FDA declares clones livestock safe for food chain.

Please respond with your public opinion on these issues:

For the next few months public response including international response to Cloned Food Risks is requested at this address:

Docket Number & Title:
2003N-0573 – Draft Animal Cloning Risk Assessment; Proposed Risk Management Plan; Draft Guidance for Industry; Availability

FR Type:Notice

Action:Request for Comments

Keywords:Industry

Comment Period End Date:04/02/07

Summary:
Availability of, and request for comment on, Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment (to evaluate the health risks to animals involved in the process of cloning and to evaluate the food consumption risks that may result from edible products derived from animal clones or their progeny); draft Animal Cloning: Risk Management Plan for Clones and their Progeny; and draft GFI #179: Use of Edible Products from Animal Clones or their Progeny for Human
Food or Animal Feed

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A Sample Letter:

Does Cloned Animal Safety take into account the effect of Aesthetics on the long-term Ecological effects of Food Chain Design?

We should not be overly worried about somatic cell nuclear transfer as a Food Science edible technique. The abnormalities that can be expected might be delicious. Our worries stem from the fact that a large percentage of breeders may not have had the Art Historical schooling that most Academic students of Aesthetics might have had. Right now, the only type of ‘taste’
we can see embedded in cloned livestock is based on ramping up meat production and maybe designing and cloning industrial beings born with zero percent transfat. If we are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on making copies of sires whose profitability is based on 4-H tropes of beauty alone, then we are missing much of what contemporary art can lend to contemporary breeding of gastronomic novelty.

How do we decide what is worth engineering for?

In particular, Livestock can be designed along a wide variety of Aesthetic gene expressions. Considering the range of gene expressions possible in a collage of multiple genomic palletes, economic efficiency is neither a simple concept nor our only deciding force. Beyond public acceptance of the technology, there is also public trend diversity, novelty markets and niche
power to be brokered in this global competition for more unusual food. We need to explore the entire range of clonables and widen the variety pool to include gourmet, abject and non-utilitarian breeding projects. Practitioners or Historians of Futurism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Minimalism and other Contemporary art movements may all have their own special cow, pig or chicken clone advisory role to play. Consider what a gifted cubist could
bring to the table.

What are the cultural aesthetics of our ecological future?

The decision to design livestock along a plurality of aesthetic lineages may have an impact on the future of ecology and diversity of our planet. As competitively designed meat factories take up more and more of the terrestrial grazing land, we have come to understand that we live on a
planet dominated by humans and their domestic familiars. Designed and cloned livestock are limited editions but they can reproduce independently. The industry animals may be foreign species brought forth from technological sites but are they beautiful enough for us to want to live with them for generations to come. Sometimes real-time back fat is not enough. There is
an economy of aesthetics, which will drive the ecological affect of our engineered future.

What can an understanding of the arts bring to livestock design?

The history of art may finally come to some use for humanity through agricultural and other replicant applications. The aesthetic hazards of breeding without a proper understanding of Western Culture and our shared artistic heritage must be taken into account.. The arts represent a great asset for livestock design and a great way to insure that the future isn’t
born looking dull, retrograde and a bit too sketchy. Without a firm grasp of Art History, our cloned food may not represent our national and international goals as U.S. food producers and consumers. The admixture of global variety through genetic engineering and the cloning of spectacular hereditary cascades should only be approved through an aesthetic advisory
commission made up of artists, art historians and aesthetics specialists. The future of style and the avoidance of our populous eating any aesthetic hazards depends on collaboration between new reproductive biotechnology and the Arts.

I hope these issues will be taken into account as we sculpt new life from the media of biotechnology.

n Adam Zaretsky

n Vivoarts: Art and Biology Studio

n Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

n Arts Department

n www.emutagen.com

n az@emutagen.com