Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years.

http://www.news.com.au/world/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-dairy-cows-to-produce-human-breast-milk/story-e6frfkyi-1226071579075

by wisty • 15 years ago

25 42 15 years ago

news.com.au

teyc• 15 years ago

Great. What could go wrong?

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

Apart from the usual "Oh no, we're playing God" kneejerk reactions, do we really know enough about genetic modifications to be making GM foods available?

We barely know enough about why our own medicine works (frequently only having a hazy idea, really), should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?

mseebach2• 15 years ago

Medicine is a great example. Do we really need to know everything about, say, penicillin or sundry vaccines to know that it's a good thing we have them?

If GM human milk can help babies that don't have access to enough actual human milk to be healthy in their infancy, then what more do we need to know? (OK, rhetorical device. Obviously it needs to be tested - but we don't need perfect understanding of everything to know that healthy babies >> unhealthy babies.)

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

Oh, definitely. However, I'm not sure if testing shouldn't be proportional to the complexity of the thing we're testing. Shouldn't we study the long-term effects of GM food before deeming it safe for consumption? We know already that it's not poison, but we've had long-term issues with GM food already, no?

ahi2• 15 years ago

There is no shortage of human milk. For every mother that can't produce enough there's a mother dumping extra down the drain. Back when we had functional communities these problems sorted themselves out.

zeteo2• 15 years ago

>should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?

The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing" with it. If people always chose to stay away from things they didn't understand completely and were potentially deadly, we'd have never had fire, sailing ships, chemistry etc. Take the total number of people in history who died in house fires and shipwrecks: it's much, much higher than in the case of GM. (And, to be completely fair, we should actually consider those numbers as proportions of the total world population at the time.)

nakkiel5• 15 years ago

> The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing" with it.

Agreed. Shall we mess with it in a closed environment or in our stores? Put another way, the human race has just built its first whip, do we let all humans board or do we check if it actually sails first?

nakkiel5• 15 years ago

For the record, Dolly was "born" in 1996.

How about a good old: there are things we don't fully understand yet, let's debug some more?

Dolly also died in 2003. From the Wikipedia page (take it for what it is):

On 14 February 2003, Dolly was euthanised because she had a progressive lung disease and severe arthritis. A Finn Dorset such as Dolly has a life expectancy of around 11 to 12 years, but Dolly lived to be only six years of age. A post-mortem examination showed she had a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte, which is a fairly common disease of sheep and is caused by the retrovirus JSRV. Roslin scientists stated that they did not think there was a connection with Dolly being a clone, and that other sheep in the same flock had died of the same disease. Such lung diseases are a particular danger for sheep kept indoors, and Dolly had to sleep inside for security reasons.

Some have speculated that a contributing factor to Dolly's death was that she could have been born with a genetic age of six years, the same age as the sheep from which she was cloned. One basis for this idea was the finding that Dolly's telomeres were short, which typically is a result of the ageing process. The Roslin Institute have stated that intensive health screening did not reveal any abnormalities in Dolly that could have come from advanced ageing.

Hisoka• 15 years ago

I don't trust "normal" pasteurized milk with steroids, so this can't be any worse.

mey• 15 years ago

I assume you mean rBST/rBGH and not steroids. If not that's news to mean and I've love to see some reference material.

Additionally, what is your issue with pasteurized milk aside from making it taste worse, increasing it's shelf life, and most likely destroying some nutritional value?

martythemaniak• 15 years ago

Yumm! Economic efficiencies!

yread2• 15 years ago

"There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don't get enough to eat," the director of the research project, Professor Li Ning said.

"It's our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions."

mapleoin2• 15 years ago

I don't understand how human milk produced by cows is better for feeding the world than cow milk produced by cows (will this no longer be a pleonasm now?).

And how would it help feed people who don't have enough to eat? I can't imagine this ever being produced cheaper than cow milk.

teaspoon2• 15 years ago

Babies drink human milk, which is typically harder to come by than cow milk.

yread2• 15 years ago

Perhaps chinese women don't have enough milk? I remember reading somewhere that this is the case in some developed countries. Or perhaps there is too much pollution in cities (with lot of women and little cows) so the milk isn't as healthy? I don't really understand how could it be better (any change would surely be for the worse, no? After so many generations the evolution would have perfected it otherwise), I'm just trying to find some sense in what he said.

dstein2• 15 years ago

Cow milk is for feeding baby cows. The concept that cow milk is healthy for humans is a sophisticated advertising claim sponsored by the dairy industry.

mapleoin2• 15 years ago

"It's good," said worker Jiang Yao. "It's better for you because it's genetically modified."

Flawless argument.

ori_b2• 15 years ago

I doubt he intended it as an argument. I'd read that as a very awkwardly phrased (ESL-garbled?) version of "It's genetically modified to be better for you".

BruceForth• 15 years ago

Godwinned in 1st comment.

(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)

ori_b2• 15 years ago

The sheer stupidity of the comments scares me. There are good arguments to make against genetic modification -- at least at this point in time. However, the hysteria in the comments... ouch.

yawgmoth• 15 years ago

I really don't come to HN to read these types of articles... I come here for technical and entrepreneurial topics, not this.

ChrisArchitect• 15 years ago

general hysteria-inducing article. How about some population control?

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years.

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