Dumb chicken with Alligator teeth, from Florida of all places?
Posted on 08/22/2011 2:18:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Harvard scientist Arkhat Abzhanov has done what dozens of drunk Miamians living near the Everglades have probably attempted in a cruder fashion at one point or another: successfully mixed the DNA of a chicken and an alligator. Unlike hypothetical local attempts, however, Abzhanov's method did not involve getting a gator to hump a chicken. Unfortunately. Also unfortunately, our streets are now doomed.
Because many modern reptiles and birds evolved from shared ancestors, Abzhanov theorized he could undo evolution by getting chicken embryos to grow reptilian snouts instead of beaks. According to the Daily Mail, Abzhanov injected a small gloop of a protein to alter the chicken's DNA while it was still developing in the egg.
"[The embryo] looks exactly like a snout looks in an alligator," the scientist told the Telegraph.
Ethical rules prohibited Abzhanov from letting the chicken-gators hatch, but he hopes to one day alter the fowl DNA to the point that the result resembles the Maniraptora, a small class of dinosaurs that eventually evolved into modern birds.
This means two things: (1) Jurassic Park is pretty much real now, and (2) the streets of Miami are doomed.
The Magic City already has a problem with chickens roaming the streets, and its home to the type of people who think owning a chicken-gator hybrid would be the best idea ever. What other type of animal could snap at intruders while laying eggs for omelets and flan and such?
Of course, this also obviously means one day our streets will be terrorized by monstrous toothed chickens. We weep for the future of Little Havana but eagerly await the eventual SyFy television movie this will undoubtedly spawn.
Dumb chicken with Alligator teeth, from Florida of all places?
Wellll,
even these creatures will flee Liberty City.
This kind of experimentation will be our undoing. At some point a genetically altered virus or bacteria will be unleashed and destroy life as we know it.
Isn't that the fear? H1N1 will mutate and we die enmass?
Ever had contortionists for entertainment while dining? It was real big in the CCCP.
Very convenient.
Big deal! These guys have been undoing evolution for DECADES! ;)
I thought they changed the name back to "Russia".
Well,,,, you need to Photoshop and alligator snout onto Debbie Washerwoman Schlutz!
I wanna meet her!!!!!
Undo evolution? What a crock.
Isn’t there some requirement to actually learn to write? Or to find out what the scientist’s hypothesis was, before sensationalizing the work? This article tells us the what, but forgets to tell us the why.
I’ve no problem with genetic engineering—it’s done all the time—but to write about it in this way is a crime.
I do have to say that destroying the embryos before they could hatch does rather trouble me. I’ve nothing against using animals in research, but using (and killing) babies of any species bothers me.
That’s certainly one possibility. I fear the ones that have been created to kill.
That’s nothing. In Washington, DC they’ve combined the elephant and the donkey. It’s still a jackass but it produces a lot more manure.
"An effort to recreate the 1918 flu strain (a subtype of avian strain H1N1) was a collaboration among the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City; the effort resulted in the announcement (on October 5, 2005) that the group had successfully determined the virus's genetic sequence, using historic tissue samples recovered by pathologist Johan Hultin from a female flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost and samples preserved from American soldiers.[68] On January 18, 2007, Kobasa et al. reported that monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) infected with the recreated strain exhibited classic symptoms of the 1918 pandemic and died from a cytokine storm[69]—an overreaction of the immune system
Varied ever so slightly but just as deadly and introduce it anywhere in the world and who is the wiser?
I wanna meat her!!!!!
There. Fixed it...
I’m too polite to say it that way,,,,, butt, yeah!
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