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Introduction
American scientist James V. McConnell ran a series of experiments in animal behavioral psychology throughout the 1950s and 1960s ([43] Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, 2008). After running simple planarians (flatworms) through mazes, he would grind them and have them cannibalized by other planarians. McConnell repeated these experiments with more complex organisms, including mice, purporting that the cannibals were faster at running the maze. He believed this represented transference of memory, passed chemically by the digested RNA of the predecessors. McConnell's results are not satisfactorily replicable and the significance of his work has diminished ([42] Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, 2007). Still he remains as a footnote in the history of psychology; this speaks both to our fundamentally human fascination with what we ingest, and also our more modern fears regarding the manipulation of our genetic material.
This paper will explore issues surrounding cloned food sources, specifically the increasingly vocal demands by the American public for mandatory labeling of cloned food. Articles referring to the critical perception of agricultural cloning as "Frankenstein Farming" ([30] Poulter, 2008, p. 1) and editorials decrying "Frankenfoods" ([23] Lokeman, 2006, p. 3) testify to the growing distrust in the American food and biotech industries, as well as the ability of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remain partial and to police them. Some in the biotech industry acknowledge that the next, though distant, step after cloning is to introduce transgenic and genetically modified animals into the food chain ([41] Weise, 2003).
These animals already exist; in his landmark book Dinner at the New Gene Café , [20] Lambrecht (2001) documents the existence, as early as the 1980s, of pigs genetically manipulated to carry the human growth hormone. The existence of such creatures and the possibility of fantastical future creations, mostly animal but some small part human, can elicit a primal fear of almost Oedipal quality: perhaps, one day we will become like the planarians in McConnell's experiments, unwittingly cannibalizing our human genetic material and suffering the transfer of corrupt and broken metabolic processes. This paper will explore the ethical, economic and public health concerns surrounding cloned food labeling.
History
The last decade
The issues of cloned food and cloned food labeling came to the forefront on January 15, 2008, as...