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Cloned BullThe bum rap on cloned food.

By William Saletan
Updated Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007, at 1:24 AM ET

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In principle—with apologies to Bill Clinton—there's nothing wrong with biotechnology that can't be cured by what's right with biotechnology. Yes, poorly cultivated clones may require antibiotics. But efficient cloning can reduce the use of antibiotics, not to mention growth hormones, by spreading healthier genes. Yes, factory farming can transmit mad cow disease. But guess what blocked mad cow disease in a study released this week? A combination of genetic engineering and cloning.

Cloning can be humane, too. Farmers don't want their animals to get sick. Instead of calves that are born big, they'd rather get calves that are born small—so their mothers can deliver them easily—and grow quickly thereafter. Dairy farmers prefer female calves to males, which get slaughtered for veal. Cloning could address all three problems. Biotechnology might even help us grow meat without growing and killing whole animals.

Messing with nature at this level is never simple. It requires ongoing debate, monitoring, and regulation. But we're not even getting that debate. Instead, opponents are relying, as they have in the human cloning debate, on the sheer fact that cloning freaks people out. To reinforce this revulsion and intimidate regulators, politicians, and food producers, they constantly emphasize surveys showing that Americans are uncomfortable with cloned food, think it's unsafe, and won't buy it. As though polls settled the matter. As though the FDA should put science before politics, but only when it suits liberals.

Yes, we're scared of cloned food. But according to the same polls, most of us have heard little about animal biotechnology, don't know biotech food is already in supermarkets, and, against all reason, are more afraid of cloning animals than of genetically engineering them. Don't be cowed. Question your fears. That's the difference between us and the animals.

A version of this piece appears in the Washington Post Outlook section.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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