Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. | Hacker News Reader

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years.

news.com.au

25 pointswisty42 comments

"It's good," said worker Jiang Yao. "It's better for you because it's genetically modified."

Flawless argument.

I doubt he intended it as an argument. I'd read that as a very awkwardly phrased (ESL-garbled?) version of "It's genetically modified to be better for you".

Apart from the usual "Oh no, we're playing God" kneejerk reactions, do we really know enough about genetic modifications to be making GM foods available?

We barely know enough about why our own medicine works (frequently only having a hazy idea, really), should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?

Medicine is a great example. Do we really need to know everything about, say, penicillin or sundry vaccines to know that it's a good thing we have them?

If GM human milk can help babies that don't have access to enough actual human milk to be healthy in their infancy, then what more do we need to know? (OK, rhetorical device. Obviously it needs to be tested - but we don't need perfect understanding of everything to know that healthy babies >> unhealthy babies.)

Oh, definitely. However, I'm not sure if testing shouldn't be proportional to the complexity of the thing we're testing. Shouldn't we study the long-term effects of GM food before deeming it safe for consumption? We know already that it's not poison, but we've had long-term issues with GM food already, no?

All food is 'GM' - usually done in your grandmother's back yard, as she randomly fools with crossbreeding to produce a better tomato.

In the laboratory its done in a directed manner. Hard to see how it can be worse than "random".

Cross-breeding will never bring us glow-in-the-dark tomatoes (or cats for that matter). There is some amount of difference between breeding and splicing.

Take the tomato genome and look at any random pigmenting gene. There are a finite number of mutations (flips, insertions, deletions) to change that into a gene producing glow-in-the-dark proteins. All of those mutations can, and do, occur without human intervention. If only there was any Darwinian advantage for tomatoes to glow in the dark, they would most likely be doing so already.

I think 'most likely' is an over-statement. Most of those mutations are based on random chance. There is nothing that states that over a certain amount of time, every possible random mutation will happen.

But it might bring us apricots with arsenic in the flesh (instead of just in the pit) for instance. Or berries that harbor e-coli more readily.

With splicing we can examine the goals and techniques and make a reasoned conclusion.

Its astonishing to me that we accept "natural" (read: unknown, random) genetic modification without a peep. And yet when an Engineer creates a deliberate breed, the level of fear jumps off the chart. Says more about the public perception of science than it does about genetics I think.

It's hard not to sound cynical.. but there's really only one way to really find out the long term effects of GM food.

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure some of the nasty side effects of penicillin (intolerance, resistance) took a while to discover, and probably people died in the process.

There is no shortage of human milk. For every mother that can't produce enough there's a mother dumping extra down the drain. Back when we had functional communities these problems sorted themselves out.

>should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?

The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing" with it. If people always chose to stay away from things they didn't understand completely and were potentially deadly, we'd have never had fire, sailing ships, chemistry etc. Take the total number of people in history who died in house fires and shipwrecks: it's much, much higher than in the case of GM. (And, to be completely fair, we should actually consider those numbers as proportions of the total world population at the time.)

> The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing" with it.

Agreed. Shall we mess with it in a closed environment or in our stores? Put another way, the human race has just built its first whip, do we let all humans board or do we check if it actually sails first?

For the record, Dolly was "born" in 1996.

How about a good old: there are things we don't fully understand yet, let's debug some more?

Dolly also died in 2003. From the Wikipedia page (take it for what it is):

On 14 February 2003, Dolly was euthanised because she had a progressive lung disease and severe arthritis. A Finn Dorset such as Dolly has a life expectancy of around 11 to 12 years, but Dolly lived to be only six years of age. A post-mortem examination showed she had a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte, which is a fairly common disease of sheep and is caused by the retrovirus JSRV. Roslin scientists stated that they did not think there was a connection with Dolly being a clone, and that other sheep in the same flock had died of the same disease. Such lung diseases are a particular danger for sheep kept indoors, and Dolly had to sleep inside for security reasons.

Some have speculated that a contributing factor to Dolly's death was that she could have been born with a genetic age of six years, the same age as the sheep from which she was cloned. One basis for this idea was the finding that Dolly's telomeres were short, which typically is a result of the ageing process. The Roslin Institute have stated that intensive health screening did not reveal any abnormalities in Dolly that could have come from advanced ageing.

"There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don't get enough to eat," the director of the research project, Professor Li Ning said.

"It's our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions."

I don't understand how human milk produced by cows is better for feeding the world than cow milk produced by cows (will this no longer be a pleonasm now?).

And how would it help feed people who don't have enough to eat? I can't imagine this ever being produced cheaper than cow milk.

Babies drink human milk, which is typically harder to come by than cow milk.

Wouldn't the best way be to use humans to make human milk?

Ideally, yes. But all that does is add to the market for human flesh, and we don't need yet another section of the impoverished being milked (this time literally). Furthermore, a large swath of mothers have been trained by Nestle to distrust their own bodies, and instead buy formula. As sorry as it makes me, at least the profiteering in this method will provide correct nutrition for children.

I bought this yesterday because the author did an AMA on Reddit:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Market-Brokers-Thieves-Traffickers...

It's not particularly difficult to find local milk share groups.

That may be better milk, but I doubt it's as affordable as this could be.

Sure; and we could harvest human hair to make wool etc. But we've been husbanding animals for 1,000,000 years to make stuff for us.

How so? To get milk, you need a (mostly) fully-carried pregnancy AND get the resulting baby not to consume the said milk. As far as cows are concerned, it's all-right as we eat veal meat but what are we going to do with human babies?

I agree, we could eat those.. But I don't think we are ready.. just yet.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse

Why the downvotes? He was just RTFM-ing me, which is fine as he's got a point.

"A woman can only act as a wet-nurse if she is lactating. It was once believed that a wet-nurse must have recently undergone childbirth. This is not necessarily true, as regular breast suckling can elicit lactation via a neural reflex of prolactin production and secretion. Some adoptive mothers have been able to establish lactation using a breast pump so that they could feed an adopted infant."

Perhaps chinese women don't have enough milk? I remember reading somewhere that this is the case in some developed countries. Or perhaps there is too much pollution in cities (with lot of women and little cows) so the milk isn't as healthy? I don't really understand how could it be better (any change would surely be for the worse, no? After so many generations the evolution would have perfected it otherwise), I'm just trying to find some sense in what he said.

Actually, this is a very interesting detail in the world as it is today. I used to work at the Burmese border in Thailand with karen migrants. Long story short, I was computerizing a cluster of clinics aimed at migrants (who happen to live in camps, mostly).

While talking with a Dutch medic/light surgeon/peditrician, he revealed that the migrants didn't have any problem with providing milk (quantity/quality) to their babies while this was a growing problem in Europe and elsewhere.

He said modern stress is probably responsible for a large part of the problem and the figures show a large increase since women's status changed in Europe (post-WW2).

He didn't mention pollution and I don't remember really talking about milk quality so pollution might be another factor too.

Cow milk is for feeding baby cows. The concept that cow milk is healthy for humans is a sophisticated advertising claim sponsored by the dairy industry.

Yea. They are an ancient cartel, older than the mafia families of Sicily...

The fact that it has been used to feed humans for centuries begs to differ. It's so successful in fact that agricultural societies develop lactose tolerance in only a handful of generations.

Please, tell me it's a very subtle joke.

No, it's true. Cow milk is not essential part of the human diet. The "Got Milk" ad campaign is not a government-sponsored plan to get people to eat a healthier diet, which is what most people think it is.

But cow's milk has also been consumed for longer than you could consider it an 'industry.'

Godwinned in 1st comment.

(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)

The sheer stupidity of the comments scares me. There are good arguments to make against genetic modification -- at least at this point in time. However, the hysteria in the comments... ouch.

Great. What could go wrong?

general hysteria-inducing article. How about some population control?

I don't trust "normal" pasteurized milk with steroids, so this can't be any worse.

I assume you mean rBST/rBGH and not steroids. If not that's news to mean and I've love to see some reference material.

Additionally, what is your issue with pasteurized milk aside from making it taste worse, increasing it's shelf life, and most likely destroying some nutritional value?

Yumm! Economic efficiencies!

I really don't come to HN to read these types of articles... I come here for technical and entrepreneurial topics, not this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com