Fri, 31 Oct 2003

Missing the Point of Cloning Safety

In Initial Finding, F.D.A. Calls Cloned Animals Safe as Food. The F.D.A. finding, though tentative, could eventually clear the way for meat and milk from cloned animals to reach supermarket shelves. By Andrew Pollack. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

To a large extent, they're missing the point. The point of cloned animals is to reduce genetic diversity and obtain greater uniformity (for better marketability), not to heighten flavor or make foods more palatable. Cloning in animals/vegatables/grains is strictly for "industrial production" purposes. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that a cloned calf would be any less nutritious than it's (genetically identical) mother.

Too many folks confuse genetic engineering with cloning. They are two entirely different things. Genetic engineering may or may not introduce genes into the animal that could be harmful to humans. In the strictest sense of the word, genetic engineering increases the genetic diversity in a given species so "engineered", by the intorduction of new genetic material. This could ultimately be a disaster, not because it'll make humans sick, but because these new "engineered" species could have a serious impact on the natural enviroment in a number of unforeseen ways.

On the other hand, cloning, per se, is not an "evil" thing - what's evil is what happens when we have cloned an animal to a point where the genetic diversity in a given species is gone - poof! When that happens, the species is effectively at a dead end, and while it may still be walking around, it's as dead as the dodo.

Curiously, you can achieve this same effect in a species without cloning - long term selective breeding programs have rendered sheep, for example, that are unable to survive without mass amounts of grain and other feeds. In the wild, all sheep species subsist strictly on grasses and forage. This is getting to be a problem, as these heavily line bred species are more suseptible to disease and more prone to infertility. Which is one reason why cloning is viewed as a "solution"!

The solution is to restore the balance of Nature, and learn to live within it and thru it. This does not mean we abandon technology and return to the caves (I'm no Luddite!), but it does mean that we take a long hard look at the overall systems which sustain us, and make our decisions and choices based on the maintanence of those systems.

Doing otherwise is considered by some to be "playing God". I find it more akin to playing with matches in a gasoline warehouse...

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