Drumsticks, anyone? If you're partial to chicken legs, here's good news for you. Thanks to some clever genetic engineering, scientists at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have come up with a way to grow birds with an extra pair of legs.
The work, described in last week's Nature, centers on so-called T-box genes. Common to all vertebrates, including humans, they're important in the development of limbs in the embryo--determining, for example, whether they become hind- or forelimbs (or in chickens, legs or wings). But, says geneticist Juan Carlos Belmonte, the study's senior scientist, "we didn't know if one...
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