Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gene Therapy Creates Strong Super-Rats

Posted by timothy on from the pizza-with-nietzsche-cheese-please dept.

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.)

15 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Great, thats all we need... by myowntrueself · · Score: 5, Funny

    Rats with "vaguely Wolverine-like healing factor".

    Wonderful.

    I can see the pest control guys kitting up with miniguns and RPGs.

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    1. Re:Great, thats all we need... by originalTMAN · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, most of us have been training for this day for quite a while. I think the world will be safe.

  2. I'm all for it... by Arcanix · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the only way we'll be able to compete in hand to hand combat with the robots that we'll assuredly create and be forced to fight against in the near future.

  3. How long before this gets into the food chain? by mapnjd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With the rise-and-rise of agribusiness and the permanent pressure they place on our governments, how long before such genetic modifications are made to cows, pigs, etc.?

    --
    Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
    1. Re:How long before this gets into the food chain? by jarran · · Score: 5, Informative

      the anti-GM camp is vocal, but small.

      That rather depends where you live.

      The UK goverments own research done last year shows that the public mood in the UK "[...] ranged from caution and doubt, through suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection." (Quote lifted directly from the report.)

      They also found, interestingly, that people who came into the debate undecided about GM and not knowing much about the issues became more anti-GM the more they found out, which you could interpret as meaning that a significant number of people are not anti-GM out of ignorance, rather than choice.

      When customers stop buying it, corporations will stop selling it.

      Which is why every major supermarket in the UK has removed GM from their products, and biotech companies are withdrawing from the UK because they don't believe there is a market for GM food.

      And attitudes amongst retailers are becoming more anti-GM rather than less, e.g. supermarkets are now starting to even remove products from animals fed on GM.

  4. rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean the usenet is still used for things besides spam, porn, and warez??? I can't believe it.

  5. Why are Athletic Orginizations so concerned? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I 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.

    That's like saying that someone with bad eyesight shouldn't get glasses. If this therapy is as side-effect free as claimed, then why shouldn't people be allowed to use it?

    After all, implants and other non-essential plastic surgery is legal...

  6. Careful... by The+Tyro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  7. Medical Applications by Bones3D_mac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  8. Turtles? by SJ · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great, we have the rat... now we just need some turtles.

  9. Comedy Rats aside . . . by Tetsugaku-San · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

    My Portfolio
  10. Rats with "vaguely Wolverine-like healing factor" by CAIMLAS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  11. Probably not what you want by The+Tyro · · Score: 5, Informative

    For someone with Marfan's syndrome.

    Marfan's syndrome is a genetic defect in the gene that codes for Fibrillin, a major component of microfibrils in the body's connective tissues. Much of the pathologic consequences are noted in the eye and the aorta... the former location gets dislocations of the lens, and the latter location develops large (fatal if undiagnosed) aortic aneurysms. Marfanoid patients also tend to be tall, and have a lot of laxity in their joints, primarily because of their weakened connective tissues.

    If you have weaker connective tissue than normal, it would probably be counterproductive to have greatly increased muscle mass.

    I'm not picking on you, just pointing out that it might not be exactly what a Marfan's patient really needs... It might be useful in some kinds of muscular dystrophies, but the most common kinds have defective myofibrils... creating more non-functional muscle wouldn't appear to help them very much.

    --
    Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
  12. Re:Almost too embarrassed to say but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry, I wasn't clear enough in my original post. It should have been more like "in light of all the overuse of this joke, why was it..."

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: Welcoming our new Overlords is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Overlord Welcoming community when IDC confirmed that Overlord Welcoming market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all +5 funny moderations. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that welcoming our new overlords has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Welcoming our new overlords is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Slashdot comprehensive moderation test.

    You don't need to be a Soviet Russian to predict Welcoming our new Overlords' future. The hand writing is on the wall: Welcoming our new Overlords faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Welcoming our new Overlords because Welcoming our new Overlords is dying. Things are looking very bad for Welcoming our new Overlords. As many of us are already aware, Welcoming our new Overlords continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    Welcoming our new Giant Rat Overlords is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core trolls. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time New Overlord trolls Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Welcoming our new Overlords is dying. All major surveys show that Welcoming our new Overlords has steadily declined in market share. Welcoming our new Overlords is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Welcoming our new Overlords is to survive at all it will be among trolls rated at -1. Welcoming our new Overlords continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Welcoming our new Overlords is dead.

    Fact: Welcoming our New Overlords is dying

  13. Cue new series.. X-Animaniacs? by Channard · · Score: 5, Funny

    'What do we do tonight, Brain?'

    'That's Magneto, damn you! And we do the same thing we do ever night, Pinky.. try to take over the world with our rodent superpowers! And how many times do I have to tell you? Stop licking off that blue body paint!'