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From Raising by Hand to Industrialized Breeding of Pigs-

"The 2007 Science Season: Technological Exclamation Mark for Taiwan" Special Exhibition from August 2nd to September 23rd: See How the Reproductive Technology of Taiwan Created a Legend

NTU's College of Bio-resources and Agriculture is holding a special exhibition in Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from August 2nd to September 23rd called "2007 Science Season: Technological Exclamation Mark for Taiwan." All citizens who want to understand the development of the animal science of Taiwan are welcome to attend.

As the main curator for this exhibition, Director of the Institute of Biotechnology Dr. Winston P.K. Cheng points out that the development of animal reproductive science was not merely for the purpose of finding more cost-effective ways to breed, raise, and procreate animals. Actually, many experiments and ideas which can not be carried out in human medical science are brought into realization through animal medical science. It was after test tube rabbits, rats, pigs, and sheep were successfully developed that we had test tube babies. And the hottest global genetic engineering and cloning technology all stem from the development of animal science. Animal medical science may well be termed the precursor of human medical science.

In this exhibition, Professor Cheng uses two important historical processes in the development of animal science to let people understand the past and future of Taiwan's animal science. One is to introduce the pig raising industry of Taiwan: how did it evolve from a simple, traditional, peasant family sideline business into a large-scale, professional, economical, efficiency-oriented, enterprise-style industry? Another main point is to introduce how the research scholars discover the unknowns of human body medicine through the development of animal medicine.

The special exhibition also introduces the stem cell tissue engineering that has become a global hot topic in recent years (such as the regeneration of nerve cells and its structures), and allogeneic structures or organ transplants (the feasibility of animal organs being transplanted onto human bodies). In order to effectively track and monitor the efficiency of stem cell transplantation technology for repairing the damaged organisms, NTU has successfully developed the fluorescent pig stem cell tracking system. Through the fluorescent stem cells provided by fluorescent pigs, when pigs were used as animal models to do experiments on the repair of damaged organisms, the actual conditions of the stem cells that have been transplanted into the pigs could be easily monitored by watching their very explicit and recognizable sign, thereby ascertaining the extent to which the repairs are being done. In the future, we can hope to solve the mystery of the regeneration of nerve cells from the animal models that accept stem cell treatment of fluorescent pigs.

Chinese version