You vegans out there probably don’t give a hill of beans about the Washington Post’s recent revelation that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is about to say that it’s OK for humans to eat meat and use dairy products from cloned animals. But the omnivorous masses, the ones who pick one fast-food joint over another because the patties are supposedly fresh rather than frozen, may get a little uneasy at the prospect of chomping into a double burger with cheese produced by somatic cell transfer, rather than the old fashioned way.
Scientists started cloning animals back in 1996, when Dolly the sheep was produced in Scotland. But for years, U.S. regulators were cautious about allowing clones to become part of the U.S. food supply. However, based a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report and additional findings from researchers in the U.S. and Japan in 2005, the FDA issued a draft risk assessment in 2006 that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. But consumer and health activists remain unconvinced. In December 2007, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the 2007 farm bill by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., that would require more government study of clones’ safety, but it’s unclear whether that restriction will make it into the final bill. If it doesn’t, the FDA’s approval would mean that meat and milk from the offspring of clones — and eventually, as the cost of the technology drops, from clones themselves — could start appearing in supermarkets and on restaurant menus sometime in the near future.
Proponents of animal cloning see the brouhaha as an unnecessary one. "Thousands of data points, hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and two reviews by the National Academies have all said the same thing," Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, an Austin, Texas-based animal cloning company, told the Post. "There is nothing left to review." David Faber, president of TransOva, an Iowa-based cloning outfit, insisted to the Des Moines Register that “there is no food safety issue with clones.” The Los Angeles Times actually went so far as to sponsor a taste test at an upscale L.A. eatery, in which six diners were asked to tell the difference between cloned and conventional beef. (They couldn’t.)
The rationale behind cloning cattle is that animals with the best genetic makeup to produce tasty meat or milk could be duplicated again and again. In theory, that ultimately would make the finest quality sirloin burgers or porterhouse steaks available cheaply to everyone.
Scientific American points out that the cattle industry has long employed a process called budding, in which the undifferentiated cells in a fertilized cow egg are separated, so that they grow into hundreds of artificially induced siblings (“natural clones,” as the magazine calls them).
None of this seems to have persuaded the public; a recent Pew poll found that six out of 10 Americans regarded the notion of eating cloned beef as, well, kind of icky. Consumers Union points out that many clones suffer from severe deformities, and those that survive often have weak immune systems and require large doses of antibiotics to survive. “At the very least, raising clones will necessitate greater use of antibiotics on food animals, worsening the existing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect and sicken humans,” CU testified on behalf of proposed California legislation that would require special labeling identifying food that came from clones.
The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in its public comments on the FDA’s draft risk assessment:
Animal cloning remains a technology in its early stages that still produces primarily debilitated and physiologically impaired animals. Regarding the relatively few animals that survive to adulthood and appear to be normal, there are sufficient differences between clones and non-clones to conclude that they are not normal, or at least not normal enough to conclude that subtle changes do not pose health risks. Although the possibility of such effects is not great, because milk and meat are so widely consumed in the United States, these deserve to be addressed experimentally in well-defined consumption and safety studies done in all species and breeds headed for the market on animals at the ages they are likely to be consumed.
So are you ready for a T-bone clone, or does the idea of “Frankenfood” gross you out? Express your opinion below.
I don’t know about you, but I was absolutely dumbfounded a while back by a news article reporting that a California woman had spent $50,000 to have a South Korean company, RNL Bio, clone skin cells taken from her dead pit bull, Booger, to produce five genetic replicas of him. OK, they are cute, as this photo illustrates. But not any more so than Rachel, a young female bull terrier-American Staffordshire terrier mix who is currently available for adoption in Los Angeles from Dogs Without Borders. The same could be said for any of about eight zillion other members of the bully breed who are languishing in animal control lockups across the U.S. as you read this. I can think of potentially beneficial — or least, justifiable — applications of cloning technology, but churning out puppies isn’t one of them. We’ve already got more than enough. (FYI, here’s the Humane Society of the United States’ position on the issue of pet cloning.)
If you’re uneasy about the FDA’s 
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