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Last month the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of cloned meat in the U.S., having determined that products from cloned cattle, pigs and goats are as safe to eat as meat from their naturally reproduced brethren. That makes advocates happy: Cloning enables the livestock industry to do in a fraction of the time what breeders have been doing throughout history, narrowing the gene pool to its most desirable genes. Beyond that, say cloners, future benefits include production of genetically engineered animals that could offer a variety of benefits - more nutrient-rich milk, for example, for people without...
Safe as it may be, there's another problem about cloned meat that the FDA approval hasn't taken into account: the unscientific "ick" factor. Though cattle are often reproduced artificially - using in vitro fertilization, for example - and though cloning is just another form of reproduction as far as scientists are concerned, the public is somewhat less phlegmatic about the technology. "You can't lobotomize people's brains to keep their morality from affecting their clinical understanding," said Sheila Jasanoff, a Harvard professor of science and technology studies, at a presentation about cloned meat at last weekend's American Association...
That's where Dr. Patrick Cunningham, the former director of the Animal Production and Health Division of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, and Ireland's current chief scientific advisor, comes in. Cunningham's 12-year-old company, IdentiGEN, specializes in DNA tracing of meat products - a process that can save valuable time during industry recalls, like the massive one on Sunday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) involving 143 million lbs. of raw and frozen beef. Currently, IdentiGEN is operating in Europe, where the mad cow crisis in the mid-'90s led to the establishment...
Until now, the genetic traceability of meat hasn't been much of a public health issue in the U.S. But with the USDA recall and the FDA's Jan. 15 approval of cloned-animal food products, Cunningham thinks Americans will want to know where the food in their grocery store is coming from. A 2007 poll by the Consumers Union found, in fact, that 89% of consumers would prefer that cloned foods be distinguished with labels. "This idea that all our food can be anonymous, trucked from anywhere in the world with its origins lost along...
...food products have made their way into the market in the past. Currently the U.S., E.U., Australia, China, Japan and New Zealand all use cloned cattle and pigs. ViaGEN, a cloning and animal genetics company based in Austin, Tex., produces some 150 cloned cattle annually, which it sells to meat suppliers, primarily for breeding. ViaGEN says it will launch a system to log and track each of its clones, with a unique tracking number - but not its DNA - that will be stored in an independently run database. The company will also make efforts to keep any food products made from...