AT an American government research centre in Beltsville, Maryland, Dr Bob Wall peered disconsolately at the oddly shaped piglets floundering in their straw and sighed. The experiment was finished and he knew it.
Dr Wall had staked his reputation on the creation of a 'Schwarzenegger pig' that would have put him in the vanguard of a farming revolution for the 21st century. The experimental animals' rapid early growth had promised so much - but now they were fading fast.
For Dr Wall's team at the Department of Agriculture's Gene Evaluation and Mapping Laboratory, it was the second such trial to end in frustration and failure.
The first Beltsville pigs, their growth boosted by cow genes, went lame with arthritis at an early age. They had heart problems and bulging eyeballs. For the second experiment, a suspected chicken cancer gene was introduced into another batch of piglets. The gene made their hams and shoulders grow big and meaty; but by the time they were three months old their front and rear legs barely supported them.
'Some of the animals just got weak and then they couldn't stand up,' said Dr Wall. 'If you looked at the muscles you saw some of the beneficial effects. The muscles were getting larger. But you also saw conditions that were akin to degenerative diseases that are seen in humans.' This is the brave new science of 'transgenics': taking sequences of DNA and either altering them and putting them back into the same species or, more controversially, introducing them into a different species.
The pigs are not alone. Cows, sheep and chickens are being experimented on as the farmyard is dragged into the transgenetic age. Will consumers balk when they realise that the food on their supermarket shelves has been genetically engineered? Or will the benefits of this new science outweigh the potential for repugnance? The transgenic revolution, though, is already well under way. In Canada, scientists have come up with a transgenic salmon that grows to many times its normal size.