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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."
...the world will know the glory of the five assed monkey." -Mephisto
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
They just appear to be glowing in red and green patterns, if you fucking hippies would get off of the psychedellics you'd realize that they're not glowing at all!
Oh, wait, that's Phish, my bad.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
I didn't even know they'd made zebrafish yet, let alone coloured ones.
I, also a member of PETA, am wondering how these fish taste.
BTW, that's the "People for the Eating of Tasty Animals".
the scottish have been "injecting" sheep with their genetic material for ages, sadly to no avail. some day though, the noble scots will have their sheepwomen!!!!!!!!! =D
we had to shove christmas lights down their throats to make them glow.
I'd rather have a pressurized tank with naturally bioluminescent deep-sea species...
How would you clean it? That is without killing the fish when you depressurized it.
I doubt that glowing in the dark would benefit a zebrafish. Its very unlikely they'd be more attractive to the opposite sex here, zebrafish are not used to looking for glowing mates. Also, glowing in the dark could be quite a disadvantage if any predators are near.
In case of GM'd crops (resistance to pests etc.) the modified organism could well be superior to the wildtype.
But even if an advantage is introduced, its still questionable if replacing the wild type with the improved version is a bad thing.
What does humanity lose when all soybean plants become roundup-resistant? Would the world be a worse planet to live on if all zebrafish glowed in the dark?
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".
Yes, and what is found to be cute often relies on the features necessary for best survival in any environment.
Go back a few thousand years:
In Africa, the darker the skin the more time out in the sun gathering food and hunting. The women who are larger can carry more, nurse more, hence the desire for larger, curvatious women (Go back to older African songs saying their women have bigger breasts/ass)
In Eastern Asian countries, especially Japan, a lot of time is spent fishing in bright sunlight. Darker pigmentation in the eyes, plus smaller eyes, for better visibility on the water, lean muscles for fishing -- height being a factor.
Cute is a byproduct of what the environment says will survive best.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Please go look at a Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound, and tell me again about genetic manipulation. And creating new breeds named Peekapoo and Labradoodle is as much an abomination as Mephisto's five-assed monkey.
Then, take a look at the problems rampant in the pet population:
Who wouldn't want the genes fixed?
Design for Use, not Construction!
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 to older African songs saying their women have bigger breasts/ass)
I wouldn't consider "Baby Got Back" an older African song.