From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jul 19 2001 - 07:35:52 MDT
At 08:47 AM 7/19/01 EDT, spudman wrote:
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1446000/1446706.stm
>A Californian team has managed to get the
> beaks of chicken embryos to grow tooth buds,
> something their ancestors lost the ability to do
> 60 million years ago.
This slips neatly into the socket I've been preparing about growing legs on
whales to save them from the Japanese table.
I recently saw some elderly Japanese munching happily on whale sashimi as
they explained that their religion (Shinto? Buddhism?) forbade them from
eating any animal with four legs. But whales *do* have four legs, I
muttered crabbily to the TV screen; it's just that they're vestigial,
tucked away neatly inside. Oh, the sad unintended blasphemy of those whale
guzzlers! I started wondering about a retroviral plague designed to
activate growth factors in whale buds... Watch the mighty beasts paddling
in the sea! See their young scamper about the shore! Why else, after all,
do half-dormant programs drive them pitilessly onto land? Whale fanciers
should be delighted by this scheme which harnesses the evial power of
science to the benefit of our aquatic mammal friends.
Now if we can give *trees* legs...
Damien Broderick
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