[AKA_Monet]

Originally Posted by blueangel

You forgot:

4 - ethical issues.. as in the risks to the animals themselves. There is a high failure rate with clone embryos. In addition, cloning causes oversized fetuses, neonatal respiratory failure, and heart disease. Many of the animals cloned are severely deformed.. monsterously overweight, filled with fluids, with all kinds of abnormalities. The cause of LOS (large offspring syndrome) in cloned animals is still not known.

Further... it is not only the cloned animals that suffer.. so do those that are impregnated with the clone. Cattle and sheep carrying clones are at risk for developing dystocia.

Whoa, first time pregnant mammals often get dystocia. As well as rectal prolapse--both sexes. There is no proof of all the pathologies you listed that are outside the realm that normally happens with piss poor animal husbandry...

We are ONLY DISCUSSING FDA and USDA approved farms and facilities that do these kinds of things. Not some random "Joe Farmer" that sleeps with his cows...

I think it is you who does not understand marketing. If you did, you would know that if food from clones is determined "indistinguishable" (and that, ironically is determined by the FDA itself, then the FDA doesn't have the authority to require labels.

Here's another point to ponder:
How is the public going to be able to determine whether a steak ordered at a restaurant is cloned or not? The choice of whether to eat meat at a restaurant will be taken away for those who choose not to eat cloned meat, or the cloned meat of progeny.

The point is cloned meat in our food supply is a DONE DEAL. There ain't shit you or I can do about it. Your only option is to NOT EAT FOOD AND STARVE, PERIOD.

Why do you think the FDA did not put this concept up for public debate? Archer Midland and ConAgra has a billion more dollars than you and I put together. For every $1 they've got a Billion more...

So the first folks affected by this are the poor and disenfranchised. I.E. spelled that they do not have a Whole Foods (Whole Wallet) in the ghetto and the one off Park Cities Inwood Road in Dallas, TX does NOT count.

So what options do folks really have besides starvation?

The problem is.. we just don't know. There is so much alteration in our food supplies, that it is impossible to pin-point the consequences. Yet we know, for example, that autism among children has risen dramatically... a ten-fold increase in the last 20 years.
http://www.photius.com/feminocracy/autism.html

Could all of this unnatural adulteration to our food supply be causing autism? ADHD? Premature puberty? We don't know. There is so much "frankenfood" in the U.S. food supplies, along with pesticides and even illegal pesticides from imported fruit and vegetables, that we just don't know what the effects are.

That's bullisht and you know it. No sane public health expert would agree to that concept.

That concept is waaay outside of evolution that it fails to follow rigorous scientific examination and thought. There is NO correlation that autism is directly caused by "frankenfood" consumption. And Autism as a disease is caused during development, at best it caused by poor maternal health than food consumption. And recently scientists id'ed several genes involved in autism that have to do with visual perception and similar pathways in the dopamine neurotransmitter system... The only way that dopamine metabolism can be affected is if the mother is an illegal substance abuser... Eating food does NOT make a mother a substance abuser.

What you are doing is distortion... Grossly.

Actually, you just shot yourself in the foot with that quote. The NEXT quotes say:

A new study published in August shows this to be wrong. IGF-1 by itself in saliva is destroyed by digestion, but IGF-1 in the presence of casein (the principal protein in cows' milk) is not destroyed by the digestive system. Casein has a protective effect on IGF-1, so IGF-1 in cows milk remains intact in the gut of humans who drink rBGH-treated milk. There was reason to believe that this might be true because researchers in 1984 had shown that another growth hormone, Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF), in the presence of casein was not degraded by the digestive system. However, proof had been lacking for IGF-1 until now.
So the saliva argument has been invalidated by scientific experiment. The question then becomes, what are the likely effects of IGF-1 in contact with cells of the human gastrointestinal tract? This is the question the NIH said needed answering back in 1991. Now there are at least three relevant studies.

Some humans suffer from a condition called acromegaly, or gigantism, which is characterized by excessive growth of the head, face, hands, and feet. It is caused by excessive natural production of IGF-1. Importantly, a recent report indicates that people who suffer from acromegaly have an elevated incidence of tumors of the colon.

Two British researchers, D.N. Challacombe and E.E. Wheeler, experimented with IGF-1, exposing human cells taken from the small intestine. They report that IGF-1 induced mitotic activity -- that is to say, IGF-1 promoted cell division. This is an important finding. Cancer is uncontrolled cell division.

As cells divide, at some point they are instructed (by their genes, in combination with hormone signals) to stop dividing or they are instructed to die so that the creation of new cells is matched by the death of cells and no net growth occurs; this is called "programmed cell death." If "programmed cell death" is prevented, then cells don't die at the right time, causing an unnatural increase in cells -- another way to make a tumor. A study published in June by Renato Baserga and others in Cancer Research reveals that IGF-1 promotes the growth of cancer tumors in laboratory animals and in humans by preventing programmed cell death. This is another important finding.

In the same article you quoted, it says:
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late 1993 declared the milk from rBGH-treated cows safe. However, new scientific studies published this summer suggest that milk from rBGH-treated cows may not be as safe for humans as was previously believed."




It will be interesting to see how this is played out. A poll conducted in 2006 by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found two-thirds of American consumers were “uncomfortable” with the idea of cloning animals.

And "in 2006, only 16 percent of respondents voiced a “favorable” impression of livestock cloning, and 44 percent said they were not likely to buy cloned meat, milk or eggs, even if the FDA declared them safe."
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/16509029.htm

If there is little demand for cloned beef.. then why would the industry pay that amount of money?



I think the quote from the FDA itself tells it all:
"Edible products from normal, healthy clones or their progeny do not appear to pose increased food consumption risks relative to comparable products from conventional animals."

Notice the word "appear." That one little word says it all... the FDA does not say, "do not pose increased food consumption risks".. because the fact is.. it is not known conclusively at this time.

So we are all being used as guinea pigs.

Okey first, you are misrepresenting and distorting the facts. Insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1) is made by all of us. Without it, we die. It is the major hormone that responds to our intake of food, like insulin.

Since all milk is required to be HOMOGENIZED and PASTEURIZED and before human consumption, then proteins are degraded. Meaning a salt solution is added to raw milk, to precipitate all the proteins out of it. Then the precipitate is used to generate: cheese, butter, cottage cheese, etc. Then pasteurization "bakes" the milk that follows a dialysis step to have a purified fraction of material--which then gets filtered. Just like our wine and beer goes through this process, so does our milk. It has been this way for over 50 years. Sometimes the process in inefficient and sometimes, there are failures. But there is lack of inspectors for these facilities or maybe there are payoffs. I am not all into conspiracy anymore.

Injecting animals with rbGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) increases many things along the signalling cascade leading to the increased net production IGF-1 . If you used Humilin to regulated your diabetes, you are injecting recominant human Insulin that is made either in cells or animals... Same concept.

Whether that enhances the health the steer species or worsens it is irrelevant to me. Because it is a done deal. There is nothing I could do to change it. It happens. Waring or protecting yourself from these kinds of genetic modifications has happenend and is going to continue to happen.

Acromegaly/gigantism in humans is caused by mutations in GH. Not by food consumption. Eating foods that have GH, which is raw meat products is risky not only for infectious disease's sake but plain stupid. References PubMed.

Are you quoting me references over 17 years old? Did they microarray those data?

Anything can cause cancer in rodents if they live too long. I study aging in laboratory rodents. It is not because of their food consumption why they get heptomegaly and splenomegaly. It is because they are inbred and inbreeding generally causes mutations. Yes, inbreding is roughly the same as cloning, but a rodent's birthrate is much faster than a cow's, anyday, anytime. The estrus cycle of rodent is ~14 days. The estrus cycle of a cow without injections are ~once per year or less. With injections, you can boost it up ~2-3. And at best you are getting only 2 calves.

With clones you will be increase maturation and calf production by 10-fold.

Just because apoptosis--programmed cell death--does not occur does not always constitute a tumorigenesis. Mutations in the Bcl-1/2, Bax, Bid, etc. Even knockouts in the caspase pathways did not increase tumorigenesis. The only thing that seems to change tumorigenesis are deletions in the cell cycle--i.e. the cyclins and p53, DNA damage by oxidation and loss of DNA repair (Lawrence Loeb et al. throughout).

Your capability to understand basic tenets of molecular biotechnology is poor. And if you are in a Ph.D. program, then you may need to reconsider and do something more commensurate of your abilities.

Dr. AKA_Monet
University of Washington
UT Southwestern Medical Center
University of California, San Diego
San Diego State University
The Scripps Research Institute