animal pharming

thedrowner

just covered this in lectures the other day, and it made me start thinking. its a proces im not too familair with, but i think genes are inserted into an egg, in the hope of giving rise to a birth showing the new genes. The usually start off testing on mice and then on bigger animals, such as sheep, cows and pigs. There are many medical products due to come out on the market soon thanks to this technology, such as insulin-i have a list of it in my notes which i'll check up on if anyone's interested.

but the other thing that struck me about it was that it was very very cruel-one of the experiments involved inserting this gene from a rat into a pig, to make it grow bigger (they did the same to mice, and they grew to twice the size) and the pig was so big it had all sorts of physical problems because it couldnt support its own weight.

just wondering what anyone's opinion on this kind of technology is.

[DF]RookieWan

What you are describing is called Trangenesis.

You insert DNA into the nucleus of a fertilized egg and hope it integrates into the egg DNA.

There are numerous examples of transgenic mice used in human health research, f.e cancer, arteriosclerosis etc.

The pig/ rat/ mouse you describe is when people experiment with trangenesis and go over a fuzzy boundry. Some may argue it's bad for the pigs health and this technique should be banned, some would argue there are (ten) thousands of people with all kinds of growth disorders ( dwarfism to name one) and if you can give these people an extra gene encoding for growth, these people might grow out to be of normal length. ( The conspiracy fans might point out, that you can give this gene to people to grow 2.6 meter long humans with extra genes for muscle growth and intelligence and grow super humans.)
The fuzzy boundry I talk about is the line between cruelty to animals and the need for humans to 'erradicate' certain diseases. How far do you want this technique to go?

thedrowner

yeah transgenesis

it started getting me thinking really deeply coz the lecture actually upset me, but then i am very into animal rights. then i started thinking-if it was me who was ill, and these products could save me, i'd probably sacrifice the animals

and when i mentioned it in work it gave rise to this interesting debate where one girl said that we're disrupting the process of evolution because in evoltuion, the strong urvived, and the week died, and we're now able to help the weak

ok, im taking it a bit far now, but its just one of those things that got me thinking. i suppose some of the stuff their doing to the animals isnt too bad, theyre just usig them to produce stuff and it isnt going to affect them majorly. but still should they really be violated like that coz i feel thats what it is.

Nevyn

i think it depends on the reason why the research is being done.
Yes a lot of dogs died in the experiments that resulsted in insulin for Diabetics, before this was done diabeties was a death sentnce.

Then there was the rehus monkey whos pic was used as a reason against animal experimentation. It had electrodes incerted in it's brain and was used to test a drug that becase known as eplium. Yes this was harsh but as My dad has eplisy he would not be here today if not for that drug.

Would you be able so sacrifice a puppy so that Lukiemia could be banished, 1 puppy , 10 puppies a 100 ? so that children and thier families would not have to suffer ?


This is a toughie.

But when it comes down to tampering with the gentics of an animal or plant to suit a comerical demand i disagree,
Creating a square tomatoe so it can be paced tighter and save on space in shipping ?!!!

or in america they have spliced the genes of a goat and a spider.
aparently the milk glads have been tampered so that they will produce silk. This has to be extracted from the milk.
And these goats wont produce milk until they have had a kid (baby goat) but due to the silk now in the milk these kids have to befed cows milk.

The silk is to be used along with nylon and turned into cloth.
Wrong and not needed imho.

thedrowner

well thats what i thought too. in one way, the things they do to the animals aren't really gonna affect them, if its just changing a gene so that it produces a certain antibiotic along with milk

but thats not what the animal is there for in first place, which i feel is violation.