Crop agriculture has succeeded because growers have identified and cultivated useful plant variants through selective breeding and environmental alterations. Transgenic technology improves the precision of agriculture, modifying crops in ways that are uniquely useful that probably would not have arisen naturally. Salt tolerance is one such coveted trait. Recent research on promoting salt tolerance through transgenesis focuses on boosting salt-sequestering physiological mechanisms within species,

Courtesy of PPL TherapeuticsA new generation of pigs. Headlines in late summer 2000 introduced long-awaited reports on pig cloning and retroviral transmission to mice, pig cells healing rat spinal cords, and a gaff by Dolly dad Ian Wilmut erroneously heralding halt of xenograft work at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland. So it seemed that the question of whether pigs can pass their retroviruses to humans might finally be on the road to resolution. Not quite. Pigs, as the purveyors o