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Gene Editing 'Would Allow Us To Create Hardier Farm Breeds' (theguardian.com) 91

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Leading UK researchers, vets and farmers have urged ministers to free livestock science of unnecessary legal curbs as the country prepares, post-Brexit, to ease gene-editing rules. Such a move would allow the creation of new breeds of animals resistant to disease, heat and drought, they argue. From a report: The government is expected to propose easing gene-editing restrictions in the near future to enable the creation of new generations of crops. However, the group -- which has written to the environment secretary, George Eustice -- worries there is less interest in using the technology to create new breeds of pigs, cows and poultry.

"It is every bit as important that we use the enormous power of gene editing to create breeds of animals that are resistant to disease, droughts and heatwaves as it is to fashion new crop varieties," said Professor Bruce Whitelaw of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute. "This is particularly important as global warming intensifies and we strive to ensure we are protected against future outbreaks of zoonotic diseases." The value of gene editing in this latter field is shown by work carried out at Roslin and Imperial College London, where scientists have identified a gene that may confer resistance to influenza. "We can now think about using gene editing to create breeds resistant to avian and swine flu, and so curb outbreaks on farms, while also reducing the risk of triggering future pandemics in humans," added Whitelaw, one of the letter's signatories.
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Gene Editing 'Would Allow Us To Create Hardier Farm Breeds' More

Gene Editing 'Would Allow Us To Create Hardier Farm Breeds'

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  • To be fair... (Score:4)

    by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:29PM (#61844885)

    I would rather see hardier human breeds, and would be happy to volunteer once you get the anti-aging stuff nailed down

  • Here come the pigoons (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rilister ( 316428 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:38PM (#61844929)

    Chalk up another point to Margaret Atwood on the 'this really is the unspeakably grim future that we are inevitably heading towards':
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    'Oryx and Crake' really is a terrific dystopian sci-fi novel and I'm very much looking forward to it coming to TV. The post-apocalyptic landscape is infested with pigoons, a genetically-developed pig-baboon farm animal that goes feral and hunts down humans in packs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Dystopia aside, at least we get SpiderPig.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suss ( 158993 )

        Or a ManBearPig rampage.

      • Or Spider-goat

        BioSteel was a trademark name for a high-strength fiber-based material made of the recombinant spider silk-like protein extracted from the milk of transgenic goats, made by Montreal-based company Nexia Biotechnologies, and later by the Randy Lewis lab of the University of Wyoming and Utah State University.

    • Reality is becoming dystopian enough, thanks.

    • Because sci-fi has such an impeccable track record of predicting outcomes.

      • Science fiction (or SF for short - nobody who really likes SF ever calls it "sci-fi") is not about predicting the future. Inasmuch as it has a relationship with the real world, it is more a matter of suggesting possible scenarios. "What if...?"

        You may be confusing SF with the kind of computerised mathematical modelling that has become so popular (and profitable) of late among alleged scientists.

    • Thanks for that. Just ordered a copy. A Handmaid's Tale is great but I had not looked into her other work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Not really sure why genetically engineered farm animals is some how inherently dystopian, particularly for a world that needs to figure out a way to feed an extra 2 billion people sustainably by 2050 and let's face it, most people love eating meat.

      Is it just an "ew" thing like with meat substitutes or eating crickets?

      I mean, even that book premise sounds crazy to me. Who would farm animals that are so dangerous to humans to begin with?

      • Well, I didn't go into what the apocalypse is in the book because that would be a spoiler. But it's not the invention of transgenic farm animals, it's just a complicating factor after all the shit goes down.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          Well sure, that makes sense. Regardless though, one of the first things our ancestors did when breeding animals for domestication was to breed for passivity. Why would we introduce new ones that were aggressive? Seems like any advantages provided would be outweighed by the obvious difficulties such aggression would provide.

    • As the 21st century unfolds, Fermi's Paradox looks less paradoxical every day .

      If all intelligent species develop the way ours has, it's not in the least surprising that none of them survive for long after discovering nuclear fission and fusion and - especially - genetic manipulation.

      It's like some horrible SF version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where a cruel, mentally retarded child somehow gets into God's workshop and starts playing around with the most powerful tools.

      • I share your anxiety on this point...
        Reading around the topic, I found this sobering Wikipedia article called 'The Great Filter.' Assuming that the answer to Fermi's Paradox is 'they all died,' what is the inevitable step in the development of a civilization that leads to this extinction? This is 'The Great Filter' - it might be genetic science, or fission, or bioweapons, or AI, or gray goo, or a combination...
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
        It's not good news: "On the other hand, if we find that life is c

  • Help us, Ian Malcom (Score:3)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:46PM (#61844973) Journal

    You're our only hope.

    Gee, the lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me.

  • And Gene Wilder editing would allow us to produce more excellent comedy performers.

    It is a risk, but I am all for it.

  • I fear we're not looking enough at the big picture.

    All of this genetic tinkering for plants and animals is geared towards improving output by volume rather than by quality, usually without concern to long-term health consequences (and not just the monoculture risk). I'd love to see research that was more concerned with the well-being of the humans that consume them and of the animals' quality of life. A little "waste" is okay.

    • Health has been a focus of some GMO plants. "Golden Rice" is probably the best example. From Wikipedia:

      Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice.[1][2] It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency causes xerophthalmia, a range of eye conditions from night blindness to more severe clinical ou

      • imo the best advance would be non-animal based meat so we could get rid of the vast majority of domesticated animals and let the bio-diverse wild animal communities use their resources

    • There are a few projects genuinely intent on doing good (hypoallergenic peanuts?) but the vast majority is about profits and steers production further toward monocultures and channels revenue towards those who sell seeds or piglets or whatever, even if governments originally funded development in universities. I'd be less resistant if anything developed automatically went into the public domain, no ifs, ands, or buts.

    • I couldn't agree more, Khopesh. One syndrome that seems to contribute to that kind of foolish idea is that everything is "fungible" - one of those ghastly words that economists introduced. It means that, just as one bun or car or TV set is supposedly interchangeable with any other (as of course they never are), one cow or pig or chicken or fish or vegetable is as good as any other.

      The concept of fungibility is a boon to economists and traders, as it makes their lives much less complicated than a world where

  • and then someone breeds raptors!

  • they don't create anything that can fly or swim long distances, I think I'm OK with that.

  • We've barely scratched the surface of how life even works, and now someone wants to start modding farm animals? What could possibly go wrong? /s

    • now someone wants to start modding farm animals?

      Humans have been modding farm animals for ten thousand years.

      • Breeding animals for particular traits through normal reproduction is in no way shape or form the same thing as directly manipulating their DNA and you damned well know it.
        • Yeah! The old-fashioned way our grandparents used is best!

          Yeah, it produces a lot of animals that aren't really ideal for the objective. Plus the difficulty of getting it to breed true (hell, mules don't breed at all, much less breed true).

          And then there are the things that screw up the local ecology in a big way (rabbits in Australia? Great idea, right?).

          But all those successes aside, the old-fashioned way is just...better!

          • They were cross breeding jackass - not introducing a brand new characteristic into the species.

            Look it up sometime and then you can pull your head out of your ass.

            FYI the genetic modifications are for factory farming for higher yields. Moron.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by dfghjk ( 711126 )

            And there's the false choice.

            The problem with posting insight on /., yes the people really are that stupid.

        • Breeding animals for particular traits through normal reproduction is in no way shape or form the same thing as directly manipulating their DNA

          Indeed. In many ways, it is worse.

          With direct editing of DNA, the changes are specific and targeted.

          With the old-fashioned methods of inducing mutations with radiation or chemicals, the changes are random and more likely to have unintended side effects.

          • *sigh*
            What part of 'we don't really know what the ACTUAL FUCK we're doing' are you not understanding?
            Has tradtional brreeding methods produced dangerous changes? Or food animals that are toxic to humans in ways no one foresaw? Or diseases that killed entire populations of animals, or one that was communicable and deadly to humans? 'Law of Unintended Consequences'? All of theset things are possible because we don't really have a fucking idea what we're doing. It's just more arrogance and stupidity.

        • Yeah, hybridization and cross breeding is a far worse way of manipulating the DNA.

        • A thousand times this. I wish I could mod parent to 5, sticky-note it to the top of every discussion on this topic ever, and tattoo it on the insides of the eyelids of all the science-bros who lambaste us as anti-science for not wanting to blindly jump off this particular cliff.

          I knew, just KNEW that this stupid dissembling semantic argument would be made. It happens every time. I'm perfectly willing to see proponents of gene-editing defend their stance, but not like this. Stop it. STOP NOW. You do yo

          • Just because your favorite sci-fi movie predicts a disaster, doesn't mean there will be a disaster.

            You go ahead and boycott GMO. The rest of us will reap the benefits without you. Don't forget your cross and your bible on the way out.

            • Utterly predictable kind of reply--set up a Bible thumping straw man, and tear it down. If I could let you "reap the benefits" without me, I would; but we've already had corporations contaminating non-DGM fields and then suing the farmer. We've already had Starlink corn not approved for human consumption getting in to the food supply. We can't even control the basics, or protect fundamental human rights and we're just getting started. Ask a Mexican farmer about the genetic diversity of their maize.

              We

              • we've already had corporations contaminating non-DGM fields and then suing the farmer.

                Bullcrap. No farmer has ever been sued for unintentional cross-pollination.

              • It isn't even 'control', it's just 'unintended consequences'. They're driven by profit and throw caution out the window.
            • Here's the problem, buddy: no one can 'boycott' GMOs of any kind because once they're released into the world they proliferate into all the non-GMO regardless of any precautions you take. So I don't even bother wasting energy worrying about GMO plants because they already shit the bed on that, it's already out there and being spread by pollinators, so it's in everything now anyway. If if fucks us up, it fucks us up, I just hope it doesn't fuck ME up before I die of old age. But now they want to start fuckin
      • The natural way. Nature has built-in inhibitors, the mad scientists don't.

        • Course they have inhibitors. It's called an ethics board.

          • LOL

            *ba-dum TISS*

            Those "ethics boards" don't even attempt to think scientifically or be aware of their own social conditioning.
            It's just "what does my belly tell me the crowd will boo at"?
            So mostly religious nonsense and cultural pseudo-morals that have actively been prevented from being checked against reality. Like doing actual scientific studies on questions like: What are the resource flows? (space-time, matter-energy, work-information) How big is the upper bound on the devation from a perfectly equal di

          • Rules of scientific ethics:
            1. Don't do anything which will get you or your co-workers imprisoned.
            2. Don't do anything which will get you or your organization sued.
            3. Don't do anything which will summon an angry mob and make everyone hate the organization.

            If you're going to carry out painful animal experiments, keep it to species that don't have a recognizable face.

        • Nature has built in inhibitors? Haha, assuming that is true .. which it isn't. Then why is it allowing itself to get edited?

    • If we only did things we were 100% sure of the outcome, I guarantee none of humanity's achievements would have occurred. Did Columbus have any idea of what would happen if he encountered a civilization that might follow him back to Europe? Did Gutenberg have any idea what unleashing printing would do? We know a hell of a lot more than our ancestors who did cross-species hybridization with plants -- did they have any idea of how the different species of grain plants genes would interact?

  • Hardier farm animals can wait. How about using this instead to fix whatever is wrong with the part of the human gene-pool that produced anti-vaxxers?

    • Like the leading Democrats were before election?

      ---

      Trump, who has accused Biden and his campaign of stoking doubt among Americans about the efficacy of a vaccine, told reporters at the White House later that Biden should stop promoting âoeanti-vaccine theories.â

      âoeTheyâ(TM)re recklessly endangering lives. You canâ(TM)t do that,â said Trump, who predicted at least 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine could be distributed by the end of 2020.

    • I'm sorry but that would mean the end of the USA.

      Everyone who /believes/, instead of experiencing reality, concluding patterns, predicting events, and acting accordingly, is on the same level as anti-vaxxers. Just not triggered in the right wound yet.

      And as far as I know, that's pretty much all of you guys. (Among, sadly, most of the world too.)

      Be careful what you wish for.

      The solution is simply education though. As in: Giving people the opportunities and abilities to actually understand the world and how i

  • Anybody thinking about gene editing to achieve a particular outcome (and no other outcomes) is not wise. Evolved systems (eg. humans) are fundamentally different from designed systems - it's not possible to understand all the effects of a gene edit.

  • ... to gene editing.
    In lifeforms that will spread in the wild.

    What could possibly go wrong!

    (And don't even try to act like I'm against genetics. I'm against handing it to people with zero morals or forethought and not even remotely the wisdom to handle it properly.)

  • Would eliminate many of the issues you are talking about. When you pack animals in like sardines, what did you expect would happen.
  • Then we would all get a leg for Sunday lunch!
  • If this is the first step to the sentient bovine creature that wants to be eaten and can express that, then who am I to argue?

  • Even in the human genome, there are a lot of interesting anomalies, things we should be able to at least experiment in adding to chimpanzees.

    There is a man with the genetic capacity to run for ever. He just does not get lactic acid build up.

    Then there are people that can see additional colors, they have 4 types of color detecting 'cones' rather than 3.

    There are several special genes that expand how many things you can smell and taste. A common one is the 'supertaster' gene.

    There are a few genes that are k

  • Animals are very inefficient (Score:3)

    by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @05:39PM (#61846171)

    Animals only convert about 10% of feed calories to useful human consumption calories.
    Much better to just synthesize the proteins, etc. directly and bypass the ecological disaster that is the livestock industry.

    Before you say "But I'll never eat synthetic food"... you won't have a choice. Most synthetic food will be sold "business to business". That is, it will be manufactured by one large corporation and sold to another large corporation that makes "food". It will be incorporated into the manufactured food that you buy in the store and given some plausible name so you never will know. (You must know by now that most of the food in grocery stores is manufactured by a few large corporations with multiple mystery ingredients. This will just be the next step in that process.)

    I predict that synthetic food will make livestock obsolete within 10 years.

  • > Such a move would allow the creation of new breeds of animals resistant to disease, heat and drought, they argue

    The animals, resistant to most pathogens, until the remaining animals develop resistance. Such pathogens could be then passed onto humans. Also, who would own the progeny of the animals, the gene owners?

  • Hardier than Corona ?

  • Creating monocultures, even if you think they are hardier, guarantees that some day some thing will come along that wipes them all out at once.

  • "Could" is the operative word here. When you start screwing around with genes there is no telling what the unintended consequences may be.

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