You admitted you didn't even look at the articles though lol
I read the URLs and it wasn't worth my time.
It wasn't an "accident" it was an unexpected outcome because the same gene deletion in other rodents has a different behavioral outcome.
Gene editing didn't "turn hamsters violent". The study was designed so that all the hamsters - including those that were not gene-edited - would display aggression. They placed an older hamster that had been living alone with a younger same-sex hamster. (remember, they were expecting reduced aggression based on mouse studies on the same gene.) of course they were going to display aggression! The differences were the KO hamsters had less latency to aggression, were aggressive for a longer period of time. The publication is not clear if they coded behaviors and quantified them or only measured latency and duration. The aggressive behavior observed were chasing, biting and pinning.
Knock-out (gene deleted) animal studies are important for understanding diseases in humans and pharmaceutical interventions. Ironically, they're important for animal welfare because fewer animals are used. Instead of selectively breeding generations of animals with a specific health problem, the gene is deleted in a few individuals. Interestingly, there is a CRISPR project editing genes of pigs to develop animals that have better lower stress responses, which leads to better health and welfare for the animals. People have been breeding plants and animals for thousands of years and producing radical (and often unexpected or detrimental) changes in them. But that's a whole different topic.
So yeah, if the URLs are exaggerated and false, I'm not falling for clickbait and reading the article. Research on hamsters is real. CRISPR gene-editing in research animals, including hamsters is real. The article they're referring to is real, just being misinterpreted to grab people's attention (to earn money on advertising or selling data...)
