By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter 
Food derived from cloned animals may be safe but the jury is still out on the safety of genetically-engineered animals.
SO, HOW do you feel about a glass of 'cloned milk' or a juicy piece of 'cloned steak'? It's not really farfetched, science fiction, it's in fact, one of the major preoccupation of scientists of the (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Well, they are not really considering cloning milk or steak but they are interested in assessing any potential health risks which might be associated with foods derived from cloned animals.
The agency published, on the weekend, a draft executive summary of its risk assessment of animal cloning and the safety of foods products derived from the process. While not yet conclusive, the indications are that the available scientific evidence will support the viewpoint that food from animal clones or their offspring are as safe as food from the non-clone counterparts. Most of the available data treat clones of cattle, pig and goat.
It is a viewpoint which local scientists, who were contacted by The Gleaner, also share. For example, Dr. Elaine Fisher said that, even though she had not recently researched the topic, possible health risks were unlikely.
"I couldn't see it as a health risk because...in cloning you are taking cells from the animals and not using something different," she said.
Dr. Fisher was concerned though, that perhaps there should be further investigations about why Dolly, that famous cloned sheep born July 6, 1996, aged so early. She also thinks that it would not be economically viable for the agricultural sector to market cloned food products.
The expense associated with cloning, in fact, would not currently make it practical for food production but overseas farmers are tending in the direction of cloning their top animals for breeding. Their progeny would then enter the food supply without any identifying label once the FDA gives the go-ahead and lifts the current voluntary moratorium on releasing animal clones.
The FDA's publication of the draft risk assessment is part of that agency's ongoing public discussion campaign as it seeks to address policy issues on animal cloning. It builds on previous findings by the (US) National Academy of Sciences that not only pointed to cloned products as likely to be safe but indicated, according to the FDA, that "healthy clones are virtually indistinguishable from their conventional
counterparts".
The scientists at the FDA's Centre for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) are focusing on a specific cloning technique somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the same technology used to produce Dolly, because they it can be applied to commercial use, producing a large number of animals from a single donor. Genetic information is transferred from one animal and placed into an egg with its nucleus removed. In cloning, the scientists are producing a copy of an existing animal and not altering the animal's make-up as in genetic engineering.
In fact, a committee of influential US scientists, set up by the National Academy of Sciences, last year published a report on cloning and genetic engineering of animals and suggested that genetic engineering could pose "moderate degree of concern". The committee is reported to have said that the degree of uncertainty about how, when and where inserted genes will turn themselves on, is large. Their report also indicated that inserting new genes in genetically modified animals' DNA, will produce proteins that do not normally occur in the human diet.
Though generally, biotechnology industry promote genetic engineering as benefiting the consumer by producing more nutritious, more resistant and less fatty foods, the potential to spread inserted genes into the wild, was also a concern raised by the committee. The report looked at fish in particular. Modified species that escape to the wild could change the gene pool in the wild population.
