this technology.
Who Will Benefit?
These polls make clear that consumers do not want meat or milk from cloned animals. So who does? It is likely that the agribusiness and biotech companies will benefit from this expensive technology, as they could either directly profit off the sale of cloned animals and their offspring, or better afford such a purchase. Moreover, if, for example, cloned dairy cows are able to produce higher quantities of milk, the price of milk could fall even lower, which would harm struggling farmers. Finally, this technology pushes the industrialization of agriculture even further, moving us farther from diversified, sustainable farming.
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/labeling-1/cloned-animals-on-the-dinner-plate*******************************************************************
There are gene expression problems in at least some cloned animals. In mice, researchers studied more than 10,000 liver and placental cells of cloned mice, and found that about 4% of the genes function abnormally in these cells of clones. These abnormal functions are not related to direct mutations, but instead to abnormal expression of otherwise normal genes. The cloning in this study was from stem cells, rather than adult somatic cells, and so it is not yet clear if similar problems occur from cloning of adult cattle.
2. Repeated, serial cloning of the same clonal family will result in the accumulation of deleterious mutations through time, as well as increase the risk for gene expression problems. Each clonal generation will be expected to have more of these genetic errors than the previous generation. Each time an animal is cloned (and indeed, every time any cell is replicated), a few errors are introduced into the replicated genome. The effects are generally considered to be small each generation, but they result in some of the problems noted above. However, it is clear that repeated, serial cloning is not advisable. The clones will not improve from generation to generation. If cloning were perfect, the best that could be expected is that the 2nd generation clones would be as good (from a genetic standpoint) as the original animal, or the 1st generation clone. However, since mutations (including nucleotide substitutions, and deletions of regions such as the telomeres) do occur each time a clone is made, a 1st generation clone is expected to be genetically more fit than a 2nd (or subsequent) generation clone.
http://home.austin.rr.com/doublehelix/Cloning.html
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