Fries with your double clone burger?

Some days, it’s awfully hard to believe in coincidence.

Just last Friday, the European Food Safety Authority, Europe’s equivalent of our own Food and Drug Administration, issued a draft report saying that meat and dairy products from cloned animals are safe for human consumption.

Tuesday, our own FDA declared the same thing.

Today, there is expected to be a report from the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies on the ethical and practical implications of food from cloned animals.

Both the EFSA and FDA reports note the extremely high death and disease rate of cloned animals. Both note that there are no immediate plans to introduce cloned food into the marketplace. Both note the excessive economic cost of cloned animals that will prevent them from becoming direct meat sources, but likely keep them confined to the role of breeding stock. Both note that there are no known environmental impacts to cloning animals, but the data are limited.

With all of these factors working against the concept of cloning animals for food, one might reasonably ask why (and how) agencies in the U.S. and Europe came to the conclusion that cloned food is safe for humans, and what the motivation was for even looking into the issue.

A little digging turns up a familiar name, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, a U.S.-based lobby group, currently led by a former member of Congress from Pennsylvania, that has been instrumental in the ongoing efforts to force this nation to fund embryonic stem cell research.

For those unfamiliar with stem cell issues, you must realize there are two basic cell types usually discussed: adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells have been used very successfully in a number of medical treatments for years, with no ethical issues to hamper their use. On the other hand, embryonic stem cells have not yet been shown to be of medical use, and the method of obtaining them involves the laboratory creation and destruction of human embryos — cloning. All the hoopla about funding, all the celebrity commercials you’ve seen, all the media hype about miracle cures has been about forcing government to buy into embryonic stem cells.

Two issues: agriculture and medicine. Two impractical, possibly dangerous, schemes: cloning humans for stem cells, and cloning animals for food.

It seems obvious that BIO’s real interests are not in developing a new food source or new cures, but in paving the way for acceptance of cloning itself.

I can’t help but wonder what the ultimate goals are. Money, certainly, but what else?

I think I smell a cloned rat.