That's not my clone! Where's my clone?

[daibhidc]

Somehow, possibly connected to never reading the papers, I missed the "clone milk and beef" shock horror, despite the fact the farm in question is just down the road, until I heard The Now Show parodying the scare stories this evening.

But at one point, they played the Today programme's report, and I'm pretty sure[1] the newsreader said the clone-cows were "created with eggs from champion American cows and sperm from ordinary bulls".

Now, I realise that biology was my weakest subject when I took my National Certificate in Science, but surely if a cow is made with an egg from a mummy cow, and a sperm from a daddy cow, it's not a clone!

(Edit: After extensive further research [glancing at The Scotsman], it seems that the point is mummy cow was a clone. But the actual cow the milk came from still wasn't. It's not like mummy being a clone makes any difference[2] - which I suppose just highlights what a nonsense the scare stories were.)

[1]I'd check, but it's not on iPlayer yet, and I can't get the podcast to work.

[2]As far as I'm aware - I've not heard of any abnormalities in Dolly's lambs, anyway.

Comments

[rhiannon-s.livejournal.com]

Remember back in the eighties when we were going to clone meat without a nervous system, hang it in vats and just cut off a slice when you needed it? It was gonna be both the solution for world hunger and animal cruelty. What happened to that sort of SCIENCE that was going to solve all our problems?

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

What happened was that Three Mile Island and Chernobyl put the last nail in the coffin for Joe Bloggs' faith that SCIENCE could solve problems (rather than cause them, or point them out).

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Exactly my thought when I heard about it. Then I started to wonder how far removed it would have to be to be considered non-cloned, and came up with the concept of homeopathic cloning, where you can become a copy of a film star or athlete by sharing a pool with them.