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Now that the CRISPR Cas-9 gene editing tool is available to make manipulating DNA as easy as cut-and-paste, scientists want to use this technology to create certain farm animals that would only give birth to female offspring.
The male offspring of a variety of species of farm animals are routinely slaughtered because they are less useful than females. Male calves are immediately killed because they don’t produce milk. Male chickens, roosters, are killed shortly after birth because they don’t lay eggs and only a limited amount of roosters are needed.
Farmers slaughter the animals because they are unneeded and too costly to support.
Scientists believe the solution to this dilemma and unnecessary waste of animals is to simply edit the DNA of certain farm animals so that they would only produce largely female offspring.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have developed a system whereby mostly females are born.
Experimenting on mice, which like humans, have a similar makeup of chromosomes: males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes.
In the system researchers developed, essentially the alteration of the genes causes damage to a gene that is essential for the development of embryos, which therefore causes the likely male embryos to abort.
Their system produced just three males for every 20 females that were born.
As technology races faster forward than mankind can often pause to ponder the ramifications, once again it raises the question of: Just because you can do something – should you?
As has often been the case, the technology has progressed faster than legislation. Currently, while it is illegal to alter the DNA of the unborn humans, it is not illegal to alter the DNA of animals in this way.
However, no one knows what the short term, let alone, the long term consequences of such genetic altering will bear. There are not enough standards around the world that force scientists to spend more time studying and testing such experiments before their use is expanded.
In this type of study described in this article, not enough is known about how this genetic altering affects the resulting offspring as a whole.
