Thanksgiving Bits

An anonymous reader writes "Whatis.com has a holiday themed tech quiz, Thanksgiving: Do you speak Geek?. Bit stuffing, anyone?" And reader Punboy writes with some hope of building a better turkey: "Apparently the biotech guys are at it again, this time with our poultry! They're mapping the turkey genome in hopes of providing better breeding techniques, and remove the 'guesswork'." And while food is on your mind, here's a story about the challenges of feeding a hungry planet.

Comments

I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome our new genetically engineered turkey overlords!

Interesting

[StarWreck]

Although mapping the entire Turkey Genome is something new, they have been manipulating Turkey's genetically for years now. For Instance, the Turkey's that are "pardoned" by the President of the United States never survive for more than a couple of weeks because their genetic structure has been altered so heavily for the purpose of providing more Turkey Meat.

No thanks, I prefer dark meat

[ak_hepcat]

And what is up with this huge fascination with the 'all-white-meat' bird?

Gag me with a spoon! Everybody knows that the dark meat is tastier. Who cares if it's got more fat in it -- fat is flavour, after all.

Sheesh. If i -wanted- all-white-meat, I'd eat caucasian.

To Quote Albert Einstein

[xXDarkNinjaXx]

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Look into it.

Re:To Quote Albert Einstein

[kfg]

That, and a damned sight fewer people. The idea that vegetarianism alone, in a geometrically expanding population (which speeds up with an increase in food supply) is the solution, with all due respects to the good doctor, is daft.

We may need to go through a Soylent Green phase before we can adopt a vegetarian phase.

I'll also note that the record seems to indicate that it was evolution from a vegetarian diet to an omnivorous one that allowed us to survive our first ice age (while we were still Australopithicine). It's pretty obvious really that the more things you can eat the more things you will find to eat. The invention of agriculture doesn't change this.

If you live in most of world and are not vegetarian all you need to obtain food is a white sheet and a flashlight. Most hunger (outside of areas that are both arid and overpopulated) is due to fastidiousnous of diet, not a lack of foodstuffs.

Of course this will change when we add a sufficient quantity of new people.

(And please note that I have been a vegetarian for more than 30 years before you respond to me with something along the lines of "You meat eater, you.")

KFG

Not the problem...

[Mydron]

These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.

The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes

Sequencing is only the beginning

[jackelfish]

Sequencing is only the first small step required in such lofty goals as improving a turkey's meat quality or introducing disease resistance. The actual tough part (which the article does not mention) is identifying the genes that code for the protein, or more likely proteins, that are involved in producing a desirable trait. If it were as simple as sequencing an animals genome, a task which an automated sequencer and computer can almost do by themselves, then we would already be well on the way to curing all of the genetic diseases that currently plague the human race. I can tell you that this is a goal we are far from accomplishing for humans, let alone turkeys. And remember this is the genetic sequence from only one or two turkeys and hardly represents the diversity of all turkeys on the face of the planet, an issue that also arises in discussion of the human genome project. The genetic sequencing of all these organisms we hear of in the media, while extremely useful for researchers (myself included), is not the holy grail for our understanding of how biology actually works.

Re:Gene technology?

[mordors9]

Sorry but maybe I have missed something. Turkeys are prolific, we can already grow as many as we want to. The only limitation is what the market will bear. So how does making freaky genetically modified turkey change that.

Giant turkey breast tumour - just carve off hunks

[jbridges]

Reminds me a delightful (and dark) book from 1952 called "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. The main character ends up working at an offshore turkey breast factory where they grow a giant turkey breast tumour from cancerous turkey issue.

They just carve off hunks as it grows.

The texture is lacking the grain of real turkey breast, but lots of people seem to like ground turkey, or turkey loaf, or turkey hotdogs.

There is a mention of it in the Wikipedia article on vat grown meat.