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More control in the experiment that results in a lack of natural variation, which is vital for understanding how it would impact a population rather than a single individual? I can understand certain aspects it might help, but that seems awfully foolhardy to think it wouldn’t result in such a lack of diversity among study subjects that it’s as if you only had a sample size of one.

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GMO plants are not dangerous to insects unless explicitly made to be.

F1 just means they're first generation hybrids - the children of two "purebred" plants, if you will. If you choose the parents well, you can get fairly low variation - because the parents have known and predictable genetics.

Imagine you're a botanist working for a commercial nursery. One of your company's most popular offerings is a lovely little potted plant. It can either grow a red flower or a white flower, with leaves that are either waxy or fuzzy. The way the genetics work is that red flowers and fuzzy leaves are dominant traits - They win over waxy or white flowers. The powers that be inform you that customers love growing these plants from seed, but they love the uncommon red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants even more! So they want to offer seed packets that grow into red flowered, fuzzy leaved plants - But how can you know what the seed will grow into ahead of time??

Well, you might decide to be clever. You put in lots of effort and careful labor, and you come up with one plant that has, as close as possible, all the white flowering genes squeezed out, along with all the fuzzy leaved ones, and another that's exactly the opposite - No red flowering or waxy genes. When you breed these two plants together you'll tend to get lots of seeds that have both sets of genes, and because of how the genetics work that means almost all the seeds will be red flowered and fuzzy leaved! Maybe an occasional plant will glitch out and have pink flowers or stunted fuzz, but you can offer a pack of ten seeds and say nine of them will grow to flower red and have fuzzy leaves. Those plants are F1 hybrids - If a customer takes them and breeds them together trying to make more seed though, suddenly waxy leaves and white flowers will start appearing out of nowhere, because those genes are still there, just being overridden. You've maintained enough genetic variety for those traits to survive while also creating an entire generation of plants that doesn't have them.

GMO happens when those damned marketing guys butt in, and so management comes and tells you they signed a big contract with Northwestern University and they need you to grow a bunch of plants with purple flowers. "But they don't grow purple flowers, only red and white!" you protest, to no avail - In fact, that just puts dollar signs in their eyes at the thought of being the only ones to offer this plant with purple flowers.

Luckily, this is lucrative enough to them that you get a blank check to make it happen, and you take it to people with the right equipment and skills to do the same thing you did with careful crossbreeding, only more specifically and without the restriction that it has to actually be possible. They take your plant, then they grab a T. ionantha and an African violet, and set to work.

They find the specific sections of each plant's genes that produce purple pigment in flowers, and snip those out. Throw them in a machine, and swiftly they have millions of copies of each gene - And with the power of Science, they edit the genes of your plants and stick the code for purple flowers from each donor into white flowering plants. Turns out, the violet gene works better, so they manufacture a bunch of those, and next thing you know, you're growing these precious plants with aggressively purple flowers that they haven't ever been able to grow before.

Those are GMO flowers. They could also engineer them to produce their own antifungals so they don't rot as easily, or be super fancy and pricey and push the envelope of science forward by editing in the genes from that T. ionantha that code for its method of photosynthesis, so your plants now require less water.

But the edits they make are specific - You get the code for violet pigment, but not anything else from the violet.

How are famuly members of those patients protected from exposure? It seems like a sneeze or a cough could release radioactive material into the air of the patient’s home.

It's been done tho, the failure of SCNT in primates and other mammalian models was found to be due to inappropriate reprogramming of the somatic cell nucleus, which then couldn't support the embryo development. Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua are a couple of Macaca Fascicularis monkeys that were born via SCNT, and the use of new strategies for the epigenetic reprogramming of RRRs that yielded two healthy baby monkeys from enucleated fetal fibroblasts.

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Wow, thank you. Apparently my ten minute deep dive into nuclear medical isotopes didn't give me all the right info to make assumptions. And as a news junkie I do recall the Chalk River shutdown. Thanks!

Great explanation. Thank you

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Isotope generators at each facility are common in Canada https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/uranium-nuclear/7799 but it seems to be shifting to a more centralised cyclotron supply chain https://www.triumf.ca/headlines/cyclotron-produced-technetium-99m-approved-health-canada

Interesting. There was a BBC documentary about drinking habits of monkeys (short excerpt) that stated their alcohol consumption habits mimicked humans. Some would get drunk once and avoid alcohol, some would drink casually, while others would be considered alcoholic.

Fascinating thank you.

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oh, ok. but it still made for sensationalist news titles!

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I'm missing something but too tired to care. Of course light reinforces and cancels like any other wave.

> Sound waves are not carried by particles

Um, they don't do well in a vacuum.

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You're right, I scanned it too quickly. Thanks.

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