Animal rights activists were suspicious of the experiment
Two of the 2,000 beagle dogs housed in a scientific laboratory in southern China have been at the center of intense public debate. A group of scientists from the Celestial Empire stated that by modifying genes, they managed to obtain individuals with a double mass of muscles. Experts from the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine argue that their results can be used in medicine, while animal rights advocates outraged the experiment.
Scientists have blocked a gene in two dogs that is supposed to block muscle growth in dogs at some stage. As a result, the dogs have grown significantly more muscular than typical of their species.
According to the researchers, their experiments are aimed at creating animals prone to various diseases - for example, Parkinson's disease - for the subsequent use of these animals in the search for an effective and safe medicine. However, animal rights activists fear that in fact scientists are driven by purely commercial interests - a number of public figures suspect that in the future "superdogs" are planned to be sold.
Animal rights activists remind that in the past, technology similar to that used in relation to dogs, in the recent past has already been used to create the so-called "designer animals" - other specialists from China in 2015 with its help created miniature pigs, which were subsequently sold for a very substantial amount. reports cbsnews.com. As another argument, animal rights advocates cite the fact that out of 60 genetically modified beagle embryos, only two were able to survive.
This is not the first time recently that public figures have criticized the results obtained by scientists. In particular, recently a public debate has flared up around the permission given by the British authorities to raise pigs and sheep with human organs. While geneticists see such "chimeras" as a potential source of transplantable donor organs, animal rights advocates insist that such a practice is immoral. Earlier, animal rights activists criticized the cloning of domestic animals practiced by Korean experts.
Dmitry Erusalimsky