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A tiny bit of legislation from the state capitol in Oklahoma is making the rounds among grossed-out news readers, as NPR reports on a bill that would outlaw the use of fetuses in food. Ew, right? The whole thing is complete baloney (which doesn't contain fetuses!), and seems to be little more than a PR grab from a state senator who wants to get in good with the pro-life lobby. The bill, introduced by Sen. Ralph Shortey, is pretty limited. Outside the legalese pertaining to the bill's statute number, it contains 42 words:

No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.

We reached out to the senator to ask if this is an ongoing problem in Oklahoma, and haven't heard back from his office yet. But he did explain a bit to Tulsa's KRMG News Talk Radio: "I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here." But it's not really happening.

What is happening is that Senomyx, a company that's been working with PepsiCo on flavor development since 2010, patented a technology for which it did some stem cell research, and that has some pro-lifers campaigning for a boycott of PepsiCo.

Senomyx patented a process "for what is essentially an automated taste test," NPR reports. That patent "mentions HEK 293, or Human Embryonic Kidney 293, a widely available cell line that was originally cultured in the early 1970s from a human embryo in the Netherlands."