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Scientists Genetically Engineer Pigs Immune To Costly Disease (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The trial, led by the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, showed that the pigs were completely immune to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a disease that is endemic across the globe and costs the European pig industry nearly $2 billion in pig deaths and decreased productivity each year.
Pigs infected with PRRS are safe to eat but the virus causes the animals breathing problems, causes deaths in piglets and can cause pregnant sows to lose their litter. There is no effective cure or vaccine, and despite extensive biosecurity measures about 30% of pigs in England are thought to be infected at any given time. After deleting a small section of DNA that leaves pigs vulnerable to the disease, the animals showed no symptoms or trace of infection when intentionally exposed to the virus and when housed for an extended period with infected siblings. The study has been published in the Journal of Virology.
Pigs infected with PRRS are safe to eat but the virus causes the animals breathing problems, causes deaths in piglets and can cause pregnant sows to lose their litter. There is no effective cure or vaccine, and despite extensive biosecurity measures about 30% of pigs in England are thought to be infected at any given time. After deleting a small section of DNA that leaves pigs vulnerable to the disease, the animals showed no symptoms or trace of infection when intentionally exposed to the virus and when housed for an extended period with infected siblings. The study has been published in the Journal of Virology.
TV Personality: The world of medicine has seen its share of miracle cures, from the polio vaccine to heart transplants. But all past achievements may pale in comparison to the work of Dr. Alice Krippin. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Not at all.
TV Personality: So, Dr. Krippin, give it to me in a nutshell.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Well, the premise is quite simple - um, take something designed by nature and reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it.
TV Personality: You're talking about a virus?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Indeed, yes. In this case the measles, um, virus which has been engineered at a genetic level to be helpful rather than harmful. Um, I find the best way to describe it is if you can... if you can imagine your body as a highway, and you picture the virus as a very fast car, um, being driven by a very bad man. Imagine the damage that car can cause. Then if you replace that man with a cop... the picture changes. And that's essentially what we've done.
TV Personality: And how many people have you treated so far?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Well, we've had ten thousand and nine clinical trials in humans so far.
TV Personality: And how many are cancer-free?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Ten thousand and nine.
TV Personality: So you have actually cured cancer.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Yes, yes... yes, we have.
[cuts to post-apocalyptic New York three years later]
Ethics aside, because nobody in an emergency room wouldn't want a cure. We as a species IMO should be focusing 75% of our resources on biology for curing diseases and life extension, There is lots of space in this universe & our limiting factor right now is age / death
Future generations are saved!
I like my pork without respiratory diseases.
A loinly disease.
--
Pun's-errific -- Jack Hoffman
.. have eight drumsticks and no wings, so sounds good to me... with barbecue sauce.
Heil Hitlary!
Too bad its the same gene sequence that made it non-toxic to humans...maybe? maybe not?
There have been reports of cells been CRISPR-ed are more likely to get cancers.
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/54794/title/CRISPR-Efficiency-Tied-to-Cancer-Causing-Process/
Will the pigs get cancers?
No to GMO, GMO is bad, evil and poisonous. Feed the slashdot population on these "pigs" and send them into the Sun on DC-8 spaceships.
Fuck Bayer, fuck the humankind.
Nuke them from orbit.
So they've created disease resistant pigs? Meh. Let me know when they fly.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I for one welcome our new pork-based overlords.
Perhaps they can just choke and die.
uh. huh
Genetic engineering
a disease that is endemic across the globe
Water is limited to the universe. Silica is restricted to the small area of the whole planet's crust.
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Pigs are biologically similar enough to humans that we ought to genetically engineer them to be immune to various ailments that also affect humans -- particularly the ailments that make them less likely to make it to the dinner plate. This'll lower the cost of meat production, and simultaneously lead to medical advances for humans.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'm reminded of efforts to stamp out sickle cell anemia. Then it was discovered that carriers of the gene for sickle cell anemia were highly resistant to malaria. Are they sure the snippet of DNA they're deleting doesn't confer some benefit which (on an evolutionary level) outweighs the disadvantage of vulnerability to this disease?
and Crake
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Youre such a brave people. Bigly free. Keep on fearing. It looks marvellous on you darling.
All of the food you eat, ALL of it, is the result of genetic modification over thousands of years by human beings. There is no animal, wheat, rice, canola, tuber, or fruit that you can buy today that is not the result of humans genetically modifying nature. You would not be able to eat bread in today if not because of a radical invention in crossbreeding russian and canadian strains of wheat in the early 1950s (otherwise we would have run out of capacity to grow enough wheat to support our populations by 1970). If you dont want to eat GMOs you better stop eating altogether ya mong.
We get it. You hate people of color and want to see them all starve to death when the oceans die and the current strains of rice no longer provide any nutrition because of co2 poisoning.
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This disease is HUGE in swine production. Producers have Faustian bargain to make.
Option 1: stay PRRS Free
Animals are healthier, perform better, and require less medical intervention. Great! However, biosecurity measures are prodigious, can be super expensive, and if they fail it will cost you a lot of animals and money.
A small University run operation I worked on sold ~500 nursery piglets every 2 weeks. When they broke with PRRS the number of viable pigs was cut in half in the first group. Bottomed our at 5 pigs surviving to weaning before it started to recover. All told we lost some where in the order of 2,000 piglets over about 2 months. We also lost about 10% of the sows over the same period. Mostly the younger ones.
Option 2. Manage a PRRS positive herd.
Animals are always a little sick, a little less productive, and require a little more TLC, but you mostly avoid the dramatic >90% losses of an accure outbreak. Flair ups top out closer to 25-50%.
Genetically immune pigs would save literally millions of pigsâ(TM) lives, improve their welfare at the same time, and improve the environmental impact of swine production by reducing waste (feed, medications, etc spent on pigs that die due to the disease). Will we forgo all of those advantages because GMO makes some people scared? I sure as hell hope not, but wonâ(TM)t be holding my breath.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
In Soviet Russia, immortal porcine overlards welcome you!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now that they've identified that the elimination of that particular gene will produce immunity, they need to develop a quick way to test for it. Then test all the pigs they can find who aren't obviously infected. What are the odds of some pigs already having this trait? If they can find it as a mutation, then they can bypass all the GMO restrictions.
Frankenpigs!
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P.S.=> "take something designed by nature and reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it"... apk
TFA states that "...there is no effective cure or vaccine..." which is wrong. There are multiple PRRS vaccines on the market and it's been that way for 20 years.
How could everyone have missed the opportunity to call this what it is... Cured Ham :)
now the piece of shit factory farmers can continue torturing pigs in cramped shit holes but won't lose any product/money because of this one little drawback.
Really? Cite?
We use pigs for experimentation all the time because they are good biological proxies for human beings.
Contrary to The Guardian's "research" there are papers that say otherwise, such as: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...