Cloned Animals safe to eat??????

[johnnny]

Story Highlights• Final approval of cloned animals for food is months away
• FDA: Cloned food safe; doesn't need special labeling
• Many consumers are uncomfortable with the idea of cloning
• FDA: Cloned animals "virtually indistinguishable" from normal livestock
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government declared Thursday that food from cloned animals is safe to eat.

After more than five years of study, the Food and Drug Administration concluded that cloned livestock is "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock.

FDA believes "that meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day," said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Officials said they don't think special labels are needed, although a decision on labeling is pending.

Because scientists concluded there is no difference between food from clones and food from other animals, "it would be unlikely that FDA would require labeling in those cases," Sundlof said.

Final approval is still months away; the agency will accept comments from the public for the next three months.

Critics of cloning say the verdict is still out on the safety of food from cloned animals. (Watch the safety concerns, the ethical debate and the 'yuck' factor )

"Consumers are going to be having a product that has potential safety issues and has a whole load of ethical issues tied to it, without any labeling," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety.

Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, said the FDA is ignoring research that shows cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies.

The consumer federation will ask food companies and supermarkets to refuse to sell food from clones, she said.

"Meat and milk from cloned animals have no benefit for consumers, and consumers don't want them in their foods," Foreman said.

However, FDA scientists said that by the time clones reached 6 to 18 months of age, they are virtually indistinguishable from conventionally bred animals.

Labels should only be used if the health characteristics of a food are significantly altered by how it is produced, said Barb Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

"The bottom line is, we don't want to misinform consumers with some sort of implied message of difference," Glenn said. "There is no difference. These foods are as safe as foods from animals that are raised conventionally."

Those in favor of the technology say it would be used primarily for breeding and not for steak or pork tenderloin.

Cloning lets farmers and ranchers make copies of exceptional animals, such as pigs that fatten rapidly or cows that are superior milk producers.

"It's not a genetically engineered animal; no genes have been changed or moved or deleted," Glenn said. "It's simply a genetic twin that we can then use for future matings to improve the overall health and well-being of the herd."

Thus, consumers would mostly get food from their offspring and not the clones themselves, Glenn said.

Still, some clones would eventually end up in the food supply. As with conventional livestock, a cloned bull or cow that outlived its usefulness would probably wind up at a hamburger plant, and a cloned dairy cow would be milked during her breeding years.

That's unlikely to happen soon, because FDA officials have asked farmers and cloning companies since 2001 to voluntarily keep clones and their offspring out of the food supply. The informal ban would remain in place for several months while FDA accepts comments from the public.

Approval of cloned livestock has taken five years because of pressure from big food companies nervous that consumers might reject milk and meat from cloned animals.

To produce a clone, the nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the DNA of a cow, pig or other animal. A tiny electric shock coaxes the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal. Cloning companies say it's just another reproductive technology, such as artificial insemination, yet there can be differences between the two because of chance and environmental influences.

Some surveys have shown people to be uncomfortable with food from cloned animals; 64 percent said they were uncomfortable with such food in a September poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan research group.


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-This is some gross shit, but they say its indistingushable which i guess is a good thing
-mabye if it works out we can restock the oceans, and we will have seafood in restuarants in 2050

Conspiracy

I think genetc engineering is going to sweep us off our feets and fuck up our bodies in the future

what are you opinions?

[frozen fire]

that aint natural! i wouldnt eat a cloned animal even if you paid me!

[johnnny]

me neither, fuck that shit

[Sentenza]

that aint natural! i wouldnt eat a cloned animal even if you paid me!

Not only that, but once youll see the door being opened for cloning, youll see terrible experiments being done in the name of science. Everything is possible, from Eugenics, to creating genetically modified supersoldiers, or whatever. Thats why i am against it. Because once humans get such a thing into their hands, they are bound to do shit with it.

[looneytunes1]

fuck it...id eat it... (no homo)

[frozen fire]

Not only that, but once youll see the door being opened for cloning, youll see terrible experiments being done in the name of science. Everything is possible, from Eugenics, to creating genetically modified supersoldiers, or whatever. Thats why i am against it. Because once humans get such a thing into their hands, they are bound to do shit with it.

Your are right the world is bad as it is, without having modified beings running around!

[Sentenza]

Not only that, but once youll see the door being opened for cloning, youll see terrible experiments being done in the name of science. Everything is possible, from Eugenics, to creating genetically modified supersoldiers, or whatever. Thats why i am against it. Because once humans get such a thing into their hands, they are bound to do shit with it.

Your are right the world is bad as it is, without having modified beings running around!

Watch "Star Wars-Attack of the Clones" become reality.

[frozen fire]

lol...i saw it....but i doubt we would live to see that day.

[johnnny]

weird, mabye i can genetically engineer my legs so that i can jump over houses - now that would be dope

[johnnny]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/12 ... index.html

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Chinese scientists have successfully bred partially green fluorescent pigs which they hope will boost stem cell research, Xinhua news agency said.

A research team at the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin managed to breed three transgenic pigs by injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs, Xinhua quoted Professor Liu Zhonghua as saying.

"The mouth, trotters and tongue of the pigs are green under ultraviolet light," said Liu.

Genetic material from jellyfish was injected into the womb of a sow which gave birth to the three pigs 114 days later in Harbin, he said.

China celebrates the start of the Year of the Pig in February.

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This kinda reminds me of the Simpsons episode where homer is getting tested by the nuclear safety board and the van they have him in melts down and creates a crater, and he comes out and says "Homer kill"

-anyways this is some fucked up shit

[Garf]

look what happened during WWII when we discovered mass nuclears that can destroy the eatth!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just what and we'll see bad things happen with cloning, because when we discovered the nuclear compound they were first going to be used as radiation, but we found out that they destroy!!!!

[EmperorPenguin]

Mmmmmm cloned meat.

[Qdawg]

shit like this probably would give you a new form of cancer

[whiskeyjack]

so were all eating cloned beef, mabye?

check it out we can actually buy genetic altered pets, i had some of these when i was knee high to a duck

this is old

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3660462/

the conspiracy is in front of us ><

[Old Shatterhand]

It would appear that the scientific literature asserts that eating cloned animals appears to be safe.

[whiskeyjack]

good point