Friday, January 04, 2008

Cloned Meat

The FDA is likely to approve the sale of cloned meat next week, and personally I don't have any huge problem with that. You're not squeamish about identical human twins, are you? (Well, perhaps just a bit, but not really.) So there's no reason to be weirded-out about cloned cows. They're just cows, like any other cow, and they have genes like any other animal. Who cares what they're a copy of?

Frankly I'm far more concerned about the putrid industrial farming conditions under which today's cows are raised, and the junk-food diet of corn and soybeans they eat, topped off with antibiotics. Yes, I know that clones aren't yet perfected and that they may suffer telemere problems that shorten and affect their lives. There's work to be done in this area and it may well turn out to be beneficial to ban all clones, of any species, for ethical reasons. But not for nutritional reasons.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What worries me is that human made clones degrade over time, and have instabilities introduced by the cloning process. We don't really know what else happens, nor what all the effects of the known issues are on human consumption.

What worries me is the FDA has rushed something potentially dangerous through.