What is Digg?202 Comments
- bloodrave, on 09/05/2008, -5/+117And we should care...why? We've been eating cloned foods for decades, notable examples being granny smith apples and seedless grapes. Various large, quality studies from the FDA and the National Academy of Sciences have proven that there are no ill effects of foods cloned from somatic cells.
The only group taking a risk are those growing the livestock, not the consumers. This is simply another case of a nonexistent health threat blown ridiculously out of proportion without a foundation of sound scientific evidence. Some people don't like new technology. And the world moves on. - Narcism, on 09/05/2008, -4/+42Oh my god! The genes of the cow I just ate are the same as another cow! HOW DO I SLEEP AT NIGHT?
//oh right, eating hamburgers... - NSResponder, on 09/05/2008, -6/+33"genetically modified as well."
So what? We've been genetically modifying all of our livestock since we first domesticated animals.
-jcr - Surfrock66, on 09/05/2008, -1/+26Excellent. It was delicious, and I now know the next one will be equally delicious.
- shadus, on 09/05/2008, -7/+28Lets see...
... Cloned? Don't care. If you don't understand why this doesn't effect the safety of the meat go away.
... Genetically Modified? Don't care. If you change things that are too significant, Nature remedies the problem.
... Tasty Steaks at Reasonable Prices? Oh, this is something I can get behind.
NOM NOM NOM - bigmouse64, on 09/05/2008, -3/+24I'll still eat it. Nomish
- DoctorGumbo, on 09/05/2008, -3/+22You'll be lucky if your quarter pounder came from any type of cow period.
- inactive, on 09/05/2008, -8/+26OM NOM NOM NOM!
- jec68, on 09/05/2008, -2/+19Thank goodness we here in America don't have any powerful interest groups that are opposed to science, reasonability, and improvements like this.
- glaz, on 09/05/2008, -0/+16Clone Burger would be a cool name for a franchise.
- Evilblobs, on 09/05/2008, -6/+19Oh dear god, cloned beef. The horror....
- Maurik, on 09/05/2008, -2/+15@Vegetarians, Vegans:
For every burger you don't eat, i'll eat two! - sleze, on 09/05/2008, -1/+13Why not? These cows aren't being generated by a replicator from Star Trek. And they are delicious!
- coreman, on 09/05/2008, -5/+17actually, it DOES threaten the safety of meat, or more likely, the long term availability of it. Cloning would establish a monoculture. It then establishes a single point of failure in one's food supply. Not smart.
- norman619, on 09/05/2008, -1/+12Ah yes because it's 100% true that meat is bad for you.... STFU please. We are omnivores for a reason. I prefer to get the nutrients my body needs from food not from a pill. It is also the best way to get those nutrients. You go on and pretend you aren't what you are. you gotta love living in modern times. Modern technology allows people to do stupid things like pretend to be a vegetarian animal. Without the supplements you can not survive on a vegetarian diet. You would die of malnutrition. Those of us who chose to eat the foods we were meant to eat would be able to continue our diet in the wild w/o a problem and survive. Human vegans/vegetarians are just omnivores in vegetarian clothing.
- norman619, on 09/05/2008, -4/+14Not just cloned but genetically modified as well.
- karel747, on 09/05/2008, -0/+10pintomp3 is correct, and this has happened before in other crops. Chances are, every banana you've ever eaten has been a clone. The current industrial banana is actually smaller and much less sweet, with a less fullfilling flavor than the previous chosen banana - it's over-all inferior. Why don't we use the other banana then? Because a virus nearly wiped them all out. A virus which the current incarnation of the industrial banana is immune to.
Genetic variation is the single greatest advantage to life - it's what makes life immune to potential extinction. Sure, cloning insures that every sample of the population will give the same result, but there's a huge risk involved in terms of economics.
Health-wise, there's absolutely no issue. Only ignorant people are worried about adverse health effects. - norman619, on 09/05/2008, -2/+12As long as that clone is just as tastey as the original it's all good.
- freezerburn666, on 09/05/2008, -1/+11you'll be dead from iron deficiency or lack of nutrients by then, maybe catch some flu that kills you because you don't have a strong enough immune system :P
- aethelberga, on 09/05/2008, -2/+11With all the other stuff that they do to the food we eat nowadays, cloning seems pretty tame. Wait until we get to lab grown meat protien (i.e. meat that was never alive) and see how that flies with the general public.
- twiztidsinz, on 09/05/2008, -0/+9Welcome to Clone Burger, home of the Clone Burger....
Can I take your oooorder? - norman619, on 09/05/2008, -4/+13NSResponder:
Did I say it was something bad? Please don't read things into my comment that aren't there. More people world wide would be starving if it weren't for these technologies. Cloning food helps to ensure the safety of said food. - megaton, on 09/05/2008, -2/+11I don't know why they're digging you down, coreman. You're absolutely right.
It's not a threat to the person EATING the cloned food--there is nothing genetically different between a clone and the original, and we eat the original without harm all the time. However, having a single genetic specimen is a threat because there is no diversity among the group. If it were to be especially vulnerable to a particular virus, or fungus, or bacterium, the entire herd or crop could be obliterated. On a large scale, this could be devastating.
This is basic evolution theory, folks! - inactive, on 09/05/2008, -1/+9Whats with all these fear of cloned or GMO food anyway. Remember the golden rice? it could have potentially solved the world's vitamin A deficiency, but knocked down by a bunch of anti GMO activists and Greenpeace.
We're eating the food, not merging DNA's or anything... - raquel9e, on 09/05/2008, -0/+8Ummm... yes there is. Plants have genes just like humans do.
- cawpin, on 09/05/2008, -2/+10Yes, because meat causes heart disease.
- maj0rm0j0, on 09/05/2008, -2/+10To be honest I would rather eat beef cloned from a healthy cow than risk the possibility of eating diseased meat.
- gordonj, on 09/05/2008, -0/+8""Cross-breeding only works within the same species."
Not always. In plants at least, there are hybrids where species barrier can be crossed."
Fungi too (although as you know the term "species barrier" is an artificial concept and could be argued about all day long). Also horizontal gene transfer can occur from one species to another, which is basically nature's way of creating GM-organisms. - shadus, on 09/05/2008, -2/+10Oh get over it people. Who cares if it came from a cloned animal? Its still just meat. Because someone shocked an egg instead of inseminating it with sperm doesn't change that fact.
- karel747, on 09/05/2008, -0/+7I'm sorry that the public school system has failed you so hard.
- wing05, on 09/05/2008, -1/+8Great.
So label it and enforce it and let us all have the choice of whether to eat it or not.
Don't mix it into the general food supply and not tell anyone about it until someone starts asking questions.
That's just as good as the government telling schools that they have to teach ID and evolution as both equal theories. Someone is enforcing their will on you as a captive audience.
And don't slippery slope the argument by saying that pruning/grafting for 1000's of years is the same thing as manipulating something in a lab and releasing it into the wild. Nature takes care of unviable things that didn't work well. Humans in the lab interfere with that process and give their creations a massive advantage.
I'll bet some pointy headed scientests somewhere also thought that processing the carcasses of dead animals into food for herbivores was simply accelerating the course of nature and saw that a few hundred test cattle were okay for a few years. Look at where mad cow disease is now.
As great as science is, humans still run the game and last I checked, the only human ever to be proclaimed infallible was that Jesus dude, and then it's only by his followers. As a result, there can still be short sightedness and scientists not have known where or when else to look for trouble.
As I said, great, bring it on, but give us the choice to eat it or not. - suckanucka, on 09/05/2008, -2/+9But what about the magical satan chemical that grows in cloned food that turns us into liberals?
- CosmicJustice, on 09/05/2008, -2/+9Not if we eat them first.
- TheCatsPants, on 09/05/2008, -0/+7"Cross-breeding only works within the same species."
Not always. In plants at least, there are hybrids where species barrier can be crossed. - LastDitchHero, on 09/05/2008, -2/+8I don't get what is the big deal about cloning? People should be more concerned with the ***** they pump into cows to get them bigger faster, aka steroids.
- DucoNihilum, on 09/05/2008, -2/+8Yes,we're all working for the man.You may see us in our black hellicopters.
- gordonj, on 09/05/2008, -0/+6actually, plant cloning has been going on for way longer than animal cloning. Some plants can't actually reproduce sexually, so they require cloning for their very existence. Bananas are a good example. Any plant grown from a cutting is a clone.
- VitriolAndAngst, on 09/05/2008, -3/+9I feel compelled to shed a little light every time this subject comes up.
I love science and progress and all the potential it brings.
BUT.
Whatever wide-scale changes you make, need to be carefully looked at. Things like toxins, manipulated DNA, and Radiation, are problems that can get out of control. For instance, if someone created a "super cyano-bacteria" that was great for harvesting bio-fuels, it could also get lose in the ocean and destroy habitats.
Cloning is not MERELY A COPY. Not yet. The cloned animals is NOT identical to the original. -- because it is using genes that have BEEN DEVELOPED. When an organism is an embryo, it's genes are in a different state than when it is an adult.
The most basic difference is, that younger genes have more "copies allowed" -- there are proteins called 'telomeres' that get snipped off after each copy. So a clone will have a shorter life-span, because it's cells cannot be regenerated as many times as the Original. The OLD GENE issue, also comes up with more birth defects and health problems -- the immune system is weaker, I theorize that is because the gene has "less learning capability" in the adult form -- the new clone doesn't have the young form of the gene to adapt to diseases.
Vastly more complicated, than a DNA helix, is the geometry genes take up. The structures are formed in a way that exposes parts of the gene to be read, and parts not to be. So the structure of you DNA in your liver, is different from your skin -- because the genes to build a liver, are exposed. Make sense? Genetic science is just beginning to get an understanding of this, but you can understand that it makes the issue so many more times more complicated. Think of a Rubics cube, with 9 faces, for a total of 54 squares. What are the combinations that can be made, by changing the order of these 54 squares? So yeah, getting the genetic "folding" down is about 10,000 times more data than sequencing genes. Now we are helped in this task somewhat, because there are recognizable patterns and chunks that do one thing, rather than every gene being able to fold at any spot -- but I'm digressing here.
Now, there is some progress, especially in "regressing" cells to their stem cell state. I'm not sure if they can do this with genes -- but their might be a way to find a "default state." I can honestly stay that I'm not sure -- I only guess that this is possible, but don't know if people have yet found it.
The other problem with clones is diversity. If you have 10,000 clones, no big deal. But when you have 100,000 clones, at farms all over the country, one disease that kills the first cow, will kill all 100,000 clones. You may find a fast growing cow, but that cow can be potentially wiped out all at once. So you make more profits for the meat industry -- at the expense of having the whole population wiped out.
And the weaker immune systems mean that more anti-biotics are going to be needed. Either culling a lot of cows at the first sniffle, or drugging them constantly until they are slaughtered. So guess what? Veal is going to usually be a sick cow. Yummy!
YOU may enjoy a cloned burger now -- at your own risk. I'd like to know so I can choose not to. I may seriously consider becoming a vegetarian and wait for all these trusting fools to be the guinea pigs. - pintomp3, on 09/05/2008, -2/+8i don't think there is a health threat per se from cloning animals. i do think it is dangerous to have entire species being genetically identical. genetic diversity is key for survival. one disease could wipe out the entire species.
- inactive, on 09/05/2008, -0/+6i'll take a clone burger, clone fries and some orange soda
- KikiWilliamson, on 09/05/2008, -1/+7Something original? Listen, the format in which genes are combined to produce life doesn't change the fact that a cow is a cow is a cow. They just want to reproduce the BEST cow. Fine by me. Your mysterious "trust me it isn't" does not give me any reason to think otherwise. However, my degree in microbiology does give me reason to say cloning is not going to produce an unhealthy cut of meat. Maybe an unhealthy animal with a short life span.. but not bad food.
- ApokalypseNow, on 09/05/2008, -0/+6We can cross-breed tigers and lions to get ligers and tigons, we can cross-breed horses and donkeys to get mules and hinneys, we can crossbreed zebras and horses to get zorses, we can crossbreed zebras and donkeys to get zeedonks... There are numerous examples of cross-breeding in the animal kingdom- and sometimes, the results are even fertile!
- CosmicJustice, on 09/05/2008, -0/+6Bacon cheese burgers.
- norman619, on 09/05/2008, -1/+6I can't wait to see the heads of people who are against the cloning of our food explode when we can grow our meat in vats. They can already grow muscle in the lab. Once perfected the vegans and vegetarians won't have much of an argument against the eating of meat since no animals would be hurt in this process. It will make for some great comedy I'm sure. :-)
- norman619, on 09/05/2008, -4/+9You clone an animal that is known to be disease free. It's a good way to ensure the safety of your meat supply. It lowers your chances of eating meat from say a cow infected with mad cow.
Cheaper does not mean safer. Ask the Japanese why they have refused Amrican beef. - saikyan, on 09/05/2008, -0/+5I'll have a double clone burger with clone bacon... also give me some clone fries and a diet clone coke... gotta watch the figure.
- TheCatsPants, on 09/05/2008, -0/+5Surely a clone is just a genetic copy of an animal? Just like twins or triplets. Cloning doesn't necessarily mean there is any interference with the genetics.
- Mightbiteyou, on 09/05/2008, -1/+6cool, get that technology figured out and cheaper and clone me some replacement parts.
- lpmiller, on 09/05/2008, -1/+6hey, you find a good burger, you don't want to give it up. Clone that bad boy!
- SeenByMany, on 09/05/2008, -2/+7...the secret of the Double Quarter Pounder finally revealled
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