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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."
This is great! Now we can go back to feeding the cows a healthy diet of dead sheep, which was how the whole "mad cow" thing started.
... or you could just not feed them parts of their dead relatives?
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.'
Oh, that was "prion"? I was trying to figure out how cows were getting "pron", and why we'd want to take it away from them anyway.
or Mad Cow Disease for those of you like myself who had no idea what the headline was about.
The actual article headline "Mad Cow Breakthrough?" really should have been followed by a story about mad cow scientists were developing a doomsday weapon to destroy humanity, or that mad cow armies were breaking through our outer defense perimeter or some such. Would have been much more interesting.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
What is so new in those cows? Two heads? Fallout style?
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
I'd rather eat meat and die young. Pigs taste good.
As for environmental factors, the planet will do just fine all by itself. Until the sun explodes and destroys it, so I guess we'd better build some big engines.
In 2005 a controversial paper in The Lancet introduced a theory that BSE might have originated in British cattle when they ate imported animal feed that included infected human remains from Hindu funeral ceremonies in India.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy
This theory has some merit because scrapie from sheep does not appear to infect people, whereas BSE from cattle does.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So how long until we get a new study that says Prions were indeed good things, and should have been left in our meat.
From TFA: "Prions are proteins that are naturally produced in animals."
Hmm... Removing natural things... Nope, doesn't sound like a good idea to me. I just can't wait until they find out that Prions actually helped prevent cancer or something and everyone on the planet now has a timebomb in their body.
Seriously, they'd better do some SERIOUS studies on this before feeding this crap to me.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
A google search will tell you, but so will the fucking article.
*sigh*
Its posts like these that make me consider moving to digg.
...is tasty!
t icleEEF238D9C90E4B2989F5E473D3145A16.asp
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
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.
A bigger worry is the fact that a company (read capitalism) will be holding the patents on our food supply. Much like what big agra has on corn, soybeans, etc.
I too wondered why "big science" would try to come up with a way to create cattle that can still be fed 'cannibal chow' without getting sick, instead of just changing the feed to something healthy, when I realised there are no IP licensing rights for natural, healthy cattle. This 'super cow' is surely patentable :(
My other disappointment is that so much time & resourcefulness was spent on this rather than a way to prevent prion diease from taking it's toll on the untold people who have eaten infected 'industrial-beef' through fast food & other sources but won't show symptoms for many years.
If that does not sound like wishful thinking, I don't know what does. Also keep in mind that they have a really strong interest in not finding anything....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
showing vegetarians lived 10-15% longer
Yeah, but smug self-satisfaction knocks about 10% off the lifespan, provided you're not punched by an offended meat-eater beforehand. So it's basically a wash.
Isn't Prion the name of that hybrid fuel car from Toyota? I didn't think it was big enough to drive cows around in anyway...
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Normal high tempurature sterialization of surgical instruments that have been used for brain surgury doesn't destroy prions. You have to use more exotic techniques that are a little rougher on surgical instruments. It's a big problem for hospitals. So mere cooking wouldn't affect prions.
As for vegetarians, unless their idea of going vegetarian is going from hamburger and fries and soda to more fries and soda, it's not hard for them to eat healthier than their omnivore peers.
/. readership) probably has too much meat in it at the moment, I'd urge people to be cautious if they are only going to eat vegetables. Intensively-farmed vegetables may have all kinds of nasty chemicals on them. Extensively farmed and organic vegetables won't be free of them either, and with organic farming comes "organic fertiliser". You really want to make sure you clean and cook those organic veggies *very* thoroughly. Faecal bacteria will make a mess of you.
Oh, I wouldn't be so sure. While I agree that our western diet (I'm in the UK, so not so very far west compared to probably most of the
I'd say that my meat is probably safer by far than most shop-bought vegetables. The problem that most people run into is they want to eat as cheaply as possible, and this is fundamentally incompatible with having good-quality food. Most people put more attention into the kind of oil and petrol they use in their car than the fuel and lubricants they use in their body. You can't cut out fat, your joints will fail. You need to get the right kind of fats. You don't get these from a Big Mac and Fries. It costs roughly three times as much for an organic free-range chicken than an el-cheapo battery hen. Is it worth it? Well, yes - the hen has had a better life, a better diet, and has probably been slaughtered and prepared a bit more carefully. Once you've had *real* meat instead of factory-farmed crap, you'll never ever go back. Spend the money, eat a little less of something better, and the environment, your wallet and your waistline will thank you.
"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.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
In the Bible, Abel was a peaceful animal-herder, and Cain was the homicidal vegetarian. What's up with that, huh?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Still, if this part is true, I can understand why they didn't let them do it:
Bad science is bad science. Let's not have 'security theator' become 'safety theator'.
From what I've read, you have a better chance of dying from the flu than catch Mad Cow.
I don't read AC A human right
Ok, so BSE damages prions which leads to all the characteristics of the disease. No prions, no disease. But does that necessarily mean no infection?
BSE can be passed to humans. Is it possible that these genetically modified cows are just modern day Typhoid Marys?
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
A prion is an 'infectious' protein which causes similar proteins to change their structure, rather like seeding a supersaturated solution. What has been done is to clone cattle which lack the protein which could be altered by the prion.
I have an educated guess regarding your findings: I think there is a correlation inbetween the "living 10-15% longer" factor and the "paying attention to what you stick in your pie hole" factor. I'm of the firm belief that all diets (vegetarian, Atkins, etc) are successful for the latter reason rather than a complex biological one.
I'm thinking of marketing a Prime diet, where you only have to pay attention to what you eat on prime-numbered days of the month. I'll call you from my yacht filled with bikini babes in a few months and let you know how it worked out.
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.
>> Those meatarians out there should give life a long good look as decide how do I want to enjoy life: quick and painfull (and ignorant), or slow and healthy.
:-D
>
> Perhaps it is you who are "ignorant" of the fact that the human body is built around an omnivorous diet.
*Sigh* Where to begin?
Humans are omnivorous largely by choice (just because we like the taste of meat) or necessity (because there aren't always enough veggies around to keep us from starving). Nature, however, gives us clues as to what our optimal diet should be.
Go to a mirror and study your teeth. Notice how most of your teeth have flat edges or large crushing surfaces? Those are the teeth of a herbivore: the teeth up front and center are suited for biting off plant matter, while the teeth in back are excellent for grinding the stuff down. The few pointed teeth we have are woefully inadequate for killing and devouring prey -- if you don't believe me, go out into the wilderness and try to take down and eat an animal with nothing but your teeth.
Next, get a reference book on human anatomy and look at the diagrams of the digestive system. Notice the extremely long and twisty intestines? That's the mark of a herbivore -- true meat-eaters have short digestive tracts in order to process food as quickly as possible. They also produce a specific acid to rapidly break down meat once it is ingested, yet humans lack that digestive acid.
Now look up 'dietary fiber' and its value for the digestive system. Nutritionists are in agreement that dietary fiber is not only beneficial, it is essential for good health. That means a diet that is rich in fruits, vegetables, breads and cereals -- all of which contain dietary fiber. By contrast, meat has absolutely *no* fiber.
"But you can't get adequate/complete protein nutrition on a vegetarian diet!" Not so: the average adult human requires only 40 to 50 grams of protein per day, and can get complete protein nutrition by eating certain foods such as
- peanuts and wheat (i.e.: peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread)
- beans and rice (the staple of Mexican food)
- chickpeas and sesame seeds (hummus, anyone?)
- soybeans
Sure, humans can sustain themselves on an omnivorous diet. However, just because we can do something doesn't mean we have to -- or that we ought to. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish my bowl of vegetarian chili. Mmmm... meatless chili, mmmm...
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"