Do it because you can? Cloning gets the go ahead.

The U.S. government ruled on Tuesday that food from cloned animals and their offspring is as safe as other food, opening the door to bringing meat and milk from clone offspring into the food supply.

One justification for this approval was that there appears to be no danger posed by food from cloned livestock. This is reckless approach to a complex issue, if you ask me. It is a little like saying that although an army tank might be dangerous if it is armed, you can drive one around town if you just leave the shells at home, because at that point it poses no apparent danger.

While I consider myself fairly progressive with regard to scientific innovation, I also consider myself a thoughtful food consumer. Having grown up in an agricultural area, and having family ties to the grocery business, and with a professional interest in food production, I have had lots of time and opportunity to think about what I eat.

One thought that I have is that some things work better in “low gear” and some should be pushed a little in order to get certain tasks done in a timely manner.

If you are planning to plant corn after the fourth of July parade, then you can bet you won’t face much success. Planting is something that happens in the spring, on a schedule. When it is time to go, you go. Feeding livestock is another task that must be done on time. Late just won’t cut it.

Planting your crops on time, however, doesn’t mean planting your field with the tractor in road gear. Likewise, farmers don’t expect the plants to grow at a quicker pace than nature will allow.

Genetic mutation is, I think, something that should happen at a slow and natural pace in the great outdoors, not rushed by nerdy guys in white coats at the lab bench (it is OK for me to stereotype them, because I am them).

A safety net that all of the species on earth enjoy is that of genetic diversity, or in other words, a broad pool of genes to select from as the generations proceed. Genetic diversity demands a slow and natural mutation process, not instantaneous, “on-demand” mutations initiated by man.

It is the wild types and “waste animals” that become the vehicles for genes which, while perhaps not studied by well-funded scientists, are likely the best insurance policies against creating a dominant class of animal that eventually becomes devoid of desirable traits like disease resistance, longevity, weather hardiness, and reproductive vigor. The truth is that we don’t know how our experimentation will affect generations of animals into the future, because we’ve not had the required time to observe these effects yet.

I don’t think that our genetic basis for life is anything less than miraculous and I don’t think that it is nearly so easy to understand as we sometimes like to assume. Relationships aren’t always only the ones we can observe, some causes have multiple and unknown effects. Clearly a newspaper article doesn’t qualify you to make these decisions, but I wonder how many of the bureaucrats at the FDA have studied this issue beyond the white papers provided by the lobbying groups for either side of the argument. While the food itself may be safe for human consumption, and I would still emphasize the word “may”, I find it difficult to believe that humans can exert proper control over something as complex as genetic cloning, especially in light of all the other things we have already gotten so wrong.

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