Dolly on the dinner table?
Don’t worry about it
The Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat, paving the way for cloned products to show up in grocery stores across the land, likely without any special labels or warnings.
This makes sense because there is absolutely no evidence to show that there is anything unsafe about milk or meat from cloned cows, goats or pigs. (Actually, the FDA is holding off on deciding whether cloned sheep are a safe source of chops, saying not enough information is available yet.) But many of us hear the words “meat from cloned animals” and get queasy. Dolly, fairly or not, is to blame.
Dolly, whose remains are on display at the Royal Museum of Scotland, spent her six years on earth as the object of scorn, fear, derision and slander. The media had a field day upon her birth telling us that Dolly was the key to resurrecting the dead, creating vicious clone armies and a world in which everyone would be trailed by a hapless clone whose internal organs would be available on demand to prolong lives threatened by disease or old age.
But worse was to follow. Soon wacky cults like the Raelians and nutty scientists were hollering about cloning rich people, cult leaders, and generally unsavory types to the rapt and stupefied attention of a media unable to discern the fact that dressing in a Star Trek uniform and displaying a very bad hair dye job did not prove your bona fides as the cloner most to be feared.
All of this nonsense took a toll. It made Americans forget that cloning is nothing more than artificially creating twins. It made us forget that every drop of wine we drink comes from cloned grapes.
Dolly got a bad rap. And it has stuck. But the FDA is right to follow the evidence and let products from clones enter the marketplace.
If people want these products labeled so they can choose not to buy them, that’s their right.
But, before you decide, remember the only thing you really have to fear from cloned animals is what human beings have done to ruin their reputations!