Green Options

“Old-fashioned dairy, the new-fashioned way!  CyClone is the first major dairy to raise a herd of clones and clone offspring.  You could say cloning is our passion - where we combine DNA with TLC.”

That is what Cyclone dairy says on their website’s mission page.

Thank goodness it’s not for real…not yet anyway.

Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) is a San Francisco, CA based system of 41 hospitals and medical centers in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

This national leading Catholic hospital system is now leading the nation in more ways than one.

CHW has made the decision to use food suppliers who have agreed to seek out alternatives to foods made with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients or cloned animals.

Included in CHW’s new food policy is GE sugar beets, which just recently have been introduced into the nation’s food supply, as well as meat and dairy products from cloned animals, which the FDA has decided to allow.

Scientists succeeded for the first time in achieving the holy grail of conservation: bringing to life an extinct animal through cloning. For seven minutes.

Just seven minutes after Spanish and French scientists brought the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, the young animal died of lung complications also common to other cloned animals. And so an extinct species blinked into life for an instant and then flickered out again.

The success, albeit brief, is spurring scientists and conservationists alike to imagine some wild possibilities. Can extinct species–say, the dodo or even the wooly mammoth–be brought back into their natural habitats through cloning and if so should they?

The FDA green lights selling cloned meat and here is why we’re worried:

A year ago the the FDA approved cloned meat and it has seeped its way into the food supply at grocery stores. The USDA found out and they quickly put a ban on it, but it was just too late.

It’s not quite on the scale of Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers claim that they have successfully produced clones of mice that have been frozen for 16 years.

Will this research help revive extinct animals like the woolly mammoth or saber-toothed tiger?

The findings of this fascinating study were published this week in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences. So without further ado, here’s how they brought the long dead mice back to life.

© Ivan Vasilev | Dreamstime.com

In an unusual twist, biotech scientists have decided that focusing on creating hybrids of new animals and plants is just thinking too small. “We realized that if we were to try and fix all the ills in the current Big Agriculture system, we’d be cloning for the next millennium” said Irving Pinkel. “So, we figured maybe it would be easier to just start from scratch.”

According to Pinkel and his lead associates, the galvanizing moment came after an experiment with cloning a round worm gene into pigs that would make the resulting pork “heart-healthy” and containing more Omega-3 acids. Three of the piglets had to be euthanized due to heart defects.

“Well, the irony of the situation set in,” said Pinkel. “We were all out and maybe had a few too many beers. One of the guys said, ‘You know, I bet if we just fed them [pigs] a natural diet, that would fix the whole meat thing without cloning. Could you do that?’”