Clones – It’s what’s for dinner

I’ve posted here before about biotech foods, as it’s one of those subjects that I think is at the visceral edge of biotech. Most people are gung-ho about modifying genes to cure cancer, but many fewer like using that approach when it comes to their food.

But the idea of selling cloned beef in the meat section at the supermarket seems one step closer to reality after the FDA issued a report this week that gives defacto approval to cloned foods.

Here’s the Associated Press’ take on the issue, http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/16346332.htm. The story’s boiled-down conclusion is that it will take years for cloned meat to hit stores because of the relatively high cost of cloning.

Key quote: “Mark Walton, president of the ViaGen Inc., the leading cloning company, said that it would take about five years before clone-derived food hits the market. ‘And it still we be relatively small numbers,’ he said. ‘For this to really take off, producers are going to have to see the animals out in the field.’”

For a good question-and-answer primer about cloned foods, see this from Time magazine, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1573224,00.html.

For more stories on the issue, click here, http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=174365, and here, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,72373-0.html?tw=wn_index_3 and here, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16382412/.

That third link is to an MSNBC commentary by Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. While he argues the FDA was right to approve cloned meat, he freely admits “many of us hear the words ‘meat from cloned animals’ and get queasy.”

And that may be the deciding issue: If consumers really are freaked out by cloned meat, it won’t sell. We’ll see.

(My usual disclaimer on this: I haven’t eaten beef or pork for years thanks to my wife’s dietary preferences, so this won’t affect my daily eating one way or another.)