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  3. Clone Farm Factory farming could soon enter a new era of mass production. Companies in the US are developing the technology

Clone Farm Factory farming could soon enter a new era of mass production. Companies in the US are developing the technology

admin2012-12-22  41
问题                               Clone Farm
    Factory farming could soon enter a new era of mass production. Companies in the US are developing the technology needed to "clone" chickens on a massive scale. Once a chicken with desirable traits has been bred or genetically engineered, tens of thousands of eggs, which will hatch into identical copies, could roll off the production lines every hour. Billions of clones could be produced each year to supply chicken farms with birds that all grow at the same rate, have the same amount of meat and taste the same.
    This, at least, is the vision of the US’s National Institute of Science and Technology, which has given Origen Therapeutics of Burlingame, California, and Embrex of North Carolina $ 4.7 million to help fund research. The prospect has alarmed animal welfare groups, who fear it could increase the suffering of farm birds.
    That’s unlikely to put off the poultry industry, however, which wants disease resistant birds that grow faster on less food. "Producers would like the same meat quantity but to use reduced inputs to get there. " says Mike Fitzgerald of Origen. To meet this demand, Origen aims to "create an animal that is effectively a clone", he says. Normal cloning doesn’t work in birds because eggs can’t be removed and implanted. Instead, the company is trying to bulk-grow embryonic stem cells taken from fertilized eggs as soon as they’re laid. "The trick is to culture the cells without them starting to distinguish, so they remain pluripotent. " says Fitzgerald.
    Using a long-established technique, these donor cells will then be injected into the embryo of a freshly laid, fertilized recipient egg, forming a chick that is a "chimera". Strictly speaking, a chimera isn’t a clone, because it contains cells from both donor and recipient. But Fitzgerald says it will be enough if, 95 percent of a chicken’s body develops from donor cells. "In the poultry world, it doesn’t matter if it’s not 100 percent. " he says.
    Another challenge for Origen is to scale up production. To do this, it has teamed up with Embrex, which produces machines that can inject vaccines into up to 50,000 eggs an hour. Embrex is now trying to modify the machines to locate the embryo and inject the cells into precisely the right spot without killing it.
    In future, Origen imagines freezing stem cells from different strains of chicken. If orders come in for a particular strain, millions of eggs could be produced in months or even weeks. At present, maintaining all the varieties the market might call for is too expensive for breeders, and it takes years to bread enough chickens to produce the billions of eggs that farmers need.
Which of the following statements about Origen and Embrex is correct according to the fifth paragraph?
选项 A、Origen and Embrex will jointly invent machines to increase production.
B、Origen wants to purchase an efficient donor cells injecting machine.
C、Origen has joined hands with Embrex in producing cell-injecting machines.
D、Origen is the leading company in producing embryo-locating machines.
答案C
解析 根据第五段，Origen面临的另一大挑战是提升产量。为了能实现，它和生产将疫苗一小时内植入多达五万卵子的机器的Embrex合作。Embrex正在改进机器，使之定位胚胎，并将细胞准确送入但不会杀死胚胎，只有选项C，“Origen和Embrex合作生产植入卵子的机器”符合原文。
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