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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.
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
I like my pork without respiratory diseases.
A loinly disease.
--
Pun's-errific -- Jack Hoffman
I, too, base my fears of progress on movies designed to sell a fear of progress as entertainment.
Not before I eat them.
I for one welcome our new pork-based overlords.
uh. huh
Will the pigs get cancers?
Not before I eat them.
And if that genetic modification changes something in those pigs' meat that promotes cancer in you (regardless of effect on the pig's health), would you care? If research team says that's not the case, could you trust them? Could those scientists even be sure themselves, that they've 'covered all bases' ?
Lots of questions. Probably a lot more I didn't think of. And possibly even more answers that will be MIA. There's just 1 thing I am sure about: (some) scientists will probably be more confident in making claims, than I'd be confident in believing those claims. Regardless of how much I trust or respect the scientists involved.
Disclaimer: been a vegetarian for close to 40y now, so I wouldn't care much either way. Unless it makes the pig's -short- life happier. In that case: great, go for it! :-)
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?
It might just be a little bit safer replacing that gene sequence that was removed with something non-coding for anything.
In DOS game days, you silence a noisy game that didn't have a volume control by replacing the sequence E6 60 with 90 90, which replaced out 90h,AX with NOP, NOP. If you were to just delete those two bytes the whole game would just crash. There's always the risk that something else might use that sequence E6 60 like a jump address.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
This article describes the purpose of CD163:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
It is a receptor for hemoglobin, and is involved in hemoglobin clearance after intracerebral hemorrhage. It is elevated for anyone with myelo-monocytic leukaemia and infection.
http://jvi.asm.org/content/91/...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
and Crake
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thousands of mutations naturally occur in every pig. Adding one is not likely to affect us. And pig lifespan isnâ(TM)t an issue.
Oh the irony that Europe outlawed the GMO fix to their huge porcine problem! Perhaps this event will teach Europe to be much more judicious in their opposition to precisely which kinds of GMO and why. For example, GMO to permit glyphosate on crops is bad not because of the GMO modification per se, but because of consuming glyphosate residue in food.
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!
It's inappropriate to nuke Bayer from orbit. Some of their facilities are near beautiful buildings.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This, totally this. One would be rightfully scared if someone where suggesting that they modify your DNA using CRISPR. That literally means rewriting the code that makes you, you.
But the fears of GMO foods harming consumers are simply hysteria, no different than the uninformed panic of Y2Kers. By what mechanism could these modified organisms could harm you? There isn't one.
Our bodies are very adept at ripping apart the cells we eat into their constituent elements. So long as the organism isn't producing a protein we can't disassemble or pass through, it won't harm us. And because these modified organisms actually receive any amount of safety testing, means you are far more likely to encounter a harmful natural mutation, than you are a harmful GMO.
That said, GMOs do present a real threat, just not to us directly. Just using old fashion breeding techniques we have become very successful growing large monocultures. Vast fields of very closely related plants and animals. That had already put us at risk. Now GMOs promise to deliver dramatically greater yields. If a single corn trait provides superior yields across the board, it will be deployed everywhere. The result being an increased risk of a corn pest or diseases that targets that trait and causes massive crop failures.
For the safety of our food supply, our food sources need to have broad genetic diversity. That actually can include GMOs, but they have to be deployed carefully to prevent monocultures.
I can make the case that, so far, the atomic bomb has kept us from having WW3 as the major powers can't afford that kind of destruction. Better to get along somehow than bomb civilization back to the stone age. Hard to actually "win" a war when all your cities glow in the dark without electricity. The same with bio and chemical. The planet is too small for the consequences. Hell, even Hitler didn't use gas in combat. Only for ethnic cleansing in controlled environments. WWI convinced the military that gas is not an effective weapon against modern equipped armies.