I'll have a cloneburger, medium rare

USA Today (Online Only)
Andrew Kantor, CyberSpeak
Friday, January 5, 2007

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration said that cloned animals are safe to eat. This isn't a surprise, of course; cloned animals — the ones that live to term — are really no different than any other animal any more than a test-tube baby is different than a typical one.

Yet the announcement was followed by the expected hand-wringing from opponents — opponents who either fight any kind of biotechnology or who get their views of cloning from too many bad science-fiction movies. Or both.

Cloned meat is somehow not safe, they insist, or at least we can't be sure it's safe. And they've begun their efforts to scare the public into thinking their way.

Of course, we can't be sure than anything is safe, as recent scares about spinach, lettuce, and onions have shown. But the safety of food has nothing to do with how the animal was conceived any more than the sex of a child is determined by which page of the Kama Sutra the parents preferred.

Two tidbits from the news story in particular deserve to be smacked around.

First there's this quote from Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety: "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."

Note the word "potential." Just about every object in your home has "potential safety issues." That's why we end up with all those wacky warning labels. What's important isn't potential safety issues, but realistic ones. Do you really need a warning of the "potential safety issue" of, say, sticking a pencil up your nose?

The CFS, though, has a broad anti-science, anti-technology agenda — biotechnology is bad, period. In the case of groups like the Amish, I respect this. But, unlike the Center for Food Safety, the Amish aren't hurting children.

What, you say? Surely you exaggerate, Mr. Kantor. Alas, no.

It's because of efforts by the Center for Food Safety and others against any kind of genetically modified food that prevent Golden Rice from being grown. Golden Rice is genetically engineered to produce a high level of Vitamin A, something that many children in third-world countries suffer from a lack of.

Golden Rice could save millions of lives. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for one to two million deaths and half a million cases of irreversible blindness every year, mostly affecting children.

If your child was going to die or go blind, and the cure had only a theoretical chance of being dangerous, would you turn it down? Yet that's the decision the CFS wants to make for millions of kids. It's hard for me to respect an organization like that.

The second line from the story that gave me pause referred to a comment from Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who (the article said), "the FDA is ignoring research that shows cloning results in more deaths and deformed animals than other reproductive technologies."

The FDA is not ignoring that information; it realizes that it's meaningless. Yes, a lot of cloned animals die very young. Cloning is a hit-or-miss proposition. But that has nothing to do with the quality of the meat from the clones that survive for two reasons.

First, the milk and meat that will one day be available to consumers will come not from the cloned animals themselves, but from their offspring — cloned animals are far too expensive to use an anything other than breeding.

Second, if you clone an animal and something goes wrong, the animal will die very young. Thus, obviously, you won't be getting that milk or meat from them or from their offspring. Only in those aforementioned bad s-f movies would a hidden genetic defect turn all who ate the meat into zombies or mutants. And note: Hidden genetic defects occur all the time, and naturally. You might remember that from high school biology.

If something goes wrong with the cloning process, you won't end up with a secretly deadly animal. You'd end up with a not-so-secretly dead one. It's not getting into the food supply.

We've been doing genetic engineering for thousands of years — ever since the first farmer culled the first bad seeds from what he planted. Gregor Mendel made it scientific in the mid-1800s.

Modern corn — most of which is genetically engineered— couldn't exist without us. Without bioscience, cows couldn't produce nearly as much milk. The Haber-Bosch process for creating artificial fertilizer is responsible for keeping millions from starving, ditto for food preservatives. The simple addition of fluoride to water has saved the teeth of millions of kids, some of whom don't have access to dental care.

Yet I can't help but think that groups like the Center for Food Safety and the Consumer Federation of America would have fought tooth and nail against all of those, using the same kinds of scare tactics and misinformation they're using today. And that's a shame.

What's the Beef?

By Henry I. Miller
last modified
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
American.com


The preliminary decision of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week to permit the consumption of food from cloned animals is a good one. If anything, it's long overdue, because scientists have known for years that the clones are indistinguishable genetically, biochemically, and nutritionally from the parent. As one farmer who owns a pair of clones of a prize-winning Holstein cow observed, they are essentially twins of "a cow that was already in production."

Cloning technology is analogous to other reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, that are widely used in the livestock industry. A clone is produced by taking a single cell from an animal that one wants to replicate and fusing it with a cow egg that has had its DNA removed. Then, a small electric shock induces the egg to grow into a copy of the original animal, resulting in the creation of an embryo that can be transferred to and gestated in a surrogate mother animal. The newborn is a replica of the animal that donated the initial cell. Just as a breeder of racehorses would like to have an exact duplicate of a Triple Crown Winner, farmers want copies of exemplary animals.

Although clones that survive to term are likelier than other animals to die in infancy (perhaps caused by known subtle differences in gene regulation even among animals derived from the same cell), the animals that survive infancy appear to be completely normal.

Some in the food industry have expressed fears that consumers might reject milk and meat from cloned cows, but history argues otherwise. Twenty years ago, there were similar concerns when dairy farmers began using the first gene-spliced veterinary product, bovine somatotropin (bST), also known as bovine growth hormone. The drug, a protein that stimulates milk production in cows, generated significant controversy, with some analysts predicting that its introduction would so frighten consumers that milk consumption could drop as much as 20 percent. Although the milk is in no way different or less wholesome than that obtained from untreated cows, activists demanded special regulations, including mandatory labeling of dairy products from bST-treated animals. FDA demurred, however; the product was hugely successful; and a decade after milk from bST-treated cows began to be marketed, an analysis from the USDA's Economic Research Service concluded: "Scientific evidence about food safety will not prevent controversy." On the other hand, said the analysis, "even intense controversy may have minimal or no effect on total demand [and] the absence of reports of harm from consumption contributes to continued consumption."

Once again, compelling scientific evidence about food safety isn't preventing controversy. The FDA risk assessment released last week reflected a high degree of assurance-"extensive evaluation of the available data has not identified any food consumption risks or subtle hazards in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats"-but that didn’t deter the anti-technology NGOs from attacking the decision. The biotech-bashers have been especially upset that because the meat from cloned animals is indistinguishable from the parent, it is highly unlikely that regulators will require labeling to identify food derived from cloned animals. Activists have adopted a two-pronged strategy. First, they try to coerce food producers and processors into rejecting new food technology. Failing that, they try to get government agencies to over-regulate. An important element of these efforts is mandatory labeling of food made with technologies the activists dislike-such labels help them to demonize those products and to intimidate their producers, distributors, and retailers.

The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act requires that food labels be truthful and not misleading, and federal law prohibits label statements that are likely to be misunderstood by consumers, even if they are, strictly speaking, accurate. For example, although a "cholesterol-free" label on a certain variety or batch of fresh broccoli is accurate, it could run afoul of FDA's rules because it could be interpreted to as implying that broccoli usually does contain cholesterol, even though in fact it does not.

Analogously, instead of educating or serving a legitimate consumer need, mandatory labels o food from cloned animals would falsely imply that FDA is aware of some important but unspecified difference between cloned meat and other meat. FDA's current approach toward labeling, which has been dubbed "need to know"-as opposed to the European Union’s view that consumers have a "right to know"-has been upheld both directly and indirectly by various federal court decisions. Given that practice, labels that identified food derived from cloned animals would only mislead consumers.

This technology will offer yet another tool to enable biologists and animal breeders to make foods more consistent, nutritious, and tasty. The activists have cloned their own visceral, irrational objections from earlier food debates-and they're just as misguided this time.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at the Hoover Institution, headed the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology from 1989-1993. Barron's selected his latest book, "The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution," as one of the Best 25 Books of 2004.