On unanticipated effects on the health of genetically modified animals
"This work, by definition, is experimental, and no matter how well you think it out you never know quite what the resulting animal might be like, what its health might be like. There's a pretty good example of that from a few decades ago. It's called the Beltsville Pig, and scientists were trying to create a pig that was leaner and that grew faster and that required less feed. (The idea was to raise these pigs for pork.) So their solution was to put the Human Growth Hormone gene in all these pigs and, in some ways, it worked. The pigs did grow faster. They did require less feed.
"But, from an animal welfare perspective, it was disastrous and I don't think scientists really saw it coming. The pigs had ... basically every medical problem you can have: metabolic disorders, arthritis, eye problems. They were just miserable. And so that's a real concern but ... not all modifications will be bad for animal welfare. As it happens, these goats [with genetically modified milk] have elevated levels of an anti-biotic compound in their milk and early studies from the scientists that created them indicated that the goats are actually healthier than other goats because their milk essentially protects them from udder infections that can be common in farm animals. So it can really go both ways."
On the prospect of raising animals for their organs
"Scientists used to focus on the potential for transplanting ape organs into humans. The idea was that apes were very similar to us so that should work, but that idea has sort of become taboo, especially as we learn more about how cognitively sophisticated apes are. So, scientists are now really focused on pigs, largely because their organs are about the same size as human organs and there are already some very successful procedures being done. It's somewhat common now to receive a valve from a pig heart in certain heart operations. But scientists really want to be able to transplant whole organs, not just a heart valve from a pig but, say, a whole pig heart into humans. There's a huge shortage of organ donors worldwide, so scientists just imagine that if you could have these pig farms that are just growing organs constantly it might save a lot of lives. The problem is ... rejection. It just shows the potential of if we can re-engineer an animal's body, we could potentially engineer it so that it creates these perfect replacement parts for humans."
“ Emotionally and instinctively there's something that seems very distasteful about engineering animals only so we can take them apart and make our own lives better but, as soon as I have that thought, I think about the fact that I'm not a vegetarian. So, logically, it seems more defensible to me to have pig farms for organ transplants than it does to have pig farms for pork.