blog.bioethics.net
a Nature Top 50 science blog from The American Journal of Bioethics
Entries from blog.bioethics.net tagged with 'animals'
Swine Reputation To Be Saved! Pig Stem Cells On The Way!
Just as swine flu is about to reach pandemic proportions according to the WHO, pigs are about to have their reputations saved by a recent discovery by Chinese researchers who say that cells from adult pigs have the ability to be coaxed into any type of cell in the body,... (read the rest)
Moooove Over Elsie. We Know Your Entire Genome Now.
The Saint Louis Post Dispatch says that the sequencing of the cow genome is going to lead to more milk and better beef, but all I can say for sure is that it certainly is an interesting step forward in the world of genomics. Secretly I'm hoping for healthy... (read the rest)
Goats: Not Just for Making Feta Cheese and For Petting Zoos Anymore
Researchers have finally done it. Engineered a goat to save lives. On Friday, the FDA approved a genetically engineered goat that is able to produce in its milk (not for feta cheese making, mind you) a drug that will save the lives of patients born with a rare hereditary deficiency... (read the rest)
With 47 Million Humans Uninsured, Can We Really Ask About Health Insurance for Dogs?
Well, the Houston Chronicle did today in the article, "Should You Get Health Insurance For Your Dog?" The justification: "Dog owners can expect to pay a few hundred dollars a year for routine veterinary care, but a serious illness could send the bills soaring into the thousands." According to the... (read the rest)
Stick with the Turkey, Stay Away from the Chicken
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have reported that those giant trucks flying down the highway with chickens stacked many crates high are actually a hazard to our health. According to HealthDay News (via the Washington Post), these tractor-trailer trucks full of chicken and, um, the... (read the rest)
PA Pooches Get Health Care, But Their Human Counterparts? No Way!
While lawmakers in Pennsylvania are cracking down on "puppy mills" and other unhealthy conditions for the care and raising of dogs in the Quaker State, it seems that these same legislators just couldn't find it in them to forge a consensus about how to provide care for 20,000 or more... (read the rest)
You Read It Here First...Booger's Back!
Last week on our website, you saw the news story from the Baltimore Sun about the woman, Bernann McKinney, who cloned her dog, Booger, to the tune of $50,000. One doesn't even know where to begin to comment on the ethics here: resource allocation, health risks to the animals, and... (read the rest)
Woof!
You couldn't make a story like this up. Lou Hawthorne, the guy who was previously involved with an operation called Genetic Savings and Clone (that's him on the right with cloned dogs), teams up with Hwang Wook Suk -- the central figure in one of modern science's epic frauds --... (read the rest)
"Victimless" leather, and yet, there's still regret
Here's something you don't see every day -- or, you know, ever: a living coat made out of mouse stem cells. Yep, really. The coat was part an exhibition at MoMA called Design and the Elastic Mind. Here's how the piece is described on MoMA's site: A small-scale prototype of... (read the rest)
Toward test tube meat
PETA recently announced it would award $1 million to the first person who develops commercially viable in vitro chicken meat during the next four years. They've set the bar pretty high -- the meat has to have "a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and... (read the rest)
Cloning is cheaper when you buy in bulk
Odd info nugget from an AP story about breeders of fighting bulls turning to cloning: cattle cloning at ViaGen in Austin gets cheaper the more clones you buy. It's $17,500 for the first calf, $15,000 for the second, $12,500 for the third and $10,000 a calf when you buy four... (read the rest)
Art Caplan on food from cloned animals
In his latest column for MSNBC.com, Art calls for transparency in the marketing of food from cloned animals: The Food and Drug Administration has spoken: meat, milk, cheese and other products from cloned animals are safe to eat. And the federal agency won't require any special labels identifying these products.... (read the rest)
Drawing the line on genetically engineered pets
Catching up on the last little bit of year end list-making, here's Wired's "Top 10 New Organisms of 2007." The collection includes quite a few organisms that you might call useful or productive -- vaccine-producing button mushrooms and mice that model schizophrenia, for example. But a few of the... (read the rest)
About those glow in the dark cats
As Kelly posted earlier, the South Koreans have cloned cats with RFP genes. A side-effect is that the cats glow under ultraviolet light. Sure, there's probably a legitimate scientific reason for these experiments (it proves that the manipulated gene was passed on to the clone), but the cynic in me... (read the rest)
Weekend reading
NYT: A Drug Maker's Views of What Ails Health Care Via Art Caplan comes this interview with the chief executive of Novartis: Q. Is the pharmaceutical industry part of the cure or part of the problem? A. If you look at the mortality rates from hypertensive heart disease or stroke... (read the rest)
What are those beady little eyes watching?
Via the Washington Post and the BBC, apparently, comes a story that's just too good to check. The Post cites a BBC translation of an article in the Iranian newspaper Resalat: "A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian]... (read the rest)
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