| Following Dr. Felts eyes and pointed finger I noticed one of the cages before me. Indeed it was a chicken, or something vaguely resembling one. It had no feathers, and was enormous, nearly as big as a turkey. Its legs were fat and stocky and the feet were tiny. The beak and head were also smaller than a normal chicken. It was a hideous creature, with a taught skin like that of some hairless cat which has grown too large for its outer layer. The bird was constantly twitching its limbs and eating a greenish concoction. "My god, is that really a chicken? It is so big!" "Ha ha, yes, its a chicken all right. But a chicken which solves all of the problems I have just spoke about. It has no feathers, which takes an entire step out of the process. We have made it much more efficient at converting its controlled diet into muscle, a simple tweaking of the transcription levels of a few gene groups. Also, to make the muscles grow leaner, we introduced a genetic disease which makes their muscles in the limbs and breast fire randomly. This keeps the muscles growing even when they are caged up constantly. We jumped the overall eatable meat on the chicken from 30% weight to 56%, a really remarkable number considering all the innards and bone and other stuff. It is an all meat chicken, or as close as we can get it without crossing the lethal barrier." Dr. Felts stood back, looking at me with a very proud smile. I didn't know what to do. Personally I found it all rather disgusting, the way he had engineered this chicken. Was it really possible to do what the scientists here had done, make the chicken so efficient at producing meat that in the end it was questionable whether it was still a chicken? With the doctor still staring at me, apparently waiting for a validating response, I took a few seconds to take it all in. There was no sign of expectation of bad response from me, he was obviously very firm in his belief that this was beneficial and good 'for all.' So what was I to do. "Hmm, this is truly interesting stuff, Dr. Felts. I am taken back by it." "I knew that you would be. But you see the good in it, don't you. I can tell, I knew right away that you were perceptive. You see how good this research is, how vital it could be not only for the food industry but for us all. The board of directors don't see it. They think that we should not be fooling around with animals like this, that it is wrong. But we have been doing it as a race for centuries on plants, we just took a more passive role. You don't think that the efficient corn and wheat that we eat today was a product of natural selection. It was more human selection. We controlled it, we chose which variations would be planted the next year, and over time we have a very efficient plant. The question in which the board and me differ is whether or not the quicker and more calculated method of genetic engineering is the same thing. Results from experiments like this will show that it is the same, or actually a better method of achieving an efficient food source." "Is the animal safe to eat? I mean, by messing around with it so much did you make it poisonous or cancerous in some way?" "Oh, that is a good question. One which an intelligent person must always ask. Yes, it is safe, we have tested it repeatedly for any increased levels of chemicals which would be hazardous to the public. All have came back negative. The reason for this is that we have merely increased slightly levels of hormones and cellular regulators which are already present in the normal chicken. Nothing foreign has been introduced. Another question which you might ask is whether this will affect the biodiversity of the planet. It is a question which also gets brought up quite a bit. The answer is quite obvious if you think about it. This animal, although it grows well in our controlled environment, could not survive in the wild, it could not reproduce. Actually it can't reproduce at all, it is sterile. We control their conception by using gene therapy on normal wild type chickens. The normal male and female chickens are engineered to produce eggs and sperm which will produce these animals. The eggs are then carefully looked after and the chickens grow normal. There is no possibility of the normal chickens getting out and producing some crossed version in the wild, either, because we introduced a gene which makes them require a supplement in their diet, an obscure amino acid which they need to survive. So if they do not receive this amino acid they die. We have covered all our bases here, as I am sure you can tell." "It appears as though you have." I was shaken at the resolve of the doctor, and the fact that he believed me to be on his side. I desperately wish to be rid of this story, to leave and not write it at all, or at least to just be rid of the doctor to my side. He had something about him which made me nervous and intrigued at the same time, his intensity was scary. "If you will follow me, Mr. Miller, we'll just walk on down to the next lab, it is sort of a continuation of the research we have been doing here." I thought quickly of some way of getting out of the institute, I didn't wish to see or listen to Dr. Felts any more. But I shook off the idea, I knew that this was a great story, a blessing to my career as a journalist. And so I got in stride with the doctor as we walked out of the lab and down the hall way to a door labeled Oceanic Lab A. "Cone on in, Mr. Miller, this is our shrimp lab, or as the scientists like to call it the gumbo room." The room was full of aquariums, big and small ones, stacked on top of each other on all walls, and also an enormous tank in the middle of the room. It had to be at least thirty yard across and fifteen feet high. The most intriguing thing about the room though was the huge amount of light emitted from every aquarium, especially the big tank in the center. The light was so bright, it hurt my eyes just being in the room. I felt like asking for a pair of sunglasses, and I felt like I was in a dream when put a pair of tinted lab glasses in my hand. "Are you familiar with the life cycle of shrimp Mr. Miller?" I shook my head no, although I had some recollection of hearing about them on some discovery channel documentary. "Well, if you look at their growth pattern they are not extremely unlike corn. They grow on a seasonal basis, it takes them a matter of a couple of months to reach maturity, some taking longer than others because of a larger size. Although they are not the most efficient eaters, they consume organisms which are extremely efficient. Actually, the organisms cost nothing, they are photosynthetic. So the end equation leaves us with sunlight growing shrimp, as the photosynthetic algae which the shrimp eat never get fully consumed and can rebuild their numbers quite easily. This is where Jon and I got the idea for shrimp as a crop. Previously we have harvested shrimp from the oceans on a hunter/gather type of principal, we don't control their growth, we simply remove some from their natural environment. It is not a ground breaking concept, cattle farmer and all livestock growers have been doing it forever, and even more recently fish farms have emerged. Shrimp pose a problem because of their size and the amount of area they need to feed, or actually the area that their feed need to be stable. One of the criteria for making shrimp a crop was to first solve the problem of their food supply. We did that by taking away some of their genes which made them need such low population density. We then jumped up the amount of light in the tanks to levels which would have been stuck before in the stationary growth phase of the algae but now increased their numbers. This effectively produced a stable amount of food for our new shrimp." |