Posted on 01/02/2007 7:31:55 PM PST by indcons
dozen calves that don't have prions - the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease.
The research project is reported in the online journal Nature Biotechnology.
Preliminary tests suggest that the brains of the genetically engineered calves are immune to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). The scientists verified this by trying to infect post mortem brain tissue from two of the 20-month old calves with prions, but the tissue remained healthy.
This follows a long process using donor cattle cells in which the gene known to trigger the production of prions was "switched off". The cells were then used to create cloned calf embryos, of which 12 grew to term and were born free of prions. Three have been killed and used for brain tissue analysis, and the other nine have been injected with BSE to see whether they develop the disease or whether, as the scientists hope, they are immune since the gene responsible has been switched off. This could take several years since BSE can lie dormant for some time.
If the results are successful, the path to producing cattle free of BSE is not straightforward and could be years away. FDA approval must be sought before genetically engineered animals enter the human food chain. And, the current technology is not focused at food production but drug development.
This research is sponsored by a US biotech company, Hematech Inc, based at Sioux Falls in South Dakota. Representatives of the company suggest that BSE-immune cattle would be of great benefit to the production of human medicines like antibiotics, a field where thousands of cow embryos are used every year.
And the results of this research could also benefit the study of other diseases involving prions.
The risk to humans from animal BSE is currently very small in the US, following the scares that occurred in Europe, and the UK in particular, after which meat production and slaughtering regulations were tightened up. Also to reduce spread of the human version from human to human the FDA introduced strict regulations on blood donation by members of countries with a history of BSE.
In the last 20 years under 200 people worldwide have died from the human equivalent of BSE, thought to have come from eating infected animal products or from receiving transfusions from infected blood.
If BSE prions get into the human body they can trigger the human equivalent of mad cow disease - variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - vCJD. The prions cause havoc in the brain because they make the brain's protein tissue form into unnatural patterns, gradually damaging the links between brain cells, the cumulative effect of which is a gradual wasting away of the brain. vCJD can take years to show symptoms and is invariably fatal. The only sure test on a live person is by sampling brain tissue, a very risky procedure.
Research into prions is still quite young, and scientists remain puzzled by exactly what controls their normal and abnormal behaviour and how the bad ones get "switched on" once they are in the body.
The remaining genetically engineered calves will no doubt be closely watched for any unexpected side-effects of being prion-free.
We're doomed, indcons. Doomed, I tell you.
:-)
Could it eradicate homosexuality?
LOL
Good luck, FRiend
There's a theory that it came from the feed that the infected cattle ate. A while ago, I read that the disease spread from sheep carcasses to living cows because the former were being fed to the latter.
Don't know if this is true and I'll be happy to learn more.
The first sentence that got truncated should read as follows:
"Scientists from the US and Japan have bred a dozen calves that don't have prions - the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease....."
My apologies.
This'll be interesting. I wonder if the third world starvelings and/or the Luddites will enjoy their BSE beef as they avoid GMO, irradiated and cloned foodstuffs.
I note elsewhere that some are arguing to have cloned animals labeled GMO. How much more confusing can THEY try to make it?
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns. NRA KMA
Being in IT, I know that messing around with code you don't know, or fully understand, can lead to all sorts of unforeseen problems. I suspect that genetic code is no different, but the consequences could be much more dire.
I mean, look at how much trouble Micro$oft has keeping Winders secure, functional & disease free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_Spongiform_Encephalopathy
As always, take a large grain of NaCl with a wiki anything. This one has some truth in it, especially on the spread of prions. But it makes no effort to separate the live/infectious from the not-live/contact transmission paradigms. Prions are like getting sick from touching a coin.
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns.
You're right. Genetic code is no different. Don't go messing in the kitchen, if you don't know what you're doing.
No, mad cow disease is perfectly natural. But that makes it good, huh? Why, it could be God's Judgment against...well, against something, and by gum, it would be downright sacriligeous to interfere with that. Right?
Wonderful News.
Now, I wonder, will the elite allow the serfs to benefit?
A group of FReepers have downloaded Folding@Home from Stanford University to help advance the research into disease such as Alheimer's, cancer, diabetes and CJD.
Please feel free to pop over and catch up on the latest thread, and even download the program to run in the background. It is a very good distributed application with strong FReeper involvement. There are other FReeper DC project but I believe that this is the largest of them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1760898/posts
/Shameless Vanity
Thanks for your time!
How is mad cow disease spread?
Believing that one can mess with Mother Nature has gotten us in a lot of trouble over the years. One example is Kudzu, imported from Japan in the '30's to control soil erosion. Now it threatens to blanket the South with inroads into the midwest. Different species of fish from South America and elsewhere are crowding native fish out. Snails from other countries are clogging up water filters, hence rivers. We didn't have sparrows til some idiot many years ago introduced the English sparrow, as a pet I guess.
Messing with Mother Nature can carry a high price. Environmentalists will be the death of many species with all their bleeding heart do-goodism.
Through offal-based feed, through feces, and through blood- or endocrine-based IV medications. In humans, it is also passed through blood transfusions.
This is the part which I was inquiring. If God only wants us to eat animals which chew cud, and He does not want us to boil a calf in its mother's milk, then it is most logical to assume that He does not want us to feed ground up cow flesh to cows (making them cani-bulls :)). Again, had we followed God's rules, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with, no?
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