Headless Clones Rear Their Ugly ... Shoulders?

Indo-Asian News Service is reporting that P.B. Desai of the Mumbai-based Tata Memorial Center (India) has argued that the development of the headless, cloned mouse model will make it ever-more likely that there will be headless human organ farms. No data to report, just good old speculation and hype. Somebody better let National Enquirer know about this one.

The Hypo-Allergenic Cat

From Allerca: A cat that just does not make you sneeze. But is it just hype?

It is probably possible to create cats that do not produce the most common protein allergen, says Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the Asthma and Allergic Disease Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US. But he adds that cats produce many more allergens, and that blocking production of the protein could damage the cat's health. Moreover, Allerca's claims that a technique called RNA-induced gene silencing can work in cats are "unfounded", says Greg Hannon at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, and author of the book RNAi: A Guide to Gene Silencing. So far the technique has been used only in mice.