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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.)
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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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.
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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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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