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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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