According to the Washington Post, the US Food & Drug Agency (FDA) is set to say that it is safe to eat cloned animals. Commentators have said that is probably means the parents will be cloned and their children sent to slaughter. When the parents start to get old and rickity then they will be recloned.

The paper also reports the FDA as saying that while it looked at moral and ethical concerns it decided to go with science alone.

Much of biological science is now based upon Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution”. Simply put, and allowing for all the research which has taken place in the ensuing hundred years or so, this describes how all life’s DNA changes in order to accommodate its environment. Generally such changes are thought to happen over hundreds or thousands of years, but there is concrete evidence to show that they happen much faster (for instance, Darwin’s finches show how man harms evolution and Scientists watch Darwin’s finches evolve).

What worries me most about the idea of using cloned animals in this way is the fact that its based upon the idea that when you take a copy of some DNA it is an immutable snapshot. It is not. The animal produced is a very close copy to the original, but is not exactly the same.

This leak from the FDA is in fact the latest milestone on the long road in the US to approve cloned animals for human consumption. The process was kicked off in 2002 as one of the first acts of the current Bush administration, which leads to the inevitable suspicion the there may an invisible corporate hand somewhere in the story. Back in 2002 it was admitted that there simply wasn’t a good enough data sample to reach a definite conclusion. This cannot have changed in under six years.

There is a welter of reasons why we should be cautiously sceptical about cloning at the very least: animal welfare, “playing God” and the Law of Unintended Consequences to name but a few. However, to maintaining a purely scientific line like the FDA, is there enough science to say it is safe to eat cloned meat?

I would have to say “No”. Simply because a) clones are not duplicates, they are close copies, and b) evolution can cause DNA to change within a couple of years. Put these two facts together and you realise that this is definitely a case where trials involving the cloning of animals and then the examination of their offspring several generations later need to be undertaken before any serious conclusion can be arrived at.

Site Tags: FDA, animal, cloning, safe to eat

Sent to Paul Goodman (my MP — lucky chap) and DEFRA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Cloning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.