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China's western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.
Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu's colleagues say. "The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years," his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:08AM
Right, at least the Chinese haven't nuked anyone. About the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Admiral William F. Halsey said [google.com] that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment." Something called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission [wikipedia.org] was formed, to study the survivors. I wonder: was knowledge about the bombs' effects on people a motivation for dropping them?
People were injected [wikipedia.org] with radionuclides, among them plutonium, as part of the Manhattan Project. Soldiers were brought to the vicinity of above-ground nuclear explosions. Civilians exposed to the fallout were provided with disinformation.
About STDs: In Guatemala between 1945 and 1956, U.S. researchers [news-medical.net] deliberately infected [theguardian.com] human subjects with syphilis, gonorrhea and other diseases, to test [nature.com] the effectiveness of penicillin. The victims were not told that they were being experimented upon.
There was also the Tuskegee [wikipedia.org] experiment, in which sham treatment [cdc.gov] was given to people who had contracted syphilis on their own.
Wikipedia has a page about unethical human experimentation in the United States [wikipedia.org].