Personal injury news

Fluorescent green pigs said to aid spinal cord injury research

Scientists in Taiwan have announced they have successfully bred a fluorescent green pig.

Although sounding like something out of a bizarre horror movie, the pigs are actually being hailed as huge step in the study of stem cell research. As stem cell research develops, scientists believe they are getting closer to a day when they will be able to repair spinal cord injury and so treat the tens of thousands of people across the world that have been paralysed by motorbike accidents.

Boasting of his latest medical advancement, Wu Shinn-Chih of the National Taiwan University said, "There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green."

The glowing swine were created by injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs, and will now help researchers trace and monitor changes of the tissues during their physical development. The study of this will then hopefully be applied to spinal cord injury research.

In 2003 a Taiwanese company provoked outrage among environmentalists by selling the world's first genetically engineered fish, a fluorescent green creature that some said posed a massive risk to the world's ecosystem.