HotmailCloned milk and meat: What's the beef?
Scientist, consumer advocates disagree on whether products would be safe
Milk and meat from cloned cows could hit grocery shelves in a few years if the FDA approves the process soon, as is expected.
But would the products be safe? Scientists and consumer advocates disagree on the answer.
The Food and Drug Administration has been wrestling for more than five years with the question of whether or not to allow the use of milk or meat from cloned cows, swine and sheep, with a voluntary ban on such products in place for now. Cloning companies and many scientists say the products are safe to eat, while consumer advocacy groups argue there are unaddressed concerns.
Several researchers told LiveScience that the FDA approval is inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that it could come as soon as this week.
But milk and meat from cloned animals is unlikely to hit grocery store shelves for a few years. Clones must grow up before products from them can be used. And since creating them is expensive, they will likely be used for breeding, not for direct consumption, experts say.
Cloning concerns
Reports of abnormalities, higher disease susceptibility and early deaths of clones have prompted many of the concerns about using their milk and meat. (Dolly, the sheep that was the first animal cloned by this process, was euthanized at the early age of 6, though scientists at the institute that created her stated the disease she was suffering from was unrelated to her being a clone.)
Some of these abnormalities result from slight changes that occur when the DNA from the cow to be cloned is being read and translated by the egg cell from another cow into which it is implanted — even if clones are genetic replicas, they aren't quite identical to the original donor. These so-called epigenetic changes allow us to tell human identical twins apart, said geneticist Bill Muir of Purdue University, an author of a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report on the scientific concerns of animal biotechnology.
Abnormalities can result in prenatal deaths and deaths early on after birth, but TransOva Genetics President David Faber says that this is true of all artificial breeding processes, including artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Clones that do make it to adulthood seem to be no different than their peers, Muir told LiveScience this week.
"Generally the animals that have survived have been perfectly normal," said biochemist R. Michael Roberts of the University of Missouri, also an author of the 2002 NAS study.
Some consumer advocacy groups, such as the Center for Food Safety, remain skeptical. CFS spokesman Jaydee Hanson acknowledges that some clones do reach adulthood without abnormalities, but contends that cloning is still an uncertain science with potentially unknown effects.
"We're not saying that every clone comes out wrong, but enough of them do" that more stringent requirements should be used and more testing done, he said.
Changes nutritional value?
One big question on the minds of groups like Hanson's is how these abnormalities would affect the composition of milk and meat, whether it could change the nutritional value or introduce some harmful component.
Muir says that FDA scientists and the companies that do cloning have conducted chemical tests that show that the proteins, fat and other components in the milk of cloned animals appear to be the same as in normal milk.
"The milk was ordinary milk," Roberts agreed.
Muir acknowledges that though it is unlikely, some other substance or problem could be introduced through the cloning process that might escape detection because scientists don't know what to look for.
But, he points out, "there doesn't seem to be anything harmful."
Hanson, the Center for Food Safety spokesman, says that though studies have found nothing wrong with the cloned animal products, that doesn't mean they should be fed to humans.
"We shouldn’t see what the effects are by going ahead and feeding them to humans just in case there aren't any," he said.
Consumer advocates don't think the FDA testing has been rigorous enough.
"The FDA's done a poor job with the risk assessment," Hanson said. He called the FDA's work "a weak risk assessment with people with a vested interest from the industry side" participating.
Muir, Roberts and Faber contend that the studies that have been done are more than adequate to assure the safety of products from cloned animals.
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