Barnyard Brain Cells Transferred Biotechnology Involves Chickens, Japanese Quail

When is a chicken not a chicken? When it sings and bobs its head like a quail, thanks to an experimental brain-cell transplant.

In what sounds like something out of a B horror movie, Evan Balaban, an experimental neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, carried out the switch.

“The larger implications are what this will teach us about the development of brain circuits that produce behavior,” Balaban said Wednesday. “It could eventually help people who have brain damage or mental illness or even brain diseases.”

His research on Plymouth Rock chickens and Japanese quail was published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although different from cloning, his work is adding to the furor over genetic experimentation.

“This is more dangerous than cloning,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday. “When the animal rights people get in on this, I might join them.”

But one ethicist said this experiment’s implications aren’t dangerous.

“This is a big week to hyperventilate about barnyard biotechnology,” said Glenn McGee, director of research ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “But we’ve got to be careful not to overreact. It doesn’t mean that soon there will be armies of baby Ronald Reagans or Michael Jordans.”

Balaban does not see his work as opening the way for people with socially unacceptable behavior being forced to undergo brain surgery.

“There’s no good reason to do this in humans,” Balaban said. “It’s not technically possible to do this in mammals anyway. There are some enormous obstacles that would have to be overcome.”

In the quail-and-chicken experiment, after much trial and error, Balaban discovered that certain cells in the quail midbrain changed the animal’s sound patterns, and other cells in the quail brain stem changed head movement during singing.

Balaban incubated fertilized quail and chicken eggs for 48 hours and then cut tiny windows in their shells. Cells in the chicken embryo were removed and substituted with corresponding quail brain cells.

Quail and chickens were used because each species has a distinctive crowing and bobbing pattern.

Sound patterns and bobbing behaviors were documented on videotape in experimental chickens that received quail brain cell transplants and in a control group of chickens that received chicken transplants only.

The chickens were killed after 14 days to further document the results with brain examinations.

Balaban’s previous research, published in 1988 in the journal Science, transplanted cells governing only the quail’s sound pattern. No bobbing measurements were done then.

His work continues a long line of research by neuroscientists who are trying to understand cells and their connection to certain behaviors.