Are clones safe to eat?
(Credit: Ben Harris-Roxas. Some rights reserved.)
In 2006, the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 43 percent of Americans think food from cloned animals is unsafe to eat.
Mark Walton: I think it’s common for any of us, anybody, when there’s something we don’t understand, there’s always a little bit of hesitancy and a little bit of fear.
That’s Mark Walton of ViaGen, a Texas-based cloning company. Earth & Sky caught up to him at an early 2008 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he sat on a panel exploring issues of eating cloned animals. Walton called cloning the newest of existing technological tools for animal breeding.
Mark Walton: The reason I think it has so much potential in animal breeding is that it’s the only technology that really allows you to take a single animal that has a combination of traits that you’re interested in and reproduce that animal multiple times to be able to multiply the impact of the genetics.
He emphasized that clones are too expensive to end up as steak – citing $13,000 to clone a cow.
Mark Walton: They’re breeding animals. And so consumers are not going to see cloned food in the grocery store. There will be offspring from clones or grand-offspring from clones that actually become the meat and milk-producing animals.
Also in early 2008, both the European Food Safety Authority and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced their decisions that food from cloned animals is safe to eat. Tell us what you think by commenting below.
Mark Walton on clones in our food supply
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Cloning is simply a continuation of the agricultural research that has being pursued since the work of Gregor Mendel. There will be glitches but we will benefit from this work. If we can learn to produce more meat with less feed and water, with less medicine and veterinary care, we win.
It is definitely a market driven research. If governments will leave the scientists alone; if the dogooders in society will allow the governments to leave the scientists and producers alone, we will continue to improve our breeding herds and therefore improve productivity. Efficiency of the uses of water and foodstuff will improve as well.
Remember, when we are not eating meat, we are competing with animals for the same foodstuff.
No offense Benjamin, but there’s a lot of dart-throwing in biology/medical science. Also, humans and cows are complicated. Even if you aren’t directly eating cloned meat, you’re still introducing human intervention into the gene pool. I guess I trust evolution (the process which removes those from the gene pool who eat stupid stuff) more than biological science (empirical dart-throwing).
We deserve to know what we’re eating to decide for ourselves if we want to eat it, and one shouldn’t trust science blindly like that. Just because some scientists (including government scientists) say it’s okay, doesn’t mean you should trust them. Hell! People drank 222Rn in the 30s and 40s because they were told it had health benefits, without realizing how radioactive of an isotope it was.
What makes cloning acceptable, or why people like Mark Walton think it should be acceptable, is that humans have been interfering with the gene pool since Gregor Mendel created the first hybrid. Cloning is the latest technological tool in a long history of human intervention with animal reproduction. If you don’t trust science, you don’t trust it, and that’s not unhealthy. I recommend that you grow your own food.
If the truth is to be told Mr. Walton can not tell us with complete certainty that clones are safe to eat.
Wasn’t it only 10 years ago that Dolly was cloned? What are the health implications when the clones grow old?
Or will they live to be old? Sorry, Mr. Walton, can not possibly have all the scientific data. Cloning
especially for commercial purposes is in its infancy.
We are all having the wool pulled over our eyes in the name of potential patent profits
aren’t we?
What I don’t see discussed is the vulnerability factor. Cloned organism will all be vulnerable to the same diseases and we know how shockingly fast viruses can evolve. A newly mutated virus could wipe out an entire food supply. Genetic diversity is a buffer against this possibility and clones should never be allowed to replace them.
Mendel? we’ve been mucking about breeding new traits into plants and animals practically forever! at the very least since the advent of dogs, let alone animal husbandry and agriculture.
we’ve been cloning plants via grafting for a similarly long time, and the lessons learned there are as likely to be heeded as they are in modern agriculture. which is to say, some will pay attention and some won’t!
I don’t see anybody objecting to eating half-clones. Or being half-clones, for that matter, as I am myself, of my own parents. And how about the bacteria in yogurt? They’re clones, right?
Orchids, whose clone fever began in the early 70’s in Hawaii provides a fair amount of years to observe invitro clones in large numbers. Ultra beautiful and mutations that sport 4N became in vogue. Breeding orchids for 24 years and playing with species, natural hybrids and clones has lead me view clones in distrust, from a genetic standpoint. I would estimate that utilizing one cloned parent would have greater than 90% chance of infertility or producing progeny with abnormalities. Our transition to organic methods has also shown that clones or their siblings will more readily succumb to disease or early death like Dolly.
I LIKE CARNE.