[chewxy]

This sentence strikes me as interesting:

> (For ethical reasons, they did not allow the chickens to hatch.)

What exactly is the ethical reason? Do they suspect that the dino-faced chickens will not have a good quality of life? How do they know that? Also, who doesn't want to see a dinosaur-faced chicken?

[DC-3]

It's not a dino-faced chicken. It's a deformed-chicken-face chicken. You're not going to get something cohesive by flipping a couple genes, you're going to get something malformed.

Edit: a bit of googling suggests that, at least according to the scientist leading the project, I am wrong here:

For now Bhullar has no plans, or ethical approval, to hatch the snouted chickens. But he believes they would have been able to survive "just fine".

"These weren't drastic modifications," says Bhullar. "They are far less weird than many breeds of chicken developed by chicken hobbyists and breeders."

"The rest of the animal looked OK, but one needs to think about this carefully from an ethical point of view."

[nn3]

I bet it was something like

- Do we do the experiment now (or in the next quarter at least), or do we spend a lot of time getting through ethics boards with new unique proposals that would likely take forever to get approved.