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."

Comments

Why were they killed?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

from MSNBC: IT IS NOT yet clear whether the mice are smarter -- they were all killed soon after birth

Um, why did they do that? Did the scientists just give the mice an X-ray and say "OMG THESE MOUSES ARE SO FREEKIN SMART EWWWWWWW I DONT WANT SMARTY-SMART MICE SQUISH IT SQUISH IT SQUISH IT!!!!!!!!!!!" and then they all stood on top of lab chairs waiting for their spouses to squish the brainy mice, (but of course they had to settle for the building custodian)?

Look, I'm just guessing, okay?

Re:Why were they killed?

[Prof_Dagoski]

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.

Re:Why were they killed?

[margaret]

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

Just imagine...

[zenyu]

If they gave this to a dolphin or a whale which already have larger brains than us, but presumably don't have our overabundance of the magic protein.

Or our nearest neighbors like chimps and gorillas... Though I think it would be more interesting to give it exclusively to Bonobos, they'd probably write some interesting erotica ;)

Manic Mice

[ThereIsNoSporkNeo]

They said that the mice were "Killed soon after birth"... what they didn't say is that they were killed after leading a bloody rebellion that culminated in a tense showdown in the lab, with one of the engineered mice holding a poisoned needle to one of the researcher's throats.

Luckily they were able to calm down the miscreant with a piece of cheese, and lured him far enough away from the researcher to turn him into a bloody splot on the (otherwise spotlessly clean linolium) floor.

Back to you Bob.

Rescaled images

[nucal]

In the MSNBC article, they rescaled the brain images to be about the same size - going to the original article (subscription req'd), the brains overexpressing ß-catenin look to be about twice the size of the normal ones.

The researchers genetically altered the brain cells, but not bone growth - so I wonder whether the increased folding is a response to being crammed into a cranial cavity that is too small.

Re:not such a good idea

[TriciaMac]

In the early 1600's members of the church were saying much the same thing about Galileo and his support of Copernican heliocentric theory. Echoes were again heard with the introduction of Newtonian physics, and Darwin's natural selection. Throughout history people have feared and even violently supressed new ideas and methodologies that would later prove beneficial and increase our understanding of the wonderous and often mystifying universe that we live in. While I agree that new discoveries can be frightening, I don't think that we should even attempt to place limitations on the growth of the human sphere of knowledge (mostly,because we can't). We are, by nature, an inquisitive species and that trait has brought us some amazing things like computers( and there was MUCH rejoicing!), air-conditioning, antibiotics, books, Hitchhiker's Guide on compact disc, etc. At any given time in our past there were people saying," Hey, that's enough! We go much farther with all of this new-fangled learning and we are in grave danger!{Insert name of deity here} is going to punish us if we don't cut it out this instant!" The end result? We are already in a hell of our own creation where there are effective treatments for a vast number of diseases, where we have the tools to combat drought and famine, where we can accurately predict storms and the path of a hurricane, where we can communicate with loved ones across vast distances by simply pressing a few buttons, and where doomsday criers can post their warnings on the internet for all of the world to see! You see, we have always been "extremely close" to your imaginary line with our unlocking of seemingly insoluble mysteries and looking back, we find that that line was never really there.

please not now

[Tablizer]

Oh great!

First it was H1B's from India, Pakistan, and China. Now we have to compete with smart mice also.

Shudduv been a dentist like Mom warned.

eh, unlikely to be smarter

[mikeee]

If such a simple mutation could make you smarter, evolution would have found already. After all, intellegence is an evolutionary advantage, just look at all the chicks us geeks get...

Quick! Kill those mice before they build the death ray to destroy us!

Arthur always was a little confused about the mice

[schmaltz]

"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."

Only one word registered with Arthur.

"Mice?" he said.

"Indeed Earthman."

"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"

Slartibartfast coughed politely.

"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sit coms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."

The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.

"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."

Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.

"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioural research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run around mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behaviour we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own ..."

Arthur's voice tailed off.

"Such subtlety ..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."

"What?" said Arthur.

"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis, - if it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous."

He paused for effect.

"You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme ...

"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."

"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems."