WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, TOBY HUDSON
Camels’ highly adaptable nature and resistance to disease has always made them essential to desert-dwelling cultures, and with a little help from genetic engineering they may one day provide us with cheaper drugs. A team of researchers at Dubai’s Camel Reproduction Centre have created transgenic camel embryos to which they introduced non-human genes "similar to those of humans," according to United Arab Emirates newspaper, The National. They haven’t yet been able to introduce human genes into the embryos, but the head of the Centre’s reproductive biology lab, Nisar Wani, told The National that he and his team have taken an important first step. If human genes that code for proteins such as insulin could be added, the camels could produce milk laden with pharmaceuticals to ...
