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Dolly Chops for Dinner©
Who's going to eat Dolly? Dolly was the first cloned farm animal. I honestly don't know if she's alive today. But more and more, companies are moving into the business of cloning farm animals. Everybody is now familiar about the debate on whether eating genetically modified organisms is healthy. Does, for instance, eating a potato with the gene of a bacteria inserted into it create health risks. There's lots of discussion on questions like that. And consumers and scientists have come down on both sides of the issue.
But cloning is different.
Cloning is creating supposedly identical plants and animals from the tissue of the original animal. There are no new genes involved.
Now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is developing policy guidelines on whether cloned animals that are not genetically modified should be tightly regulated like drugs. The agency plans to issue its position after the National Academy of Sciences completes a report assessing if cloned animals pose any hazards to animals, human health or the environment. The report is due out early next year.
But for the timevbeing the FDA is asking companies that have cloned farm animals to ask the agencies permission prior to put slaughtered cloned animals into the food chain.
"If people insist on putting them into the food supply ... before the report is out, we would recommend that they come into us with an investigational application first, just to be on the safe side," said John Matheson, a senior regulatory scientist at the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, told Reuters in a June 7, 2001, story on the issue.
Companies involved in animal cloning include PPL Therapeutics, creator of Dolly the sheep, Infigen Inc., a Wisconsin firm http://www.infigen.com and Advanced Cell Technology.
Infigin currently has a herd of 125 cloned cows; two of which are on display at a corporate financed family farm exhibit at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Infigin also has forty cloned pigs and the company plans to create genetically modified pigs whose organs are intended to be used in the human transplant industry.
The first clones at the Minnesota Zoo, cutely referred to Cookies and Cream, were retired from the Zoo in less than a year. They've been replaced by Carbon and Copy. Who's going to eat Cookies? Who will get Cream's t-bones? Who wants to?
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