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genetic engineering | health

Cloned Meat is NOT a clone: up to 5% expressed differently, clones more deformed,cancerous

Clones cannot be perfect copies, and health difficulties arising from clones get transferred into the food chain: you. Yet another open air experiment on your health, thanks to the corrupt FDA, just like their corrupt open air experiment without notification concerning GMOs.

"...clones are far from perfect copies. All clones are defective, in one way or another, with multiple flaws embedded in their genomes. Rudolf Jaenisch, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that something like 4-5% of the genes in a cloned animal's genome are expressed incorrectly. These often subtle genetic defects can have tangible consequences. Cloning produces an extraordinarily high number of deaths and deformed animals. Some clones have been born with incomplete body walls or with abnormalities in their hearts, kidneys or brain function, or have suffered problems like "adult clone sudden death syndrome" and premature ageing."...who knows how this is transferred to YOU. Nothing has been done in research on these issues of long term exposure.

Cloned animals demote biodiversity and in practice would yield more health dangers to you from wider 'monocropped animals' in factory farm conditions, with more loads of crowd diseases risk, stress, and antibiotics given to them all the while, which gets transferred to you as well, as well as leads to pathogens becoming immune to antibiotic treatment. Cloned meat is anti-consumer and anti-animal on every level.
"Ba! Ba! Black Sheep! Have you any clone disease?" "Won't say. I'm unlabeled."
Dolly's long goodbye

Four years since the death of Dolly the cloned sheep, her legacy very much lives on...
Date:15/02/2007
Author:Jonathan Matthews

Ten years ago this month the world first heard of Dolly the Sheep - the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. And St. Valentine's Day marked the fourth anniversary of Dolly's "euthansia" at the age of six after a veterinary examination showed she had a progressive lung disease, a condition more common in older sheep.

But this double anniversary doesn't round off the story. Dolly's birth at the Roslin Institute in Scotland marked just the beginning of a long production line of animal clones that has included mice, rats, rabbits, horses, mules, cats and a dog. More ominous perhaps are the cloned cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. For, while Dolly's stuffed remains are to be found exhibited in Edinburgh's Royal Museum, the push is on to serve up the remains of today's cloned livestock on our dinner plates.

Just two months ago a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s draft risk assessment concluded that meat and milk from adult clones and their offspring are as safe to consume as those from standard animals. There has, of course, been no public debate about whether US citizens, let alone the recipients of US exports, wish to consume such fare, and surveys of US public opinion show a decided lack of appetite for cloned food. But we may not have the choice. The FDA has already concluded labelling should not be required while semen brokers have been busy selling thousands of units of semen from cloned bulls. Their offspring are almost certainly going to end up in the food chain. The daughter of a US cloned cow has already been born on a British farm.

The corporate Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) sees no need to worry. A clone, claims BIO, is just "a genetic twin of that animal... no genes have been changed or moved or deleted." But clones are far from perfect copies. All clones are defective, in one way or another, with multiple flaws embedded in their genomes. Rudolf Jaenisch, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that something like 4-5% of the genes in a cloned animal's genome are expressed incorrectly.

These often subtle genetic defects can have tangible consequences. Cloning produces an extraordinarily high number of deaths and deformed animals. Some clones have been born with incomplete body walls or with abnormalities in their hearts, kidneys or brain function, or have suffered problems like "adult clone sudden death syndrome" and premature ageing. This brings us back to Dolly who developed a potentially debilitating form of arthritis at an unusually early age.

By that point, the company behind Dolly, PPL Therapeutics, had received big public funding guarantees, as Dolly became the biotech icon at the centre of what was supposed to provide Scotland with an emerging "biotech tartan triangle" and a major economic driver. However, in the same year that Dolly died, PPL Therapeutics decided to sell its assets and shut its doors, following multimillion pound losses. It left behind a large herd of unwanted GM sheep in New Zealand that, like Dolly, had to be "euthanised".

But still Dolly lives on, not only in the industry of the abnormal that she gave birth to but as a "cuddly" incarnation of the dream of a world remade without natural boundaries - limited only by our imagination and desires. While the dream may be inherently defective, it has powerful economic drivers. Cloning expert, Peter Shanks, points out that the FDA's favourable draft assessment of cloned food leaned heavily on the work of animal-cloning companies like Cyagra and ViaGen.

Over a quarter of the 700-page draft, says Shanks, is a data dump from the two companies - a fact that the New York Times failed to mention, even when quoting the president of ViaGen saying, "I think that this draft is going to provide the industry the comfort it needs."

For Dolly and her "descendants", it looks set to be a long goodbye.

Jonathan is the founder of
GM Watch -  http://www.gmwatch.org - and
LobbyWatch -  http://www.lobbywatch.org .

 http://www.theecologist.co.uk/archive_detail.asp?content_id=751

How about leaving the 17.Feb.2007 13:31

?

suffering of helpless animals off the menu and not eating meat at all?

 http://www.whyvegan.com
 http://www.meetyourmeat.com

DC Radio pirates call out FDA for decision not to label clones 17.Feb.2007 18:04

WSQT Guerrilla Radio 87.9 FM in DC

The FDA's decision not to require labels means YOU WILL EAT McCloneburgers and Kentucky Cloned Chicken unless you either can afford to pay triple price for organic-or decide to finally stop eating meat.

WSQT's War of the Trees covers animal and earth liberation issues. This segment was used as an intro to this section of several broadcasts.
War of the Trees-McCloneburgers and Kentucky Cloned Chicken
War of the Trees-McCloneburgers and Kentucky Cloned Chicken

Clone-contamination 18.Feb.2007 08:59

x

does not stop with the steak. All meat products will be contaminated - milk, cheese, icecream, etc. Also, all chicken products- anything with eggs. And pork - heart valves used in human heart surgery. etc. etc.

Also, the cow poop problem. That's how ecoli gets onto your spinach. And your salmonella into your peanut butter. Will fertilzers be labelled for organic use - no cloned poop products?

I don't think ethical vegans should respond to 18.Feb.2007 11:14

xxx

the ridiculous scare tactic of "cloned poop fertilizer" as a health concern. We are all in danger from the habits of people who eat animals and their products (bird flu, water runoff contaminating spinach, etc.) but the threat to veg products is not from cloning, it's from more run-of-the-mill diseases from contamination. It's also from global warming and pollution caused by cattle and other farmed animals.

I personally hope that meat becomes a more risky health proposition for meat eaters. Obviously the ethics aren't getting to you (which is shocking - you want to stuff animals in your mouths so badly you don't care how much they're suffering because of it). So maybe worrying about your own greedy ass will make you do the right thing. You don't need to kill for your meals. So stop it and do the decent thing and go veg.

Talking about fertilizer is 19.Feb.2007 11:53

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not a 'scare' tactic. And eating veggies won't save you or me. Once the 'cloned' enter our food chain it will go everywhere with unknown effects for generations.

'Fateful Harvest: the True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret', Duff Wilson, Harper, Oct/2002, ISBN-13 - 978--60931834

In this alarming, real-life version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Patty Martin, a housewife, mother of four and mayor of the small farming town of Quincy, Wash., began to notice a pattern of failing crops, infertile topsoil and rare diseases in her community in the early 1990s. When she asked tough questions about the pattern, she received evasions and resistance from some local businesses and farmers, which only made her dig deeper. Martin found that a product manufactured with sludge from a waste pond in town, sold as fertilizer and spread on local farms, stunted crops, destroyed quality topsoil and left high concentrations of such heavy metals as cadmium, chromium and beryllium not usually present in fertilizers. As Martin pursued links between fertilizers, hazardous waste and public health risks, she, like Ibsen's protagonist, became increasingly unpopular in the town she was trying to protect. Growing beyond the conflict in Quincy, Wilson's investigation (which led to a 1997 series of articles that were nominated for Pulitzer Prize consideration) revealed that under prevailing state and federal laws, polluting industries throughout the U.S. saved millions of dollars by sending hazardous waste to fertilizer makers who in turn recycled the toxic chemicals into a product sold to farmers and consumers without disclosing what was in it. In the resulting outcry, Washington State became the first to insist that fertilizer companies provide detailed chemical analyses of their products.

Fertilizer is still a huge risk. 19.Feb.2007 15:36

x

Contaminated fertilizer causing human birth defects, dead pets, poisoned crops. Salads aren't going to keep you or me safe. Once the 'cloned' enters the food chain it will persist and spread.

Duff Wilson: Fateful Harvest: the True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret
Oct/02
ISBN-13 9780060931834

Reads like a thriller - horrifying, mind blowing, and right now right in our own backyard.

 http://www.amazon.com/Fateful-Harvest-Global-Industry-Secret/dp/0060931833

In this alarming, real-life version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Patty Martin, a housewife, mother of four and mayor of the small farming town of Quincy, Wash., began to notice a pattern of failing crops, infertile topsoil and rare diseases in her community in the early 1990s. When she asked tough questions about the pattern, she received evasions and resistance from some local businesses and farmers, which only made her dig deeper. Martin found that a product manufactured with sludge from a waste pond in town, sold as fertilizer and spread on local farms, stunted crops, destroyed quality topsoil and left high concentrations of such heavy metals as cadmium, chromium and beryllium not usually present in fertilizers. As Martin pursued links between fertilizers, hazardous waste and public health risks, she, like Ibsen's protagonist, became increasingly unpopular in the town she was trying to protect. Growing beyond the conflict in Quincy, Wilson's investigation (which led to a 1997 series of articles that were nominated for Pulitzer Prize consideration) revealed that under prevailing state and federal laws, polluting industries throughout the U.S. saved millions of dollars by sending hazardous waste to fertilizer makers who in turn recycled the toxic chemicals into a product sold to farmers and consumers without disclosing what was in it. In the resulting outcry, Washington State became the first to insist that fertilizer companies provide detailed chemical analyses of their products.