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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @10:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-goat-on-with-it dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:16AM

    by Gravis (4596) on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:16AM (#268197)

    Do not believe the scary engineered plague doomsday scenarios. They are overblown,

    based on what? you think everyone is just going to agree to not commit genocide? the sad fact is that genocide happens regularly, it's just that it's ineffective. however, i would expect the plague to be more insidious and instead of killing them, it would make them a carrier of the disease and result in infertile offspring. it could go decades before being detected and by then it would be too late for an entire generation.

    a little population reduction would not hurt the planet anyway.

    sure... but losing 85% of the population would be devastating to the human race.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @01:37AM (#268200)

    genocide, ineffective, by what measure? Certainly, in the US and Canada, it was rather effective...