I can has cloneburger?

[mithriltabby]

The recent FDA approval of cloned meat has been in the news lately. I reached for the bag of rock salt I keep handy for anything that originates from a government and claims to possess scientific rigor and took a look at their risk assessment.

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with cloned meat— a true clone would be identical to its original and pose identical risks. The problem is that cloning is error-prone, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about cellular biology. Even if they’re getting all the chromosomes duplicated properly, what about DNA methylation and microRNA? The FDA release has a Risk Assessment section that does discuss the risks of epigenetic changes, which mentions methylation but not microRNA; their conclusion is that “Progeny of animal clones, on the other hand, are not anticipated to pose food safety concerns, as natural mating resulting from the production of new gametes by the clones is expected to reset even those residual epigenetic reprogramming errors that could persist in healthy, reproducing clones. Thus any anomalies present in clones are not expected to be transmitted to their progeny.”

So what I see here is a lot of informed expectation and a few animal trials that have promising initial results. Since we’re still learning about these subtleties of genetics, I’d rather hold off on cloned meat for a few years while it gets further scrutiny. Once we have the science down, I will be delighted to enjoy tasty, tasty filet mignon that was created on a tissue printer from cell lines cloned from a cow you can feed in a petting zoo, along with fresh sourdough made from grain grown in a vertical farm. I’d rather have cloned meat labeled as such; as The Economist suggests, if it’s that good, being cloned should be a badge of quality.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I completely agree on all counts.

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Personally, I would prefer cloning parts rather than the whole animal and I hope they can overcome the safety concerns. And hey; it's just a step away from real life HuFu.

[mithriltabby]

Sweeney Todd’s Peopleburger! All meat cloned from sentient volunteers! PETA-Approved!

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Which makes me wonder if the freaks at PETA would have a problem with cloned tissue since no animals were slaughtered to make it.

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder what ethical concerns there are for cloning human flesh for would-be cannibals, provided no actual humans were created. And do the same concerns apply to Hufu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu)?

[mithriltabby]

Once you aren’t killing people for meat, the ethical concerns are now pretty much food safety— you’d want very good quality control to make sure you couldn’t catch a human disease that might have been replicating in the same growth medium. When I took over weregamer’s Omniverse game, I had some of the supporting cast from the 33rd century talking about the latest news from their home era: someone had injected different retroviruses into their main muscle groups to make their left biceps taste like chicken, right like pork, left quadriceps like beef, etc. and then had them sampled to create cell lines that could be used in tissue printing, and was selling the results as super-ethical “Bodhisattva Burgers”, where you could be 100% sure that the being that gave the cells had consented.