Public concern over cloned meat is based on bitter experience

Scientists appear to be a little surprised by the media attention and public concern about the news that meat and milk from cloned cattle have been consumed by people.

They should not be. Instead, there needs to be an acknowledgement from both the authorities who superintend food standards and their scientific advisers that much work needs to be done to explain the nature of this "novel" foodstuff, as the official nomenclature has it.

The reassuring news is the speed at which it has been possible to identify the sources of some of the cloned meat and milk. Tracing two bulls to a purchase by a farm near Nairn of embryos from a cow that was cloned in the US is something which would not have been possible until a few years ago.

But it will worry many that the Food Standards Agency has admitted it does not know how many such embryos from cloned animals have been brought into Britain. This is a matter it must clarify as soon as possible, along with introducing procedures to make sure that all such imports are properly recorded and remain traceable.

The case for saying that any meat or milk from such animals is safe to eat and drink rests on a decision approving these products taken in 2008 by American authorities. On intuitive grounds, it is hard to think of a reason why the offspring of an animal which has been cloned should be unsafe. Thus Professor Hugh Pennington, perhaps Britain's foremost authority on food hygiene and safety, thinks that objections are based more on religious worries about scientists playing God than on any serious scientific assessment.

Not so. The British public has been through a number of food scares recently, which have created a great deal of public scepticism about scientists and their pronouncements. Particularly relevant here was the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. This could well have caused an outbreak of the terrifying brain- destroying disorder variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the human population.

It was traced back to the practice of feeding vegetarian beasts meat products largely consisting of offal and other tissues rejected for human consumption. This practice grew up for the same broad reason that scientists have been experimenting with cloned cattle. Economics forced farmers and feed manufacturers to seek out ways of producing cheaper cattle food, produce which turned out to be contaminated. The ultimate aim was cattle which produced higher yields of both milk and meat. Faced with the same process at work, the public, which is ill-educated in the science of genetics, is bound to be at least sceptical and at most hostile, to cloned animals that sound like the product of science fiction.

Cloned farm animals which we may ultimately eat are clearly a fact. But before they become widely acceptable, the public needs to know much about this science, how it works and what the risks are. Mere reassurance from impressively-labelled organisations and highly qualified individuals is not enough.