Genetic Engineering

Fast-growing salmon. Pork containing heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. These are two examples of products you might see in your local supermarket soon -- animals developed not through conventional breeding but through genetic engineering. On Jan. 15, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided how it will regulate genetically engineered animals, for the first time paving the way for such animals or their products to be sold as food and medicine.

News that Chinese researchers have succeeded in growing healthy living mice from mouse skin cells takes scientists a significant step closer to human cloning, experts say, and is thus likely to reopen debate about the ethics of such reproductive techniques. The new feat -- in which animals were grown from cells that had been reverted back to their embryonic state -- is technically different from cloning. But the outcome is the same in both cases: a genetically identical copy of the donor animal.

They have four legs, fuzzy faces and udders full of milk. To the uninitiated, they look like dairy goats. To GTC Biotherapeutics Inc., they're cutting-edge drug-making machines. The goats being raised on a farm in central Massachusetts are genetically engineered to make a human protein in their milk that prevents dangerous blood clots from forming. The company extracts the protein and turns it into a medicine that fights strokes, pulmonary embolisms and other life-threatening conditions.

James Symington is experiencing an extreme case of deja vu. The former Halifax, Canada, police officer's partner, Trakr, died in April. But on Wednesday, Symington took home five clones of the German shepherd as the winner of a contest run by a business that does stem-cell research and microengineering. In his career as a search-and-rescue dog, Trakr helped recover more than $1 million in stolen goods and sniffed out the final survivor in the rubble of the World Trade Center after the Sept.

Don't look for much food from cloned animals or their offspring at your neighborhood supermarket or restaurant any time soon. Despite the Food and Drug Administration's declaration that such meat and milk are safe to eat, it is going to take years for ranchers to produce and raise the animals. Even then, many of the nation's biggest grocers say they are dead set against selling it.

Scientists in California say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men, a potential step toward developing scientifically valuable stem cells. The new report from La Jolla documents embryos made with ordinary skin cells. But it's not the first time human cloned embryos have been made. In 2005, for example, scientists in Britain reported using embryonic stem cells to produce a cloned embryo. It matured enough to produce stem cells, but none were extracted.

When Cyagra Inc. holds an office potluck, no one's stomach churns when the lasagna, meatloaf or tacos are made with cloned beef. The cutting-edge ingredient was produced on the company's Pennsylvania farm for the Food and Drug Administration, which spent seven years evaluating the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring. "We had leftovers," so we used them, said Steve Mower, director of marketing for the Elizabethtown, Pa.-based company.

Howard L. Bachrach, the virologist who purified the polio and foot-and-mouth disease viruses and was the first to use genetic engineering to produce a vaccine, died June 26 in Atlantis, Fla. He was 88 and had been suffering from heart disease, according to his daughter, Eve. His work on purification of the polio virus made possible the development of the vaccine against the disease by Dr.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday opened the way for a bevy of genetically engineered salmon, cows and other animals to leap from the laboratory to the marketplace, unveiling an approval process that would treat the modified creatures like drugs.

Cattle can be genetically altered to lack the protein that causes mad cow disease without adverse health effects, a study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Hematech Inc. shows. The findings, published on the website of the journal Nature Biotechnology, suggest that genetic modifications can protect cattle from the disease, potentially eradicating the threat to livestock and the people who eat them or use products made from them.