I found this gem in the Telegraph. In this piece, Roger Highfield writes about the unease about breeding cloned animals the conventional way and letting them enter the food chain. This is a very real conundrum. Most people agree they don’t want to eat meat from a cloned cow (although they are clamouring to inject themselves with embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos) but what about the offspring of a cloned cow. The daughter cow is technically not a clone, but "half-a-clone." Does that count? Would you eat the offspring of a cloned cow?
What left me scratching my head about this piece is how Mr. Highfield finishes it:
Underlying much of the concern about a calf that is not even herself a clone is the "yuck factor". This articulates a visceral fear that these methods are unnatural, though what people mean by this is hard to say.
After all, in the Garden of Eden, the first life was reproduced by cloning. Like Dundee Paradise, we all have clones in our family tree.
Huh? I guess I just wasn’t expecting a science editor to suggest that Adam and Eve were our real ancestors and that they were clones in the same breath.
If Eve was a clone then I guess we need to revise history since it was not Alexander Graham Bell, but Satan who made the first clone fall.
More seriously though Rebecca is right is wondering about this add convergence. Sillier though is if Eve was cloned then she would be genetically identical to Adam and of course of the same gender.
13 comments
What I find interesting about the question is that farming magazines and at least one Ontario farming TV show has investigated how clones are an expensive gamble. The clones that one hears about are those of farmers wish to produce good milkers or breeders, and what I’ve read and seen has focused on cows that ended up with weaknesses that their originals didn’t have. The problem appears to be that farmers think that getting good offspring is more of a “sure thing” using clones than old-fashioned selective breeding, but it isn’t necessarily so.
“Clone fall”???? Oh, Jeff, shame on you! (Made me spew water on my desk.)
Unease of cloning animals and (as noted in the quote) little unease of cloning people. That’s just amazing. Then again, I meet women who are very careful in what they eat (i.e. no hormones in meat), yet use artificial hormones to regulate a working part of their own body.
Adrian,
I hear you there.
The ‘clones in the Garden’ comment doesn’t surprise me at all. “Scientists” are raised to believe that they know all there is to know about religion. In general, its hard to confuse them with the facts.
MissJean,
Very true, which is why it puzzles me that scientists *insist* that cloning human embryos and extracting cloned embryonic stem cells are “the best and most promising” way to treat diseases.
If there is one thing that is true about the stem cell debates, it is that the facts don’t matter.
Jeff,
Kudos to you for catching the gender thing…I hate to admit that totally escaped me. I’ll chalk it up to your superior attention to detail and the fact that I must have been so stunned by the comment that I was unable to think straight! 😉
“‘Huh? I guess I just wasn’t expecting a science editor to suggest that Adam and Eve were our real ancestors and that they were clones in the same breath.
If Eve was a clone then I guess we need to revise history since it was not Alexander Graham Bell, but Satan who made the first clone fall.’
More seriously though Rebecca is right is wondering about this add convergence. Sillier though is if Eve was cloned then she would be genetically identical to Adam and of course of the same gender.”
Watch the gay rights groups pick this tidbit up. ^_^
Personally, I would have no problem eating meat from cloned animals, given it passed the regular safety inspections. It’s only when it comes to people that I get antsy. (Similarly, artifical insemination is a sinful and disrespectful way to begin the life of a human being- but I have no problem with farmers who produce cows that way.)
“if Eve was cloned then she would be genetically identical to Adam and of course of the same gender.”
So it really was Adam and Steve! =o
I think they’re mixing up clones with genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
There’s nothing really creepy or unnatural about clones: after all, all twins, triplets etc. are clones… Artificial clones can have a shorter life expectancy of course, because they are not “made” the natural way, but offspring of clones? I beg you! I mean, would you agree or not that your son marry a girl whose mother has a twin sister?
Well, I’m not mixing up clones with GMOs when it comes to cows. A cow’s ovum is used to create a replica, a mini-moo. 🙂
Actually there are differences between clones and naturally occuring twins, genetically speaking. Because clones are not made from egg and sperm (even indirectly like twins) they have issues with “imprinting.” Imprinting is a process where certain genes are turned on or off depending on whether you inherent them from your mother or father. Clones don’t have a genetic mother or father per se, so the normal imprinting doesn’t occur most of the time. If certain genes are turn on (or off) when they are not supposed to be then it causes big problems in development.
The problem people have with eating clones is that they are afraid that because of imprinting issues that the meat may have unnatural or unhealthy levels of certain proteins. People may not totally understand that this is what they fear, but they certainly instinctively understand the “yuck factor.”
Which is why I still puzzle at the reluctance to eat cloned meat, but the insistance that we need to inject ourselves with stem cells from cloned embryos to cure disease.
zovirax
Comments are closed.