Word: oregon
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...while the creatures housed at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center are nothing more exotic than monkeys, one experiment performed here and reported in last week's Science had something in common with the Spielberg thriller: an animal, produced by genetic manipulation, like nothing else on Earth. Despite its utterly normal outward appearance, the Rhesus monkey known as ANDi bears an extra gene taken from, of all creatures, a jellyfish. And while so-called transgenic animals have been created before, this is the first time such a species-mixing experiment has been performed on a primate, the class of animals...
...genes of a creature so similar to humans could give researchers an incredibly powerful tool for studying and perhaps someday curing human illnesses--introducing Alzheimer's genes, for example, to test new drugs and vaccines against the disease. For that reason, says Richard Weleber, a professor of ophthalmology at Oregon Health Sciences University who believes the research could help cure the form of blindness known as macular degeneration, "this is a revolutionary achievement...
Before they could try transferring a gene, the scientists had to master the technique of in vitro (that is, test-tube) fertilization, which isn't typically used with monkeys. Though the technique wasn't required to create ANDi, the Oregon team had already learned to clone the animals, which in the future will prove important since having identical copies of different monkey strains will be crucial for rigorous scientific experiments. That milestone--the first cloning of a primate by embryo splitting--was achieved by Schatten's group last year...
...scientists in Oregon have taken a tiny step toward doing what many scientists have said no scientist would ever want to do--use genetics to change, improve or enhance our children. Sticking genes into eggs and growing a healthy monkey means that someday scientists could and most likely would insert genes into human eggs to try to make kids smarter, stronger, faster, healthier or happier than their parents...
...rapidly turned into six months as I navigated through page after page of tricky self-contradicting forms and a bureaucracy with absolutely no interest in issuing any gun permits to anyone in Jersey City. This was the biggest hurdle yet, and the temptation to smuggle in a rifle from Oregon was overwhelming (federal laws regulating interstate transport of firearms are surprisingly lax; I could have flown from Oregon to Jersey with a rifle as declared luggage and nobody would have blinked an eye at Newark International). I just couldn't stand the fact that I was losing six months...