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Genetically Engineered Big-brained Mice
StefanJ writes "'Are you pondering what I'm pondering Pinky?' An item on MSNBC reports that researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have produced mice with big, convoluted brains by inserting an single extra gene. I am reminded of two pieces of SF: Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius, about a lab experiment that produces a brainy dog, and Bruce Sterling "Our Neural Chernobyl," in which the country is overrun with cunning coyotes and tribes of raccoons."
That's what's so frustrating about medical imaging technology. It's advanced enough to show what the brain looks like in the skull while the organism is still living, but you don't have a real good way of looking at the very fine structure without dissecting the brain. But, the things that's important to these researchers is what's happening at the cellular level. They want to know how the cells are qualitatively and quantitaively different. For that kind of analysis, they need cells, and a whole lot of 'em to get batches of cell stuff they can measure. My wife does this kind of work and it's amazing what they have to do in order to measure some of these chemicals and cell components.
Because imaging can't tell you things like:
Is the beta-catenin really being overexpressed ?
By how much?
In which neurons?
Has the expression of other proteins been altered too?
To answer these kinds of questions, you need to stain thin slices of the brains or grind up the brains.
-margaret