Found this on a website :(

[Pigeon lower]

Living in London, you get used to people hating pigeons. Our very own mayor Ken Livingstone is waging a war against the birds, even spending a fortune to hire hawks to patrol Trafalgar Square to stop people feeding the "winged vermin". And it's true that some of them are particularly manky and freaky.

However, the White Carneau and the Show Racer are two breeds of pigeon that are not manky or freaky - in fact they have the potential to save lives. The reason is their genetic makeup. The Carneau birds are abnormally susceptible to heart attacks and heart vessel disease, the Racer birds not so much. In the Carneaus, the smooth muscle cells from the heart vessels are prone to uncontrolled growth. In humans, this growth is thought to be the reason why the lifesaving results of angioplasty operations sometimes don't last - 25 - 30% of patients experience re-stenosis, ie "over exuberant" tissue healing, which eventually blocks up the newly cleared artery once more.

Why exactly this restenosis happens in some patients but not all has up til now been a bit of a mystery. But by studying transcription factors that switch genes on and off, scientists found something surprising. A factor called STAT4 was 10 times higher in the Carneaus with heart disease. In birds without the heart disease, stimulating the STAT4 caused a 3-fold increase in cell growth. So now medics can work on figuring out how to block or modify the STAT4 pathway without needing to know what genes it affects, and possibly rescue a lot of people (and pigeons) from serious heart problems.

Here's the press release via Eurekalert.

FYI - I was looking for info on the two breeds mentioned above and I found the National Pigeon Association homepage, and with it some very handy advice on what to do if you find a lost pigeon with a band on its leg...