"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Like a different people moving into a homogeneous neighborhood cloned animals are scheduled to be introduced into the global food chain before 2012. That’s less then 5 years from now.
Immediately a couple of questions come to mind. What are the risks to humans and why must we eat cloned animals.
To answer the second question first, this is (pardon the pun) projected to be a cash cow for researchers and companies that hold the patents for the technologies that create cloned animals and the products that derive from them.
This technology started with the cloning of a sheep named Dolly in the United Kingdom in 1996. Dolly has since died (which I will speak about later) but one of the scientist who was a member to the team that created Dolly, Professor Ian Wilmut, feels that it is ashamed that his country didn’t profit from this technology.
Professor Wilmut told BBC News: "I think that it is very difficult for a small country like this to develop fully something which does have great international value, because once that's recognised the science will move elsewhere.
"And in a sense, that's a compliment to the science: the technology was very important and is now being exploited commercially in Japan and the United States, all sorts of different countries."
To answer the question, “Why must we eat cloned animals?” Professor Wilmut gives us a clue suggesting that no matter what the benefits are that producers of this technology will point to justify this experimentation, touting those benefits as progressively good for humanity; the bottom line is always the bottom line.
In other words, some people will make a great deal of money from the ability to create animals and depending on how this is accomplished cost will be significantly cut by cloning therefore the potential for enormous profit making will ensue. Simply put some people are going to get extremely rich! That is the reason why you and I the consumer must eat cloned animals; we’ll be forced to eat them to enrich the holders of the patents of cloning technologies.
The most important question is, “What are the risks from consuming these animals?”
Unless there has been some ultra-secret experimentations there is not a great body of information regarding the affects that eating cloned animals has on the human physiology. So how could any government body judge these animals safe for consumption? They can’t.
But in 2006 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that products from cloned animals were safe for human consumption that’s only ten years after Dolly was cloned. Where are the findings which support such a conclusion?
There are none. It is the same as it ever was, money trumps everything. In this case money even trumps the health of the species, Homo sapiens. Our health and safety are both being compromised by science corporations that lobby our government. These same corporations are poised to profit richly off of you and me consuming cloned animals.
In an related instance some 7 to 9 years ago there was no scientific data on the affects that genetically altered corn would have on human beings despite that scientist of StarLink, an international corporation created a genetically alter corn produce that generated its very own, built-in pesticide but after the fact it was found that this scientific creation caused allergy symptoms and asthma in humans.
StarLink corn was introduced in 1998, but by the year 2000 it was all mixed up in our food supply. StarLink developer Aventis CropScience argued that growers weren't isolating it, as they were supposed to, which led to pollen drift, grain processors inadvertently mixed StarLink corn with regular corn at mills and in grain elevators.
After what only God knows will be the repercussion for their scientific hubris and their incursion into our natural crop bank scientist backed by corporate moneys now turn to the animals that humans depend upon.
Interesting enough made in the U.S.A. no longer just applies to items that we call durable goods that term can and does apply to the animals our scientist can create.
For instance a calf, named Dundee Paradise, was born on a farm near Wolverhampton after being created by scientists in the US.
The Holstein calf is not itself a clone Dundee Paradise began life in a US laboratory, where scientists created an embryo from a normal bull and the clone of a prize-winning dairy cow.
She was then flown to the UK as an embryo and implanted into a cow on a farm near Wolverhampton.
The UK government is only now attempting to understand the impact that such an animal will make on their country, presently they have no laws regulating cloned animals for consumption. As well they have no scientific data on which to base their decisions however they are expected to make a decision soon because animal cloning is on the verge of widespread commercial use and it is expected to spread within the global food chain within 5 yrs. All of this is due to the fact that Science Corporations influence governments around the globe?
This brings me back to the sheep Dolly, a Finn Dorset named after the country-western singer Dolly Parton.
Dolly was euthanized at the age of 6-years-old though typically sheep live 11 to 12 years of age. She was reportly the first mammal to be cloned with DNA taken from an adult cell.
Six years into Dolly’s life she was diagnosed as having arthritis, a condition usually expected in older animals.
It was not clear whether the cloning process led to the arthritis, but research in 1999 suggested that Dolly might be susceptible to premature ageing -- a possibility raised after a study of her genetics. A study might I remind you is again after the fact.
In the light of Dolly’s death Professor Wilmut said that Dolly's arthritis showed that cloning techniques were "inefficient" and needed more work.
Yet in spite of the lack of science and data regarding what cloning will do to the animals that we are supposed to eat or what will happen to us after we consume them there seems to be no stopping cloned animals entering into the human food supply.
Science has already damaged our crops to what extent we don’t know yet. Ironically we are once again on the verge of science unleashing an unknown quantity into the global food supply.
Are we really so enamored with science and scientist that we will allow them to continue experimenting on us unquestioned?
If these experiments go awry as StarLink corn’s developer Aventis CropScience experimentations already have just what are we suppose to eat?
I don’t think we are even supposed to question. I think they expect us to follow along like sheep while we are being economically shorn,sheared and fed food that will make us all mad.
Why else would profit be placed above the health and welfare of an entire species?
