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Gene Therapy Creates Strong Super-Rats
srstoneb writes "The AP is reporting about a
gene therapy study in which muscle tissue in rats is modified to grow at an accelerated rate. The researchers are mainly interested in combating muscular dystrophy, but obviously there are other potential applications, both good and bad, for a treatment which makes you stronger. Athletic ethics are addressed in the article (it's in the sports section, after all), and rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe regular Tom Galloway -- who posted the link there, where I saw it -- made a comparison to the 'super-soldier serum' that created Captain America. Based on the article, a vaguely Wolverine-like healing factor is another benefit as the therapy allows faster recovery from injury. We already had a non-powered superhero
reported last year. Who knows what the future may hold? ^_^" (And that's not the only natural-born superhero.)
Just as well Captain America turned out to be a pretty all round nice guy.
What's to stop Mr. Super Human being annoyed at the rest of humanity and taking it out on us?
Will we have to create a bunch of super heroes to stop the super-villians? Sounds like Darwin at his best.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.
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It sounds great in theory, but there are all kinds of potential problems with rapidly and artificially increasing strength that way.
If you increase strength very rapidly without allowing for the corresponding tendons and bone to adapt to the greater muscle mass, you can cause tendon ruptures and stress fractures (already well-known phenomenon in athletes). The body can adapt to all kinds of derangements if you give it enough time, but too much too fast? Bad news. I've seen people come in to the hospital with a hemoglobin level of 5, still walking (slowly) and talking. Now, that's theoretically too low to survive on, but if it happens over a long enough period of time, your body can adapt. If you take a normal person and immediatly bleed them down to a hemoglobin of 5, they'll die.
Plus, if you are turning over too much muscle tissue too fast and don't stay adequately hydrated, you can clog your kidneys and end up in renal failure. This happens periodically when some untrained amateur athelete tries an Ironman without adequate conditioning.
The human body is an amazing machine, but you have to be careful monkeying around with it... athletes may be after performance, but anyone who volunteers to be a guinea pig for this stuff needs his head examined.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I wonder if this would also help stop or reduce the breakdown of muscle tissue, when used to combat the effects of genetic conditions like Marfans Syndrome.
Another application might be to solve certain heart related issues. There isn't exactly a huge replacement supply right now.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I actually have muscular dystrophy, and although it doesn't affect me, it affects my mum, and potentially my children - I'm damn glad that someone has taken the time to research this oft (relatively) overlooked genetic disease.
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I wonder how 'vaguely Wolverine" these healing abilities are.
It's be interesting to see precisely what applications these advancements are seeing in military use. Sure, it's unlikely that any serious or controversal issue gets used right away by mainstream military, but surely there are special military groups that get "advanced tech" quite, in, er, advance of the main military force.
I heard/read somewhere once that the US military's "high end" technology is 12 years more advanced than anything that is actually available for the mainstream military force, and only used by Special Ops.
Consider how un-advanced things were during the first desert storm compared to how they are now - and jump ahead another years, and think of an equal amount of differential, if not an exponential differential. Wow.
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Personally, I think they should have two seperate athletic leagues - the normal one, and an indy league in which steroids, gene-therapy and performance enhancing drugs are allowed. It would make for an interesting competition. Give the scientists an arena.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Just wondering if this would be useful for building up muscle mass to combat long periods in low-gravity - such as a manned trip to Mars?
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I don't know if it exists in English, but in France, 'Le Lombard' brought out a 'commic' called 'Des Lendemains sans Nuage' (Cloudless Tommorow's) in which this topic, amoung others is nicely disected. In the end, you get a competition, where no one can remember the runners names, just the labs that they work for, and the loss of a life is just considered par for the course in testing.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
thought that the concern with steroids was that they posed long-term health risks... not that they made people stronger. The concept of limiting strength to those with naturally good genes is quite elitist.
Well, actually, it is REALLY IMPORTANT. There is a form of socio-economic natural selection that occurs today (which replaces the more mundane reproduce or face gene extinction). This type of evolution takes the most beautiful among us and mates that set against the wealthy and famous. The children of these mergers belong to an elite caste with higher privelege than others.
Is this wrong? Perhaps, when viewed locally. But when viewed statistically over many generations, this acts as an evolutionary pressure that improves our genepool.
Over time, the "top" becomes quite heavily loaded with genes from those with money (presumably intellegence/beauty/skill allowed them to acquire and/or retain such funds) and those with natural beauty. The men from this upper caste (like all men) are very promiscuous and highly saught after by women who often have their children out of wedlock (happens very often with the rich and famous).
Simultaneously, the lowest caste in the population is washed every few generations in bloody wars that statistically prune the bottom of the genepool (yes, awful when viewed directly - but when viewed statistically over generations, it proves to be important).
The overall result is that over many generations the population becomes more beautiful, more intelligent and more athletic. Yes, of course, there are ugly, stupid non-athletic rich folk and beautiful, brilliant athletic poor folk as well... Remember, we are talking statistics here and even if the difference is a few percentage points this way or that, it makes a big difference over multiple generations...
But if you change the rules (e.g. plastic surgery and sports-drugs), natural selection stops working properly. Very much in the same way that paying welfare mothers to have babies screws with evolution, so does providing a means for lesser genes to pretend to be greater genes.
Don't get mad at me for saying these things - I am simply speaking about evolution. It is, after all, how we came to be - the stronger genes gave advantages that ensured their survival over the weaker genes... It still happens... That is all.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
US beef producers use Trenbolone synthetic steroid anabolic to muscle-up calves. It is applied as a thin tube stuck into ear of cattle. (Anabolics work best when injected, frequent injections are not practical - hence the slow-release modified formulation of steroid stuck into ear). Bodybuilders get trenbolone from farmers (they can't buy anabolics legit in US). Since they do not want to walk around with a tube in the ear, they extract trenbolone from the tube formulation and inject themselves daily with the stuff in form of extremely painful subcutaneous injections. They call it "making their own gear"
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
That's funny, because I guarantee you, no matter how hard I tried I could not become professionally competitive in likely any athletic event. I don't have the natural genes for it. So it's just luck that the top people got the superior genes (for this task), but it's cheating if I engineer my children so they have them?
The real complaint (and the one I'd support for now) is that any gene therapy that will come around soon will be dangerous. Others have mentioned potential downsides of massively increased muscle production, and most potentially enhancing gene therapies would be best expressed through geneline engineering, where a developing embryo is genetically modified. The ethics of that aren't pretty, and its first uses are going to be therapeutic in nature. When it's safe to actually enhance though, there's going to have to be a new look at the old rulebooks banning genetically altered atheletes.
The answer to this, of course, is to create genetically modified cattle and poultry that are naturally resistant to common bacterial infections, and drop the use of the antibiotics.
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Some of us already vote with our wallets, and i'd second the notion that it's how to get the idea out there that we might want to know what's in our food. I hate to bring up the same old song again, but the truth is that there are a lot of reasons for GMO food to be labelled, and some of it has to do with current, known allergies, intolerances, and illnesses. Obviously, this won't matter if a GM rat makes it into the food market- anyone who's eating rat probably isn't watching their diet for such things too closely. But when it comes to cows? It's hard enough to find cows that aren't being fed other cows (mad cow disease, anyone?) Do we know what a prion disease would do in a supercow? would they be more immune, or would they just survive longer as incubators, becoming more infectious once they got turned into feed? (I don't know if they're 100% sure that that's how it spreads, but i think that's what they've decided to go with here in the US.)
What if they just show fewer symptoms?
Granted, the non-organic but anti-growth-hormone folks might like this path (except for me, but i'm a treehugging crazy white chick who has immune and food allergy problems; i have to be careful what i buy in the first place) but i'd like folks to have a lot more time to think about it before it hits the market.
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the Wired Article:. html?tw=wn_tophead_1
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62297,00
the DARPA announcement:d 2.htm
http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa03-02mo
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from the Yahoo article, was Monkey Man of Tumbridge Wells. He was an elaborate spoof created by ccc of b3ta. There were no sightings of him, all the sightings were fabricated by ccc himself and sent into local newspapers. It was quite big news over here in the UK. I had the pleasure of speaking to the Monkey Man on the radio when he revealed himself, and he's a damn nice bloke
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You're form the UK and say this?
The very existance of Asda and Iceland, and the continuing popularity of McDonalds and KFC, demonstrates that a significant proportion of the UK food-buying public simply doesn't care what they eat.
Remember, if you want to understand people, ignore what they say and pay attention to what they do.
> What you're doing is taking something many people have an aversion to (intrusive gene therapy etc) and using it as a rational for why bloody wars that clean out the working classes are good. You're basically making the argument that rich beautiful people (most of whom got beautiful primarily by virtue of being rich) are actually better in a vague "scientific evolutionary" sense than the rest of us.
>
> The corollary is that the poor and ugly people are worse. The same logic was used to justify the sterilization movements in the United States and the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany. No, the Jews were exterminated because (1) the Nazis needed a scapegoat, and (2) if you believed Nazi propaganda, because they controlled all the money on the planet, or some such bunkum.
The sterilization movement in the US had nothing to do with scapegoating or allegations of control - I fail to recall any allegation that the retarded were Communist infiltrators or secretly holding onto the world's purse strings, from even the most strident McCarthyite.
Eugenics is not National Socialism. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad rap, and maybe it's time we realized that eugenics is nothing to be afraid of.
Seriously - what's so wrong with selecting for intelligence, as opposed to "big butts"? Intelligence is partially determined by genetics, and also by cultural factors. Both need to be selected for.
I'll grant that there are almost as many potential Einsteins in the ghettoes as there are in suburbia. But if you've got Einstein's genes, and you're born to a crack whore shitting out six kids and raising them in a memeset that considers its own ignorance as a mark of cultural pride ("Yo, dat skoolin's fo' whitey! Y'all don't wants ta be actin' white!"), you're doomed from the get-go. When more of your population group is in prison than in college, you don't have an intelligence problem, you have a cultural problem.
Likewise, the most hundrum set of IQ100 genes, raised in a culture that values knowledge, science, and realizes that a good education is a key to survival in a knowledge-based economy, can have a successful and productive life.
If we wanted to be technical, I'm arguing more about memetics than genetics, and my sterilization programme should be called "eumetics", rather than "eugenics".
As someone who pays more in taxes to support the aforementioned trash than I spend on every other expense, including food, shelter, travel, ongoing education, and recreational activities combined, I want some return on that investment. Breeding more consumers of social services feeds my government's appetite for more voters, but doesn't contribute in any way to my country's long-term economic stability.
Eliminating the drag on our economy - preferably through through sterilization, less preferably through cutting social payments without cutting the population of consumers, and much less preferably through extermination - and using the savings to fund the education of people who are culturally receptive to learning, would be a Big Win.
You may not like the fact that high educational standards are required of the citizens of post-industrial states in a globalized economy, but that's the economic reality. We need to improve our population's net overall educational level, and eumetics (the sterilization of those who are uneducated, unemployable, and have demonstrated themselves culturally-unreceptive-to-learning) is merely the least repugnant way of doing it.
Finally, consider that a eumetics programme could be less repugnant than what we're doing now -- namely government funding of excessive breeding, throwing the offspring in prison, and charging the economically productive for the government's privilege to do so.
Your last sentence marks you as a reactionary zealot. Meat is made of protein and as such is incapable of making you fat. Of course it can have fat on it, but even if eating fat made you fat (it doesn't - credit for that goes to carbohydrates, like the big fucking potato that most americans put down with their steak, or other source of refined, processed carbs) you can trim the fat off.
I've seen a lot of FUD spread on slashdot, but I haven't seen much food FUD.
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How about this guy? Freaky-low lactic acid production, high lactic-acid clearing, huge heart, VO2 Max (oxygen uptake to blood) more than twice the average person... And he beat cancer when he had about a 20% chance of living through it. Then he went and won the toughest race in the world. Five times. In a row.
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That much is true, since most people are unaware of both the risks and the prevalence of GM crops.
First, many people are more concered about the long term ecological impact of GM crops than about personal health risks. Besides the problem of GM crops escaping into the wild and displacing original species, risks to wild animals (like birds and butterflies) from toxins produced by GM crops, and increased use of pesticides on "Roundup Ready" crops, there are risks of gene transfer into other organisms - including disease organisms.
Second, GM crops have not existed long enough to be proven safe. There are unanswered questions about allergens and toxic substances produced by GM crops. You wanna eat 'em? Hey, I support your right to put anything you want into your body - so long as you grow them under biohazard protocols and label them, so that I don't have to assume the risk too.
Thrid, GM food crops have no real benefit except inflating profits of multinational corporations at the exepense of third-world farmers. The idea that third world farmers should plant "golden rice" rather than go back to those local crops rich in vitamin A that were displaced by globalization - where third world nations have to grow food that can be exported for the profit of others, rather than feed their own populations - would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
Choosing to avoid GM food is not only a rational decision, it is the only rational decision.
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Actually I know a few type 2 diabetics that are doing much better by avoiding carbs. Some of them are even drastically lowering the amount of medicine they need to take. Their sugar levels are much lower and are stable. These people are also in good shape and are feeling great. At least two people started eating more protein and less carbs about 5 - 6 years ago, before all this Atkins craze started. Of course 5 - 6 years is not that long and the long-term effects are not known, but they can't be much worse than taking insulin and other drugs for diabetes long-term. Not that this is a good place for this discussion, but making blank statements about such a complex subject, without much proof is never a good idea.
Besides the problem of GM crops escaping into the wild and displacing original species, risks to wild animals (like birds and butterflies) from toxins produced by GM crops, and increased use of pesticides on "Roundup Ready" crops, there are risks of gene transfer into other organisms - including disease organisms.
You can't have it both ways -- Anti-GM zealots like to say that GM is different than selective breeding because according to them, "genes don't cross species". Yet, when it suits them, the exact same anti-GM crowd turns around and invokes the possibility of lateral gene transfer between GM crops and wild crops. That's doublethink -- the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once.
Second, GM crops have not existed long enough to be proven safe
It is logically impossible to "prove anything safe". We could find out tomorrow that totally "natural" carrots cause cancer, The simple fact is according to all known rules of molecular biology, there is not even a single logical reason to suspect that GM crops are any more or less healthy than non-GM crops.
You wanna eat 'em? Hey, I support your right to put anything you want into your body - so long as you grow them under biohazard protocols and label them, so that I don't have to assume the risk too.
That was more or less the same reasoning that white South Africans used to justify Apartheid -- you want to live around Blacks, then fine, so long as I don't have to assume the risk too. The point is just like the anti-GM crowd, the white South Africans had no evidence for their prejudices, although they could certainly say that there was no *proof* that Blacks were safe.
The idea that third world farmers should plant "golden rice" rather than go back to those local crops rich in vitamin A that were displaced by globalization - where third world nations have to grow food that can be exported for the profit of others, rather than feed their own populations - would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
It may or not be tragic that traditional life styles were displaced by capitalization, but the fact is the clock is not going to turn back to medieval times before European contact, no matter how much some people may want it too. Either technology can be used to help the problems of the third world, or the problems can remain unsolved
They kindof have us over a barrel there, and not everyone can afford the extra expense of buying labeled and certified "organic" grown foods.
I'm always interested in human behavior, and I like to watch people in my local Safeway. You might be surprised how many people buy the cheapest generic-brand foods they can, then spend loads on cigarettes and lottery tickets. I wrote a JE on it a little while ago.