The GM chicken that lay eggs with anti-cancer drugs (story on BBC)

[poultry_admin]

interesting read:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46993649

[kenya]

Wow that is really something, have to wonder though if chickens with human DNA might cause more new human diseases.

[Ontario Chick]

It's all a bit mind boggling, next thought, what happens to the fox who eats the chicken and so on and so on...

[windwalkingwolf]

I think that's pretty cool. If you think it's too mad scientist/Frankenstein-ish, then I suggest you avoid ever needing insulin...it's made by inserting human DNA into E.Coli bacteria. Many anti-cancer drugs are already made from genetically modified organisms such as bacteria and yeast. Personally, I'd much rather get my medicine laid in my breakfast!
I'm more concerned about what they are going to do with all those eggs after the proteins they need are extracted and purified. Thrown away? incinerated? Sprayed on crops? For commercial production, there would be a staggering amount of eggs. And what about the hens when they're done with them? Millions, possibly billions of chickens that have outlived their usefulness every year? There's already no shortage of those in our canned soups, pet food, etc.., and I don't think Chimera Chicken soup would go over very well with consumers, any more than tonnes of chicken ash in landfills.
I also have to take issue with the hinting that these lab chickens will be "pampered" and treated "better than farm animals", meaning better than factory egg farms. Maybe NOW they are, because there's only a few hundred, but when some biotech company is producing MILLIONS, I expect their management practices will have a lot of parallels, because "pampering" chickens is not cost-effective.

[WLLady]

the left over yolks etc are incinerated.....and the spent adult transgenic birds would likely need to be incinerated too with the biosafety laws as well. we used to raise antibodies in eggs. We had chickens housed in an animal quarters at the university. they lived on chopped straw and we were not allowed a roost because of the potential cleaning issues LOL. so i think my farm birds are happier....although the chickens we had for the antibodies didn't know anything different and were perfectly happy AND got sunflower seeds every day.

[windwalkingwolf]

the left over yolks etc are incinerated.....and the spent adult transgenic birds would likely need to be incinerated too with the biosafety laws as well. we used to raise antibodies in eggs. We had chickens housed in an animal quarters at the university. they lived on chopped straw and we were not allowed a roost because of the potential cleaning issues LOL. so i think my farm birds are happier....although the chickens we had for the antibodies didn't know anything different and were perfectly happy AND got sunflower seeds every day.

What a waste...poor people are starving, animal shelters have to beg for food donations, but someone rich with terminal cancer gets to live three months longer. Sigh. Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying, it just seems to me that there must be a better way than burning delicious eggs and meat.

[WLLady]

it depends on how they made the genetic modification. AND if there are levels of interferon throughout the chicken or just in the egg.....if someone has an autoimmune disease and the meat has extra interferon in it that may make an unsuspecting person much sicker. and the advent of crispr technology has shown that these technologies don't always just change the genome where we want, there can be many other things altered as well....and while the DNA is likely metabolized normally when eaten, if the chickens are carrying human interferon, a human protein, you don't necessarily want a human to ingest human based proteins, since we know this can lead to prion disease.....so....um.....yeah, seems like a total waste, but the risk is so unknown at this point i'm good with them being incinerated for the time being!

[Killerbunny]

Yup and look what prions got us!

[windwalkingwolf]

it depends on how they made the genetic modification. AND if there are levels of interferon throughout the chicken or just in the egg.....if someone has an autoimmune disease and the meat has extra interferon in it that may make an unsuspecting person much sicker. and the advent of crispr technology has shown that these technologies don't always just change the genome where we want, there can be many other things altered as well....and while the DNA is likely metabolized normally when eaten, if the chickens are carrying human interferon, a human protein, you don't necessarily want a human to ingest human based proteins, since we know this can lead to prion disease.....so....um.....yeah, seems like a total waste, but the risk is so unknown at this point i'm good with them being incinerated for the time being!

I know, I know, but waste makes me grumpy, and chickens and eggs are precious to me . If the eggs in the article eventually prove to be a commercially viable source of drugs, the amount of meat and eggs that just gets burned, well, burns me.

Yup and look what prions got us!

It got us Laughing Disease, FFI, GSS, CJD and (probably) ALS, but I'm 99.999>% certain that my father (died of Lou Gehrig's in '86) never ate GM chicken eggs. Or people proteins of any sort. Hey...wait a minute...a lot of vaccines are gmos and contain egg protein... (looks up scholarly articles) ok, I may be too old for that stuff (as if trying to learn chicken genetics didn't hammer that into my head)...I am NOT going back down that rabbit hole. I will be content to leave that stuff to you smarter people that are paid to nitpick about stuff like prions and food safety, and I will have to be content to feel bad about eggs being destroyed in a fire instead of being on my breakfast plate
Still, I am excited about this. To oversimplify again, I LOVE LOVE the idea of a GM chicken laying eggs that medicine is extracted from. Growing food (and medicine) is a passion of mine, and I am finding that the disconnect in society between growing food, and the end result on a plate, is also growing. The PETA vegan idiots that believe that the rich are going to just magically feed 7.5 BILLION people with "death-free" non-GM legumes and grains are living in a la-la land ever more disconnected from reality, and it drives me 'round the bend.

[WLLady]

hm...i'm going to contest the ALS is a prion disease.....that's my field of study. and it hasn't been proven yet. YET. and everything that i have studied to date says it's not....however.....LOL. So a lot of vaccines are produced in eggs which is why they have some egg proteins in some of them. depends on how they purify the dead/attenuated viruses after growing. and generally speaking EATING a gmo is not bad for you because your body destroys and denatures the proteins (of course, misfolded resistant prion proteins are another story-that's how some people can contract CJD from infected cow or sheep) and all the DNA etc....so....
at least the chickens can lay the eggs (hopefully for more than a year) in these companies and live happy lives. IF they could introduce the gene just into the oviduct/ovary then i don't see why the chickens couldn't be processed afterwards, because that part is removed in processing. i'd just worry about the potential for circulating TNF or interferon or whatever it was, that may be in the chicken that might be therefore in the meat and people that have autoimmune disease.....i always wondered why someone didn't make a cholesterol free egg just by knocking out the cholesterol depositing machinery in the ovary....and i actually have a molecular biology plan for how it could be done....but.....i don't have a lab in my basement.....lol