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zro · Dec 30, 2006, 02:20 AM

If I could clone the last steak I grilled, I would.

houstonmacbro · Dec 30, 2006, 07:44 AM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

I hate to throw this thread off topic, but what exactly is the benefit of cloned meat? I can't think of a single one, and isn't it insanely expensive to clone an animal?

Theoretically, you could clone a perfect cow (or pig) and have the same quality product all the time. Almost like product quality control at a restaurant or ... factory.

So I've heard.

Eug Wanker · Dec 30, 2006, 11:17 AM

Originally Posted by houstonmacbro

Theoretically, you could clone a perfect cow (or pig) and have the same quality product all the time. Almost like product quality control at a restaurant or ... factory.

So I've heard.

That's not true. Cloning a cow doesn't guarantee good meat. You still have to raise that cow.

Wiskedjak · Dec 30, 2006, 12:45 PM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

That's not true. Cloning a cow doesn't guarantee good meat. You still have to raise that cow.

Right. The only benefits I could see from cloned cows would be avoidance of genetic diseases, resistance to non-genetic diseases, and general hardiness. Taste will depend more on how the cow is raised than on genetics.

Doofy · Dec 30, 2006, 12:50 PM

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak

Right. The only benefits I could see from cloned cows would be avoidance of genetic diseases, resistance to non-genetic diseases, and general hardiness.

And if the scientists screw up (more than likely), that's all your cows taken out by the same disease.

nonhuman · Dec 30, 2006, 01:10 PM

Originally Posted by Doofy

And if the scientists screw up (more than likely), that's all your cows taken out by the same disease.

Just like bananas. We already lost the best food bananas around because of genetic uniformity, and the current, second-best, food bananas are in exactly the same position.

Wiskedjak · Dec 30, 2006, 01:13 PM

Originally Posted by Doofy

And if the scientists screw up (more than likely), that's all your cows taken out by the same disease.

Yup. Certainly possible that the cloned cow is resistant to all known diseases but one of the few vulnerable to a previously unknown disease. Cloning nullifies all of the advantages gained by the evolutionary process, such as having a diverse gene pool from which to draw resistance to unforeseen challenges.

Eug Wanker · Dec 30, 2006, 03:20 PM

This is what happened to maize crops in the US a while back. The maize/corn was not cloned per se, but it had no real genetic diversity, and the crops were devastated by a single pathogen.

Furthermore, resistance to all known diseases doesn't mean the resistance is permanent, since many known diseases will change slightly over time, making that original disease resistance useless.

Anyways, my point isn't that I'm necessarily completely against cloning for food. My point is that cloning for food (like many things) has many risks, and those risks have to be taken into account if the agricultural community is going to start doing this in a big way.

SirCastor · Dec 30, 2006, 04:33 PM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

The risks of cloning have nothing to do with the gene pool, it's because cloning is an imperfect tool to say the least, and the majority of clones animals have major birth defects and developmental problems. These are not due to the DNA being wrong, they're due to the fact that you ripped the nucleus out of one cell and stuck it in another (there's more to life than DNA). I still don't see any benefit to doing this for food (unless they mean genetically altered animals, like seedless watermelons, but I doubt they do).

I was suggesting that the best available breeding animals would be cloned, and then those clones would be used for breeding. So as the diversity of the gene pool is removed due to large numbers of animals coming from similar(cloned) parents. So the naturally born children have less genetic diversity and the population has to deal with problems associated with that. (as the children are bred with children coming from other parents which are similar) The problem isn't cloning the animals themselves (well it may be, but that's not the problem I was referring to). The problem I see has to do with removing diversity.

Salty · Dec 30, 2006, 04:51 PM

Seems like it would take a lot more work to clone animals for food, than to just let them go at it and reproduce naturally.

Eug Wanker · Dec 30, 2006, 05:29 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

Seems like it would take a lot more work to clone animals for food, than to just let them go at it and reproduce naturally.

Well, many cows bred for food aren't necessarily bred "naturally".

Selective breeding and artificial insemination, etc.

mrtew · Dec 30, 2006, 06:51 PM

Originally Posted by Dakar²

I think you're choice of adjective is throwing me, because yuck and icky don't come to mind. Disturbing and creepy, maybe.

I've been thinking about it for years and while cloning might be unwise or expensive, I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would think it was yucky or icky or disturbing or creepy. Enlighten me. Did I miss some cow cloning movie or something?

imitchellg5 · Dec 30, 2006, 06:54 PM

It's creepy because you'd eat the same cow over and over and over.

Uncle Skeleton · Dec 30, 2006, 07:03 PM

Originally Posted by SirCastor

I was suggesting that the best available breeding animals would be cloned, and then those clones would be used for breeding. So as the diversity of the gene pool is removed due to large numbers of animals coming from similar(cloned) parents. So the naturally born children have less genetic diversity and the population has to deal with problems associated with that. (as the children are bred with children coming from other parents which are similar) The problem isn't cloning the animals themselves (well it may be, but that's not the problem I was referring to). The problem I see has to do with removing diversity.

Well I already said that this makes no sense, but even if they did do this it would not be any more risky than breeding from the originals. It's not like they're going to breed one with a clone of itself (male + male ≠ more cows).

Uncle Skeleton · Dec 30, 2006, 07:16 PM

Originally Posted by mrtew

I've been thinking about it for years and while cloning might be unwise or expensive, I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would think it was yucky or icky or disturbing or creepy. Enlighten me. Did I miss some cow cloning movie or something?

Animals produced by cloning are generally all ****ed up. They have birth defects, cancers, hormone irregularities and a lot of miscarriages and earlier than natural organ failures.

Basically, you shouldn't be worried about strange DNA. Eating DNA is absolutely harmless, no matter what it codes for. What you should be worried about is eating an animal that has been significantly altered through experimental means. There are many parts of the animal which aren't safe to eat, and you don't want to eat an animal whose parts have been scrambled all around and which have cancers and unknown developmental abnormalities. Now imagine you took an animal when it was just one cell big, tore out it's nucleus and stuck in another one. It's not surprising that these animals often grow up (if at all) to have major structural problems. Not due to the new nucleus and genome, but due just to the process of tearing it open to remove half of it and stick a new half in.

The problem is not in the DNA, it's on the DNA. Protein expression is significantly regulated by what's called epigenetic modification. The way a skin cell knows to be a skin cell and a brain cell knows to be a brain cell, even when they both have the same DNA, is the sum of thousands of regulatory mechanisms. So it stands to reason (and experiment) that depending on the appropriateness of the current states of all the regulatory mechanisms in the cell during the time when it's being enucleated and renucleated, things could go right or things could go horribly horribly wrong. The regulatory mechanisms in question include non-coding RNA fragments that are floating around, kinases and phosphatases in varying states of phosphorylation, chromosome packing and unpacking, DNA base pair methylation, histone acetylation, transcription factor activation, the presence or absense of all the various enzymes that regulate all this crap, and whatever other mechanisms we haven't happened to have discovered yet. In short, it's a small miracle whenever a cloned animal actually does manage to survive past puberty, and there's no reason to believe that any adult cloned animal is entirely normal, at the metabolic, biochemical, hormonal, or gross structural level.

It's not like sticking a cow in the xerox machine.

Atomic Rooster · Dec 30, 2006, 07:43 PM

Duz this mean we gets too steaks fer the price of wun?

I dun hear'd if'n ya eat too much ya grows another head. I mean in Virginie we gots enuffs ta worry bouts.

rambo47 · Dec 31, 2006, 12:20 PM

Originally Posted by Gossamer

I suppose terrorists could sneak a mad cow infected specimen in there...

Except Mad Cow Disease is not genetic. And "sneaking in" a bad gene into a cloning experiment is not something I could see happening. It's not like you could walk by and splice one in while everyone was momentarily disctacted.