FDA set to rule on cloning-for-food

[MilwaukeeMike]

"WASHINGTON - Regulatory approval could catalyze the nascent U.S. cloning industry, but leading firms say growth would come slowly as they battle to win consumers over to the concept of food from cloned animals."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22593574/

A) Would you eat meat or drink milk from a cloned cow?

B) Is this morally right to do?

C) Could this solve world hunger crisis once the technology improves allowing for cheaper cloned animals. (Right now a cloned cow goes for $17,500)

For me;


A) Yes

B) No more morally right than eating a naturally born cow.

C) Yes if it becomes cheap enough and is proven to be safe.

 

[ponderingturtle]

"WASHINGTON - Regulatory approval could catalyze the nascent U.S. cloning industry, but leading firms say growth would come slowly as they battle to win consumers over to the concept of food from cloned animals."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22593574/

A) Would you eat meat or drink milk from a cloned cow?

B) Is this morally right to do?

C) Could this solve world hunger crisis once the technology improves allowing for cheaper cloned animals. (Right now a cloned cow goes for $17,500)

For me;


A) Yes

B) No more morally right than eating a naturally born cow.

C) Yes if it becomes cheap enough and is proven to be safe.

C is a strange question. It will just premit more control over the gengnome that we currently have. Premit breeds to change faster and so on.

It will not likely seriously reduce the cost of raising these animals, and animals are little benifit for world hunger anyway as plant sources are in general more efficient at producing calories.

 

[Darth Rotor]

A) Would you eat meat or drink milk from a cloned cow?

Yes.

B) Is this morally right to do?

Moral isn't the issue, the issue is safety, and the second order effects (unknown until well into such a program) that can influence spread of disease, or resistance to it, and other hard to predict third and fourth order environmental effects.

C) Could this solve world hunger crisis once the technology improves allowing for cheaper cloned animals. (Right now a cloned cow goes for $17,500)

"Solving world hunger" is a vague abstraction.

I think you'll find livestock a suboptimal path for "solving" a global nutritient deficiency in terms of bang per buck. Grains and soy protein would tend to get better bang per buck in bringing the starving up to minimal acceptable nutrient levels.

I'll point out that solving world hunger brings on population increases, which can bring hunger back if land/resources aren't expanded at a like rate. Population pressure can lead to wars, so if you "solve world hunger," you provide a catalyst for an increase in the incidence of wars, local or larger.

DR

 

[WildCat]

Can someone please explain to me what all the handwringing is over milk or meat from a cow that has the same genetic makeup as another cow?

 

[rob_hebert]

The handwringing is mostly centered around fears that, while the cows may be genetically identical, they may be more susceptible to certain types of diseases or defects, since they have been "artificially created." I think a large part of this is good old fashioned anti-science thinking (it's not "natural," and we all know that natural equals safe, right?), with a little political opportunism of course, but there could also be some legitimate concerns here.

For instance, children who are conceived through in vitro fertilization and other assisted repro techniques have higher rates of birth defects ranging from club foot to genital malformation (although they do tend to develop normally afterward from what I've read). This could be caused by the environment in utero--possibly due to the hormonal manipulation, or other factors--and it's worth a gander to see if a similar thing could happen with cloned, milk-producing animals.

I'm not saying that cloning cows is the same as getting pregnant through in vitro; I'm merely pointing out that when we reproduce biological creatures in the lab, the process can affect them in a number of ways besides changing their DNA. Two identical twins can be born in extremely disparate states of health because they sometimes develop under very different conditions in the womb. Could this mean that some cloned cows won't develop properly and will give us "bad milk"? Possibly.

That being said, I see no reason why you couldn't just test milk from a cloned animal the same way you would from a naturally produced animal. We already have controls in place to protect us from diseased dairy products, and whey is whey, no matter the source. Same goes for beef, pork, chicken, etc. It's kind of the same argument as GM crops. Just test them normally and don't worry about it.

As to the original questions:
1) I'm not overly concerned. As long as the "cloned milk" or whatever they call it is tested and pasteurized and all that jazz, I'll drink it.
2) A cow is a cow, so if you think it's okay to eat one (I happen to) then you should be able to eat the other. Also, if we are cloning meat, and not the whole cow (which will be possible, though maybe not economical, soon) you don't even need to kill anything. Just grow the parts like you would soybeans or whatever. Seems to me eating a steak that was grown in a petri dish would be more morally defensible than cutting up a cow that could feel pain.
3)Though I don't think that feeding people necessarily leads to overpopulation (another post, another time), meat production is just so expensive that it doesn't really affect world hunger the same way staples like wheat and rice do.

 

[Puppycow]

I'll point out that solving world hunger brings on population increases, which can bring hunger back if land/resources aren't expanded at a like rate. Population pressure can lead to wars, so if you "solve world hunger," you provide a catalyst for an increase in the incidence of wars, local or larger.

DR

Very good point. I think most world (or many) problems could be solved (or mitigated) if there were fewer people. 1 or 2 billion seems about right to me.
(Of course this should be done ethically and humanely by emphasing familly planning and making birth control as widely available as possible.)

Of course, some would disagree.

 

[Beerina]

Can someone please explain to me what all the handwringing is over milk or meat from a cow that has the same genetic makeup as another cow?

Scare tactics used by the power hungry. The very title of this thread, "FDA set to rule on cloning-for-food" already grants a worldview where things must be "permitted" by those in power.

 

[Puppycow]

Scare tactics used by the power hungry. The very title of this thread, "FDA set to rule on cloning-for-food" already grants a worldview where things must be "permitted" by those in power.

So you think we shouldn't have an FDA? Should it be permitted for example to sell fake cures like magic water that cures cancer and AIDS? Let consumers figure it out for themselves?

 

[Schneibster]

A) Would you eat meat or drink milk from a cloned cow?

Sure. Why not?

B) Is this morally right to do?

I don't subscribe to morals; ethically (which is what I DO subscribe to), I see no difference between consuming products of cloned vs. ordinary cows. If I wouldn't consume products from an ordinary cow, I wouldn't consume products from a cloned cow; and if I would, then I would.

C) Could this solve world hunger crisis once the technology improves allowing for cheaper cloned animals. (Right now a cloned cow goes for $17,500)

I'm not sure. I don't see any technical procedure that would permit a cow to gestate outside the womb of another cow, that would be more efficient than the other cow would be, nor do I have any reason to believe that any such technology is likely to come along anytime soon. So when we talk about this, what we're talking about is creating a zygote in the lab, and implanting it in a host cow for gestation. I don't see it as being any more or less expensive than just letting the bull at the cow; the one advantage is, you've got a pretty clear idea what you're getting, rather than having to deal with possible random recombination that might yield a non-optimum cow.

If a non-optimum cow is a significant risk to you, then it's probably worth doing, but otherwise, it's about six of one and a half-dozen of the other as far as I can see.

I can't see it solving world hunger.

C) Yes if it becomes cheap enough and is proven to be safe.

How could it not be safe? I hope you don't think you could look at a cow and tell if it was cloned; as a matter of fact, you couldn't even perform any chemical test that would tell you so. The ONLY way to determine it was a clone would be a detailed genetic analysis, something we currently only barely have the capability to do, and something that has taken months or years for each individual we've undertaken it on so far.

So cloned cows' safety as meat or milk sources is equal to that of non-cloned cows. If you don't think so, I'd like to know what sort of risks you think might manifest themselves.

I don't get all this terror over cloning. People don't seem to understand that the main problems with cloning are ethical, and they don't really apply unless you're cloning creatures, like humans, that are commonly awarded rights, and are capable of intelligent autonomous behavior. You could clone a cat, then raise the kitten in the presence of the one you cloned, and neither would ever question or notice that they seemed identical. Cats are capable of self-awareness, but not capable of noticing such details. I'd have no hesitation cloning both of mine if I could, and would love the clones just as much as the originals. They'd never know the difference. The originals would be just as jealous of their clones as of any other cats brought into the house; they wouldn't know the difference either. It's only when you start talking about cloning humans that you get into such ethical dilemmas.

There would be problems with cloning wild animals and releasing them into the wild; these have to do with the necessary genetic diversity to permit their species to survive. With cattle, this is not an issue. With other species, it might be. With plants that seed in such a way that the seed might escape into the wild, it's very much an issue.

 

[The Painter]

While they are cloning that cow for my steak, could they tweak the DNA just a little to make my steak even more delicious. I know it sounds like a joke, but is possible? I wonder. Brand new tastes we’ve never had before. Just a little genetic manipulation and Wah Lah.

 

[Beerina]

So you think we shouldn't have an FDA? Should it be permitted for example to sell fake cures like magic water that cures cancer and AIDS? Let consumers figure it out for themselves?

No, but the presumption that approval must occur first causes more harm by slowing things down than are caused by things getting on the market for a little while before they get yanked. And last I checked, snake oil was doing pretty well in any case.

 

[TragicMonkey]

With cloning, it's conceivable we could reach a point where we can create parts of an animal and not the whole thing. Think of the ramifications: take a sample of Bossie's DNA, and clone a million copies of her delicious steak bits but no actual living cows. Would it be wrong to eat the perfect copies of her meaty parts?

And then, logically, if we can eat cloned meat that is real in the sense it's actual meat, but artificial in the sense that it was never part of a living animal....then could there be an ethical argument against cloning human steaks, and eating them? At a certain point, everything is just a clump of molecules. If no living thing is hurt by their consumption, does that mean it's okay? Could we one day be chowing down on artificial-but-real copies of our own flesh? Would it be ethical? Would it be delicious? Would it count as transubstantiation?

 

[Beerina]

I predict that if factories to grow perfect steaks without the rest of the animal come around, that there'll be a new woo movement that claims nerves themselves have "bits of consciousness" in them, and that this is morally wrong for that reason.

This prediction is based on the old theory that a combination of idiot followers + talking heads with books to sell, exist. Perhaps it will even rise to the next level where politicians seeking power "ride to the rescue", to the applause of buffoonery.

 

[Father Dagon]

"WASHINGTON - Regulatory approval could catalyze the nascent U.S. cloning industry, but leading firms say growth would come slowly as they battle to win consumers over to the concept of food from cloned animals."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22593574/

A) Would you eat meat or drink milk from a cloned cow?

B) Is this morally right to do?

C) Could this solve world hunger crisis once the technology improves allowing for cheaper cloned animals. (Right now a cloned cow goes for $17,500)

For me;


A) Yes

B) No more morally right than eating a naturally born cow.

C) Yes if it becomes cheap enough and is proven to be safe.

A) Yes.

B) Yes.

C) Wrong question. World hunger is a totally politically "engineered" crisis. There is no massive hunger crisis in democracies. If i could reverse all agricultural technology to the state-of-the art of 1948 AND make all countries democratic and capitalistic, there would be no massive hunger crisis at all.