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Denying the right to choose

A decade after the birth of the world's first cloned animal, Dolly, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come out with a draft risk assessment of consuming meat and milk from cloned animals such as cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. The key finding is that there is "no additional risk" from such products as compared with those derived from animals brought into being through other assisted reproductive technologies. With this clean chit, products of cloned animals can be expected to be available to consumers once the process of public comments and discussion is completed. The FDA approval should come as no surprise because as early as 2003 the regulatory body seemed convinced of the safety of such products. However, no decision could be taken at that time because the National Academy of Sciences, which was commissioned to study the safety of consuming products derived from cloned animals or their progeny, called for more data. Although the regulatory body decided to go with the premise that a "healthy animal is likely to produce safe food products," it had only "a relatively small" dataset for live goat clones. With no report available on the health status of live sheep clones, the FDA has excluded it for human food.

According to the FDA, the somatic cell nuclear transfer technique used to produce clones by removing the nucleus of the egg and replacing it with DNA from the animal to be cloned is a "biologically imprecise and inefficient process" and also expensive but it provides farmers a way to make exact copies of their prized animals. The point is that by refusing to make labelling of the products from cloned animals mandatory, the regulatory body will be denying consumers the right to know and to choose. This will be to follow the bad example set by the marketing of genetically modified food without labelling. In the short term, the prohibitive cost of products derived from cloned animals is likely to limit the scope of their marketing. However, researchers are in hot pursuit of solutions to the key issues faced by the somatic cell nuclear transfer technique. The FDA's approval will be a big incentive to invest more time and money in resolving these issues.

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