No-Sneeze Kittens Cost Big Bucks

Well, we all knew this was coming. You get the sense that this is the first drizzle just before the monsoon.

Actually, the part that shocked me most wasn’t anything to do with genetics. How many of you knew the pet industry was $35 BILLION a year?!

More importantly, how easy is it to imagine this industry exploding once designer pets of all varieties become common?

5 comments November 6th, 2006

Free Love = Better Babies?

I’m not sure how people should take this study. From the article:

Scientists at the Australian National University said they had proven for the first time that frequent sex with multiple partners increased the survival rate of offspring in an animal species.

Just remember, people are not animals.

10 comments November 3rd, 2006

Transgendered Through Transgenics

In a seemingly unlikely partnership Isreali, Palestinian, and German scientists have annnounced they are going to try and transgenically transgender fish by injecting compounds found in plants.

As part of a project with Hebrew University and Germany’s University of Hohenheim, Qutob and his colleagues will inject compounds from plants found in the occupied West Bank and often used as seasonings into food fed to newborn Nile Tilapia fish. “This will have an effect on the fish’s metabolic (structure) — it may shift from female to male,” said Qutob, a chemist at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.

Apparently, they’ve already been able to do this with steroids. I think this presents a very strong case for labeling GM food clearly. I don’t think I want to eat a transgendered fish whether it was done through steroids or through injecting plant compounds. Do we have the right to know, or is it irrelevent details?

7 comments November 1st, 2006

Is Biotech Moving Too Fast?

Activist David Suzuki asks that question at NewScientist.com (subscription required):

Imagine bacteria that could spread through our bodies to scavenge mercury or other pollutants and then extrude them from a pimple. Or plants that continue to photosynthesise under very low light conditions, or food crops that can survive in highly salinated soils. Such boons are the promise of biotechnology. We expect to be able to manipulate life at its most basic level to help solve some of our most pressing problems, such as food security, habitat loss and pollution. Yet dazzling as such prospects are, I believe we should be cautious about diving into the deep end of the gene pool before we have learned to swim.

Emphasis mine.

3 comments October 20th, 2006

Transgenic Goats; Transgenic Experiments With Human DNA Next?

The gist of the article at timesonline.co.uk:

BRITISH patients could soon be using the world’s first medicine derived from transgenic animals after European regulators approved a drug produced by genetically modified goats.

The pioneering drug, an anti-clotting agent for people with a rare inherited disease, is made from the milk of goats whose DNA has been modified to incorporate human genes.

However, a few paragraphs in is this blurb:

Chickens, cows, rabbits are already undergoing trials.

However, proposals to modify pigs with human genes so their organs could be transplanted into people have largely been abandoned for fear of transmitting viruses.

Largely abandoned. Not totally. Not completely. And there is a fear of creating viruses. And if messing with humans induces fear of creating viruses, what about creating them experimenting on animals? Many of our worst diseases and viruses originated among livestock and apes before leaping over to humans. Related is this article from the Pittsburg Tribune-Review about diseases jumping from animals to a human, specifically with regards to using animal body parts in humans.

5 comments October 10th, 2006

Nobel Prize Awarded for ‘Silencing’ Genes

Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering a way to silence specific genes, a revolutionary finding that scientists are scrambling to harness for fighting illnesses as diverse as cancer, heart disease and AIDS.

Andrew Z. Fire, 47, of Stanford University, and Craig C. Mello, 45, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, will share the $1.4 million prize.

Congrats, guys.

Read the whole nytimes.com (subscription required) article here before they lock it behind TimesSelect. Or you could subscribe.

1 comment October 3rd, 2006

Escaped GM Grass

I’ve talked before about my fears of GM foods and animals getting into the wild.

Well, it happened in Oregon just recently:

According to a report in Nature, transgenic grass produced by The Scotts Company has escaped its test plot, and been found almost two miles away. The grass is resistant to Roundup and other herbicides. The bioengineered grass could pose a significant threat both to wild grass species, as well as to the sod industry of the Willamette Valley. Grasses can spread widely and rapidly leading one biologist to state:”We’ve broken down the barriers — things happen so fast,” he says. “It’s like Darwin on steroids.”

Like Darwin on steroids. As much as I’m concerned about the intellectual property and commercial aspects of GM plants and animals, this is what frightens me the most. This could very well become just as big a threat to nature as global warming. Think about it. One day we’ll have thousands of these facilities all around the world, pushing the limits to varying degrees, and practising varying degrees of containment. GM outbreaks are inevitable.

4 comments September 20th, 2006

Transgenic Chickens

Seed Magazine has an article online about transgenic chickens.

Origen Therapeutics, a California biotechnology company, has developed a new method to create transgenic chickens—fowl that express genes from other organisms. The new technique, which the company revealed in the June 8th issue of Nature, may make the squawking barnyard birds as easy to genetically manipulate as that workhorse of animal research, the mouse.

(via A Blog Around the Clock)

As our understanding of transgenics increases exponentially, expanding into ever more species, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to wonder where this all leads to. Mice yesterday, chickens today, and what comes tomorrow? Dogs? Chimpanzees?

And then?

3 comments September 10th, 2006

Glow-in-the-dark Pigs

ABC News is reporting on their website that we have more glow-in-the-dark animals to upstage their more luminously challenged bretheren:

Partially green pigs exist elsewhere, but the Taiwanese pigs are believed to be the only ones that are green inside out, including their hearts and internal organs. In the dark, they glow bright neon green.

Do these pigs mark the glorious forward march of technology? Or are they abominations whose creation should be condemned?

Hopefully for them they last longer than Alba.

11 comments September 10th, 2006

GM Animal Test Rising in UK

According to the BBC.

Of course, this isn’t a surprise. I was surprised that fish make up 7% of all animals experimented on.

It can be difficult to get passed the PR and spin of the different sides, but what does everyone out there think of the increasing use of GM animals for testing? Is there an increasing grey area of animal rights, or should their GM status be irrelevent?

Add comment August 25th, 2006