Odd Bob does Science...

I am doing proper science at work atm! Not that I don’t always do proper science; but normally it’s behavioural experiments (watch the bees completely fail to do what you expect them to do, or what you don’t expect them to do, or in fact anything interesting...then come back tomorrow and do it again!) Or the ‘fun’ job of writing everything up (if you can’t guess, that was sarcastic. I really don’t like writing reports)

Today however I was actually in the lab. I was even wearing a lab coat! I was doing stuff that involves acronyms that make no sense to most non-scientists (or me most of the time)! I feel strangely more scientific than normal, and in celebration of this I decided to find some odd science to blog about.

You can eat cloned meat!!

On the BBC news site the other day was the amazing news that we can eat cloned meat without becoming oddly mutated or dying of cancer or anything. (Damnit and I was looking forward to becoming a Marvel super hero!) This isn’t anything new. A pilot study back in 2005 came to exactly the same conclusion. Besides in the US many farmers breed from cloned animals to increase yields.

In the UK however we’re still a little freaked out about all this new science like GM and cloning. Then some cloned meat was accidentally sold and eaten this summer and I guess people wanted to do more checks. Besides the Soil Association were getting their knickers in a twist again. The point is that there is no significant difference between cloned and 'natural' cattle in terms of the milk and meat produced.

Will this report stop people freaking out about these 'novel foods'? Um...I doubt it. But the main argument against GM and cloning that I actually agree with is that we don't yet know enogh about the long term issues asociated with them, so I guess we have to start somewhere. Maybe one day cloned meat will be as normal to us as any other food. We cetainly have to find some way to feed our ever growing population.

I’ll probably write a fuller post about this on The Birds and the Bees at some point. It looks interesting...

In the mean time I’ll continue dreaming of some radiation/GM/other random experiment at work going horribly wrong so that I gain amazing new super powers...