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Genetically Engineered Pets Hit the Market
psoriac writes "According to this article the Taiwanese Taikong Corporation is starting to sell "Night Pearls" - zebrafish that glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine coral. US sales are expected to follow."
I'd rather have a pressurized tank with naturally bioluminescent deep-sea species...
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Before all the fuss about "messing with nature", I'll just remind /. readers about the theory that most human attributes including pigmentation were selected by sexual, not environmental selection. I.e. we look like we do largely because, like glowing fish, we find ourselves "cute".
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In about 10 years, La-Z-Boy is going to introduce the chair dog.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Sometimes theyâ(TM)re just injected with dye: Painted fish, which is pretty cruel.
I wonder how a buyer could tell the difference?
âas more than 90 per cent have been sterilizedâ I guess having your organs glow is a bit of a downside here too. Must make the remaining 10% glow relatively brighter.
Sometimes itâ(TM)s best to go low-tech, like Gibson says. (I hope you know where â¦)
And Iâ(TM)m sure the dolphin with the SQUID would agree.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
What I want is a genetically engineered lawn - the blades of grass never grow to 3" and stop, and there is built-in resistance to Round-Up.
NPR had an interview with a guy from Transgenic Pets, about allergy free cats. What was funny was that the interviewer asked the guy repeatedly what was the benefit to the animal and all he could say was that 'it didn't hurt the animal at all'
You got it. Genetic Modification thru Engineering is nothing more than a single generation evolution. However, the one thing that individuals who are against genetic modification cite is that a modified species which overruns a natural species completly is that the modified species did not have a chance to adapt to the new threat which they would have if the introduced change came about naturally. This is why current genetecists are looking at human evolution and some of the branches that didnt't survive, or integrated with the branches that did survive. This is also why they take measures to prevent the release of the modified species into the wild.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
is if these things actually get out in the wild.
"Fish", you ask. "How could they get out in the wild?"
Simple. People flush them down the toilet. Where I live, Carp are a big problem. Our lake is full of them, they disturb all the mud and turn the lake into more of a mud-puddle. How did they get there? People flushing goldfish down the toilet, apparently.
Now, that's bad. But imagine if The Great Barrier Reef got a couple of these genetically engineered monsters onto it. It's biological integrity would be instantly compromised; who knows what will happen with these fish in 5, 10, 50 years time?
-- james
Just what I was thinking. The glowing fish would be the first thing eaten, so their genes would not last long in the wild.
i see all this "implant a gene from another creature and it will wreak havoc on the ecosystem and stuff" comments
hello? do you know how stupid you sound?
look: there is informed, intelligent whistleblowing and alarmism, and then there is false, hysterical, fear of the unknown alarmism
i think "frankenfood" is a good term to use for gm food another parallel to the frankenstein legend: remember the stupid peasants who wanted to burn frankenstein in their fear of something that, essentially, in the story as written by mary shelley, was actually HELPING them?
do you not see how your uneducated fear of the unknown holds us back?
are you going to stop the part of human nature that is curious and tinkers and is basically what has gotten us as far as it has in civilization?
please.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The little bugger's WILL to reproduce?
Since when are chemicals considered to have wills? If they don't they can't be frustrated in the way that you are claiming, and as such your argument that they are not being tortured.
They are, however, being altered from their "natural" course. Or are they? Aren't humans part of nature? If we are, if we are a product of nature, how can we ever do anything that is outside of what is natural? Then us playing with genes is just anohter part of nature, albeit a new aspect of nature.
So, to drag out and beat he proveribal Slashdot Glowing Dead horse..
I assume these glowing genes are patented by somebody?
Does this mean that if you buy these fish, breeding them will be illegal?
Do you think that once, rather than this just being something that affects farmers (in faraway states) and computer programmers (who the average person has to learn an entire new vocabulary just to understand what the programmers are talking about), once the whole you-can-patent-anything thing starts to affect "the average person" in a very clear, noticeable way-- "Here are some dogs, that you paid money for. But you're banned from letting them breed, because they happen to contain some invisible series of DNA codes that, despite being part of this dog's very life, is the intellectual property of some random corporation."-- do you think once we reach that point, maybe we'll finally start to see public backlash against how far the u.s. patent paradigm has gone?
Of course, if the people selling these fish want to keep their patents safe, they'd probably just make all the fish infertile. But then if all the fish are infertile, why are the environmentalists worried? Is it because they've seen "Jurassic park"? And what happens if some of the un-neutered versions somehow leak out on the black market (ebay)? Could they stop that? Is spaying a DMCA-applicable "method that effectively controls access to intellectual property"?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I know this is hard to imagine, but eating something doesn't somehow confer its genetic structure to you. For a long time people seem to have developed the belief that "you are what you eat" but that simply isn't true. Eating one of these fish isn't any more likely to make you glow in the dark than it is to make fins pop out of your body. Better not eat any cows unless you want 4 stomachs! Or any plants unless you want to start turning green and getting energy from the sun through your skin! or maybe you'd just start throwing down roots!
Just to clarify: you are not what you eat. Remember those nutrigrain commercials, where the guy looks at the hot woman and then realizes that her "buns" are the "sticky" variety? So instead they say "you should eat nutrigrain".... which leaves me wondering how thrilled that guy is going to be when she starts growing nutrigrain bars instead of breasts. I hardly see how that is an improvement, except possibly for cleaning. (nutrigrain is probably less messy that stickybuns) In case they had confused you, I'll let you in on the secret. It doesn't really happen. OK? So all you FUDsters can just drop this particularly silly topic.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
For personal aquariums and the like I think this is an awsome idea. I think would be quite entertaining to turn of the lights and have glowing fish in the tank.
And in this case I think the likely hood of an escaped glowing fish having an advantage over natural fish somewhat unlikely. I would think the glow would tend to be a big sign saying "Food Here!"
I tend to take a fairly relaxed view of gentetic engineering. I think our chances of stopping it and our chances of stopping genetically modified species from populating the wild are both slim to none. Therefore the best course of action, I can see, is to figure out how to mitigate the detrimental impact.
The virus is a genetically engineered strain of the herpes virus from a mouse, and has been modified to induce an immune reaction in female mice around the egg, causing them to become infertile for around 6 months.
Obviously this virus is targeted at mice only, and is aimed at reducing (if not eliminating) the frequency and severity of mice plagues in Australia.
If successful it would remove the need for the literal tonnes of highly poisinous rodenticides that are now applied around farms, grain silos etc. Not to mention the economic benefit from an increase grain harvest quantity and quality.
The results of an unsuccessful trial are left to the imagination of the reader ..
They are now nearly at the stage where a permit is to be applied for that would allow for field trials of this virus.
Of note is that last time similar field trials were undertaken (of a Calaci (sp?) virus) for rabbits, the virus escaped from the control area and rapidly spread across the entire continent. Luckily it appears to have had no adverse affects on native wildlife, although several childen lost pet rabbits to the virus (a vaccine is now available to protect the "Fluffys" of this world).
You can read more about the virus in this transcript from a local Science show.
Should make for interesting debate when/if the permit application becomes reality.
Oh poopiedoops. A froo-froo gene like luciferase or GFP (Green Flourescent Protein) will not convey an advantage (more likely a disadvantage as it would make them visable to predators). This is innocuous and harmless to the fish.
So-called "frankenfood" is also mostly alarmist nonsense. SOME forms of GM food are a good thing(tm). For instance, if you could increase the nutritional value of a crop plant, that is good. It is likely to be somewhat costly to the plant when compared to non-altered wildtype (it takes energy to produce extra nutrients that evolution didn't set you up with). Food designed to be used for vaccination would also be good and not provide any advantage (but a cost) for the plant for similar reasons. On the other hand, creating drought-resistant plants, salt-resistant plants, or chemical agent resistant plants is NOT a likely good thing as in the evolutionary environment of a farm, this would provide a distinct evolutionary advantage to the plants, even those that pick up the trait by incidental species transfer of DNA (happens a lot...agrobacteria is one way to pass DNA around, as are certain plant viruses).
Under NORMAL circumstances (left to the wild ways of evolution), resistance to herbacide would not be of any real use and would actually be a biological burden to be selected against. But in our day with chemicals being used, it is an advantage. Thus it would be as advantageous to the desired plant as it is to the "weed" that picked up the gene by horizontal gene transfer. Bad news and ultimately self-defeating.
Thus, Greens and other knee-jerk anti-GM food people need to learn a bit and start making logical and reasonable distinctions. Altering crops for improved nutritional value or for specific use in immunization is A-OK and not harmful (What, a weed might actually pick up some extra nutritional value? Good! A new crop plant! But it wont because it is burdensome to carry). On the other hand, altering crops to produce pesticides or be herbicide resistant is a recipe for disaster.
One genetic engineering project I was involved with for a while was an attempt to improve the fungal resistance of sugarbeets. The means was to transfer chitinase into sugarbeets from fungi, an enzyme that degrades chitin, the cell-wall material in fungi (among other things). In fungi, the chitinase gene is tightly regulated and needed for proper cell growth and division. Placed into a crop plant, the hope was that if a fungal disease tried to attack the crop, the chitinase in the plant would cause the fungi to lyse (break open) and die. There are different ways this could work: have the gene turned on all the time so there is always a low level of chitinase (alien to a plant) all the time or you could tie it to a gene promotor associated with the plants stress response system so that it turns on only when the plant is under direct attack by fungi. Spiffy idea and good. Weeds are not generally devastated by fungal disease anyway so a transfer would be harmless. Besides, since there are viruses and bacteria that can transfer DNA between species of plants, and fungi can infiltrate and attack various plants, it is not unlikely that there are already wild plants out there that contain various genes from viruses, bacteria and fungi anyway already. There is nothing magic going on here.
An alternative project along the same vein was to alter yeast to overproduce chitinase on demand. The idea here was that you would spray your crop with a solution containing the modified yeast and then induce chitinase overproduction. The yeast would burst and dump their cell contents into the soil in the immediate vicinity. For some unknown period of time, active chitinase in the soil would (or so it was hoped) provide a barrier to fungi, preventing attack on the plants. I doubt this project would have worked out very well for a number of reasons but at this point I don't know the status of either project as I no longer work in that lab.
It is not automatic that any GM of crops MUST be a bad thing. Use some critical thinking before judging.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Go back and reread the first 2 Chapters of Darwin's treatise on Natural Selection. It is all about humans as the major force in natural selection through domestication.
As someone who has taken several courses on Genetic Engineering with scientists deeply involved in the field, I can say that there is little consensus on what exactly 'Genetic Engineer' means, as a term.
There are natural processes by which genes from one organism get inserted into genomes of another. Are you saying that this is not GE? Does it have to occur in a test tube to be GE? How can the location where the transgenetic meeting occurs determine the risk to the ecosystem?
-R
I assume you read my previous disclaimer, so bear with me.
My understanding was that terminated plants produce nonviable seeds. Do they also not produce pollen? Is it certain (I took special note of your "effectively", which is often informal shorthand for "almost certain", but perhaps you meant it differently) that pollen from a terminated plant could not be introduced into a species that is viable and pass that gene to its offspring?
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