Word: dna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American pet owners display pictures of their pets at home or at work. Fifty-three percent believe their animals would risk their life to save their owners. Such interspecies devotion will soon stretch beyond the grave. Two firms, including PerPETuate Inc. in Farmington, Conn., are offering services to store DNA so that a four-legged loved one can be reproduced once cloning has been perfected...
Approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996, so-called Bt corn has become enormously popular with farmers, and now accounts for up to 25% of the U.S. corn crop, or about 20 million acres. By splicing DNA from the common soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into the corn's genes, scientists have created a plant that turns out the same toxin as the bug. While the toxin is deadly to the corn borer, which costs U.S. growers more than $1 billion annually, it is harmless to humans--as well as to such beneficial insects as ladybugs and honeybees. Indeed, organic...
...Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. Archaeologists merely uncovered a single skeleton of a child with a mixture of modern and Neanderthal features. To deduce that this indicates a peaceful coexistence or gradual immersion of Neanderthals into the Homo sapiens gene pool is groundless and inconsistent in the face of DNA testing recently conducted. The Neanderthals, like other hominids, are no more. Perhaps mankind's evolution was a more violent affair than we would like to believe. Yet even today the killing continues. KEVIN M. KIRBY Sydney...
...certain that farm animals were the source of the problem, the scientists performed an experiment that mixed molecular genetics with shoe-leather detective work. First they decoded a unique stretch of the resistant bug's DNA, and then they went shopping. They bought 91 chickens in local markets and, by matching DNA, found that 14% were contaminated with exactly the same bug. Tracking the infections to the source, the scientists discovered that the birds originated not from any single chicken farm but from farms across Minnesota and surrounding states--suggesting that the problem was widespread in the industry. Their conclusion...
...these lab mice were not bred for the benefit of cats that have trouble seeing in the dark. They do glow, however, thanks to a gene that usually codes for green fluorescence in jellyfish but was knit into the animals' usual complement of mousy DNA by scientists at the University of Hawaii. The experiment was reported in Science and demonstrates an improved method of gene transfer--called Honolulu transgenesis--that uses sperm as a vehicle to move DNA from one species to another...