Cloned Cows Coming to Market?

Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.

Biotech Empire

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Meat from cloned animals – untested and unlabeled – is coming to supermarkets in the United States. A headline from The New York Times:

F.D.A. Says Food from Cloned Animals Is Safe

"After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores…

A poll this month from the nonprofit Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that while most consumers knew little about animal cloning, 64 percent said they were uncomfortable with it, with 46 percent saying they were "strongly uncomfortable."

According to most dictionary-style definitions, "cloning" is the process of creating an identical copy of an original life form. But clones are not "identical" in the full sense of the word because something gets tweaked during the process of replication, and clones end up being defective copies of the originals.

Many cloned animals die unexpectedly. They differ from normal animals at the cellular level, specifically in the lengths of "telomeres" (cellular structures which prevent a cell's chromosomes from fusing with those of another). Dolly, for example, was the first sheep to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, and she died prematurely. It seems that copies of originals – and copies of copies – are inherently flawed. What's true for the Xerox machine is true for life forms.

But then the biological engineers fixed the problem, or so they thought at first. They produced a fresh batch of biologically younger cows – until, alas, they grew up too fast, and accelerated aging did them in…

The FDA, whose parent bureaucracy was founded in 1906, does not test for accelerated aging or any dimension of this technology's inherent weirdness. The FDA was never in the business of measuring telomeres or other cellular exotica.

So why clone animals for food in the first place? Donald Coover, owner of SEK Genetics, Inc. (a beef cattle semen distribution company), is favorably quoted in an FDA report:

"The consumer is looking for a nutritious and wholesome product provided to them in a repeatable and reliable manner… If a consumer spends $30 on a steak dinner at a restaurant, they expect a great steak, but don't always get it."

The quest for standardization in commerce is a familiar story. Henry Ford accomplished the mass production of a homogenous product, the Model-T car. "People can have the Model T in any color," Ford said, "as long as it's black." So the industrial process of Fordism has simply moved from the factory to the farm – and from the farm to the fork.

The Model-T analogy is quite apt. Eric Schlosser, in Fast Food Nation, describes how chains like McDonald's developed assembly-line kitchens just as most Americans were getting their post-war wheels. Drive-up restaurants soon followed. But mass-produced food led to a decline in food safety and to a sharp rise in obesity and disease. If anyone doubts this, they can view Morgan Spurlock's brilliant movie, Super Size Me, in which his McDonald's-only roadtrip landed him in the hospital.

The fast-food industry covets the uniformity and predictability promised by cloning. Cloning aims to impose discipline upon the food supply, particularly upon burgers, whose production at present funnels an entire herd of cows into one burger:

"In just 4 ounces, a typical burger patty is packed with the meat and fat of 50 to 100 cattle from multiple states and two to four countries. Eat two hamburgers a week - as the average American does - and in a year's time the consumer samples a stampede: 5,200 to 10,400 cattle."

The common hamburger, mixing the meat of dozens of cows, is bovine goulash. But cloning leads to the exact opposite situation. It will be possible for people the world over to bite into hamburgers made from a singular flawless cow, forever. That's right: McDonald's in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mexico City could all be selling burgers made from the same cow, over and over.

Perhaps Plato was right, and every object has a perfect form, even a cow. Plato did not think that perfection existed here on Earth, but then again Plato did not foresee cloning. As the bio-engineers would have it, cloning promises to progressively tease out Nature's faults, thus realizing civilization's quest for the perfect hamburger.

Is cloned meat risky? The FDA insists that cloned livestock is "virtually indistinguishable" from conventional livestock (notice the word "virtually"). In addition to "virtually," another Orwellian term used by the food industry is this: "substantial equivalence." The FDA claims that cloned food is "substantially equivalent" to normal food...

The FDA even insists that "cloning doesn't put any new substances into an animal, so there's no 'new' substance to test." The FDA's party line is that cloning is no big deal: "Clones are similar to identical twins, just born at a different time." 5 Not mentioned in the statement is that the twin born later tends to kick the bucket prematurely. Shared birthday parties, yes, but the FDA fails to plan for separate funeral arrangements…

Most Americans feel that cloned food is unethical, unhealthy or simply disgusting. This is actually the main reason the FDA will not require mandatory labeling. Will some food companies be motivated to issue "Clone Free" labels? The better question is: Will they be allowed to? After all, the label "Hormone Free" for meat is "unapprovable" because FDA sided with the major slaughterhouses, refusing to allow a label that set such high standards.

No solid study exists testing the effect of cloned food on human health, partly because the technology for cloning mammals has only been around since about 1996. One study, however, is about to be launched as a live experiment, with American consumers serving as guinea pigs. The Center for Food Safety describes the situation accurately:

"Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones' milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done… Given that researchers do not understand many of the health problems that arise throughout the lifecycles of cloned animals, the FDA acted irresponsibly in assuming that the foods produced from these animals are safe for humans to eat."

Furthermore, cloning animals advances the technology for cloning humans. In fact, the word "clone" was coined in 1963, when a biologist and "transhumanist," or "posthumanist," J.B.S. Haldane, presented a paper with this grand and sweeping title: Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years.

As the transhumanists forget, biotechnology has often been harnessed to the abuse of power, and grandiose hopes (and biological ones no less) projected across thousands of years of time reminds one of the racialist ambitions of the Nazis. Animal cloning is specifically reminiscent of Dr. Josef Mengele's twisted experiments on twins. It's a fine line between high-tech animal husbandry and human eugenics.

But does the FDA think that animal cloning will lead to human cloning? "The FDA does not believe so..," the agency said, oddly talking about itself in the third person. Then the FDA concludes with this:

"Additionally, there are unresolved issues regarding the broader social and ethical implications of the use of cloning for humans."

Well, nothing that can't be sorted out eventually…

 

Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.

Biotech Empire: The Untold Future of Food, Pills, and Sex,

& Profit, Power, and the War on Your Health

 

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References

 

Andrew Pollack and Andrew Martin, "F.D.A. Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe," The New York Times, 29 December 2006.

Linda Bren, "Cloning: Revolution or Evolution in Animal Production?" FDA Consumer Magazine. May-June, 2003.

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.

Pulaski, Alex and Andy Dworkin, "Cattledrive: What's in that Burger You're Eating? Newshouse News Service, Jackson Citizen Patriot, 22 February 2004.

Government Report, "Animal Cloning: FAQS About Cloning for Consumers," Food and Drug Administration, 26 October 2007.

Institutional Report, "Cloned Animals," Center for Food Safety, 2008. <http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/cloned_animals.cfm>

Timeline, "Bloodlines," Public Broadcasting System, 2003. <http://www.pbs.org/bloodlines/timeline/text_timeline.html>

Government Report, "Animal Cloning: FAQS About Cloning for Consumers," Food and Drug Administration, 26 October 2007.