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Creating Prion-Free Cows
Science Daily is reporting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is reporting positive results from a recent study designed to create genetically engineered prion-free cattle. From the article: "ARS studied eight Holstein males that were developed by Hematech Inc., a pharmaceutical research company based in Sioux Falls, S.D. The evaluation of the prion-free cattle was led by veterinary medical officer Juergen Richt of ARS' National Animal Disease Center (NADC) in Ames, Iowa. The evaluation revealed no apparent developmental abnormalities in the prion-free cattle."
I confess; I had to look up what a prion is.
A +prions%3F&btnG=Search
I'm so embarrassed.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=define%3
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
From Wikipedia: "a type of infectious agent made only of protein."
"Mad cow disease" is a prion disease.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Or you could take the road us Finns have taken: Nowadays each and every cow that dies here is tested and not a single piece of a particular animal may be used to produce food unless that animal has been tested.
The farmers feed the cows RENDERED cow feed made in big factories. It's very easy to stop the factories rendering down cows and sheep into protein supplements.
Even a break of feeding rendered meat for 1 complete cow generation would clear the contamination out.
The problem is the renderers have a strong lobby group and want to continue the practice, however unsafe, so they got a compromise. Instead they promise to only feed dead cows and sheep that were healthy. So they continue to feed infected meat to cows, just as long as the prion infection was at a too early stage to be detected. The US executive branch has gone along with this 'voluntary' code and practically no inspections are made to check it's being done.
It's why I don't eat US beef, because the US views the problem as something to fix in the PR dept., not something to fix on the farm.
Yet it's so trivial to fix, switch to vegetation based protein supplements for 1 generation of cattle, and poof the problems gone.
Well, Chronic Wasting Disease has managed to do a number on deer without anyone feeding sheep to deer - so don't be so certain about the origin of mad cow. It might have spontaneously occurred in cattle populations, or there might be some other vector.
For what it's worth, soybean meal is the primary protein source for cattle in the US, and it has been for a long time. IIRC, Europe was the only place where they had to grind up sheep and cows for protein because soybeans don't grow very well there in general.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...is tasty!
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In all seriousness, you make a good point. BSE was first spotted among the cannibals of Papua New Guinea (where eating of the dead was a sign of respect).
http://www.gwinnettdailyonline.com/GDP/archive/ar
Here are a ton of articles on BSE & vCJD:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/bse
That's the PRIONs 'memory' you're talking about. It has a good memory that replicates whether its Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prion or a Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Not our memory!
I think you've been eating too much beef.
An important point is that a lot of work on artificial/cultured muscle research is dependent on using fluids derived from cows as a growth medium, both from a compatibility and cost standpoint. However, a large barrier to commercial artificial meat research/production is keeping that fluid free of prions both in a small lab setting as well as in industrial quantities. This is the reason why when those scientists cultured meat and cooked it, they weren't allowed to eat it due to prion safety.
If they can sucessfully remove prion issues, then commercial artificial meat is a real possibility (though those issues dissappear once the culture medium fluid can be reliably and cost effectively made through wholely artificial means).
I for one welcome our vat-grown meat progenitors.
That means data encoded in the prions, not the memory of the organism containing them. PrPSc is not conductive to your long-term memory since it causes brain death.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The prions that cause BSE are externally introduced through cattle feed. You'd have to have all the components of cattle feed be produced from prion free animals also. Not likely unless all cattle feed was constantly tested for the presence of any prions at all.
No kidding. All cows are already created "prion free" naturally... it is our feeding them unnatural shit they should never eat that's the problem. You don't need to have a pharma company engineer a fucking cow to fix that problem. I like my steak as much as the next guy, but it's pretty messed up what we do to farm animals.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Also there *ARE* good tests to determine the ESB both faster than the biopsy and not needing to put down the cow, much better than clinical observations.
Intensive research has been done in German and Swiss laboratories. The first test working on live animal has been developped in Göttingen, Germany. Thus sadly, the information is only available in the German version of wikipedia. (Though the german article mentions a later Texan discovery).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Primates (tested on monkeys, very likely true for humans) who subsist at near-starvation levels of calorie intake life significantly longer than those that eat "normal" amounts of calories. Why aren't you starving yourself?
Also, if meatless diets are so obviously better for your health, why do so few health experts choose meatless diets for themselves? Perhaps the evidence is not as clear as you think it is.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Cows are as docile as they are today because they have been bred for about as long as any animal we today have. It's true they were taken from relatively docile herbivores but not all are that way.
Llamas for example have been known to run people down and kick them for no apparent reason - presumably just because they don't like them. And Ostriches and Emus are both extremely hazardous to raise. A friend told me a story about some friends who got an obscenely expensive pair of breeding Emus (something like $50,000 in value) as a wedding present from a wealthy relative. Feeling that they couldn't just get rid of them, they began raising Emus. They learned quickly that when they put their head down, you run like hell, because they're coming after you. And you'd better be far away, because they run a hell of a lot faster than you do with those reverse-articulated legs.
You could probably raise carnivores to be more docile, though I doubt you could ever take it out of them entirely through breeding. But why? That would be a lot less efficient than just raising tastier herbivores.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I couldn't access the mentioned paper, but I found another paper that I assume that review cited (Lindquist worked on both of them). The summary "CPEB prions might function in the formation of long-term memory" is probably though not certainly taken from:
R L&_udi=B6WSN-4C5RJXX-C&_coverDate=12%2F26%2F2003&_ alid=516758008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=7051&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000051401&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=817b088d824d789 e3c68039a6e013561
i ?itool=AbstractPlus-def&PrId=3580&uid=12058449&db= pubmed&url=http://joi.jlc.jst.go.jp/JST.JSTAGE/jts /27.69?from=PubMed
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleU
which talks about CPEB in Aplysia californica, the California sea slug. The results are pretty interesting, but it's unclear whether they apply to higher organisms. I haven't yet found anything where they test this in mice, but that doesn't mean the paper doesn't exist.
Another paper at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/utils/fref.fcg
found that: "Whereas the Zurich I Prnp null mice, as well as mice from a later PrP knockout line designated Edinburgh Prnp -/- (Manson et al., 1994) were clinically healthy, mice of other knockout lines, for example Nagasaki Prnp-/- (Sakaguchi et al., 1996) came down with ataxia and less of cerebellar Purkinje cells at 6-12 months of age. In the Zurich I and Edinburgh mice only the PrP open reading frame (ORF) was ablated or interrupted, while the lines developing ataxia had deletions extending from within the second Prnp intron to the 3' non-coding region [which runs into another gene called Doppel]."
To summarize: at this moment it doesn't seem that taking out only the coding region of PrP wrecks anything blatantly obvious in mice (though other papers I haven't cited show some other effects, not all of them neuro).
The floggings will stop when morale improves.