Cloning Livestock: Beneficial or Harmful?

Cloning is a new technique that is being introduced to the new world. In European countries, cloning is considered to be a dangerous and “immoral”. Europeans also is against the idea of genetically modified crops. Even though no health risks have been found and that the United State’s Food and Drug Administration declared that food from cloned cattle, pigs, and goats were safe to eat in 2008. Also small amounts of cloned meat were already sold at supermarkets. Cloning has an impact on other traditions such as in Spain where they created a clone of a bull named Got. But still Europeans opposed the idea even when some of the world’s largest genetics companies and cooperatives were European owned. The director of the largest European association of farmers and cooperatives, Arnaud Petit, believes that cloning is beneficial; allowing farmers to raise the food supply while decreasing the amount of resources used and therefore help improve the environment. While opponents such as Corinne Lepage, a French member of the European Parliament, say that cloning will cause “a reduction of biodiversity”. Some farmers such as Michael and Oliver Eaton raised cloned cattle on their farm before fierce oppositions forced them to sell their cattle and to grow crops instead. Other farmers sold diary products from clones and would not give their name fearing that nobody will buy their products. These controversies have slowed down the cloning of fighting bulls in Spain but some see this idea of creating more food while using low amounts of food is unavoidable.

The process of cloning involves creating multiple copies of a DNA segment or gene cloning. In the most common methods of cloning, after a gene is extracted it is implanted into the plasmid of Escherichia coli bacteria. The plasmid is then inserted back to the bacteria creating a recombinant bacterium, which reproduces to form clones. This process no doubt is largely related to science.

Learning about cloning is very important topic especially because of the worlds growing human population. It will help decrease the amount of resources needed to make more food. Cloning is also used for medical reasons. It can be used to make proteins that may help get rid of blood clots. And cloning can also be used to clean up our environment such as oil spills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/business/global/30cloning.html?_r=1&ref=science