Cloning.

Well, the US. has got approval after 5 years to be allowed to sell, meat ,dairy products in its supermarkets, from cloned cattle etc.

Also these products may not show on the labels of the food that its from cloned stock.

Initially I thought, hmm cloned lamb chops, yes or no ? or not cloned. But if in the US, they wont be labelled then, organic sales will go through the roof ! Standards of organic foods being all nicely transparent (I Hope )

What gets to happen in the US. usually lands in UK at some point, so this will be interesting to see the UK consumer market react in a year or 2 when cloned produced gets here.


Further, and this is what info popped into my head, Humans advancing really well with technology over last century or 2, are we catching up with ourselves. Going full circle?

Now , the missing link, yes, could it not be how we came to inhabit the earth.

Nucleus + DNA = human breeding program .

Our DNA is apparently too evolved for the life of the earth to of evolved on the earth. The missing link ?

if you eat foods containing human genes, does that make us cannibals ?

special rice to help prevent illnesses - great.
at what COST to the third world?
this is not some humanistic act, its about using the "oh look, we can save lives" as the bait to allow this to happen.

( we still have people here having to do "charity events" to raise money for gee-whiz dialysis machines, cos there so expensive, and the govt wont buy them, or the manufacturers arent making enough profit. )

has their stock price risen yet? investors want a good return, you know.
me, cynical?

As if they haven't already

Human cloning has been done. If it can be done on other species, who wouldn't give it a go. Hell I would if I was a cloning scientist. But I guess nature is strange beast in itself, it has a habit of counteracting things that shouldn't be there (like human being for examples - what with new viruses and diseases and the odd natural disaster here and there).

Like with GM, until enough of it is planted/enough animals are cloned, its impact on the environment won't really be known. Problem is, if you go ahead and do that and the results are dire, well you are in it already aren't you.

Cloning and GM is often cited as a solution to world hunger, but the irony is the sort of people that push hard for this stuff to be allowed to be sold and consumed in the first place, are the same people who would want to patent it (the US is the only country in the world that actually allows life forms to be patented), and ensure that they are the only people that are allowed to grow/manufacture that in the first place.

World hunger is not due to there merely being a lack of food, more from political policies and ideologies enforced by despots - encouraged, endorsed and fuelled by greedy corporates.

The last place in the world that needs more food is the US, and yet it is they who get to eat assorted cloned cow bits in their burgers - and surprise-surprise without them being aware of it too. Only business interests would ensure that there is no legal obligation to not label the product as being derived from cloned animals.

It just means that more people will buy organic - as organic has to tick certain boxes first before being certified as being organic (sure there will be fraud); it will be one of the few food ranges that will have a guarantee as being non-gm or non-cloned, so people won't take the risk, and cough up and pay for stuff which has just farmed and produced in the appropriate manner in the first place.

</rant>

Chimeras - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6534243/

No I wouldnt eat cloned food coz I'm not sure it's healthy or not!

"Sheep thats 15% human" -
-- which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/26/content_5897670.htm

JTrader said:

"Sheep thats 15% human" -
-- which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/26/content_5897670.htm

Click to expand...

at what percentage does it become cannibalism?

trendie said:

at what percentage does it become cannibalism?

Click to expand...

I don't know, but it all makes my stomach turn
.

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/A/animal_farm/index.html

saw this program.

Cloned horse from a champion barrel racing horse
Goats that produce spiders web material in their milk
Illuminous pigs
A mouse with a human ear growing on its back
........

hmm saw a clip regarding creating humans organs in the lab, I think they said they should be able to take a humans DNA and create or grow a new heart for example, and that technology will possibly be here in the next 3-5 years so people can upgrade a flagging organ or 2 . but it will be a perfect bio match, so rejection shouldnt be a problem.

Not sure what happen to pigs hearts for humans idea, unless the thinkng was get the pig to grow a human spliced heart, anyway, seems like they have advance beyond the pig incubator.

Genetic engineering technology in general is a difficult issue.

It's easy to be against what seem to be such freakish developments.
However, if you were a person who would benefit from such developments, or who's life could be saved by new developments, a persons outlook may easily change.

With the spiders webs in goat milk, apparently spiders web is the strongest or one of the strongest materials known to man for its weight. Much stronger than kevlar, therefore the military are interested in this technology for making body armour.

All the elites need to do is to add a terminator gene, and whoosh goes 2bn people

What CB's poll didn't take into account is that we may well already be eating cloned food without knowing it in the form of crops etc. Who knows (?)

JTrader said:

What CB's poll didn't take into account is that we may well already be eating cloned food without knowing it in the form of crops etc. Who knows (?)

Click to expand...

It becomes worrying when you eat a supposedly "healthy" diet with lots of fruit & veg, fresh fish etc, but don't know what the rice, potatos, tomatos, corn, salmon etc. have in them, or how it has been grown....

Clones are genetic replicas, as opposed to being genetically engineered. They are, in other words, identical twins. Yet a certain irrational hysteria arises when an identical twin starts its life in a test tube not by way of an egg splitting in the womb.

There is no reason why cloned animals cannot be reared under strict organic principles, just as a pair of "natural" identical twin calves might be. I'd have no problem eating one that had been, as long as the cloning process had not involved problems that made the animal suffer.

The NOSB (organic standards board in US) allows organic cows to be conceived by in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. If that is okay, why not cloning?

However most disagree with this view. In February the NOSB ruled out cloning as a livestock production practice under federal organic regulations and recently voted even to ban the progeny of cloned animals from organic production.

It seems that the main objection is a practical one: Cloning results are not as perfect as they should be.

FDA said:

...an increased frequency of health risks to animals involved in the cloning process, including late gestation complications and an increase of mortality. Many cloned animals develop abnormally due to misarranged genetic code, with some abnormalities so subtle that they would not be visibly noticeable, but which may have health implications for humans if consumed.

Click to expand...

I'd go along with that, mainly for reasons of animal welfare (a worthy standard of organic), but the risk of a cow with two tails suddenly containing arsenic seems rather remote.

Apart from that the reason seems to be that since consumers are very uneasy with the idea of cloning, the organic producers stand to do much better out of a rush for their certified clone-free products than they would from the costs saved by adopting cloning technology.

(Taken from this report.)

JTrader said:

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/A/animal_farm/index.html

saw this program.

Cloned horse from a champion barrel racing horse
Goats that produce spiders web material in their milk
Illuminous pigs
A mouse with a human ear growing on its back
........

Click to expand...

And these are just a few of the things that they are openly telling us about..................

JTrader said:

It becomes worrying when you eat a supposedly "healthy" diet with lots of fruit & veg, fresh fish etc, but don't know what the rice, potatos, tomatos, corn, salmon etc. have in them, or how it has been grown....

Click to expand...

Yep, but if you ever get or make the chance, get growing your own. Its can be very rewarding and a very earthy thing to do...

Absolutely CB I was just going to say JTrader you sound like you need a vegetable garden, or allotment. We have a plot that costs £10 a year or something ludicrous and there is room to grow more organic veg than we can eat. I thought I loathed gardening until I realised copious sweet carrots could be earned in return for a mere couple of hours a week and the odd pulled back muscle. A man does the rounds with a trailer of horse cable every so often, plus we add our own fruit/veg waste compost and a bit of blood n bone to perk up the hungriest plants. It's a blissful retreat after a day trying to coax cash from the Dow, apart from the ubiquitous smug expert who likes to tell us we're doing it all wrong and show off his latest stainless steel tool.