Now we can create novel organisms in years, months, and even days."Īnthes is an MIT-trained science writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York with her dog, Milo. It took thousands of years to turn wolves into dogs. As Emily Anthes writes in Frankenstein's Cat, "selective breeding was a blunt instrument, one that required us to transform animals using educated guesswork, breeding desirable hounds together, over and over again, until a puppy we liked squirmed into the world. Today's biotechnologies offer the power to do what other methods could not-and to do so efficiently.
Since infants who drink breast milk for the first thirteen weeks of life are less likely to have gastrointestinal problems, the UCD researchers are attempting to engineer goats that produce milk containing higher levels of lysozyme, an enzyme that is especially concentrated in human breast milk. That's no mean feat since more than 2 million die each year from those causes. China's Fudan University hopes eventually to create 100,000 strains of genetically modified mice, while scientists at the University of California, Davis, are using the "tools of pharming" to reduce the number of children who die annually from diarrheal diseases.
Electric Green, Sunburst Orange, Cosmic Blue, and Galactic Purple are a few of the possible color choices.Īlthough GloFish may be America's first genetically engineered pets, they are far from the first animals to be manipulated biologically. Instead, GloFish are genetically engineered by adding a bit of sea anemone DNA, causing them to radiate under black lights.
What makes them glow so brilliantly is not a result of millions of years of evolution or even selective breeding by enthusiastic collectors. Designer animals are here! GloFish, for instance-a variety of zebrafish native to South Asia-are a highly marketable commodity in pet stores around the country.
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