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NEWS > SCIENCE > NEW SUPERCHICKENS STILL DON’T HAVE HANDS MAKING REVOLUTION UNLIKELY
NEW SUPERCHICKENS STILL DON’T HAVE HANDS MAKING REVOLUTION UNLIKELY
January 30 2011
Cambridge, U.K. – For centuries, perhaps as long as human beings have been around, we have feared monsters. Many of those monsters were, in the fiction of the story, borne from the depths of man’s greatest fears or the heights of our greatest 
sins. Many of those monsters were, of course, totally fictional, products of unenlightened minds and of an unenlightened age. In today’s world such fictions still exist but are diminished as the ravings of unbalanced mind rather than commonly accepted fact. Still, the fears that created those monsters persist, causing new monsters, real or not, to continue to impact our lives.
While real life monsters such as serial killers and terrorists certainly do exist, and natural threats such as lions and sharks are most certainly still frightening, the scope and scale of fantastical monsters are still very much still in the realm of fantasy. Of course things change and one of the defining characteristics of the human animal is our ability to adapt and our ability adapt the environment around us, occasionally to disastrous consequences. Whether it is destroying rainforests or redirecting rivers, often our best intentions end in disaster and now that we have started to mess with the essence of life, the genome, the unanticipated consequences could escalate dramatically. While that may or may not happen, we apparently now have our first test with a genetically modified super chicken that is virtually invulnerable to disease. 
“Preventing virus transmission in chickens should reduce the economic impact of the disease and reduce the risk posed to people exposed to the infected birds,” said Dr. Laurence Tiley of Cambridge University whose team helped create the super chicken.”The nature of the decoy molecule means it is pretty well inconceivable that could have any detrimental effect on somebody that ate it because RNA is an unstable molecule that is easily broken down by the gut. There is no reason to suggest that these chickens would be unsafe in any way.”
The new chickens will be invulnerable to H5N1 virus, or bird flu, and may eventually develop other traits.
“When it comes to food supplies the onus is on us to prevent or avoid infection. We have a growing number of people to feed on this planet and mass unexpected outbreaks of disease can be disastrous to a population. We have seen that in a number of places throughout the world and as we get bigger the threat will become even larger,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “Altering the DNA structure of food sources to prevent such outbreaks is good, but with chickens we are talking about creatures with brains, small brains perhaps, but brains nonetheless. These aren’t stalks of corn that grow and are plucked. These animals have brains and there are a great number of them. One thing we have learned is that nature breaks out, it breaks free, and considering the way we have treated chickens thus far, we could be in for danger.”
The modifications may also be extended to other animals including turkeys, geese, and perhaps most ominously pigs which are amongst the smartest of all domestic animals.
“There is a threat, a minor threat perhaps, but still one worth considering that these changes could spark a change in the animals that could imbue them with a whole new level of awareness and potential, likely, malevolence that could damn humanity,” continued Poe. “Of course we still have guns, lots of them, and we could see the threat coming well in advance, but one of our greatest issues is that we often don’t see the problems coming until it is too late and that could very well happen with these super chickens.”
Despite the name, the super chickens are still unable to fly.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
NEWS > SCIENCE > NEW SUPERCHICKENS STILL DON’T HAVE HANDS MAKING REVOLUTION UNLIKELY
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