First Pig Monkeys born in China

[CrealCritter]

This makes me so angry.

Exclusive: Two pigs engineered to have monkey cells born in China

Two pig-monkey chimeras were born in China but died within a week. This is the first time live pigs have been created that contain some primate cells

www.google.com

 

[NH Homesteader]

Yep, I heard this the other day. China is messing with things that need not be messed with.

 

[flowerbug]

when i was younger i had more hope for the world and humans in general. there still are some good people out there, but the number of people who just do things for money or because they think it is a good idea is just going to end up doing a lot of other people in some time. think of all the diseases that have hopped to humans from pigs. quite a few. swine flu, etc. so we go along, start messing around this way and start implanting a lot of pig stuff in people. some virus comes along later and people start keeling over. oops. sorry, we didn't know... yeah, right... dumbasses.

same for a lot of things that people are doing with resistant bacteria, how they are raising and feeding animals, viruses, insecticides, fungicides... we're just walking more and more thin lines all the time and some day, well, the price will be paid. we're not above or beyond the biological world. we are of it. we're messing with things we don't fully understand and have no control once they get out and into the world at large. well then perhaps the next big plague will come about from some other completely unknown vector (thawing permafrost is getting my current vote).

i guess being a robot with a mechanical brain seems a safer bet coming along, beam me up Scotty...

*sigh* ok, rant over.

 

[Britesea]

There was a sci fi novel I read as a teenager The Lord's Pink Ocean by David Harry Walker. It describes a Post Apocalyptic earth after scientists dumped a bunch of bacteria specially designed to eat all the pollutants in the oceans. It was a bright pink color and *surprise!* it didn't stop with just the pollutants, it ate everything in the ocean, and then managed to evolve to live on land as well ( I think- this was a long time ago), where *surprise!* it ate everything there. The story was about a couple of families who, through a lucky chance, lived in exactly the right spot that the bacteria couldn't get to because their little valley was protected by bare rocky cliffs that prevented the bacteria from crossing over to eat the last little bit of life on the planet. Even though there was a lot of holes in the premise, I've never forgotten the message from that book.