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Asimov's Message Board: "By Matt Jarpe on Saturday, November 22, 2003 - 01:10 pm:

Here's my favorite story about genetic modification. I've told it on this message board before, so I appologize in advance to those who have heard it. A few years ago there were some scientists studying an interesting class of genes, the transforming growth factor family. One of the ways they study them is to 'knock out' one gene at a time in mice. They knocked out one of them and the mice that were born looked like Arnold Schwartzenager (in his Conan days, not govenor days).

They figured out that this protein's job was to dampen down muscle growth. It was made in muscle cells and signaled to other nearby stem cells that the muscle needs in that region of the body were covered. You knock out the gene and the muscles don't know when to quit.

So, these guys publish their paper and then they start thinking, how can we make money off of this? You can't use it for body building because it has to be knocked out from conception, and nobody's ready to do that to a human. Not yet, anyway.

But there is the meat production industry. Muscle is the money making part of the cow, the rest is just life support. If you increase the proportion of the body that's muscle, you make more money (even though you have to feed the cow a lot more to get the muscle, it's still probably more efficient.) So, let's knock out myostatin (as the gene came to be called) and we'll have Schwartzeagger cows.

Well, it turns out Mother Nature, with the help of some selective breeding by cattle farmers, beat these guys to the prize. There is a breed of cattle in Europe called a Belgian Blue that is 'double muscled.' A quick gene sequence confirmed that these cows lack functional myostatin.

Funny thing is, if a myostatin knock out cow hit the market, there would be protests against Frankenfoods. Do the same thing by selective breeding and it's hey, make mine medium rare."

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