[Music]
you may not need an introduction to this
sheep this is dolly the cloned sheep so
just over 20 years ago when Dolly the
sheep was introduced to the world the
world’s press descended on the Roslin
Institute where I work the Roslin
Institute is a long-established
Research Institute where we undertake
research into farm animal production
health and welfare but Dolly the sheep
made the Roslin Institute world famous I
think the whole idea of being able to
make muddled copies of an animal really
intrigued everybody and especially when
people started to talk about whether we
could apply the cloning technology to
human beings well of course I think that
this is rather distracted us from
actually the main purpose behind the
cloning of Dolly the sheep the purpose
was to develop a technology for making
genetically modified sheep and other
farm animals and at that time there’s a
lot of interests in the potential of
genetic modification to make animals
give animals new characteristics new
genes and in the case of dolly that was
part of a program where they’re trying
to make new protein medicines in the
milk of genetically modified sheep for
example factor 9 which is used to treat
a blood clotting disease well I was
working at the Roslin Institute at the
time and I was also working on
developing technology for a genetic
modification but I was working on a
different farm animal I was working on
the chicken and this is one of my
chickens a very fine-looking animal and
he is in fact genetically modified so we
were developing a technology we had to
work make different inventions to
genetically modified chickens compared
to sheep but this is a genetically
modified chicken and if you looked at a
couple of his chicks which I show here
we introduced a new gene which was
passed on to one of these chicks and not
the other and I think you can spot the
one that got did the genetic
modification so these chicks are
illuminated by a fluorescent light and
we added a new gene the
codes for a protein called green
fluorescent protein so this chick
expresses a new protein and it glows
green in fluorescent light but had no
other effect on the on the chicken and
it was really just as part of the
development of the technology that we
used that gene that we could identify
easily by using the illumination to see
the green fluorescence but why are we
developing this technology and what do
we think are the potential values of
using genetic modification well I have
to say that when people ask me what I
carry out research on and I say chickens
I usually get a bit of a snicker no
people don’t take chicken so seriously
as I think they should so here are some
of the chicks a few few tricks that we
hatched at the Institute one day my
photo very cute little fluffy chicks but
you know how many chicks are hatched in
the world a year over 50 billion just
think about it fifty billion chickens
most of those are chickens from eat but
they’re also the chickens for producing
eggs so the chicken is a really
important food animal to people
worldwide it’s a healthy food and it’s
acceptable across many cultures but if
we think about 50 billion chickens now
that’s about if we look at this graph
it’s a graph for the population of the
world it’s in 2015 the population of the
world was estimated to be about 7.3
billion 50 billion chickens it’s about
seven chickens per person per year but
also if we look at this graph and this
is data from the United Nations we know
that the population of the world is
going to be increasing up to eleven
point two billion in 2100 yes or nine
point seven billion in 2050 so how are
we going to keep up with the demand for
food and that’s one of the big
challenges now and this graph here is
from the Gates Foundation website and it
shows the predicted increase in demand
for meat and the demand for meat is
going to go up for all of the animals
that we eat beef cattle mutton pork but
particularly chickens chicken meat and
chicken eggs and it’s estimated that by
2050 we only
170 percent more chicken meat to meet
growing demand so how would we achieve
that in the past well we’ve done it my
genetic breeding and here we can see on
the left the chicken from 1950 and it’s
rather scrawny beast and 2014 they’re
much bigger we’ve used genetic selection
to produce chickens that are much Meteor
and we’ve also made them much more
efficient in producing meat from food so
in 1950 we will get 330 kilograms of
meat per ton of feed but by 2014 we get
590 kilograms of chicken meat per ton of
feed so this is more efficient so we
need to use less grain which means we
need to use less land to produce the
food that we want that is the animal
food and we know that as people get
gradually wealthier they will want to
eat more meat but there’s a real problem
in producing farm animals and although
we can select use genetics to select
those animals to grow more to be more
efficient in the use of the feed we give
them they’re threatened by many diseases
and in particular I’m particularly
interested in the potential threat of
bird flu so here we can see in the
middle that’s a duck and we know that
bird flu is a disease that is present in
birds in wild birds and particular
author birds so it’s not going to go
away it’s present in those wild birds we
can’t control their the wild the
inflation of wild birds and also they
migrate so they spread bird flu around
the world and we also know something
else about bird flu we know that it can
transfer from ducks to chickens but also
to mammals so bird flu can infect a
whole range of mammals that you can see
here from whales bats horses dogs cats
pigs and importantly humans so bird flu
is a problem for production of chickens
because they catch it from the wild
water birds and the migrating birds but
it’s also a problem for us because we
know from studies of the bird flu virus
that and human flu virus is that they
are related so the pan
they make human flu that we get going
around the world can often come from
bird flu so we need to think about how
we control bird flu for the welfare of
chickens and the production of chickens
but also from human health so how do we
control it well I’m afraid at the moment
if there’s a bird flu outbreak the main
way we control it is by slaughtering the
chickens to stop spread of the disease
and that can have huge consequences so
this is information from an outbreak in
the u.s. in 2014 where bird flu was
spread by birds migrating over the
Arctic Circle and down through the North
America and there the losses of birds
were 48 point 1 million chickens and
there was a consequent 80% increase in
price of eggs and the great cost of dead
poultry / 191 million and big economic
damage from the outbreak so how can we
deal with this we can vaccinate chickens
like we do humans but there isn’t a
proper VAX a good vaccine no available
we can shut the chickens away which is
actually what we’ve had to do in the UK
this year but that doesn’t isn’t
compatible with free-range but which
we’re very key so this is where the work
that was mentioned very briefly at the
beginning with my colleague Lawrence
highly-developed so he is a scientist at
Cambridge University and he works on the
flu virus and particularly bird flu
virus and he developed a new gene that
when he introduced it into chicken cells
would stop the chicken cells being
inflected with flu virus so he came to
me and he said can we make genetically
modified chickens with this new gene and
we put the gene into chickens and we
then did an experiment so we had a group
of chickens that were her usual chickens
and then we had brothers and sisters of
those chickens that were genetically
modified and we infected them with flu
virus and the exciting result was that
the the non-gm chickens infected got
were infected and past that flu virus
onto the other chickens but when we
looked at
the chickens they were cool house with
the chickens that were genetically
modified after infection with flu they
did not pass the disease on so this is
really one step on the way to using
genetic modification to make birds
resistant to flu but the importance I
think of this was that it demonstrated
are used for genetic modification to
give the birds a characteristic which
they wouldn’t have otherwise we couldn’t
make chickens resistant to bird flu by
our normal breeding strategies and as I
say bird flus are really a really big
challenge to the production of chickens
so here a whole range of farmed animals
and diseases of all sorts are a real
problem in producing farm animals
they’re a problem for smallholder
farmers as well as for large-scale
farmers they’re a problem for free-range
farmers and for intensive farmers and we
need to think about how we can control
all these diseases too in terms of
improving the welfare of the animals and
the business of the farmers and to stop
economic losses and also to deal with
the challenge of producing all the food
that we’re going to require as the
population of the world inexorably
increases over the next decades
so in Scotland we’ve been developing
this genetic modification technology in
chickens and other farm animal species
and it is one of the ways that we could
shape use to control disease which is
only going to become a bigger challenge
into the face of for example climate
change and proteins and in Scotland
Dolly the sheep is held up as an example
of innovation in science and technology
but also in Scotland we’re not allowed
to produce GM food so I think I’d like
to leave you with the question today
should we be leading the world in these
technologies in a responsible way to
solve these problems relate
to food production or should we be
stepping back and not get involved and
taking these new technologies forward
thank
you
you may not need an introduction to this
sheep this is dolly the cloned sheep so
just over 20 years ago when Dolly the
sheep was introduced to the world the
world’s press descended on the Roslin
Institute where I work the Roslin
Institute is a long-established
Research Institute where we undertake
research into farm animal production
health and welfare but Dolly the sheep
made the Roslin Institute world famous I
think the whole idea of being able to
make muddled copies of an animal really
intrigued everybody and especially when
people started to talk about whether we
could apply the cloning technology to
human beings well of course I think that
this is rather distracted us from
actually the main purpose behind the
cloning of Dolly the sheep the purpose
was to develop a technology for making
genetically modified sheep and other
farm animals and at that time there’s a
lot of interests in the potential of
genetic modification to make animals
give animals new characteristics new
genes and in the case of dolly that was
part of a program where they’re trying
to make new protein medicines in the
milk of genetically modified sheep for
example factor 9 which is used to treat
a blood clotting disease well I was
working at the Roslin Institute at the
time and I was also working on
developing technology for a genetic
modification but I was working on a
different farm animal I was working on
the chicken and this is one of my
chickens a very fine-looking animal and
he is in fact genetically modified so we
were developing a technology we had to
work make different inventions to
genetically modified chickens compared
to sheep but this is a genetically
modified chicken and if you looked at a
couple of his chicks which I show here
we introduced a new gene which was
passed on to one of these chicks and not
the other and I think you can spot the
one that got did the genetic
modification so these chicks are
illuminated by a fluorescent light and
we added a new gene the
codes for a protein called green
fluorescent protein so this chick
expresses a new protein and it glows
green in fluorescent light but had no
other effect on the on the chicken and
it was really just as part of the
development of the technology that we
used that gene that we could identify
easily by using the illumination to see
the green fluorescence but why are we
developing this technology and what do
we think are the potential values of
using genetic modification well I have
to say that when people ask me what I
carry out research on and I say chickens
I usually get a bit of a snicker no
people don’t take chicken so seriously
as I think they should so here are some
of the chicks a few few tricks that we
hatched at the Institute one day my
photo very cute little fluffy chicks but
you know how many chicks are hatched in
the world a year over 50 billion just
think about it fifty billion chickens
most of those are chickens from eat but
they’re also the chickens for producing
eggs so the chicken is a really
important food animal to people
worldwide it’s a healthy food and it’s
acceptable across many cultures but if
we think about 50 billion chickens now
that’s about if we look at this graph
it’s a graph for the population of the
world it’s in 2015 the population of the
world was estimated to be about 7.3
billion 50 billion chickens it’s about
seven chickens per person per year but
also if we look at this graph and this
is data from the United Nations we know
that the population of the world is
going to be increasing up to eleven
point two billion in 2100 yes or nine
point seven billion in 2050 so how are
we going to keep up with the demand for
food and that’s one of the big
challenges now and this graph here is
from the Gates Foundation website and it
shows the predicted increase in demand
for meat and the demand for meat is
going to go up for all of the animals
that we eat beef cattle mutton pork but
particularly chickens chicken meat and
chicken eggs and it’s estimated that by
2050 we only
170 percent more chicken meat to meet
growing demand so how would we achieve
that in the past well we’ve done it my
genetic breeding and here we can see on
the left the chicken from 1950 and it’s
rather scrawny beast and 2014 they’re
much bigger we’ve used genetic selection
to produce chickens that are much Meteor
and we’ve also made them much more
efficient in producing meat from food so
in 1950 we will get 330 kilograms of
meat per ton of feed but by 2014 we get
590 kilograms of chicken meat per ton of
feed so this is more efficient so we
need to use less grain which means we
need to use less land to produce the
food that we want that is the animal
food and we know that as people get
gradually wealthier they will want to
eat more meat but there’s a real problem
in producing farm animals and although
we can select use genetics to select
those animals to grow more to be more
efficient in the use of the feed we give
them they’re threatened by many diseases
and in particular I’m particularly
interested in the potential threat of
bird flu so here we can see in the
middle that’s a duck and we know that
bird flu is a disease that is present in
birds in wild birds and particular
author birds so it’s not going to go
away it’s present in those wild birds we
can’t control their the wild the
inflation of wild birds and also they
migrate so they spread bird flu around
the world and we also know something
else about bird flu we know that it can
transfer from ducks to chickens but also
to mammals so bird flu can infect a
whole range of mammals that you can see
here from whales bats horses dogs cats
pigs and importantly humans so bird flu
is a problem for production of chickens
because they catch it from the wild
water birds and the migrating birds but
it’s also a problem for us because we
know from studies of the bird flu virus
that and human flu virus is that they
are related so the pan
they make human flu that we get going
around the world can often come from
bird flu so we need to think about how
we control bird flu for the welfare of
chickens and the production of chickens
but also from human health so how do we
control it well I’m afraid at the moment
if there’s a bird flu outbreak the main
way we control it is by slaughtering the
chickens to stop spread of the disease
and that can have huge consequences so
this is information from an outbreak in
the u.s. in 2014 where bird flu was
spread by birds migrating over the
Arctic Circle and down through the North
America and there the losses of birds
were 48 point 1 million chickens and
there was a consequent 80% increase in
price of eggs and the great cost of dead
poultry / 191 million and big economic
damage from the outbreak so how can we
deal with this we can vaccinate chickens
like we do humans but there isn’t a
proper VAX a good vaccine no available
we can shut the chickens away which is
actually what we’ve had to do in the UK
this year but that doesn’t isn’t
compatible with free-range but which
we’re very key so this is where the work
that was mentioned very briefly at the
beginning with my colleague Lawrence
highly-developed so he is a scientist at
Cambridge University and he works on the
flu virus and particularly bird flu
virus and he developed a new gene that
when he introduced it into chicken cells
would stop the chicken cells being
inflected with flu virus so he came to
me and he said can we make genetically
modified chickens with this new gene and
we put the gene into chickens and we
then did an experiment so we had a group
of chickens that were her usual chickens
and then we had brothers and sisters of
those chickens that were genetically
modified and we infected them with flu
virus and the exciting result was that
the the non-gm chickens infected got
were infected and past that flu virus
onto the other chickens but when we
looked at
the chickens they were cool house with
the chickens that were genetically
modified after infection with flu they
did not pass the disease on so this is
really one step on the way to using
genetic modification to make birds
resistant to flu but the importance I
think of this was that it demonstrated
are used for genetic modification to
give the birds a characteristic which
they wouldn’t have otherwise we couldn’t
make chickens resistant to bird flu by
our normal breeding strategies and as I
say bird flus are really a really big
challenge to the production of chickens
so here a whole range of farmed animals
and diseases of all sorts are a real
problem in producing farm animals
they’re a problem for smallholder
farmers as well as for large-scale
farmers they’re a problem for free-range
farmers and for intensive farmers and we
need to think about how we can control
all these diseases too in terms of
improving the welfare of the animals and
the business of the farmers and to stop
economic losses and also to deal with
the challenge of producing all the food
that we’re going to require as the
population of the world inexorably
increases over the next decades
so in Scotland we’ve been developing
this genetic modification technology in
chickens and other farm animal species
and it is one of the ways that we could
shape use to control disease which is
only going to become a bigger challenge
into the face of for example climate
change and proteins and in Scotland
Dolly the sheep is held up as an example
of innovation in science and technology
but also in Scotland we’re not allowed
to produce GM food so I think I’d like
to leave you with the question today
should we be leading the world in these
technologies in a responsible way to
solve these problems relate
to food production or should we be
stepping back and not get involved and
taking these new technologies forward
thank
you
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