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Designer Mice Made to Order
blackbearnh writes "CNN is reporting about the world of designer mice. No, not the kind you click, the kind that scamper around and eat cheese. An effort is underway to produce mice with each of the 20-25,000 individual mouse genes "knocked out", which could lead to novel new treatments for humans. It turns out that after fully sequencing the mouse genome, the little fellas are almost identical to humans. From the article: 'A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.'"
Does not the deliberate creation of a living creature to have a specific disability of some sort seem in some way cruel or inhumane? Or is it just me?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm partially kidding; but partially serious too. If today's california condor isn't well suited in the modern environment; wouldn't it be better to grow better ones more able to survive - rather than forcing the unfortunate few remaining ones to suffer in an environment no longer well suited to them?
A lot of recent research that's interesting to me includes designing siRNA and miRNA "virus" packages to target cancers and other tumors in mice specifically bred to have increased, decreased, or normal (control) reactions to certain diseases.
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It's fun to watch the tumors glow red, green, blue, yellow, or a mixture of two or more.
The best part is if you squish the mice a bit but not too much, held flat to a transparent plate, you can see the glow without killing off the mice.
Sadly, this doesn't work with humans, they're too dense (can't see thru them easily), or we'd be further along with methods of locating and killing or at least targetting for excision (surgery) the tumor cells, especially when they have designed receptor tags (an offshoot of HIV research, actually).
Now if we could just design glow-in-the-dark instant tattoos for humans, that would change color if you started to have certain diseases (say HIV or TB or whatever), now that would be super cool.
I'd get mine as a standard-light invisible one, with a green serpeant that had red fangs if I had whatever disease, and maybe a blue afro if I was coming down with something common
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Although I consider research on animals an unfortunate necessity, I do have some issues with your argument. For example, you say that animals can be treated as objects because they lack self-awareness... but what about animals that are more intelligent/aware than some humans? A mentally retarded child might be less self-aware than the average octopus, but an octopus is food, and a child somehow fits in a special moral category even though, logically, he/she might be more oblivious to being eaten/used for experiments/otherwise abused. It would also be possible to intentionally engineer humans to be less aware than animals, but would that be ethical? They would feel no pain and be unaware of their suffering, after all, so wouldn't that make them better test subjects?
It just irks me when people try to claim that it's ok do experiment on animals because of their mental capacity or whatever but refuse to apply the same arguments to our own species. If your perspective is that humans are automagically better/sacred/whatever, that's fine, just don't try to justify it with arguments that make no sense.