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At Long Last, Mice Produce Sperm From Monkeys
Hoon Mihn Fao writes "The BBC Reports: 'Mice have been used to produce viable monkey sperm using tissue transplanted from the testes of macaques.
The U.S. scientists involved say their work might one day help to conserve animals that are facing extinction.'"
I know nobody here reads the articles, but the most disturbing part of the whole procedure is that the testicular material is grafted onto the mouse's back. The mouse must then be constantly producing a thin gelatinous ooze of reproductive material, which is attempting to burrow into anything and everything nearby.
Eww.
The ______ Agenda
But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that if it's a bad idea to be doing GE on humans then it's probably a bad idea on animals too. If it's okay on animals, it's okay on humans. After all, we're all part of the same evolutionary closed-cycle system, and if we f*ck things up for the animals around us we're f*cked too.
Also, I hate PETA as much as the next person (Unless it stands for People Eating Tasty Animals) but if we think GE is somehow cruel and horrible for humans, why exactly is it not cruel and horrible for monkeys?
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
I'm no cell biologist, but it seems this process could be used to bring back extinct species as well, or at least a part of them[....] Of course, one would then need a female.... maybe an elephant?
That's the rub (no pun intended).
While we have a basic understanding of genetics, our understanding of embryogenesis -- how a baby organism is built from the genetic code -- is still rather limited.
We also, in most cases we don't know what a particular gene does, and given that other genes can control a gene's expression, and those genes can be controlled by yet other genes, and all the genes in the process can be influenced by the organisms internal -- hormones, etc. -- and external environment, just what a gene does is a complicated question.
But it's clear that the environment of the embryo -- which is, by and large, the embryo's mother -- has a strong influence on what's actually produced from the genetic "recipe".
Experiments cloning cats, for instance, have shown that pelt patterns and hair color are only a little influence by the gene (which makes sense if you consider that getting locked into one pattern, over many generations, makes for poor camouflage -- so not having pelt patterns under genetic control may in fact be a very successful genetic adaptation).
So while elephants are related to mammoths, it's still an open question whether injecting mammoth DNA into an elephant egg would produce anything viable, let alone anything that would survive to term and be healthy. But you're correct, it might be possible, and if it is, we could then breed successively less "elephant-contaminated" generations of mammoths.
But it's still far from trivial, and shouldn't be seen as an excuse, as some would use it, to be blase about species extinctions and dwindling species diversity occurring in the present.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Didn't the OP say the motivation behind the research was to protect against extinction? The means may be perceived as cruel and horrible, but if it preserves an species that would otherwise be lost, the end is not. In any case, the motivations for doing GE on humans are different than the ones they mention here. It's not like we're very close to extinction...
(Though I suspect that depends who you ask).