There's a pick-up truck ad where the vehicle is shown getting a workout on a farm. One of the tasks is to "take Norm up to see the ladies;" a properly-dangling bull is shown standing in the back of the pickup. What would be the harm of cloning Norm and having a legion of Norm 2.0s "seeing the ladies" around the country?
The early answer is "nothing," according to the FDA. The meat and milk of cloned cattle and pigs are safe, as are the products of their progeny.
The meat may be safe, but is the practice?
Two problems come to mind; the first is that we'll potentially have a set of genetically-similar cattle, if most of the cattle are descendants of Norm or a few other star breeding cattle. When the royalty of Europe intermarried, making their family trees look like intertwined vines, they had a nasty tendency for hemophilia. Any bad generic traits that Norm might have will be passed on to all his offspring; if a Norm 2.0 mates with another Norm 2.0's child, you won't get the genetic balancing that you get from a wider gene pool.
That's going to lead to a strong possibility of the herd being prone to a certain problem; in the animal world, the rather inbred Dalmatians have a bad tendency towards deafness. We might not find out what the wild-card in Norm is for a while. It might not affect the meat from Norm cattle, but it might effect the usefulness of Norm cattle.
Secondly, there might be a disease that Norm is susceptible to, one that we might not know about yet. If a big chunk of Norm cattle drops ill all at once, it could do a number on our food supply.
A third fear is that the products of cloned cattle might be bad in some way that needs longitudinal testing; a steady diet of cloned meat might have some effect that only shows up after years. You can't prove that for decades, since some of the things that are problematic don't show up for decades, like some chemicals doing a number on someone's reproductive system if exposed to it in the womb; that's something that will by definition take close to two decades to find out.
However, we're unlikely to put that rigid of standard on cloned meat. That would stifle nearly all private research if it takes twenty years to get an OK on a product; the payback needed to fund that long of an R&D trail would have to be extraordinary.
Cloned breeding stock doesn't seem to be much of a problem, but there are issues that the various industries will have to keep abreast of, like making sure that their breeding stock doesn't get too inbred and to make sure to look for long-term problems from such inbreeding.
P.S. When Eileen was teaching at SVSU this semester, one of the things that they did with the teachers of ENG 080 was have a set of meetings where grading standards were fine-tuned, so that the idea of a B, C or D paper was standard across classes. They called those meetings "norming sessions."
"Taking the ladies to see Norm?" was my standard joke, since most of her colleagues were female.
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