Quote:
|
Originally Posted by seafarer
I don't understand the whole controversy in the first place. What possible harm do people envision from eating meat from a cow born from a cloned parent (or eating the actual clone in the first place)? In the NYTimes, Stephen Sundlof, director of the F.D.A. Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition is quoted as saying:
“It is beyond our imagination to even have a theory for why the food is unsafe,”
And that's the point. There is no biological, nor rational basis for even hypothesizing that such meat would be any different to eat then any other meat. And especially since the meat producers are talking about selling the meat from the natural offspring of a cloned animal (since the clone is highly valuable as a breeder of whatever desirable characteristics that warrented cloning it in the first place - nobody is talking about slaughtering herds of clones, they'd go bankrupt doing that).
It seems to be a bunch of mindless hype from fundamental religious groups and others with ethical concerns, but no real understanding of what they are against.
|
For the same reason, I never could understand the difference between an organic apple and any regular apple. Chemically, they're exactly the same. The only difference is the price. To certain people, "organic" is better, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the difference in the final product, i.e., one apple is the same as the other apple, no matter what you fertilized it with.
I had someone mentioned their distrust of microwave ovens some months ago, saying it might make the food radioactive. I had to explain the different ends of the EM spectrum to him, and the fact that there is no Radium anywhere in the oven.
Another guy called in to ask about an Atomic Watch (we sell watches where I work), asking if there was any danger of the radiation leaking from the watch. Of course, it's got a small radio receiver in it to receive time signals from the clock in Fort Collins, Colorado, but his impression was that since it was an "atomic watch", there must be some piece of U235 or U238 in there to power the watch.
Yes, we all got a good chuckle out of it after advising him that U235 wasn't used in watches - it had been discontinued in favor of several variations of isotopes of Plutonium. Yes, people like that breed.
