Mandatory Labeling of Food Made from Cloned Animals: Grappling with Moral Objections to the Production of Safe Products
![handle is hein.journals/foodlj63 and id is 161 raw text is: Mandatory Labeling of Food Made from Cloned Animals:
Grappling with Moral Objections to the Production of
Safe Products
JoHN F. MuRPHY*
The public deserves to know if their food comes from a cloned animal. My
legislation will help the American public make an informed decision. [Without it,
w]e won't be able to tell which foods were made the good old-fashioned way and
which came from a cloned animal.
- U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulskil
I. INTRODUCTION
It is now possible to take a cell from the body of an adult animal, such as a cow,
and produce from it a clone-essentially a younger identical twin. The Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) recently found that animals cloned in this new way yield milk
and meat that is as safe as that from sexually-reproduced animals. On this basis, FDA
intends to allow cloned animals to remain in the food supply, and does not intend to
mandate any labeling requirement. Senator Barbara Mikulski, riding a tide of public
sentiment, has introduced legislation that would require labels on food containing
material from clones produced by this new process and their progeny.
This article concludes that the notion that [t]he public deserves to know if their
food comes from a cloned animal2 may be intoxicating, but it cannot withstand the
scrutiny of science and public policy without more force than mere political rhetoric.
Section II explains the basics of a new form of cloning that has excited public and
political attention. There are few, if any, valid safety concerns, and the moral concerns
are generally tangential, overbroad, or self-contradictory. Section III presents a brief
historical vignette on the use of hormones for milk production, attempting to show
how debates such as these can be distorted and reach a bad result for the public. Sec-
tion IV discusses Senator Mikulski's bill, and shows that it is at best too broad, and
at worst self-contradictory and harmful to the public's interests. Finally, the article
provides an alternative plan to obtain the benefits of cloned food while meeting the
government's political obligation to quench existing public apprehension.
II. CLONED FOOD
A. The Origins, Mechanisms and Applications
Cloned animals caught the attention of the public in 1996 when Dolly, a Finn
Dorset sheep, was born. She was the genetic duplicate of a six-year old ewe. Although
Mr. Murphy is an Associate in the law firm of Woodcock Washburn LLP., Philadelphia, PA. He
received a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from The California Institute of Technology and a J.D. from
Harvard Law School. He won first place for his short paper in the 2007 H. Thomas Austern Memorial
Writing Awards Competition. The author is grateful for the constructive comments and support of Mr.
Peter Barton Hutt.
I Press Release, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (Jan. 26, 2007), available at http://mikulski.senate.
gov/record.cfm?id=268056. [Hereinafter Mikulski Jan. Press Release].
2 See Mikulski Jan. Press Release, supra note 1.
See J. Suk, et al., Dolly for Dinner? Assessing Commercial and Regulatory Trends in Cloned
Livestock, 25 NATURE BIOTECH. 47, 47 (2007).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/foodlj63&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Mandatory Labeling of Food Made from Cloned Animals: Grappling with Moral Objections to the Production of Safe Products
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