Genetically engineered pets - Progressive Rock Music Forum

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Icarium

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Posted: February 15 2013 at 10:58

lookn at the breaded race horse, its so in breaded and so full of injected testosteron and storides that it is dangerous to eat them, hence the now very emberrasing horse meat in lasagna scandal in Europe

Dean

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Posted: February 15 2013 at 11:06

The reality is already here:

GloFish® http://www.glofish.com/

What?

Barbu

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Posted: February 15 2013 at 11:53

Doctor, Doctor, what is wrong with me?
This supermarket life is getting long...

Failcore

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Posted: February 15 2013 at 16:08

I tend to oppose this kind of stuff just because Mother Nature is such a complex system that the blowback is impossible to predict. There's a potential to destroy entire ecosystems if a scientist puts an A C T or G in a wrong place. It probably would go just fine to genetically engineer pets. But on the off chance something wonky and unforeseeable happens, like the genetic cat's improved immune system causing a rapid adaptation/mutation in bordatella which then jumps the species barrier to humanity and kills half the planet, it could be bad. Obviously an exaggeration, but the potential exists for some weird crap to go down if we start down the Eugenics path, even if limited only to animals. Heck just look at the transgenics stuff going on where the retroviruses used to engineer crops are getting into fauna that interact with those crops, also altering their DNA.

Edited by Failcore - February 15 2013 at 16:13

Ajay

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Posted: February 16 2013 at 00:59

Failcore wrote:

There's a potential to destroy entire ecosystems if a scientist puts an A C T or G in a wrong place.

How? DNA mismatches during replication and recombination have been happening for as long as there's been DNA. Organisms have a DNA mismatch repair system which repairs these errors. When that system fails, the result is cancer, not a genetic epidemic. Here as elsewhere, most mutations are not viable.

Failcore wrote:

Obviously an exaggeration, but the potential exists for some weird crap to go down if we start down the Eugenics path, even if limited only to animals.

Eugenics is the science of improving humans by the application of selective breeding, which is how humans have been improving plants and livestock for thousands of years. Selective breeding leads to monocultures, which, through a lack of genetic diversity in their makeup, are more susceptible to being wiped out by bacteria. The products of selective breeding, therefore, tend to be wiped out by other organisms, not the other way around.

Tapfret

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Posted: February 16 2013 at 03:05

Yes! I can finally have this!

Bandcamp

Gerinski

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Posted: February 17 2013 at 07:19

Ajay wrote:

Eugenics is the science of improving humans by the application of selective breeding, which is how humans have been improving plants and livestock for thousands of years. Selective breeding leads to monocultures, which, through a lack of genetic diversity in their makeup, are more susceptible to being wiped out by bacteria. The products of selective breeding, therefore, tend to be wiped out by other organisms, not the other way around.

As long as you keep a large enough population to ensure a diverse enough gene pool, and take care that mating happens among members of different strains, you can still breed towards an 'eugenic' target without compromising too much the vulnerability of the species, that's what good breeders do.

An associated but different problem however is that breeded species populations tend to be overprotected from their natural predators, bacterial infections, parasites and other diseases, so gradually they loose the features which protected them from these threats, making them vulnerable, but the cause is not selective breeding itself but overprotection.

You can do selective breeding aimed at being more resistant, more successful at defeating predators etc, it's just that that's not what is usually done.