In a story straight out of Orwell's Room 101 in 1984, Russian scientists have, since 1972, been conducting a genetic experiment that has resulted in a breed of super vicious rats. In the experiment two colonies of wild rats have been selectively bred, one for tameness & the other for aggression. It is the degree of difference between the two colonies & the speed of change that has surprised the scientists, with geneticist Svante Pääbo declaring of the aggressive rats that "10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages." Several key regions of the genome involving half a dozen genes have been identified as being key. The next step is to locate the individual genes involved.
Posted by Astrojenny
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