FDA to approve cloned animals "safe to eat", what do you think?

Pasquale said:
This is a really good point. I honestly believe that would drive a person mad. I don't know how i'd take finding out my whole life was a lie. I assume I'd handle it like Judge Dredd did.
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The 6th Day, starring Arnold Shwarzenegger.
 
I dont think we know enough about cloning just to say it's safe to eat. Sure you make a few dozen sheep that live successfully but how long have we been doing this? can't be long on a history scale since this is the age of inventions

If they pass it they sure as hell better mark which is cloned and which is not seriously...

Pretty sure this isn't against Islam in any way(read 80% sure) but ya know when we started putting pesticides to kill our crops it took us ya know "awhile" to realize that "hey we are screwing with our food1"

study it more find out all of the kinks before we are the guinea pigs imho
 
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Uzor said:
Yes, but we're not speaking from today's point of view. We're speaking about the future. I don't think any company would be stupid enough to spend 100k bucks on cloning a cow and slauther it and sell it in a food store.
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Yet the idea is on the table now, is it not? Hell in the future we may be able to reorganize groupings of molecules to create whatever we want Star Trek style, but I don't expect to see the FDA giving it a gold star before the technology is perfected. So why is cloning different? Why are we even talking about eating cloned animals when it's not economically or scientifically feasible? That's what makes me concerned.
 
Khidir said:
Sure you make a few dozen sheep that live successfully but how long have we been doing this?
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Keep in mind the object isn't for the animals to live, it for them to be grilled. One of the problem they've had with cloning is accelerated growth rate and aging. If you are growing animals for food, that's a good thing because it doesn't take as long to raise your crop. If that means less chemicals in my food, i'm all for it.
 
Trippyhippy said:
Keep in mind the object isn't for the animals to live, it for them to be grilled. One of the problem they've had with cloning is accelerated growth rate and aging. If you are growing animals for food, that's a good thing because it doesn't take as long to raise your crop. If that means less chemicals in my food, i'm all for it.
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They don't really grow any faster, sadly. The arguable "problem" is that a cloned animal is, in some ways, the same age as the DNA donor animal from the day it's born. You clone a 90 year old dog, you get a puppy with 90 year old DNA. While the wear & tear of life isn't going to be present, certain disorders and accumulated genetic damage will be expressed at an unnaturally early age in the cloned animal.

Does it matter with food animals? Not really.

Is it worth worrying over under the misguided idea that some sort of subtle mutation is going to creep in and cause your hamburger to kill you? Don't be a retard. Or a luddite. Mutations occur spontaneously regardless, cloning the animal won't make it any more likely. In fact, arguably, you'd be LESS likely in many ways to have a flawed "product" in that case. Any mutation that's dangerous enough to harm you when you *eat* the animal is almost invariably going to kill the damn thing before it's even born.

There are, however, problems with cloning food animals on an extensive level, and one has to do with susceptibility to disease. If you start cloning successful animals too much, you wind up narrowing the gene pool even more than it already is in most domestic animals. When you lose that diversity, you run the risk of having a particular virus crop up that's likely to kill a much higher percentage of the animals than they might otherwise lose.

Ultimately, cloning of this nature isn't all that practical, and at best represents an interim step between the time-honored process of breeding the traits you desire in a domesticated animal, and simply engineering them into it. The day of the Slig is coming.

On a side note, the issue with why clones are not identical isn't an issue with mutation, typically. Mostly it has to do with the fact that they have different mothers, usually, or the same mother at different times, etc. DNA is only part of the equation that determines how you turn out. Hormone balances, etc, have a VERY significant effect on fetal development.
 
I'm curious though how this would affect the meat market in general. Would this result in an oversupply of the product we buy at grocery stores? Would such an oversupply result in prices of the supply plummeting due to ease of availability?

Would cloning of food animals end world hunger? I mean...if you can clone unlimited supplies of beef cattle where's the point in holding out?

The way I'm seeing it, that delicious NY Strip you get at your favorite steakhouse would drop from a hefty $20 meal to the price of something you'd get at Mcdonald's ... and then that raises furthur questions...how would this impact restaurants that serve huge quantities of beef, poultry, fish, and so on?

Of course, not that that's a bad thing for the consumer, but is it good for the economy?
 
Fellina said:
Yet the idea is on the table now, is it not? Hell in the future we may be able to reorganize groupings of molecules to create whatever we want Star Trek style, but I don't expect to see the FDA giving it a gold star before the technology is perfected. So why is cloning different? Why are we even talking about eating cloned animals when it's not economically or scientifically feasible? That's what makes me concerned.
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Yeah, but last I checked the idea of the comuter was on the table for a long time before it was actually usefull. While yes, they're arguing wheither cloned animals should be an additional food source or not, doesn't mean they'll actually spend thousand of dollars to clone them now.

As for your second question with building food from molecules, that's as far from cloning as you can get. That requires you to actually take molecules from other substances, and put them together in order to make food. This is much more advanced thencloning, and can lead to dangerous poisonous substances. Cloning clones the animal and doesn't create dangerous poisonous substances. The only thing cloning can possibly cause is diseases, but those are easy to check for before you send it off to the store. While yes, diseases can sometimes slip by, they can do that naturally too.

As for the 90 year old DNA, that's true to some extent. But who says we won't have found the aging gene by that point? The scientists are constantly looking for it, and they get closer every day. I'm sure when cloning is cheap enough to actually make food from it, they'd have found a way to reverse the DNA.
 
Kind of side-topic Uzor,

An aging gene seems kind of nonsensical. Finding such a gene and being able to manipulate it would be as ridiculous as being able to manipulate time itself. Look up "entropy" and associate it with the way we grow old. The cells in our body eventually expend all that's left of their energy and organs fail.

As they also grow, it seems kind of silly to think there would be a way to "reverse" them or make them work backwards.

I'm no PhD but I still think it's kind of funny that doctors would pursue such an idea as eternal life through DNA manipulation?
 
Cloning an animal is too expensive for the meat right now. By the time it was actually cheap enough to consider, I can't imagine it not being safe. Just because something was approved by the FDA as safe doesn't make it financially feasable to do it. Sometimes they just like to set ground rules ahead of time. Now if they genetically alter the animals to make them even tastier than they are now.... maybe. But a steak from a cloned cow right now would be more than 10x that of Kobe Beef and probably not taste as good. And if you've had Kobe beef before, you know how much you're really getting ripped off there just to say you ate a clone. ; ;
 
Cloning isn't a panacea for world hunger, mostly because cloned animals as yet must still be gestated and birthed naturally. In theory it could lead to improvements in yield per animal, and the quality of whatever product you're trying to derive from it, but that's about it. If one could theoretically gestate the animal artificially in a factory, then you might be able to improve your overall yields somewhat, but even then the truth remains that large domestic animals are a really awful way to make food on a person-fed-per-square-mile basis.

In other words, you still need to feed the damn things to make them grow, and you get less out than you put in. Cloning isn't magic.

In regards to the "aging gene", it appears to be much more complex than that, sadly. Most research today seems to indicate that the system as a whole fails in the long run, not through age, but simply through imperfections in the copying process when a cell replicates. When you get right down to it, we don't even fully understand the problem, but the scope seems pretty massive. Would it be possible to improve the system as a whole and greatly extend lifespans? Indubitably. But it will take a long time and a lot more research, and possibly a paradigm shift or two.
 
Firestreak said:
They need to find the hottest, sluttiest, bisexual chick in the world and clone her like a billion times.
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I like this idea
 
Raesvelg said:
Most research today seems to indicate that the system as a whole fails in the long run, not through age, but simply through imperfections in the copying process when a cell replicates. When you get right down to it, we don't even fully understand the problem, but the scope seems pretty massive. Would it be possible to improve the system as a whole and greatly extend lifespans? Indubitably. But it will take a long time and a lot more research, and possibly a paradigm shift or two.
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This sortof got my attention...if they hadto take time to find out/correct why some cells eventually mess up during replication process, wouldn't that more or less be finding the cure for cancer entirely? That'd be an incredibly big two-birds-with-one-stone deal.
 
Mishaela said:
This sortof got my attention...if they hadto take time to find out/correct why some cells eventually mess up during replication process, wouldn't that more or less be finding the cure for cancer entirely? That'd be an incredibly big two-birds-with-one-stone deal.
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Yes. Cancer is partly the cause from an imperfect cell replication, which is why older people have a higher chance to get cancer. There's more to it, like cells in older people being more "lazy" and small errors are then more likely to slip by. But that might jsut be due to the cells being "old" and not identicall to new cells. So yes, it would be finding the cure for cancer.

However, the easiest way to clone a healthy animal is to clone newly born calves. Since the sheep cloning was brought up earlier, the clone died pretty much the same day that the original sheep died, which proves that there's more to cells then we know.
 
Svina said:
Kind of side-topic Uzor,

An aging gene seems kind of nonsensical. Finding such a gene and being able to manipulate it would be as ridiculous as being able to manipulate time itself. Look up "entropy" and associate it with the way we grow old. The cells in our body eventually expend all that's left of their energy and organs fail.

As they also grow, it seems kind of silly to think there would be a way to "reverse" them or make them work backwards.

I'm no PhD but I still think it's kind of funny that doctors would pursue such an idea as eternal life through DNA manipulation?
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sorry for double post, didn't read the page before >.<

Well, the thing is, the doctors aren't looking for a way to reverse the genes, but more for a way to stop aging altogether. Earlier theories and findings (I honestly don't know what findings as I'm no doctor) in some way proved that there's a gene that caused aging. I believe the theory originating from a gene that activated puberty. dunno, was a long time ago I read about it, and I'm no doctor... I could look through all of my old science magazines to try and find the article again >.> although I'd rather not dig through like 6 years of science magazines >.<
 
It's not an "aging gene" specifically, but rather Telomeres that cause genetic aging. They're basically filler material at the ends of DNA strands, because every time the strand replicates through cell division little pieces from the ends break off. The cloned animal has the same number of telomeres as its genetic "parent" and therefore the same cellular lifespan.

Interestingly enough, if you read the wikipedia, it indicates a link between altering telomeres and cancer. Apparently most cancer cells have telomeres that don't break off in cell division, which is why they can reproduce so rapidly and invasively.
 
Maybe hunting all your own food will make a comeback in the future.
 
Acutie said:
Maybe hunting all your own food will make a comeback in the future.
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When the mutations are 60ft tall and destroying cities?
 
Tyrath said:
I like this idea
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And then you find out she sucks in bed... and not suck in a good way ;p
 
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