Cloned Meat: Surprisingly Similar to Regular Meat
Katherine Mangu-Ward | January 25, 2008, 12:51pm
So here's the thing about meat from cloned animals, which the FDA recently approved for sale and general consumption: It's identical to ordinary meat. That's the whole deal with cloning, see. If it's not exactly the same, then it's not a clone.
With wearying inevitability, a movement has sprung up in the wake of the FDA's decision. They demand labeling and/or bans of cloned meat and milk on the state level. Rebecca Spector, West Coast Director of the Center for Food Safety, offers a perfect distillation the argument. “Since FDA refuses to wait for science to show what's really happening with cloned animals, it is now up to individual states to protect consumers and their families."
She wants proof that there is no possible harm from consumption of cloned meat. It is, of course, darned tough to prove a negative like this one.
The word clone has all kinds of scary connotations, which is most of the reason for the hoopla. America has been chowing down on modified corn and soybeans for years now to no ill effect. And those products are tweaked from their natural state--clones are just duplicated, which should make them even less threatening than their genetically-modified counterparts.
There are concerns that cloned meat could infiltrate the food supply in places that are less clone-friendly, like Europe, without anyone knowing. Testing, of course, would be impossible, since cloned meat is identical to non-cloned.
And so, the inevitable question: If it's impossible to tell the difference between the meat of cloned cows and the meat of conventionally bred cows by any known means in a lab, then why should state governments force producers to make two steaks from literally identical cows bear different labels, one implying risk to the consumer?
More on cloned meat here.
joe | January 25, 2008, 2:05pm | #
1. Despite FDA's claim that there is "no difference" between food from clones and their progeny and food from naturally-bred animals, most of the studies they reviewed found troubling abnormalities and defects in animal clones which could pose food safety risks.
2. Evidence from the Agency's own report and from other scientists shows that cloning does not produce identical "twins" and that cloning therefore may not be useful in breeding. In fact, studies have found that clones from the same parent differ significantly from each other and from their parent animal. A recent scientific study concluded that scientists and breeders agree that cloning may not be useful for livestock production.
3. The FDA review contradicts itself, first claiming that genetically defective clones will pose no risk to the food supply because the sick animals will be detected and removed, but then admitting that some sick and defective clones may in fact end up as food.
4. FDA says the defects seen in clones also occur in natural reproduction, differing only by degree in clones, but the Agency also finds several defects in clones that are rarely or never seen in normal animals. For example, one common abnormality in clones that can result in stillbirth or early death - or death of the mother - occurs in normal cows only once in 7,500 instances, while it may occur in up to 42% of cloned cows.
5. While the FDA claims that improvement in cloning technology is resulting in better success rates for clones, a 2005 scientific review found that success rates in cloning remain less than 5%.
6. FDA asserts that the offspring of clones - not clones themselves - will be used for food and that genetic defects in clones are "corrected" in the offspring. But - as the Center finds, the National Academy of Sciences has questioned the validity of this assumption. Even more troubling, FDA downplays or omits from their assessment studies finding that some genetic defects in clones have been reproduced in clones' offspring.
These are the actual objections to the FDA's ruling. Any takers?
Ventifact | January 25, 2008, 5:32pm | #
Yes, it's pretty ugly how people throw around the notion that animal-clone=same-genes=absolutely-identical. Unfortunately, reason doesn't get you very far without facts too.
Clones are only "identical" in having the same NUCLEAR DNA SEQUENCE. And all those qualifiers are important -- clones do not have the "same DNA". They do not necessarily share mitochondrial DNA. And more importantly, DNA's properties are dependent on much more than the base pair sequence. (Bring in the telomere issue and then you have clones whose nuclear DNA sequence won't even match the original perfectly.)
No, cloned animals are not identical; they are not the equivalent of selectively bred animals; they are not the equivalent of GM animals with genes added to their genomes; they are not equivalent to identical twins; and they are not equivalent to "cloned" unicellular organisms.
One of the interesting things about cloning is that it's kinda like the discovery of fire: people figured out how to make it happen long before they understood the details of WHY it happened. There's much that is unknown in the biology relevant to cloning.
All that having been said, I'm not sure how ANY of the unknowns about cloning, or any of the problems clones are said to encounter, would threaten the food supply. Your body doesn't care how long telomeres are, it will still just digest them when you eat the meat. If a clone's physiology doesn't match that of its original, the food may taste different, but I don't see how it could be dangerous for humans to eat it -- all the polymers will be digested to their monomeric form before leaving the gut lumen, and whether a particular part of a particular chromosome was aberrantly methylated in a cow's living cells will not change the fact that in your gut it's all going to be molecularly chopped up beyond recognition anyway.
That's the hidden crux of all this: the "health" interface is digestion, not a cow's living physiology. Veal tastes great and is fine for your health, but the animals it comes from are NOT healthy. The list joe copied is important to consider because it indicates that cloning is not a productive boon (as yet?), but nothing in there suggests cloned meat will be chemically toxic, a carrier of contagions, non-nutritious, difficult to digest, or anything relevant to human consumption. There is no way a clone, even if its genes or physiology are completely wacked out, could "infect" you with its own problems.
