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.

Cloning in nature

[halcyon1234]

Ever eaten a double-yolk egg? You've eaten a cloned animal. Same if you've ever eaten the twin sibling of any animal.

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...

Until they get cloning right....

[3seas]

... 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.

Re:The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[turtledawn]

You're thinking the Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.

Re:Glad I'm a veg

[timmarhy]

haha, so your aware much of the fruit and veg you eat comes from cuttings which are nothing more then clones?

oh, but i only eat organic vegtables i hear you say? hate to break it to you but there's plenty of organic things that are deadly or more so then non organic....

Re:The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[Adambomb]

No he isn't [fda.gov].

Re:No diversity = higher risk

[Dragonshed]

You mean like the Cavendish Banana [popsci.com]?

It's Not Cost Prohibitive...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:Until they get cloning right....

[mandelbr0t]

The genetic issues are confined to the animal. You can't screw up your own DNA by eating meat that has faulty DNA. I can think of a few possibilities that could happen down the line: genetic mutations in the cloned animals makes them more prone to disease. But, meat is already screened for human-communicable diseases, so nothing to worry about there, except that cloning may not prove to be a viable solution to making more livestock. Genetic mutations in the cloned animals cause them to grow differently, changing the quality of the meat. OK, that's something to be a bit concerned about, but grade A sirloin is grade A sirloin. I suppose if the taste was so different that it doesn't taste like cow, chicken, etc. any more they may need to start labeling stuff better (and show us pictures of the animals that are so freaky they don't taste like their ancestors any more). Cloned animals may not be able to reproduce. Of course, they don't really care about that since they're cloning instead of procreating.

All in all, there's nothing to worry about, and labeling meat as 'CLONED' will just make it easier for consumers to boycott perfectly safe products. There's just too much mis-information about a lot of biotechnology and I don't think that enabling advocacy groups to spread a bunch of FUD is the best plan. If you feel that badly about it, buy a ranch and grow your own. I assume that you'll also go back to eating maize instead of corn -- octoploid genetic freak vegetables.

Re:Cloning in nature

[dondelelcaro]

In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.

If you've ever eaten an orange, odds are you've had a clone. If you've ever drunk wine or grape juice, odds are that was a clone too. There's simply not many fruits that aren't clones of eachother, because what often makes a good tasting fruit doesn't make good root stock or high seedling yields. Most people just either don't know, or are so used to it that they don't think about it.

It's not like there's anything magical about cloning anyway; done properly, you've got the same genetic material producing a fairly similar organism.

Re:Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on a second.

[GulagMoosh]

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.

Re:Cloning in nature

[Phat_Tony]

Apples don't breed true. All commercial apples are clones. Every apple of a "variety" is a clone, unless it's one that came off the first tree ever that they used to found a new variety.

Not only are they clones, but they're the "bad" kind of "adult" clones that inherit genetic damage. If you're against cloned food, never eat anything with apples in it.

Some non-cloned, non-varietal mutt apples are pretty good, it's just hit-or-miss. If you're opposed to cloning, you can grow your own apples. Just plant the seeds from any apple and see what you get.

Not Geneticallly Identical

[Doc Ruby]

These clones are not genetically identical to uncloned animals. The newborn clone has the same depleted count of telomeres [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[swillden]

You're thinking the Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.

No he isn't [fda.gov].

Yes, he is. Read your link. It may be on the FDA's web site, but it lists the responsibilities and powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture, who is the head of the Department of Agriculture, not the Food and Drug Administration (which is an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, led by the Secretary of Health and Human Services).

No, I have no idea why the FDA has law that doesn't concern them on their web site.

Misconceptions of the ignorant

[naturalog]

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.

Dolly: Certainly not the first cloned animal

[ignoramus]

though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly

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.

Re:The FDA Approves Shit Anyway

[Adambomb]

My mistake, entirely fell prey to not rtfthing and simply assumed from the title.

Touche.

Re:Cloning in nature

[Vellmont]

A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it,

I'm not really sure what "natural" means. It seems to have something to do with not being influenced or created by people. If that's the case, NONE of the food you eat on a daily basis is "natural", even the super-earth-friendly organic stuff, even something grown in your own garden. Basically all our food has been engineered by us for thousands of years, since agriculture began.

However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals

All re-production introduces errors. What of it?

We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology

They might be. The thing is we're talking about EATING the animal, not worrying about if it'll get cancer earlier. Simply cooking your food introduces WAY more different chemicals into it than cloning ever could. I don't hear anyone sane suggesting we should stop cooking food (there are a few insane people that claim this of course)

IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know.

So we don't have the technology to look at the meat of one animal and see if there's anything wrong with it? We do. We can't look at the DNA of the animal and compare it? We can. What exactly is the big unknown lurking in the background?

Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly.

More like fear of fear. People are so paranoid about food today. There's some legitimate concerns about cloning. They're really about all the deformed or aborted animals produced to produce one healthy clone. It has nothing to do with the safety of the meat.

By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.

This kind of thing drives me nuts. We already KNOW there's a TON of shit already in the food supply that's NOT SAFE. It's not pesticides, preservatives, or any of that crap, it's simply too much saturated fat, and trans-fat, and for some people, salt. We've know these things cause deaths for more than 30 years.. and yet people get all concerned about freaking cloned animals or "GMO" foods. Shit, I'd bet the saturated fat in a mad-cow infested cow causes more deaths than the infectious agent in it. (There was a LOT of mad-cow infected cows in Britain consumed in the 80s, and only a handful of people ever got sick).

Re:Cloning in nature

[Gordonjcp]

So if they clone them early before a lot of genetic damage has happened to the template organism, OK.

Except that would miss the point entirely. You'd need to clone a lamb very shortly after it was born, at which point you wouldn't really know how it was going to turn out as an adult. I mean, yes, you can tell if a lamb is going to grow up to be a massively faulty sheep, but you've got no real idea how it's going to look in two years time. Lambs are pretty much just lambs.

You could take samples of genetic material from all your lambs and make sure you keep track of them throughout their life, but I suspect that would be prohibitively expensive (mostly due to the time-consuming nature of the job).

Re:mass cloning, loss of genetic diversity

[delire]

Cows are 100% dependent on humans for survival (put a cow in the wild and see how long it takes the local predator to feast on it),

Cows have been made dependent on humans. The term is Domestication. Cows, like sheep, used to be perfectly independent from humans before the Egyptians trained them [wikipedia.org] into submission.

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 [mad-cow.org] due to human health risk.

Re:Peanuts

[mpe]

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.

Maybe these people know what they are allergic to. The problem with GM food being not labled at all (let alone with the details of exactly how it has been modified) is that they may think something is safe to eat when it isn't.

Not Knowing

[zam664]

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? ;)

Re:Peanuts

[Thaelon]

The problem with GM food being not labled at all (let alone with the details of exactly how it has been modified) is that they may think something is safe to eat when it isn't.

Why is this a problem? Why do you always assume that crops modified by nature are always safe to eat? They're usually subtly different with every generation.

Food that's been genetically modified by nature isn't labeled. You know, by radiation in the pistol or stamen. Or in the testes or ovaries. Or by all of a certain strain of food dying off because it was less resistant to disease.

And suppose they DID tell you precisely what was modified, I highly doubt you'd even understand what the changes made result in.

And suppose they DID tell you what those changes result in, you wouldn't believe them.

So just stfu.

If you think genetically modifying food is inherently wrong, why don't you volunteer to stop eating so that the rest of the world can survive on the meager crops of non-modified food?

Yeah, in case you didn't know, if we didn't have any genetically modified crops, a few billion people would starve to death. Naturally and organically grown crops simply do not yield enough food to support the entire world. Think on that the next time you protest "genetically modified" food. As if you understand the implications.

Re:Peanuts

[crmarvin42]

Where is the panic though? It seems like any time that somebody raises any questions about the safety of GMO, nanotechnology, or nuclear whatever it is labeled as hysteria and dismissed.

No, it's not the questioning that's the problem. It's the unwillingness to believe that the USDA/FDA/Relevant Regulating Agency has done enough research to say that the risks are acceptable given the results of exhaustive research. I don't want a GM crop grown, marketed, and consumed by the general population unless it's been vetted by a regulatory agency capable of looking at the science, interpreting the results and making a decision based on the data. However, I also don't want genuinely useful advances denied to everyone because some people are so afraid of that which they don't understand that no amount of research and data will convince them.

As a research scientist myself I know some of the hurdles that are involved in bringing any new product to market, the kind of money that's involved, and the time required. The people at the USDA and FDA usually proceed from the point of view that new things are dangerous until their is a massive data set indicating that dangerous side effects are either non-existent or acceptably low. That's not to say that there haven't been errors, products that came to market only to be recalled later due to unforeseen problems. That a statistical certainty based on the number of products under review each year, the vast majority of which never make it to level of our awareness because the products are pulled as a result of the data being against it. It's not like these agencies rubber stamp every product that comes down the pipeline. If they did there would still be a lot of charlatans selling snake oil and cocaine derivatives as cure-alls.

Re:What consumers really want to know...

[RexRhino]

Lets say, for example, that a plant species, over millions of years, is slowly affected by small changes that gradually turn it into a plant we know and love today like corn.

Except this is patently false. Most of the crops we eat today (including certified "organic" crops) have been produced by mutation breeding. Meaning that the changes in the plant didn't happen over millions of years - They happened instantly, when the plant was subjected to intense amounts of man-made radiation, and/or highly toxic chemical mutagens.

GM technology isn't new, plants have been geneticly modified since the ancient Incas developed systems for antificially introducing mutations. And in the last few generations where it is easy to produce artificial radiation and create powerful toxic mutagenic chemicals, we have been in a golden age of genetic modification.

The only difference between the GM that you have a problem with, and the old school methods of genetic modification (like radiation and mutagens), is that modern GM involves deliberate modifications, vs. random modifications. If anything, the GM that you oppose is the safest kind of GM.

Re:The purpose of Cloning Meat Animals

[crmarvin42]

In Cows the process to breed a new useful breed takes decades.

As far as I know, no one is trying to create new breeds. Instead they are trying to improve the current breeds, or create productive crosses. The idea that traditional breeding takes decades is a little disingenuous. there is a huge market for selling heifers to larger farms that only use a cow for 1 or 2 lactations before selling her because they want to take advantage of the genetic improvements in the newest generation. This is a little short sighted because of the increased difficulty in managing 1st calf heifers and older more mature cows that are less likely to have reproductive or metabolic issues, but it is done. The smart farms use their cows for more lactations, maintain herd size and sell more of the extra heifers to the larger, more aggressive farms at a substantial profit.

If you breed a cow and have a calf on the interval of every 3 years

As someone who has worked on over a dozen dairy farms I can tell you that this a weird assumption. Heifers are usually breed around 24 months old, So a 3 year investment to the 1st calf. The next calf will be born, ideally 12 months later. The target for a dairy farmer is a 12 month calving interval with the cow lactating for 10 months followed by a 2 month dry period. For exceptionally well producing cows this may be extended to a 14 month interval but this is not advised since the greatest production (# of milk/day) occur early in the lactation and the rate tends to drop over the intervening months.

This process has had to be stopped by law because it spread BSE...

Chickens do not have any form of spongiform encephalopoathy. As a result they cannot transmit it to cattle that eat their feces. In fact the biggest question about BSE istransmission. We don't know how it is transmitted. Fear about this being a possible route may have been why the law was passed but that doesn't mean that it really was a route of transmission, just that politicians wanted to look like they were doing something.

That's right, most cows with calf now are virgins.

I fail to see what the sex life of a cow has to do with food safety. If anything artificial insemination has helped by preventing the transmission of STD's in most livestock species.

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.

Re:The purpose of Cloning Meat Animals

[Anonymous Coward]

There is another serious problem with the genetic optimization of crops. Cotton for example has been bred to have resistance to Roundup by Monsanto. The crop now has no weeds. The farmers now see soil erosion in the winter at 5 to 10 times what used to be unless they plant and kill wheat as a cover crop. Imagine that, they plant their own weeds!

What you are failing to mention is that this is part of a practice known as conservation tillage, or no-till farming--which results in far less erosion than conventional methods. It also less time-consuming and more economical on fuel.

Not only that, but cover crop usage and conservation tillage practices were also prevalent long before Monsanto introduced their glyphosate-tolerant crop strains. The latter makes the former easier, just like inseminating a cow with a syringe is easier and more reliable than getting a bull to fuck her.

That's right, most cows with calf now are virgins.

Virgins taste better. Ask a dragon.

Re:What consumers really want to know...

[Maxmin]

They can make crops immune to diseased insects

"diseased insects?" Care to give an example? Most what I know about insects and genetically-engineered crops is the BT toxin added to the corn genome. The corn emits Bt, which is then consumed by corn borer larvae, who die. It's a pretty interesting thing, except that you now have Bt toxin inextricably laced into commodity corn.

Aventis Crop Sciences patented a variant of Bt corn, called StarLink corn [wikipedia.org]. It contained a variant of the Bt toxin that was considered potentially allergenic to humans - StarLink was banned by the FDA for human consumption, but StarLink corn was later found in corn taco shells at Taco Bell [wikipedia.org].

I like the idea of genetic engineering, and believe someday some serious good will come of it. However, when the FDA considers transgenic species "same-as" native, unaltered species, that's just too loose a policy for me. Many cases of pollen spillover have been documented, showing that transgenic plants are spreading. A side-effect is that wild plant species related to the transgenic species are picking up some of the new traits. So, there's no protecting wild species from our genetic fuckery, meaning we'll continue to see its effect over time.

Re:What consumers really want to know...

[RexRhino]

Show me a source other than TMNT, the DC universe, or the marvel universe that describes the use of radiation and mutagenic (carcinogenic) agents in order to produce viable food. I would be ever so entertained.

Well, normally I tell smarmy dorks to type "mutation breeding" into Google, but that might be too complicated for you:

http://www.amazon.ca/Mutation-Breeding-Theory-Practical-Applications/dp/0521036828/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200536610&sr=1-6 [amazon.ca]
https://www.vedamsbooks.com/no38082.htm [vedamsbooks.com]
http://www.fnca.mext.go.jp/english/mb/mbm/e_mbm.html [mext.go.jp]
http://www.springerlink.com/content/jt5063wpq6673044/ [springerlink.com]
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w8651q494j1w6721/ [springerlink.com]
http://crop.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/41/1/253 [scijournals.org]

So now, when faced with incontrovertible proof that the use of radiation and mutagenic agents to produce viable food is widespread, will you change your position? Probably not, because once people have invested a certain amount of time and passion into hating and fearing something, they rarely change their minds for something as trivial as irrefutable evidence.

Unfortunatly, since mutation breeding is completly unregulated, I can't tell you specificly what crops are or aren't created with mutation breeding - There is no legal obligation for the breeder to report any such thing, as it is all grandfathered in as "safe", "organic", and "natural". But have no doubts when you pay extra for your "non-GM" food, that much of it has been artificially geneticly modified.