Researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh have managed to engineer chickens that don’t transmit the avian influenza virus (known to medical professionals as “bird flu”) to other chickens—even normal ones.
Dr. Laurence Tiley, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Virology at Cambridge, helpfully noted that “these particular birds are only intended for research purposes, not for consumption.”
The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC); the paper “Suppression of avian influenza transmission in genetically modified chickens” was published in the January 14 edition of Science.
