Des Moines Register
12-29-06
Cloned-food ruling is a win for science
Like FDA, public should resist scare tactics.
REGISTER EDITORIAL BOARD
Most Americans don't think twice when they chomp into an apple, even though
an apple tree begins life as a cutting from another apple tree. It is a clone. For
thousands of years farmers have manipulated Mother Nature by cutting plants for
roots to create other genetically identical plants.
This "cloning" is standard practice in the plant world because it produces superior
products - tasty products we humans enjoy eating.
But cloning livestock for food makes people lose their appetites. Surveys show
the majority of Americans are troubled by the idea of eating meat and milk that
come from cloned animals. They find it creepy.
And that's understandable. After all, this is a culture that associates cloning with
something unnatural, the stuff of science-fiction movies.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of
America, said polls show Americans believe it is immoral to clone animals.
"It ranks only lower than the immorality of cloning humans," she said, and it's the
same technology that could be used to clone humans.
But critics' arguments fall short when it comes to food safety - and the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration is in the business of food safety.
On Thursday, the agency announced that meat and other foods from the
offspring of cloned livestock are safe. Final approval of cloned animals for food is
still months away, and the agency will be accepting public comments for the next
three months.
The FDA's confirmation of safety comes on the heels of a study by federal
scientists, to be published in January, concluding that the milk and meat of
cloned animals are safe to eat and should be approved and sold with no special
labeling.
The agency "concluded that food from cattle, swine and goat clones was as safe
to eat as food from animals of those species derived by conventional means,"
FDA scientists wrote in the Jan. 1 issue of the scientific journal Theriogenology.
Dr. Christopher Tuggle, a professor of molecular genetics in the Animal
Science Department at Iowa State University, said he can't see how cloned
animals could pose a threat to consumers.
"If it's just a cloned animal, it still has all the same genes. It's a growing, living
animal, and I don't see the danger at all," he said.
Aside from science, common sense tells us cloned animals and their byproducts
present no danger to the food supply. Cloning is using an animal's DNA to create
another animal that is an exact genetic copy. It's essentially a twin born a
generation later - just like an apple tree. If one cow is a good milk-producer, one
could expect its clone to be as well.
The FDA deserves credit for choosing to side with science over scare tactics in
vouching for the safety of foods derived from cloned animals. Now it's time for
Americans to acknowledge the science, get over their squeamishness and enjoy
a steak and a tall glass of milk.