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Scientists Produce Fearless Mice
Dotnaught writes "According to New Scientist, a Rutgers University geneticist has found that turning off a specific gene for the protein stathmin makes mice fearless. The story speculates that this research might improve treatment for phobias. It does not mention obvious military applications for the discovery. As noted in this Naval Officer's guide for managing fatigue, the use of amphetamines to stay alert, followed by sedatives to sleep, has a long tradition. Genetic treatments may offer an alternative to pharmaceuticals."
These mice escape and breed in the wild. Enormous of fearless mice terrorize the world's cat population. It's not going to be pretty.
Whatever happened to the good old days of pumping soldiers full of angel dust to rid them of fear?
The non-military uses for such a treatment are pretty far-reaching. Would it be able to cure people that suffer anxiety attacks? Could children with night terrors be cured?
If the rats don't feel fear, do they also lose understanding of danger? That would be a pretty bad mutation.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
That was awesome.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Now scientist need to figure out how to make theese mice pilot planes.
of those poor elephants! Or ladies in the kitchen standing on a high chair!
Giving Methamphetamines to soldies to "stay alert" and to "strengthen confidence" has -sadly enough- a long tradition. As Wikipedia tells us even the Nazis spreaded the drug among their Wehrmacht. What's the point of a government saying "Stay away from drugs!" on the one hand and willingly giving it to soldiers on the other?
Seems alright, I quit military service a long time ago...
Regards
Stirz
Looks like Isadore Klein beat them to the punch. He created a fearless mouse in 1942. http://www.toonopedia.com/mightym.htm
Come on Mickey, are you a MAN or a MOUSE?
AAAAAAAAAGGHHHH!
More mice have been committing suicide by cat.
[ ]
...or just plain stupid?
Lemon curry???
So we got fear, now there are a few more emotions to get rid of and we can make Equilibrium come true. Now that's practical applicaton of science.
Three mice were sitting in a bar, each trying to impress the others with how tough they were.
The first one said, "When I see a mousetrap, I deliberately set it off, bench press the bar fifty times, then snack on the cheese."
The second one, not to be outdone, said, "Yeah? Well, every morning when I get out of bed, I stir in some cream and rat poison in my coffee. It gives me a good buzz that really wakes me up and gets me going."
They both look at the third mouse who, after a few seconds, gets up and says, "I don't have time for this bullshit. I've got to go home and fuck the cat."
He's The Best
He's The Greatest
He's The Greatest Secret Agent In The World!
He's The Ace - He's Amazing...
He's the Strongest... He's The Quickest.... He's The Best!
Till the day when they have their own children, these second generation child mice reject their parents just like the previous generation rejected their parents.
Leaving killing the child mice as the only solution, before they become too grownup and strong to stop.
Thus putting an end to the whole experiment, as the original generation dies when they finally turn on each other in boredom.
The two certainly do not equate.
people nowadays like to talk about fear in ideological and propagandistic terms, but fear keeps you alive. it keeps you from wandering into traffic or picking fights with random people. if this were ever applied to humans, you wouldn't have superhuman heroic fighters for the military, you'd have guys shooting themselves with their own guns and jumping off roofs... why not, when you're not afraid of anything, including death
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What about a laser mounted on the backs of these mice?
Oh, never mind
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Imagine hordes of these running fearless into machinegun fire... Very effective, I presume....
Been there, done that. We called it World War I
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
See, it was all as Douglas Adams predicted. This proves that mice really are pan-dimensional super soldiers waiting to be triggered. I, for one, welcome our new fearless rodent overlords!
I think you meant...
I, for one, welcome our new fearless rodent overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted Slashdot poster, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground cheese caves.
Lemon curry???
That's because there is no military applications. You don't want the soldiers to become fearless, because if they do, they might say: "This war is wrong. I used to be too afraid to do anything about it, but now I suddenly feel fearless, and will get the heck away from here !" Basically, fearless soldiers will refuse to obey when given orders that they think are wrong, and cannot be forced to obey by fear of punishment.
What you want is soldiers that are more afraid of their commanding officers than the enemy; that way they'll follow orders.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
....have a large stock of cheese, for our new....
Why the hell shouldn't they be fearless, when they are now regenerating too? Goddammit, we have to stop this madness before we are overrun by marauding fearless regenerating mice. The irony is that we need many, many more fearful, even irrationally fearful peopl to avert this impending horror. Scream with me people! "The Mice are coming! The Mice are coming!"
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
"Hey check this out, I'm not in the least afraid anymore. Hmm, I wonder what it feels like to plough an airplane into the ground on full afterburner. Whee, fast! Hello mr cornfield. Ooh, a scarecrow. My, that ground sure is big."
Does this have any impact on USB mice?
this mutation would have dominated the species milions of years ago.
In a world of cats, fear is the superior evolutionary trait.
Fight Frist Psoting!
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If you put a fearless mouse in the wild, it will die like anything else that lacks a healthy sense of which dangers are worth avoiding.
Fear is an emotion that rules our lives from moment to moment. Losing fear doesn't mean losing sanity, actually is usually means the opposite.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
No more Sith Lords since we know it is fear which leads to the Dark Side.
Ok, so they found a clever way to turn down fear.
... scary.
I wonder if they can use this knowledge to do the opposite: turn fear way up? How might that be used & abused? Say around election time?
The idea is
They are called lemmings...
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I'd love a mouse like this! I'd name him Johan, and let him loose in cages of other mice just to see how long it would be before they all died. Except Johan, of course.
In the end, Johan would only kill me, though. I guess that was part of the plan from the start.
This seems like a profoundly unwise idea. And unless they can reactivate the gene at decommissioning, troops who survive their fearlessness better report to the Soylent Green Division for final debriefing. (And why wouldn't they? They're fearless.)
"Genetic treatments may offer an alternative to pharmaceuticals." So a company has two options. Either a (theoretically and best case) one time genetic therapy which will raise the wrath of a public who leaned everything they know about science from bad movies. Or slightly less effective pills targeting the same mechanism, but which can be sold again and again to a person throughout their lives. I think the whole customer for life deal has a bit more appeal.
Everything will be taken away from you.
...a Rutgers University geneticist...
Rutgers? Didn't we read about them loosing three plague mice into the wild a few months back?
I don't know what these Rutgers scientists are up to, but I think we can all agree that "Fearless Wild Plague Rodents" would be an excellent name for a rock and roll band.
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin
Getzen
Incidentally, there are lab mouse strains that don't have many of the anxiety behaviors like center avoidance. The article gives the impression that the knockout animals are utterly unmouselike, which is untrue.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We're a big bag of complex chemical equillibria and messy neural wiring. We give names like "love" and "fear" to aspects of the subjective experience of existing this way, but they're seldom precise enough to be something you can switch on and off. You're bound to get either more than you intend or less than you intend, or both.
Fear would seem to be a good candidate for a neurobiologically switchable emotion, but even fear is more complex than it seems at first glance.
I saw a photo in some book I read on the psychology of emotions that showed a truck tipping over. The truck was loaded with maybe thirty soccer fans returning from a game, and all that rowdy weight caused the thing to overbalance. The photo was taken just as the truck was approaching 45 degrees, and the people on the top were leaping to safety. What was interesting about the photo was the peoples' faces. The people leaping to safety had no look of fear or emotion at all -- just intense concentration. The driver, however is obviously terrified.
The point is that there is arousal in response to danger, and there is fear. Arousal in the presence of danger is not fear: fear is specifically an emotional reaction to helplessness in the presence of danger. It's evolution's way of say, "If you're going to do nothing about this situation, then you'd better do it really, really unobtrusively."
There is already a method for controlling and eliminating fear in a soldier. It's called "training". You ingrain the right response in a danger situation into him so he can act automatically. He may be afraid before hand and traumatized afterward, but you want him aroused and as close to fearless as possible at the moment of truth.
Because of the imprecision of language, I suspect a pill that turns off "fear" would actually make a soldier's training less effective. The physiological and emotional response to danger which is not fear, or at least not exactly fear, curiously doesn't have a distinct name. Clearly this unnamed state is a kind of emotional state -- one in which reactions are automatic and information is extensively filtered down to that which is paradigmatically most useful for survival. Perhaps "fear" is a reasonable umbrella term for all kinds of arousal reactions to danger, but we have to distinguish between being "frightened" or "scared" on one hand and being "terrified" or "petrified".
But whatever the word is, I expect the condition of reacting to danger is on the whole more beneficial to the warrior than it is detrimental to a warrior. And, as you say, if the soldier does not react in an emotional way to danger, then the way he does react is probably unpredictable. An ideal pill from a military standpoint would narrowly block the "petrification" reflex, without altering any of the other subjective aspects of fear.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
... and for that extra helping of protein hunt for insects and in the case of rats even small birds and other mice. Both rats and mice also eat unhatched eggs. They don't have fangs like dogs and cats, but anybody ever bitten by a rat will tell you they have razor sharp incisors and a powerful jaw and the bite hurts plenty.
However... to set the record straight, like most other mammals a rat will
only attack a human when cornered or provoked. I suggest you do not pickup
or otherwise try to pet the rat you find out in the streets but they are
actually some of the cutest mammals in existance and they
make excellent pets.
See the pages of the Rat & Mice Club of America http://www.rmca.org/ if you're interested.
Not necessarily. Darwinian evolution doesn't necessarily dictate that the best mutation wins out. It generally suggests that the mutation best adapted to the species' circumstances will survive, but really, anything that works well enough to allow further breeding will still continue to exist. That's why we have all sorts of absurd animals in nature right alongside the magnificent ones, and why in our own species various forms of genetic disease and handicap continue (although for the latter, our own social evolution and co-dependency has something to do with it too).
There really IS a club for everything, isn't there?
+++ATH0
welcome our cheese-eating overlords
Because how do you maintain order in an Army if the soldier has totally no fear of the consequences of not obeying ?
Start a eugenics war? Control them with drugs?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?