Free Republic

Trees and wildflowers blossom during all four seasons in Kunming, which is known as The City of Eternal Spring because of its year-round mild temperatures. However, it is also home to something much less natural: a laboratory where scientists have been creating monkey embryos with a mutated gene so that, when born, they will age unusually fast. Such experiments are done to study human diseases such as autism, cancer, Alzheimer's and muscular dystrophy.

As the "new biotechnology" -- gene-splicing, or "genetic modification" (GM) -- enjoys ever more varied and impressive successes, the intractable opposition from environmental and other activists has become reminiscent of the old cartoon cliché about the person who year after year inaccurately predicts the end of the world. Activists' antagonism belies the fact that gene-splicing offers enhanced efficiency for a vast array of processes, and proven benefits to both human health and the environment. For example, a single issue of a prominent monthly biotech journal contained three unrelated articles that illustrate a good part of the spectrum of benefits of...

The complicity of many UN agencies in the unscientific, ideological and excessive regulation of biotechnology -- also known as gene-splicing, or genetic modification (GM) -- has prevented critical advances in agricultural and pharmaceutical research and development. ************* As self-appointed regulator-wannabe of much of what goes on in the world, the United Nations has become a profoundly negative influence. While its best known interventions--attempts to attain and maintain international peace and comity--too often are exercises in lowest-common-denominator diplomacy that progresses at a glacial pace, the UN’s essays into public health and environmental protection frequently are wrong-headed, self-serving and disastrous. Underlying the...

Man found raping neighbour's goat Posted Mon, 14 Mar 2005 A man was arrested for bestiality after he was found raping his neighbour's goat at a village in Limpopo on Sunday morning, police said. Inspector Ntobeng Phala said the owner of the goat heard the animal crying from the kraal at Zist Village, Ga-Maleboho, about 200km northwest of Polokwane. He went to see what was going on and "came across this man stark naked, busy having sex with one of the goats". Phala said the man was even more shocked to discover the naked man (42) was his nephew and...

<p>In a twist on the "Little Shop of Horrors," with its blood-eating plant, a Creve Coeur startup is developing a way for tobacco plants to produce human plasma.</p> <p>Chlorogen Inc., which recently set up shop in the Nidus Center for Scientific Enterprise incubator, is commercializing technology that uses the cells in tobacco leaves as a factory for pharmaceutical proteins.</p>