Cloning is a very interesting and debatable topic. It can be very controversial since religion and moral issues are against this practice. On the other hand, science sees it as a huge advance. The food industry think of cloning as an opportunity to produce more and faster. Cloning is not as new as some people may think. It has being around for about 20 years, since 1996 (Animal Cloning). In the following paragraphs, I will be discussing what is cloning, the types of cloning and how it is done. Also I will refer to some questions that come to my mind when I think about cloning for food, such as, is it safe to consume food from cloned animal, and are the animals that are born as clones healthy? Is it worth it to kill hundreds of embryos to obtain one clone?
By definition, cloning is the process by which an identical copy of an animal, human or plant is made asexually. The copied entity made is called the clone and it has the same genetic makeup as the original (Genome). The first animal that was cloned was the sheep named Dolly in 1996 (FDA). There are three types of cloning:
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They may be able to reproduce lots of animals for the purpose of business and food. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the meat from a clone is exactly the same as the original and should not imposed any health issue to humans (Animal Cloning). If we trust the FDA, reproductive cloning may be a great idea. Nevertheless, it takes many hundreds of trials to get a clone to be born alive and well. So, my question is, is this cost effective? I don’t think so. Another question that comes to me is: are the ones that are born really healthy? I would doubt this after reading that researchers have noted defects in many of the ones that are born alive. There are some defects or mutations of genes that are not too noticeable to scientists and these animals may be used to feed humans. This doesn’t sound too safe to