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Most people know that animal breeding has a long history. At least since the Neolithic revolution, and probably in some fashion earlier if you consider that dog-human interaction/co-evolution dates to the Pleistocene. In some ways this is not always a good thing, when you consider flourishing from the perspective of the animal. It is a well known fact that when you keep selecting on one particular trait of an organism, there tend to be “correlated responses.” That’s because traits are interrelated, sometimes in a direct structural sense, and sometimes due to common genes. In nature these correlated responses often prevent excessive deviation from optimal fitness. E.g., if you make mice too big they can’t breed.
But outside of natural circumstances all sorts of things can happen under human tutelage. That’s how we get grotesquely large chickens with breasts so unwieldy that they can’t walk. And, it’s how we get “cute” cats like the Persian breed who are well known to have issues with conventional mastication. The point is that conventional quantitative genetic breeding methods can lead to “monsters,” because there are plenty of mutations floating around in natural populations. There’s nothing exotic, and even before understanding the genetic basis of inheritance humans were engaging in this sort of activity for thousands of years.
All this is something you have to keep in mind when reading articles such as this in The New York Times, Open Season Is Seen in Gene Editing of Animals. Basically, probably triggered by the FDA approval of genetically modified salmon, there is now a lot of discussion around genetically modified organisms of the animal kind. The New York Times piece opens with an interesting twist:
Other than the few small luxuries afforded them, like private access to a large patch of grass, there was nothing to mark the two hornless dairy calves born last spring at a breeding facility here as early specimens in a new era of humanity’s dominion over nature.
But unlike a vast majority of their dairy brethren, these calves, both bulls, will never sprout horns. That means they will not need to undergo dehorning, routinely performed by farmers to prevent injuries and a procedure that the American Veterinary Medical Association says is “considered to be quite painful.”
If you read the whole article thought it is clear that what the new techniques are doing is supercharging the aims and methods of conventional breeding. In many cases there isn’t even going to be any transgene that moves between species. Rather, researchers may want to create specialized knock-outs, which lack gene function.
Bioethicists and animal rights organizations may suggest there are new ethical questions which are confronting us, but there really aren’t. Using traditional breeding techniques humans are already producing animals whose faces barely close in (many flat-faced cats basically have a hair-lip), or which need caesarian section to give birth. We’ve been confronting these questions for a while now, and better genetic modification techniques just amplify them, or, with greater precision allow ways to ameliorate some of the unfortunate side effects by offering more options.
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The “pig organ donor” modifications excite me the most. Growing fully functional organs in the lab (especially kidneys and livers) is still a ways off, but we might be closer to modifying pig organs so they can work reasonably well while “only” requiring that the person take the anti-rejection drugs that any organ recipient usually has to take anyways.
Lol, when I saw the title I thought this was going to be about Turkey the country (in light of the recent news) not the bird. If anyone is curious how the two are linked, when the early American settlers first encountered Turkeys (the bird) they mistakenly confused them with a type of guinea fowl from Turkey (the country), hence they gave them the nickname Turkey.
Interesting article in Chemical and Engineering News a couple months back about animal trials of cancer therapeutics. Many dog breeds have had highly elevated risks of particular cancers accidentally “bred in”. E.g. Scottish Terriers at a 19-fold higher risk of developing bladder cancer compared to other breeds.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i33/Fido-Fetch-Cure.html
Reading on a cell phone, you only see te headline and I thought you were talking about the nation, not the animal.
Wait! can we do that first? I like the present day animal much better.
There may be some informed individuals who do have actual issues with gmo products and have specific issues, but the general resistance is caused by bourgeois Luddism with a strong dose of post 60’s boutique Liberal snobbery. These people are holding up commercially available gmo tomatoes, blast them.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i33/Fido-Fetch-Cure.htmlReplies: @Razib Khan
yes. i have friends who work with dogs for this reason.
well, the broad sentiment though is not strongly political. though the activist/thought leaders on the Left.
“Bioethicists and animal rights organizations may suggest there are new ethical questions which are confronting us, but there really aren’t. (…) We’ve been confronting these questions for a while now, and better genetic modification techniques just amplify them”
I think that in this case quantity trumps everything. Traditional breeding can take decades, even centuries. This kind of research can conceivably frutify in short time, and promote bigger modifications. I’m afraid ethical considerations can have much more impact then.