Improving Gene Transfer Into Livestock

About 10 years before they startled the world by cloning Dolly the sheep, scientists at The Roslin Institute south of Edinburgh had rocked the scientific community by producing the first healthy sheep carrying a human gene. Since then, a few research groups have used similar gene transfer techniques to build herds of sheep, cattle, goats, and pigs that make human proteins, often with the goal of milking them for valuable drugs. Now, a new method developed by a team of researchers in Wisconsin and California promises to make production of such transgenic livestock much easier than it is today.