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.

The cloned steak was served medium rare. Inside the unusually hushed atrium of Campanile, the guests lifted slices of beef onto their plates. Executive chef Mark Peel had prepared the porterhouse with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper before pan-searing it with a little canola oil -- a simple preparation to highlight the meat's natural flavor. It was the centerpiece of a dinner party convened to taste the future of food.

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.

As a young evangelical Christian, Michael D. West would protest outside abortion clinics, urging women to consider the value of life growing within them. Today, he will tell a Senate panel why he is now a leading advocate for a far different proposition: cloning humans as a way to cure disease, even if it means destroying human embryos. West is chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology Inc.

In the course of 29 years, Claude Vorilhon built a small yet international religious group by preaching that scientists from another planet created all life on Earth. But in 1998, Vorilhon had an especially big pronouncement for his 5,000 or so followers: The creators would soon board their flying saucers and return. It was time to prepare. And so Vorilhon called for beautiful young women in his group to step forward as hostesses for the arriving aliens.

We're almost 50 years into the biotechnology age and scientists still can't keep a lid on their enthusiasm. Why should they? Why should anyone? The newfound ability to decipher and manipulate genes, spurred by the promise of profits, has already resulted in developments that startle: Bacteria produce human insulin and other hormones; soybeans grow antibodies to the herpes virus; sheep produce milk rich in blood-clotting proteins; crops contain their own pesticides.

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.

John Chapman is one of the few holdouts dotting the lake's shore on a cold, gray afternoon before Christmas. His line drifts with the current, this way and that, lazily cutting the murky green, its hook baited with a concoction of top designer baits: a yellow Crave Amino Egg and a Power Worm, doused with White Lightning Crave Nitro Grease. Then, in a flutter, the line flies from his spool. Chapman closes the bail, setting the hook, and the rod doubles over.

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.

To date, 26 people have been cryonically suspended--frozen for the future--in the United States. As it happens, 24 of them are in California, where the urge to live forever is beginning to look like a serious business. The numbers are still tiny. And cryonics, an ad hoc science that was born with the icy suspension of a Glendale physician in 1967, still faces some daunting questions about its practicality and legal status.

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.

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.

Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring, a development designed to give researchers new tools for studying human disease, but one that raises a host of thorny ethical questions. In this case, the Japanese researchers added genes that caused the animals to glow green under a fluorescent light and beget offspring with the same spooky ability.

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.

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.

Treatment with genetically modified stem cells helped rats with a paralyzing disease live significantly longer, U.S. researchers said this week. Rats with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, that were treated with the gene-engineered stem cells lived 28 days longer than untreated mice, the researchers told a conference. The injection contained adult nerve stem cells that were engineered to release a growth factor called glial cell-line derived neurotrophic factor, or GDNF.

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.

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.

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.

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.