We are surely doomed now.
According to The Daily Mail, the scientists, led by Du Yutao, took a gene from a roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, which is known to produce polyunsaturated fatty acids, and implanted into the genome of the sheep.
Horrors upon horror.
People only imagined McDonalds added ground worms to its hamburgers. These mad Chinese scientists are putting worms in the very genes of sheep.
Can our world possibly survive?
Some answers below the fold.
Plainly folks like Exxon-Mobil and the Koch brothers are not the only science deniers but at least they know what they are doing.
Domesticated sheep are probably further removed from their wild ancestry than our tomatoes are from tiny, sour fruits hanging on jungle vines in Peru that must be hacked away to make progress. I say this not as a scientist but from a long ago farm boy's experiences with the helpless critters we also call sheep.
There is no shortage whatever of research papers on the evolution of domestic sheep but it's not terribly likely our purported environmentalists care a whit about such matters. Such people can let forests burn down with their woodland creatures to keep things natural and oppose burning the tinder in power plants to generate electricity.
Burning wood is worse than burning coal declared a notorious Manomet paper and so we had to burn more coal and other fossil fuels and forests and animals and residences and people, particularly firefighters, so we could be natural.
Manomet spins their story to say something different now after some bad publicity. Any who wish can find the spin here.
That Chinese sheep/roundworm cross :-) may or may not be good and healthy eating. It may not even survive long. Only ancient Mother Nature with a lifespan far beyond mortal ken can determine such things. For all we know now those roundworm genes could worm their way into your brain and make you think burning coal is better than burning waste wood.
But science denial does very bad things to us. Much worse than science gone awry methinks that itself can do vast harm.
"It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that ain't so." - Will Rogers
Best, Terry