What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs?Soma, Carsten Höller‘s current installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to be offering exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, now the city’s contemparary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped “floating hotel” – a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1,000 a night. (There’s also a raffle giving away free places.)

The twist is that this is meant to be a scientific experiment, in which half the reindeer have been fed “fly agaric” mushrooms, which they consume naturally in the wilds of Siberia. It makes their urine hallucinogenic (some people believe that this is the origin of the story of Santa Claus’s sleigh being pulled by flying, red-nosed reindeers).

The urine is collected by handlers and stored in fridges by the walls, which also hold both dried and fresh fly agaric mushrooms. By day they’re locked, but at night the fridges are opened, allowing people staying over to sample the contents. However, because only half the reindeer are fed the mushrooms, it’s impossible to know which bottles, if any, contain hallucinogenic urine.

Tanja Klein, 28, won a competition to spend the night in the museum with her boyfriend, Sachar Kriwoj, 30. “I wasn’t going to go and drink six bottles of reindeer urine to find out,” says Klein. “I’m not into drugs, I’m into art.”

Höller hasn’t tried the urine, but he has tried the mushrooms. “They’re very unpleasant,” he says, speaking from his home in Stockholm. “And you throw up. The first four times I tried it, I became comatose. Then you wake up, throw up, and you don’t know where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. The sixth time, I started to chant like a Tibetan monk.”

The title Soma comes from the name of the sacred libation drunk by the Indo-Persian followers of the Vedic religion, Hinduism’s 5,000-year-old parent. Its ancient text, the Rigveda, contains 114 hymns to “creative juice”, supposed to offer immortality. The recipe was lost, but in the 1960s researcher Robert Wasson hypo-thesised that soma was based on the fly agaric mushroom.

Höller’s installation sets out to test this hypothesis – and the possibility that art may change perceptions even more effectively than drugs. It takes the form of an experiment set in a playground: from that giant “double mushroom clock” the reindeer move with their antlers, to the “mice square”, based on an actual playground in Paris designed by sculptor Pierre Székely.

One side of the hall is the “test”, the other the “control”. Reindeer on the test side are fed the mushrooms. (“At least in principle,” says Höller, helpfully.) On each side, the reindeer urine is spread on the food of the other animals. From observation posts, visitors watch the behaviour of the canaries, mice and houseflies for signs of intoxication and form their own conclusions. “The experiment is completed in the minds of the visitors,” says Höller. “It’s very unscientific.” In other words, it’s an open question whether the reindeer are even fed the mushrooms at all: the power of suggestion makes you likely to observe something that may not take place.

Experimentation has been a part of Höller’s work since he began his career as an artist while still an agricultural research scientist in the early 1990s. He went on to install 2006′s Test Site, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which allowed gallery-goers to throw themselves down double-helix slides.

Overnight visitors to Soma have reported some strange events. Florian Wojnar, a friend of Höller’s, spent the night in the museum with his 11-year-old son. “He was really excited, because at some point, there were seven reindeer on one side and five on the other. In the morning, we counted again and there were six on each. I never saw them move.”

Dorothée Brill, the museum’s lead curator, says: “As far as we can tell, nobody’s done anything they shouldn’t have.” Staff at the restaurant, however, report that some guests “drink the minibar dry”.

It’s hard to resist the suspicion that the exhibition is intended as a microcosm of society, an allegory for democracy, with extra privileges and more fun for those able to pay. And, if this is an experiment, make no mistake: it’s you in the lab. Meanwhile, those tempted to make a Christmas visit should bear in mind that the Hamburger Bahnhof is closed on Christmas Eve. “The reindeer have somewhere else to be that day,” the museum explained.

• Soma is at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 6 February. Details:somainberlin.org

Dr. David Luke x

Physicists describe method to observe timelike entanglement

January 24, 2011 by Lisa Zyga (PhysOrg.com) –

< More information: S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph. “Extraction of timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum.” arXiv:1101.2565v1 [quant-ph]>

In “ordinary” quantum entanglement, two particles possess properties that are inherently linked with each other, even though the particles may be spatially separated by a large distance. Now, physicists S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph from the University of Queensland have shown that it’s possible to create entanglement between regions of spacetime that are separated in time but not in space, and then to convert the timelike entanglement into normal spacelike entanglement. They also discuss the possibility of using this timelike entanglement from the quantum vacuum for a process they call “teleportation in time.”

“To me, the exciting aspect of this result (that entanglement exists between the future and past) is that it is quite a general property of nature and opens the door to new creativity, since we know that entanglement can be viewed as a resource for quantum technology,” Olson told PhysOrg.com. “The greatest significance of our result is almost certainly in some application that is yet to be imagined.”

Olson and Ralph’s paper, which is posted at arXiv.org, describes how timelike entanglement can be converted into spacelike entanglement using two detectors.

“Essentially, a detector in the past is able to `capture’ some information on the state of the quantum field in the past, and carry it forward in time to the future — this is information that would ordinarily escape to a distant region of spacetime at the speed of light,” Olson said. “When another detector then captures information on the state of the field in the future at the same spatial location, the two detectors can then be compared side-by-side to see if their state has become entangled in the usual sense that people are familiar with — and we find that indeed they should be entangled. This process thus takes a seemingly exotic, new concept (timelike entanglement in the field) and converts it into a familiar one (standard entanglement of two detectors at a given time in the future).”

In their study, the scientists also proposed a thought experiment in which they move a quantum state into the future using timelike entanglement as the resource. They call the process “teleportation in time.”

In the thought experiment, the physicists described two qubit detectors, one of which is coupled to the field in the past and one to the field in the future. First, the detector coupled to the past operates on a qubit and generates information about how the qubit can be detected. The qubit is then teleported into the future, essentially skipping over a middle period of time. Then the first detector is removed and the second, future-coupled detector is placed in the first detector’s spatial location, so that the detectors are separated in time but not in space. After a certain amount of time, the second detector receives the information from the first detector, which it uses to reconstruct the teleported qubit.

The physicists emphasized that there is an important symmetric time correlation that must be followed in order for the procedure to work. If the qubit is teleported at t=0, then the first detector must have operated the same amount of time before t=0 as the second detector operated after t=0. For example, if t=0 is 12:00, and the first detector operated at 11:45, then the second detector must wait to operate at exactly 12:15 in order to achieve entanglement. The scientists also noted that between 12:00 and 12:15, it’s impossible to recover the teleported qubit.

According to the physicists’ previous work, such timelike entanglement should generate a new thermal effect arising from the quantum vacuum (the quantum vacuum is thought to exhibit several thermal effects, including Hawking radiation from black holes, though none of these thermal effects have been observed). The physicists predict that the new thermal effect may be easier to observe than other thermal effects using current technology. If such a procedure for extracting and converting timelike entanglement can be realized, then it could provide a way for scientists to directly observe the quantum entanglement inherent in the space-time vacuum for the first time.

“Entanglement is observed every day,” Olson said. “However, direct observation of entanglement in the vacuum state would be new, and being able to observe it would potentially enable us to use this entanglement as a resource for quantum technology. Since the vacuum state is the closest thing we have to `nothing’ in physics (it is the state with zero ordinary particles around), observing and using the entanglement inherent in the vacuum as a technological resource would potentially give us a way to build quantum devices with just empty space as the most fundamental ingredient.”

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

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Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All

Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he’d spent the day squiring Venter around campus.

By John Bohannon for Wired Magazine

But Sasselov’s thoughts were light-years away. Two months earlier, a Delta II rocket had blasted off into the darkness above Cape Canaveral carrying the Kepler space telescope; Sasselov is on the team using Kepler to hunt for Earth-like planets around the Cygnus constellation—looking, ultimately, for extraterrestrial life. And he was frustrated. Because no matter how much data he and his colleagues collect—gases in the atmosphere, a fingerprint of color on the surface—they’ll never actually see aliens themselves. And that makes it impossible to answer one of the most basic questions of astrobiology: How diverse is life in the universe? If there is life somewhere other than here, does it look like earthly life, with DNA and protein? Or could it run on something else? Venter’s lecture about artisanal bacteria mapped suddenly onto Sasselov’s frustration. Why not just do what Venter was doing? If Sasselov wanted to study aliens, why not just make them himself—or at least the next-best thing? He imagined himself looking at synthetic aliens on a lab bench, “gazing at the other,” as he puts it, “similar to us but not the same.” He uncapped his red pen and scribbled a note: “Arrange a mtg/chat w Jack & GMC,” it read. “Chiral E. coli w GMC and put it into a vesicle w Jack & subject two cultures to planetary environments.”

Translation: Go to the synthetic biologists Jack Szostak and George Church. Ask them to create a life-form that runs on an operating system different from our own, based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. Let these alien cells grow and mutate, and see how they survive. If it worked, those new cells—Church called them “mirror life”—could answer one of the deepest questions about the origin of life, not just here on Earth but everywhere in the universe. They might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn’t have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. They would have to keep an eye on that.

Four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean eon: Volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So in some wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shore of a shallow pond, organic molecules started to replicate. No one knows exactly where or when or how, but life began.

It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today’s living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago.

Since then, life has been busy. At last count, there were as many as 100 million species on the planet, and billions more have gone extinct. And yet, at the most basic level of biochemistry, it has just been more of the same. Every organism runs on the same operating system that LUCA invented. Peel back a cell’s membrane and you’ll find a blur of activity, thousands of chemical reactions taking place all at once. The conductors of this biochemical ballet are the proteins, nano-size building blocks and machines that control the speed and timing of every reaction. From breaking down sugars to clearing waste to repairing the membrane, the unique shape of each protein determines its job, as specifically as a lock to its key.

The LUCA operating system was an ingenious solution to keeping track of all those thousands of proteins. Biochemists call it the central dogma: Genetic material, in the form of a long nucleic acid polymer called DNA, stores a digital record of every protein’s design. Another nucleic acid, RNA, carries the information to a molecular machine called a ribosome, which reads the RNA and strings together amino acids to form the protein. Once the string is complete, the protein snaps itself into the right shape and gets to work.

But there is at least one viable alternative to LUCA: the mirror image of the entire system. Biochemistry is the story of shapes, and this is its strange plot twist. Lots of molecules come in multiple conformations—sticking together the same atoms can sometimes yield different three-dimensional structures that are the mirror images of each other, a property called chirality. Indeed, most of the basic molecules of life—from the nucleic acids of the genome to the amino acids of the proteins—have mirror-image versions. And all cells have enzymes called isomerases, which flip certain molecules into their mirror versions. But for some reason, in the machinery of living things on Earth, one side of the mirror goes almost wholly unused. All of us earthlings, from algae to elephants, have proteins made of left-handed amino acids and a genome of right-handed nucleic acids. (When chemists say handed, they’re generally referring to the direction that polarized light skews when beamed through a pure solution of the molecule.) No one knows why LUCA picked one side of the mirror and not the other.

Theoretically, a cell could be based on “wrong-handed” molecules. Its biochemistry would work just like ours—DNA to RNA to proteins—but it would be completely incompatible with earthly life, its chiral twin. And now, thanks to recent advances in genomics, cell membrane science, and synthetic biology, an ambitious researcher could go beyond theory and build it from the ground up. The tools are here (well, almost here) to make mirror life from scratch.

Photo: Spencer Higgins

Sasselov is the ultimate talent scout for a problem like this. Because of his job at the Origins of Life Initiative, he knew George Church was already trying to build mirror-flipped molecular machines that could translate genes into proteins, and he knew that Church didn’t have anything to put them in. The membranes of earthly cells are built of fat and protein molecules with the wrong chirality. But Sasselov also knew that if there was anyone in the world who could create a membrane that would work, it was Jack Szostak. “They’re both pioneers, but in different ways,” Sasselov says. “They are my favorite people, and my mentors.”

So he brought them both to a café in Cambridge and made his pitch: Build a fully functioning mirror cell made of molecules they themselves would synthesize. Or, to put it another way: Don’t just create new branches on the tree of life, as Venter was doing with his tweaks of existing cells. Instead, create an entirely new tree.

Church went for it immediately. He’d been looking at similar ideas for years. But Szostak didn’t think it would work. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he says, sitting in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital a year after that first meeting. “I’m just saying it requires a lot of hard steps.” Nevertheless, he agreed to support the project.

A soft-spoken 58-year-old Canadian with boyish good looks, Szostak won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on telomeres, the protective end caps of chromosomes. He also created the artificial yeast chromosome, critical to advances in DNA cloning and gene mapping. Lately, Szostak has been working on the origin of those membranes that somehow came to enclose and protect LUCA and every cell since. Inside test tubes in his lab float microscopic, hollow spheres of fat—primitive membrane bubbles. Given the right molecular ingredients, they spontaneously self-assemble, grow, and divide, but they’re much simpler than a naturally occurring cell membrane. The fatty acids have no chirality; their mirror image is the same molecule. So if they were injected with, say, the guts of mirror life, there would be no wrong-handedness to get in the way.

And that’s where Church comes in. He’s 6′5″, with a gnarly beard and a science fiction fan’s optimism. It’s his job to build the genome and protein infrastructure for mirror life. But … could mirror cells actually survive on Earth? “Everything I know from chemistry and physics says that this should work,” he says. Then he gets a little silly: “Hey! I know a great shortcut to get our mirror ribosome! I just need a four-dimensional being to pick me up, rotate me in 4-D, and put me back as my mirror self.”

Szostak still says he’d bet against their success. The cautious scientist in him can’t see how the mirror cell, once full of chirally flipped molecular machinery, will come to life. “Forget about all the technical issues of making mirror ribosomes, mirror peptides, and mirror DNA,” he says. “The complexity of reconstituting a normal cell, or even a simplified cell with 1,000 components, is mind-boggling. You don’t just mix these things up and get it to work.” Still, he agreed that if Church got his part figured out, they could use his membranes to keep everything in. Szostak hopes that even attempting to make mirror life could lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes work and cells evolved. He doesn’t mention the possibility that mirror life could earn someone serious money.

The week that Sasselov met with Szostak and Church to discuss mirror life, a catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Two of its top sellers—medicines for treating the rare genetic disorders Gaucher’s disease and Fabry disease—are proteins. In people with these maladies, fats accumulate in the blood, organs, and brain, causing symptoms from burning pain to kidney failure—unless they get the drugs, produced by genetically modified cells suspended in giant nutrient pools called bioreactors. But that week, a virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down.

It was a hard summer for Genzyme, as well as for the people who rely on its medications. While the company decontaminated its bioreactors, thousands of patients around the world rationed their drug supplies. Genzyme’s stock price dropped 20 percent.

When Church talks about mirror life’s quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. “Viruses can’t touch a mirror cell,” he says. No virus has evolved to infect it. And even if a normal virus did figure out how to get past the membrane of a mirror cell—which usually requires a mechanism that would be thwarted by wrong-handed molecules—the mirror genome would be unreadable to the attacker. Viruses work by hijacking their victims’ genomes, taking over the cellular machinery for making proteins to build more of themselves; a normal virus wouldn’t have any effect on a mirror cell’s factory. This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech.

As it happens, the cell that Sasselov ultimately wants to create—a chiral twin of E. coli—couldn’t make proteins like Genzyme’s cells. It would make the chirally flipped versions, which would almost certainly be useless.

But that’s not the sort of mirror cell Church has in mind. The problem, he says, is that billions of years of evolutionary R&D have made today’s bacterial cells tough, adaptable, and very good at making more of themselves—but inefficient at spitting out designed-to-order molecules in a bioreactor. Church wants a “minimal mirror cell” to produce specific proteins: mirror, normal, and even mixes of the two but far more efficient than a bioreactor full of finicky, genetically engineered cells.

However initial alarm wore off when officers realised the 10 or so bears did not behave aggressively and were in fact docile and tame.

Police believe dog food was used to attract the animals onto the farm in British Columbia.

But they say the bears may have to be put down if they have become accustomed to living around humans.

Two people were arrested in the raid.

The five police who went to the farm near Christina Lake, close to the US border, to dismantle the marijuana plantation were amazed when the bears loped into view.

“They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansveld.

In Canada, feeding bears is illegal as it leads to bears associating food with humans and increases the likelihood of bears coming into towns and cities to look for food.

Conservation officers are deciding the fate of the bears

Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics — testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.

Ice and organic chemicals found on an asteroid back the theory that asteroids provided the Earth with the bare necessities of life

Astronomers have detected a coating of ice and organic chemicals on one of the largest asteroids in the solar system.

From the Guardian

The space rock, called 24 Themis, is roughly the size of Sicily and orbits the sun in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, more than 300 million kilometres from Earth.

Asteroid 24 Themis and two small fragments resulting from an impact more than 1bn years ago. Scientists were surprised to find ice and organic chemicals on the asteroid’s surface. Artist’s impression: Gabriel Pérez/Servicio MultiMedia

The discovery supports the idea that asteroids may have brought plentiful supplies of water and organic material to Earth in the distant past and so set the stage for the emergence of life.

Two independent groups confirmed the composition of the asteroid’s surface after observing the 200km-wide rock using Nasa’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) which sits on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Analysis of infrared light glinting off the surface of the asteroid revealed that some wavelengths were being absorbed by water molecules. Further investigation suggested complex organic molecules were also present. The findings are reported in two papers in the journal Nature.

“The organics we detected appear to be complex, long-chained molecules,” said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee and lead author on one of the studies. “Raining down on a barren Earth in meteorites, these could have given a big kickstart to the development of life.”

The discovery of frozen water on the asteroid has surprised some scientists because the sun warms the surface enough for ice to melt. One possible explanation is that ice in the core of the asteroid is heated into water vapour, which seeps through pores in the rock and freezes temporarily when it reaches the surface.

In the second study, a team led by Humberto Campins at the University of Central Florida timed its observations to take account of the asteroid’s rotation every eight hours and produce a crude map of the surface. It shows that the entire surface of the asteroid is coated with a layer of frost no more than one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick.

In an accompanying article, Henry Hsieh, a planetary scientist at Queens University in Belfast, likened the ice to a “living fossil”: a remnant of the solar system that many considered long gone.

“This is a thin layer of ice. It’s not like going outside on a snowy day,” he told the Guardian. “But we didn’t really think water would survive in the asteroid belt, and certainly not on the surface of an asteroid.”

The discovery is intriguing because it may finally explain how two thirds of the Earth came to be submerged in water, turning a parched rock into a haven for life.

The Earth formed close to the sun as a dry boulder 4.5bn years ago, but asteroids from cooler regions of space would have slammed into the surface for millennia, releasing any water they contained on impact. At the time, asteroids were more numerous and may have carried far more water than has been found on 24 Themis.

Some scientists believe asteroids may have delivered water to every planet in the solar system, but Earth’s rocky surface, size and orbit ensured water condensed and remained on the ground, ultimately forming vast seas and oceans.

“Each asteroid might not have carried a lot of water, but if you strike a planet with a few thousand or million of them, it would gradually build up,” Hsieh said.

The finding of frozen water as far out as the main asteroid belt suggests water might also be spread throughout alien solar systems. “The building blocks of life – water and organics – may be more common near each star’s habitable zone,” said Emery. “The coming years will be truly exciting as astronomers search to discover whether these building blocks of life have worked their magic there as well.”

From the NewScientist by Bob Holmes

The main reason is that the genetic engineering of animals – with the exception of mice – has been a slow, tedious process needing a lot of money and not a little luck. Behind the scenes, though, a quiet revolution has been taking place. Thanks to a set of new tricks and tools, modifying animals is becoming a lot easier and more precise. That is not only going to transform research, it could also transform the meat and eggs you eat and the milk you drink.

The first transgenic animals were produced by injecting DNA into eggs, implanting the eggs in animals and then waiting weeks or months to see if any offspring had incorporated the extra DNA. Often fewer than 1 in 100 had, making this a long, expensive process. “That’s just really inefficient,” says Scott Fahrenkrug, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul.

In mice, geneticists found a way round this problem: producing cells with the desired modification first, before growing entire animals. The researchers alter the DNA in embryonic stem cells growing in a dish, then inject successfully modified cells into embryos. This yields chimeras with a mixture of cells that can be bred to produce mice in which all the cells are modified. It has become cheap and easy: there are now many millions of GM mice in labs worldwide, including extraordinary creations like the “supermouse” capable of running twice as far as normal, “brainbow” mice whose neurons light up in different colours and even mice that do not fear cats.

Saved by the clones

It is not yet possible to grow embryonic stem cells from other animals – except, since last year, rats – so this technique does not work for other species. However, improvements in cloning mean that for many species ordinary cells can be altered, and entire animals then produced by cloning cells with the desired modification.

At the same time, biologists have developed more efficient ways of adding DNA to cells, by hijacking natural genetic engineers such as viruses, and jumping genes capable of “copying and pasting” themselves. All these advances mean the effort and cost needed to produce GM animals has decreased a hundredfold, says Fahrenkrug.

Researchers are also developing far more precise ways of altering DNA, rather than relying on random insertion. One promising new tool is the zinc finger nuclease: a DNA-cutting enzyme attached to a “zinc finger” that can be customised to bind to specific DNA sequences. Zinc finger nucleases allow engineers to cut a cell’s DNA at a preselected spot. When the cell attempts to mend the cut, it often leaves out a few DNA letters or incorporates a few extra ones, so this method can be used to destroy, or knock out, specific genes.

“This will revolutionise genetic engineering of animals,” says Bruce Whitelaw, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, UK. “You can design your zinc finger to cut at a specific site in the genome, and it doesn’t matter what that genome is. It could be pig, sheep, dog, rat – it doesn’t matter.”

What’s more, in theory, if you also add a bit of DNA flanked by sequences matching those on either side of the cut, the cell should sometimes be tricked into repairing the cut by splicing in the added DNA – a process known as homologous repair. In other words, the extra DNA is added exactly where you want it. Rumour has it that researchers at the biotech company Sigma-Aldrich are the first to use zinc fingers to achieve this in animals.

The ability to easily and precisely modify animals will undoubtedly lead to huge pay-offs in research and medicine. Whether it will transform the animal products we consume is less clear.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates GM animals, has yet to approve one for agricultural use. The first candidate, a fast-growing salmon, has been under review for more than a decade, in part because of fears it could affect wild populations. Such concerns would not apply to most farm animals or pets, and last year, the FDA appeared to be preparing the ground for commercial production of GM animals when it published guidance on the steps a company would have to take to obtain FDA approval. The European Union is working on a similar statement, but this is not expected to be finalised until 2012.

Ultimately, the adoption of GM farm animals may hinge on public opinion and the demand for the benefits they can offer. That demand may be felt most urgently in countries such as China, where meat consumption is skyrocketing. “I anticipate that genetically engineered livestock will be first used in China, Cuba and other places around the world, and then come to the US and Europe,” says James Murray, an animal geneticist at the University of California, Davis. “It’ll be the reverse of what you saw with the plants.”

So in 20 years’ time will GM animals be as widespread as their botanic counterparts are now? “Technologically, nothing is standing in our way,” says Fahrenkrug. “Really, the issue is coming down to: what are you going to make?” Some of the likeliest future developments are presented below.

Tasty meat, milk or eggs

Don’t expect a cow to walk up to your restaurant table and offer you a prime cut anytime soon. Nonetheless, genetically modified farm animals could provide us with more nutritious meat, milk and eggs, while causing fewer pollution problems and perhaps suffering less too.

Pigs whose muscles are enriched with omega-3s have already been created, and researchers are exploring similar options with milk. Meanwhile, a team at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has developed a pig that contains a gene for a bacterial enzyme that enables them to absorb more phosphorus from their feed. These “Enviropigs” excrete less than half as much phosphorus as ordinary pigs, thus reducing the pollution problem from intensively reared animals. The pigs have not yet been approved for human consumption, but China has begun importing them for testing. “They’re obviously very interested – they consume half of the world’s pork,” says Scott Fahrenkrug of the University of Minnesota. A similar effort under way in fish could reduce pollution from fish farms.

Animals could also be modified to reduce disease risk. Hematech of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has created a cow that can’t get BSE because it lacks the protein that turns rogue and triggers mad cow disease. Other ideas being tried or considered include making pigs and chickens less susceptible to influenza, and chicken eggs that produce human antibodies to rotavirus, protecting people who eat the eggs against this common gastrointestinal pathogen.

Welfare could be improved, too. Cows have been modified to produce a compound that protects them against udder infections, for example. Engineering could also end the quick slaughter of half of all offspring of dairy cattle and laying hens, whose owners have little use for male animals. This could perhaps be done by inserting genes on a bull’s Y chromosome to cripple male-producing sperm. “The idea has been around for 15 years, but now the efficiency of making transgenics is so high that this problem will be solved within the next couple of years,” says Fahrenkrug, whose group is one of about 10 worldwide working on the issue.

Pets in all colours

The first genetically modified pet to go on sale was a medaka, or rice fish, with a green fluorescent jellyfish gene, launched in Taiwan in 2003. The “Night Pearl”, or TK-1, is sterilised before sale.

It was swiftly followed by the GloFish, a zebrafish with fluorescent genes from jellyfish or corals that has become a popular aquarium fish in the US and parts of Asia, with green, red and yellow versions available and more on the way. Like the medaka, it was a spin-off from scientific research. It is not approved in Australia, Canada, California or Europe, though there have been illegal imports. If released into the wild, it would only have a chance of surviving in tropical regions.

Several years ago, there was talk of genetically engineering cats and dogs that people would not be allergic to. That never happened, but new methods would make knocking out the relevant genes much easier if attempted today.

While there are valid reasons to be concerned about the welfare of GM pets, conventional breeding can also produce deformities, as seen in many dog breeds.

Pharming drugs

Genetic engineering is now a standard technique in the production of many protein-based drugs. Human insulin, for example, has long been produced by cultures of bacteria carrying the human insulin gene. Pharmaceutical companies are eager to turn animals into drug factories, too. That’s because animal cells alter many of their proteins by tacking on sugars and other “decorations”, an extra step that bacteria cannot perform. As a result, many proteins – most importantly, antibodies – work much better if they are made in animal cells.

One such animal-produced protein has already been approved for clinical use by the US Food and Drug Administration. An anticoagulant called antithrombin III is purified from the milk of genetically engineered goats created by GTC Biotherapeutics, a biotech company in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Many others are under development. The Dutch company Pharming has several products in the pipeline, including human lactoferrin produced in cow’s milk. This antimicrobial compound could be added to foods such as yoghurt. Open Monoclonal Technology of Palo Alto, California, has engineered rats to produce human antibodies. Its first product, an anti-cancer antibody for treating lymphoma, should be in clinical trials within two to three years. And Hematech of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has produced cattle that it plans to use to make human antibodies to potential bioweapons such as anthrax and smallpox.

Understanding genes

We have around 23,500 genes. What do they all do, and which gene variants contribute to common diseases? By disabling genes to see what happens, geneticists can work out what they do. Until recently, however, this was possible only in mice, which are not always the best animals to use. Now genes can be “knocked out” in an ever-growing range of animals.

At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Howard Jacob has used zinc finger nucleases to knock out 43 genes in rats associated with increased risk of high blood pressure or kidney disease. Once, knocking out even a single gene in rats would have been enough to earn someone a doctorate. “I’ve now done 43 PhD’s work in nine months,” says Jacob. He is now raising the resulting animals to see to what extent each gene contributes to disease risk.

Tacking diseases

The new techniques are being used to create animals that are a big improvement on the mouse “models” used to study human diseases today. “Not only is this low-hanging fruit, it is easier politically to deal with,” says Scott Fahrenkrug at the University of Minnesota. “Most people are OK with this kind of work. The bigger issues are the agricultural ones.”

For instance, Randall Prather’s team at the University of Missouri in Columbia has disabled the CFTR gene in pigs, which causes them to develop symptoms of cystic fibrosis. Using these pigs, the researchers have shown that the lung inflammation characteristic of the disease in humans develops as a result of bacterial infection (Science Translational Medicine, vol 2, p 29ra31). Earlier mouse models of cystic fibrosis had been unable to resolve this question, because mice lacking the CFTR gene do not develop lung disease.

Fahrenkrug’s team have created pigs with high cholesterol by deleting a protein that mops up LDL cholesterol. Since the heart and arteries of pigs are roughly the same size as those of humans, the modified pigs are a realistic testbed for stents and other devices to keep blocked arteries open.

Xenotransplants

Many people die waiting for organ transplants. Animals could provide an unlimited supply, if only the human immune system did not reject them. So geneticists have been working for years to create pigs whose organs lack the molecules that trigger rejection, such as alpha 1,3-galactosyltransferase. The race is gathering momentum.

Already, a team led by Heiner Niemann at the Institute of Farm Animal Genetics in Mariensee, Germany, has begun testing pig organs modified to be compatible with monkey immune systems. The aim is to get monkeys to survive for 180 days after the transplant – a milestone that would mean they could begin considering trials in humans. So far, however, they have fallen short of that goal. “Occasionally you get the 180 days, but not on a regular basis,” says Niemann.

Meanwhile, Scott Fahrenkrug of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues are working on another major barrier to pig-to-human transplantation: the presence of dormant viruses within the pig genome that could, in theory, reawaken and infect a human recipient. Fahrenkrug has added a gene for a human antiviral protein into pigs in the hope that it will suppress the viruses. If it works, the likely first application will be transplants of insulin-producing islet cells from pigs to humans. “This is personal issue for me,” says Fahrenkrug. “I have friend and family members that have died from the complications of diabetes.”

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist based in Edmonton, Canada