Clones Abound in Nature.

There is no secret in that that agriculture companies and farmers are ready to turn cloning into a routine tool of production agriculture at any moment. Last year the prestigious National Research Council was asked to study foods made from cloned animals. The council, an independent group that advises the government on scientific issues, concluded that no evidence that meat or milk derived from healthy cloned farm animals can harm people.

There are two main questions we need the answer. Are the animals themselves healthy, and are the products nutritionally indistinguishable from those produced by non-cloned animals?
By its very definition, a successfully cloned animal should be no different from the original animal whose DNA was used to create it.
But the technology hasn't been perfected, meaning many attempts end in birth defects. The FDA acknowledged concern about the animals' welfare in an 11-page summary of its initial review, to be posted on the agency's Web site Friday.


From Science Fiction to Fact
Clones abound in nature, including human identical twins. Scientists created artificial clones from embryo cells starting in 1894, but adult mammals weren't cloned until 1996. Farm animals have been cloned by the hundreds recently, and companies want to use them in food production. Mammal cloning milestones:

1996: Dolly the sheep (made public in 1997)
1998: Mice, cattle
1999: Goats
2000: Pigs cloned; using mice, clones of clones are produced
2002: Rabbits, cats
2003: Horses, rats
2004: Adult human cloned to create embryos, which are destroyed to extract cells
2005: Dog