Cloning for food is bad but cloning to live forever is good

Sometimes I marvel at the lengths humans go to delude ourselves.  For years I have pointed out one very unusual phenomenon regarding cloning.  All over the world, consuming products from cloned animals or their offspring is bad, while creating human clones for stem cells to inject into human patients is good.  Cloned animals and cloned humans are both made with the process somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT.  Both are genetically modified organisms, but eating cloned animal products is considered "yucky" while the idea of injecting cloned human cells directly into our bodies is "laudable."  I just do not get it.

Now I am not advocating eating cloned animal products, just pointing out the strange love-hate relationship we have with cloning.  But, as I have said before, if it came down to drinking milk from a cloned cow or injecting myself with cells from a dead cloned embryo, I say, "Please pass the Oreos."

Britain is particularly puzzling.  This New York Times article points out the Brits uneasiness with cloned animals or their offspring getting into the food supply, meanwhile they are funding the creation of cloned human-animal hybrids with the intent to create stem cells. From the NYT:

ALBRIGHTON, England — Many Europeans recoil at the very idea of cloning animals. But a handful of breeders in Switzerland, Britain and possibly other countries have imported semen and embryos from cloned animals or their progeny from the United States, seeking to create more consistently plump and productive livestock.

And although no vendor has publicly acknowledged it, meat or dairy products originating from such techniques are believed to be already on supermarket shelves.

The amounts are no doubt small, and the sale appears to be legal. But the development is noteworthy on a continent that has long objected to genetically modified crops and where many people look at animal cloning as potentially dangerous and cruel — even immoral.

So animal cloning is considered immoral if it is for food supply, but making cloned animal-human hybrids for stem cell research is not.  From The Guardian in 2008:

First British human-animal hybrid embryos created by scientists

· Breakthrough could pave way for stem cell supply
· Move will aid research into untreatable conditions

Britian's first human-animal hybrid embryos have been created, forming a crucial first step, scientists believe, towards a supply of stem cells that could be used to investigate debilitating and so far untreatable conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease.

Lyle Armstrong, who led the work, gained permission in January from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create the embryos, known as "cytoplasmic hybrids".

His team at Newcastle University produced the embryos by inserting human DNA from a skin cell into a hollowed-out cow egg. An electric shock then induced the hybrid embryo to grow. The embryo, 99.9% human and 0.1% other animal, grew for three days, until it had 32 cells.

Eventually, scientists hope to grow such embryos for six days, and then extract stem cells from them. The researchers insisted the embryos would never be implanted into a woman and that the only reason they used cow eggs was due to the scarcity of human eggs.

And while stem cells from human-cow hybrid embryos will probably never be injected into a human patient, I am wondering where is the outcry? 

There is none and there will not be. Why? Because in our upside down society, cloning for food is bad but cloning to live forever is good.