Would you eat cloned meat?

I fail to see which logic could lead to normal meat being okay but clone meat being bad. "Separate but indistinguishable from the original" is pretty much the definition of "clone", right? So you can't tell which one is original and which one the clone.

We already do to a large degree... Meat factory animals are almost clonal...

Would you date cloned Swedish models?

I hope to someday transplant my brain into a cloned "Me", and I'll take a half dozen of the cloned Swedish models as a take out order.

What we really should figure out how to do is how to drop the animals out of the meat production process and instead grow meat as a kind of tissue culture.

Why not? I eat other kinds of meat. However I'm with Shetline. We should figure out how to take animals out of the equation. Better for them and better for us in the long run.

When you think about it in our enlightened culture of the 21rst century it is kind of barbaric to kill animals for food. Also growing tissue wouldn't require the kind of resources we have devoted now to raising and slaughtering animals.

It's just a better way to go about it.

Would I have a choice? I wouldn't know the difference and likely wouldn't care.

As for taking Animals out of the equation, it's a noble cause, but not one I'm willing to devote myself to because I have other interests at heart. Perhaps someone on these Forums would be willing to research it, but I haven't seen anything about that anywhere so I can't say it's also a realistic goal.

Sebastian

Yes, but then you'd have radical slig protection organizations popping up... if the Landsraad would allow it...

Male or female?

mmm, lovely delicious tumor in a tube. wanna slice? medium rare?

*

Um. No?

Oh, I'm sure a lot of people, if they're going to eat meat at all, are going to prefer to eat it the olde-fashioned way -- as chunks of flesh stripped off the carcass of a once-breathing animal -- but I think that's an attitude that can be changed over time.

I'm not a vegetarian, so I obviously must accept the idea of slaughtering animals to eat them. But if we could not only eliminate that step, but at the same time create healthier meat products which are more efficient to produce than methods which have to contend with livestock, why not do so?

Like my friend Volker, I think Chucker is just espousing the German gestalt that meat should be, well meaty... I honestly don't think that they see the pig as a pig, but rather as one of those ceramic pigs diagramming where the bits of meat actually come from. Consider it a unique cultural skill...

No, that would be perverted.

Your choice... all prime cuts, low fat.

What about cloned tofu?

I think cloning, or, rather, genetic engineering, is perhaps the only way the human race can successfully evolve in a welfare state, and/or without space colonization.

With that said, though, I like the Czech models better.

I don't see curently the interest of cloned meat.

In a theorical point of vue, cloned meat appears safe, but when you are in front of new technologies, there is some chances that some hidden backside effects might appear. I don't worry for short time backside effects at all. But I worry the long term ones.

I agree with the unknown effects theory. Although clones are essentially twins of the original, there was genetic damage found in Dolly the sheep. Ingestion of genetically damaged products could also theoretically damage the consumer. Remember, mad cow disease happened because livestock were fed parts of other cows.

If the normal genetic variety and minor mutations found in nature are narrowed and a disease wipes out the genetically similar animal population, we're screwed... in a really, really big way.

Are you planning to try to do so? Do you have the research to back the idea that it is realistic, or know anybody or of anybody working on this? It's a nice idea, but like I said above, I'm not sure how many people are interested in doing the research and experiments to do such a thing.

Sebastian

Frack the Landsraad. Muad'dib has come to free us all !!!11!!1!1!!
Man, you guys are real geeks. Heh.

I have a Bachelor's [4 year] degree in Molecular Biology. I graduated in 1999. I believe then, and even now, cloning, genetic modification, etc, etc, is very primitive technology. Monsanto Corp's genetically modified corn IIRC has some bits of "unidentified DNA" in it. I'm sorry I don't have the exact scientific details but there is valid scientific debate that they fracked up the gene insertion in that particular case. It took an independent scientific group to sequence the gene inserted into that particular crop, and they found extra bits that weren't supposed to be there.

Humans + fiddling with DNA + RNA + Gene Expression + Cloning = Generally, we don't know what we're doing. And we trust massive corporations to do their homework and validate their genetic/ cloning work? Without independent review and gene sequencing, RNA tests, whatever??

I'm not trying to be a greenie fanatic but what people very familiar with IT but NOT Biology *must* realise how different things are in the "real" Biological, Ecological and Medical world. We're not machines. The world is not a machine.

I am kinda confused in a way though. In 2004 just before I left Greenpeace where I had worked for a year, while at a national park near Sydney, I was chilling out by a rock and I believe to have had a conversation with Gaia, the earth-entity. She told me to think of the world in greater terms: what we live on/in is a thin sliver of biological "stuff" developed in the last, oh, hundred million years? Whereas Gaia has sped round the sun a long, long, longer time and encompasses so much more than the habitable layer/ regions -- what about the mantle, the core of the earth? She told me, yes, the environment is fracked, but she forgives us, the only thing is that we continue to put ourselves at risk. But we are forgiven.

Sometimes I try and think of things in a reverse-eco way, like I imagine this is a world we are terraforming. In that way, someday eating cloned meat and a lamb-chop-grown-in-a-petri-dish, I could accept it. But not for now...... Not while my mind still believes that natural is better for the body, for now.

No I haven't been smoking anything when writing this ...Seriously

And because IT is where I belong, it is why I'm not concerned about growing Meat. 8)

Sebastian

So you like the killing of animals as part of the process that goes into your mouth?

That sounds pretty perverted to me.

Already in the works and this is just a start.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3208

There have been theories about this for years. As meat gets more expensive they will be interested in a big way.

Nature's way has been the rule for far longer than societal conventions. I'd rather kill and eat than be fed Mutant Meat.

McDonald's could offer a whole new line of cloned fare...

- Beefy McClone burger
- Cloney Island Burger
- The Big Clone
- Cell McSplitter
- Ice Clone shakes
- Spicy Hot 'n' Cool Clone sandwich
- Filet o' Clonefish sandwich

The lobbying power of big agribusiness.... *sigh*.

The poll, incidentally doesn't take into account those people who don't eat meat, period... let alone these newfangled frankensteinfurters®.

Wow. Top fricking marks to SpamSandwich (or is that ClonedSandwich?) and Sammi for some excellent hilarious names

A pity about StarWars2: Attack of The Clones -- being a bit before the time of cloned Meat. The Happy-Meal tie-ins would have been outstanding!!!

If I know Lucas, he'll find a way to work Attack of the McClone Burgers into his next version of the Star Wars films once he re-releases them in the theaters in 3D (next year, I think).

You guys know they can almost grow a human bladder in a test tube now, yeah? Just an example of tissue engineering below. Actually, it was kind of my bigger picture goal in doing my main area of interest towards the end of my Biology Degree - Molecular Biology as studied or applied to development and differentiation of precursor (pluripotent, stem) cells in embryos or adults. In 1999 a lot of pregnant mice and their embryos and frog embryos died in the name of my undergrad thesis

Anyways:
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/healt...rebuilt_organ/
"The experiments did not replace the entire bladder, he acknowledged. But if you think of the bladder as a light bulb, his team replaced a large piece of the round part of the bulb, he said, and they ultimately hope to do the whole bulb. That will involve added challenges in hooking up the new bladder to the tubes that come down from the kidney, he said."

Sunil... I need you to explain to me exactly how one can grow a round, pressed and grilled clone burger in the lab. The mind boggles.

But seriously, this kind of research is very exciting. Condemning this kind of important research will only ghettoize the sciences in the US and the serious research will continue to flow to countries with fewer "ethical" restrictions.

The two main problems I have is the no. 1. UNLABELED. That is just fracking stupid. People can do whatever the hell they want, one may say, but we're not babies, we should be given the choice. We should know what the frack it is we are doing/ jamming down our throats.

2. Cloned = Twin = Triplets = Quadruplets = ??? ... I think my problem with this is almost a culinary one. Imagine if you could only drink one sort of "RosaMount" Shiraz wine. For the rest of your life, that's all you have for red wine. That would suck, no? Okay a bit of an exaggeration, but cloning means you get the same genetic version of an animal over and over and over and over again. Sure, nature vs. nurture arguments, but are we going to have sets of clones?

Maybe...
Beef.Cloneset.Build.001.2 brand name: "JuicyMacRibber"
Lamb.Cloneset.Build.003.1 brand name: "LoveMeTender"
Lamb.Cloneset.Build.005.44 brand name: "OptimalPrime"

Here's something for you IT peoples:

Let's say you are coding for Firefox 2.0.2. You take the source code of 2.0.1 and then add to it, there are various trunks but eventually it will be consolidated in the final build of Firefox 2.0.2.

But woooops. Major bug found. What do we do? Go back to 2.0.1 and then re-write the code? Nah, you'd probably try and patch it in 2.0.3, yes?

This similar challenge is faced in cloning animals for meat.

You start with the template lamb (let's call it Sheep 1.0.0). You clone a hundred, maybe a thousand animals from that. So from the clones you "copy" another several thousand. Now, genetically, in the "source code" (the DNA) and the "final build" (the whole animal), everything should be Sheep 1.0.0, right? WRONG. Spontaneous mutations can arise. So depending on the management of the clones you could have "rogue builds" because the mutation that occurs at the DNA level is actually the "source code" being randomly rewritten.

It can be compared to a "lossy" form of compression, except in this case the "loss" occurs over a longer period of time and there's no compression per se, just duplication (the cloning of the animal).

So you may end up with different "strains" (builds) -- Sheep 1.0.0a, 1.0.0b, 1.0.0c, etc.

This is not really scaremongering. As a tiny embryo let's say at the 8-cell stage, a pair of human twins has exactly the same DNA. By the time the twins are 10 years old, if you'd sequence their entire DNA, you will find that it will not match 100%. There are a series of spontaneous mutations which occur within the body. For example, cancer happens when mutations accumulate to the point where the cancer cells are really genetically different from the rest of the cells in your body. Cancer is kind of like someone hacked into your SourceCodeServer and took Firefox2.0.1 source code, randomly rewrote "GOTO LINE 20002 muah ha hahh ahahha; int[c]; printf("Hello Losers")" somewhere in there, and compiled (built the "cancer cell" in the body) Firefox2.0.1.fff.

Cloning meat, animals is going to be a messy process and managing the strains and mutations and going back to the "source code" 1st gen animals is always tricky. You can be sure these large "evil" agribusinesses would rather, like some wonderful software companies we know (hint: Microsoft, Adobe, even Apple), "apply patches" to the deviant 2nd, 3rd gen animals. Mmm... good fun from a molecular biology point of view. In other words, biological systems ARE NOT MACHINES! BioMedical, Ecological and Environmental scientists, even the smartest of them, in 2006, right now, are like a 5 year old in the 1920s being given a Mac Pro 8-core with Windows Vista [the most confusing edition].

There will of course be people that say, "But we have all these strains/ hybrids of like Roses and Tulips with all these different colours". It's an interesting topic to debate, but remember that producing these strains and hybrids involve vastly different procedures than the genetic manipulation involved in cloning (duplicating source code and compiling the animal) and eventual "patching" (restoring and rewriting source code and compiling, then duplication the animal).

I think it is inevitable, hence my rant with the "I spoke with the earth entity Gaia and she said this and that etc..." earlier on.

I tell you what, that very thing you talk about is what drove me to complete my Bio degree. The thing is, I would go for lectures at uni/college, then come back and tinker around on Photoshop. My final year internship at a research lab, I would friggin fall asleep on the microscope -- lab work is very very slow and very very boring. Maybe I would have had a better time in the US with automated bio-lab processes and the computational biology part of it.

There will come a time when you could pop out a Pez-sized pill, put it on a plate, add some water, and poof! A freshly toasted corn-dusted bun with a round, pressed, flame-grilled burger and delicious cheese and salad and dressing and tomato sauce or whatever would be right there, hot and ready for some scrumptious munching.

You have a point, I think the research should continue. I am not anti-research. It is what we release from the labs that needs to be well, controlled, made aware, etc.

With the "unethical" side, Futurama pretty much nails all this stuff. Fry walks down a shady alley and some guy comes up with him and, "You want Gills?" Fry says yes, and then the guy goes like "OK. I take lungs first, Gills come in the mail later."

SideThought: What would be the IT version of the "waking up in a tub of ice with your kidneys removed"??? Waking up to find your MacBook has morphed into a Celeron Pentium laptop with Windows98?

8) Heh. Actually what you talk about involves the collision of Biology with Physics. Being able to control things at a very fine level at the atomic scale. Current Molecular Biology techniques can "cook up" and "grow" a cloned burger in a dish, say in 5-20 years, but for it to be nicely pressed and grilled, and for the "instant" factor of producing it, a la [what do they call that synthesiser thing in Star Trek? The one where patrick stewart always goes, "earl grey, hot" or something]... There's where control at the atomic level will combine with Molecular Biology.

InstaBurger(TM) and McFast(TM) and Banana-o-Matic(TM) will stem from I predict, a new field in fact, Atomic Biology. That sounds a bit 1950s, so I dub it, this century will be the birth of Quantum Biology. Maybe the middle of this century to the later part -- when all the supercolliding, string-theory, superteraquadrillia-byte, billion-core CPUs, molecular biology, cloning, genetics, come together in a fusion of Physics, Biology and Computer Science.

Frack. I should be a Sci-Fi writer. But writers are all depressed and weird and socially isolated and stuff, right?

So what will this prove? We're fine with Growing Meat and eating it, but we can't just have the Butcher cut up a cow? Sure as a Human being, I have sympathy for the Cow, but as another Animal on this Earth, I have to eat.

Also think a bit about the Ecosystem, currently Humans are part of that gigantic Ecosystem in the name of Survival. We eat Cows, we eat Pigs, we eat Chickens, and we raise them all again so they can be slaughtered and then eaten. The only thing this does is remove Humans from that ecosystem so they don't have to feel bad about Butchering a cow, when I'm sure a Wolf would be more then happy to take down that Cow himself and eat it.

If we have to go so far in the name of Morals, Ethnics, and feeling self important about having not eaten a Dead Cow today, it's just humanity for the sake of it. While many would probably argue, a Human is just a 2 legged animal that one day figured out how to sharpen a rock and build a city with it.

Sebastian