December 12, 2018

"In other words, Lillico and his fellow researchers are putting alpha male sperm into beta male balls, so the big guys don’t have to do the work."

From "The Ham-maid's Tale: Swines, Sows and Sex in the CRISPR Age" (Wired).
The method is a marked improvement on the current, human facilitated (yes, really) way of breeding pigs, which usually involves a mountable bench, female pig pheromones and a glove. They don’t call them farmhands for nothing, you know… While this technique has produced results in the past, thanks to its clumsy and time-consuming nature, desirable traits don’t manifest for decades.

[Dr Simon Lillico, Core Scientist at The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh] and his international colleagues are looking to vastly reduce that time with their more scientific method – one that depends upon one of the great genetic advancements of the last decade: CRISPR.

9 comments:

David Begley said...

I saw an ultrasound for cattle at the Nebraska Cattlemen’s College in Kearney last week. Alas! It can’t be purchased via the Althouse AMZN portal.

Ralph L said...

Crisper and balls: two words men do not like to hear together.

tim maguire said...

That's taking cuckolding to extremes, but I don't think alpha males will go for it.

BarrySanders20 said...

A friend practiced workers comp law in an Iowa law firm. She told me of a case she had where a woman suffered fairly significant injuries when the boar the farmhand was manually massaging to extract sperm suddenly kicked. Tough way to make a living. The farmhand, not the lawyer.

Wince said...

Some animals are more equal than others on the Animal Farm.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

CRISPR bacon sounds good to me.

tim in vermont said...

+1 IiB

SeanF said...

BarrySanders20: A friend practiced workers comp law in an Iowa law firm. She told me of a case she had where a woman suffered fairly significant injuries when the boar the farmhand was manually massaging to extract sperm suddenly kicked. Tough way to make a living. The farmhand, not the lawyer.

You think that's a tough living? Look up the procedure for extracting a semen sample from a bull elephant. It involves "manual massaging", but not where you might think.

Yancey Ward said...

The comments reminds me of "A Boy And His Dog".