A recent Washington Post article tells of a report published by the FDA concluding that cloned offspring "pose little scientific risk to the food supply". I suppose it may be true, as long as the parent wasn't GMO to begin with.

Yet, SF State Department of Biology Professor Michael Goldman tells me not to worry. Says Goldman in an email, "I think the FDA's ruling makes good sense. There should be nothing inherently wrong with a clone that survives beyond gestation; early development does a superb job in editing out problems. It's especially hard to imagine what could be wrong with meat of milk from such a clone."

Really? Well, I suppose. A clone is a genetic duplicate so long as nothing is altered in the cloning process. A cow is, after all (theoretically anyway), a cow.

But this raises the ethical bar a bit higher when it comes to altering anything in our "natural" food chain. If cloned meat, milk, and eggs are ok, then what's wrong with a little genetic engineering to boot?