Is the product of a cloned cow, cloned milk? Or is it just plain old milk, as in the cow - cloned or otherwise - is just a factory? Okay, than what about four exact clones of the same cow? Clone #1 is as different from the original cow as it is different from … Clone #2. And 3. And 4. Is only the milk from the original cow actually real milk?

Now what if a cloned cow and a cloned bull mate in the natural way, or assisted natural way, as is pretty much the way things go in the cattle business these days, would the offspring of the two clones be a clone?

But how can the offspring of the original be a clone, if no original was copied? And is the product of their union a super-clone? And if this superclone turned out to be a "she," would her milk be cloned milk? Or super-cloned milk?

Now what if a cloned cow mated with a natural bull? Would that be a half-clone? And would female off-spring produce half-cloned milk?

OK, I'll stop. Even I'm getting confused.

At the same time, science decided to move forward anyway, and asks even larger questions. American and Japanese scientists started with one beef cow and one dairy cow and then proceeded to clone two beef cows and four dairy cows. They were looking to see if the beef was edible according to industry standards, and the milk was drinkable, also according to standards.

Well, both the twins and quadruplets, so to speak, met the standards, although they were marginally different from their identical ancestors. Lots could explain that, and still, it may not be explainable at all, with what we know today. Well over the 100 indicators used, and both the meat and milk met standards. According to our best tests, the cloned beef and the cloned - shall we say - milk are safe.

And that's where the cautionary tale might begin.

There's no doubt we are standing at the precipice of cloning. We didn't think of it as cloning when we got down to a handful of identical seeds, miraculously produced for mass agribusiness. But that's what it was - tinkering and then finally mass-cloning seeds to produce huge harvests. Just as we began to think about the consequences of squashing bio-diversity.

Still, why wouldn't we clone the best tasting animals? Heck, we can do it after the fact. A little cryogenic freezing of essential parts, and a decisionmaker could actually say, "Those are great steaks! Let's do it again." And again. And again.

But all that is obvious. What isn't obvious is the limits of science and its technology. Science is saying that for these particular tests, things look good. But these tests don't point to completeness. There are those aspects this scientific study is not testing, either because the study didn't think to test them, or the state of our technology is such that we can't test them, or both. Scientific studies can never say they've tested everything, because science knows it will always find more details.

These current tests are used to tell us that beef and milk from natural animals are fit for human consumption. But do we know what they say about clones?

It's not that clones are unsafe. It's that science can only tell us so much. Just thought I'd remind you of that when the talk swings around to "Is it safe?" The answer may at best be: "It looks like it!"

I'd say, "Let's use the common sense God gave us," but then we'd be tempted to clone that, too.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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