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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.'"
Oh, and Would you like to have fries with it?
...Priceless...
It's probably for scientific research... I seriously doubt that someone would buy mutant mice for fun.. well, unless they had frickin' laser pointers on their heads.
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How much for a pair of fast, reliable, self-sustaining mice that can keep my cats exercising and entertained each day so I don't have to?
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'
Oh, those clever mice, letting their genes be manipulated, mysteriously developing arthritis, glowing in the dark.
How about a mouse in a leopard skin print to match my decour?
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?
1. Catch three normal mice somewhere
2. !!!!!!
3. Sell three blind mice for $250
4. Profit!
Why can't
Work with me here.. A mouse with laser beams for eyes!! And he flies, and with super strength shall lay the capitals of the world to waste! I shall call him.. MIGHTY MOUSE!!
Unless you pay me the sum of One Million Dollars!!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
...for a superintelligent white mouse? I want to be able to create my own three-dimensional sculpture with a living element before those things go out of style.
Then I realized that given the makeup of /. (lots of "hard science" geeks), this could be considered new information to a number of people here. But still, news? I can only assume that when an old topic hits CNN, it suddenly becomes news again.
And no, I didn't RTFA very much.
You know, it was the "oh so cute" comment that gave it away. Somehow I suspect that anyone paying for a mouse with diabetes is probably more concerned about diabetes than "cute".
Jeez - I am one of those tree hugging animal rights people but your post just screams "pratt" to me. Either that or <tinfoil-hat>agent-provocateur for pharma-com</tinfoil-hat>
.This is where the serious fun begins.
Can you make them with the cheese already inside?
That would really save me a lot of trouble...
I prefer Mozzerella.
Thanks in advance.
Does this count as intelligent design?
Yup. Cause if turning a mouse into a super intelligent being were possible with a few smippets of gene code, evolution would not have produced it over millions of years.
Often, the "good" gene combinations that produce a desirable trait have negative reprocusions that far outway the positive ones.
I will attribute him to blind luck on the part of the researcher.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I want a Christian Dior mouse, with pink floral ornament and letters "CD" on the belly.
I work in a heart research lab where we cut the hearts out of the mice and attach them to a working heart machine and pump a blood subsitute through it. Then we test various drugs and load conditions on it. The question is would you like to volunteer so that we test the drugs first on you, or your older family members, instead of the mice so as to spare their lives? Or would you rather be assured that in hundreds of mamalian tests the durgs performed as they are supposed to and the effects are clear and reproducible.
We abide by the rules and anaesthesize the mice carefully, we don't torture them and try to do the best we can to minimize their suffering. Personally I wish we didn't have to do this, I don't like to kill things -- animals or people, but in this case it is worth it to save many human lives.
The amount of "genetic design" (to borrow the phrase from Blade Runner) required to make condors or any other species "better adapted to a new habitat" is simply not possible with today's knowledge of biology. Every aspect of the condor's physiology - lung function, flight muscles, temperature tolerance and body insulation, sight - is the result of millenia of "tweaking" via natural selection. We can currently barely get a single gene to express predictably in a new species, and that requires a lot of work and money to do. "Re-adapting" the condor is something a Victorian pigeon breeder would have much better luck at than a modern molecular biotechnologist - but he'd still need decades to do it, one generation at a time.
"Knockout mice" are altered to reduce or eliminate a single gene's function, in a simple binary fashion. They are an extremely reductionist technology, used to answer quite reductionist questions of how molecular pathways behave. They are, despite their cost and sophistication (and usefulness), a very crude development.
Freedom: "I won't!"
"can chew through the aluminium siding, rip arms and legs off with their paws, and can run 100 yards in 10 seconds?"
With that kind of mouse, you'll have to replace your cat more often. Not to mention walls, fences and your neighbours' Volvo.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
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.
...
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! --
How much for a pair of reproducing "mice" that are a big as beavers, can chew through the aluminium siding, rip arms and legs off with their paws, and can run 100 yards in 10 seconds?
What is stopping anyone from making these ecological monsters?
Probably the fact that you are limited to genes that can be found in the mouse population.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Had your polio vaccinations? Happy that you'll never get smallpox? Thank animal research.
Consider it a necessary evil.
True, but Rodents have the widest range in size of any mammal order. The African Pygmy Mouse is only 6 cm in length and 7 grams in weight. On the other hand, the Capybara can weigh up to 45 kg (100 pounds) and the extinct Phoberomys pattersoni is believed to have weighed 700 kg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodent
So I bet with some tweaking you could have a beaver sized mouse.
here I was all excited that I could get gold-plated mouse with hand-tooled authentic leopardskin sliders, and then the article's all about curing other people's debilitating diseases
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I think certain pandimensional beings would disagree with your assertion that they aren't already uber-smart.
Rodents of Unusual Size? ...I don't believe they exist.
Yup, this gives an entirely new meaning to the old challenge "Are you a man or a mouse?"
/F
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
No no no, you've got it all wrong! It's the mice that have genetically reprogrammed us to have arthritis, epilipsy and/or obesity! It's all part of a long running experiment to discover the true nature of the universe! The fact that the scientist think they're the ones performing the experiments just proves how ingeniously subtle the mice really are!
Exactly--put yourself in their position. They are mice. They lack self-awareness. You would be completely oblivious to your circumstances. You would not be aware of ethics, and unable to make judgements or to suffer anguish over your fate. You could not protest any more than a tree can protest. Sure, you would squirm when the big animal grasps you and jabs you with a pointy thing. You would do so because you could not choose to do anything else.
That is why animals do not have civil rights. They are objects. Yes, I understand how people can get disgusted by some of the things done to animals, but don't confuse a natural disgust with moral righteousness. There is no rational moral basis for conferring rights on animal, that doesn't pretend that they are basically humans. To illustrate: which animals have rights? If you grant mice rights, then do flies have rights? There is no reasonable ethical distinction between mice and flies, yet I wager few people (Jainists aside) who have qualms over swatting flies. Lacking a criterion for distinction, you have to assume their rights are equal. Being competent to distinguish myself from other animals, I put myself and humanity in one class and the rest in another. Thus, indeed a mouse and a fly have equal rights--equally nonextant.
How much would it cost to get a mouse with Tourette Syndrome, and what would that cost me? I would love to have one of those. That would be too much fun at bars. "Calm down, dude, it wasn't me, it was my mouse."
Yum.
But even more importantly, how much for a mouse than learns Visual Basic as its first programming language?
But what I *really* want is a USB mouse that will go where I tell it to and click itself. How much for that?
I work at the Jackson Lab, but as a software engineer (working with computational biologists to write parallel code). It's pretty facinating place. we have over 1200 employees divided into two major groups - pure research and JRS (Jackson Research Systems) which breeds and sells about 3000 different mice to the scientific community. Many of our 3000 strains of mice are available only from the Jackson Laboratory - surplus money from mice sales goes to pay for research support (research scientists apply for grants but the mice sales surplus helps pay for operating costs). It's the worlds largest mamallian research facility
That is why animals do not have civil rights. They are objects.
./, but you've hit a nerve. I'm sick and tired of people basically torturing their "property" and getting slapped with a $50 fine. People who torture animals should be sent off to Bellevue for extensive psychological testing.
Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. Its not often I get pissed on
For the truth in advertising, I eat meat. It is wrong to eat meat unless the animal from which it came was slaughtered in the most humane way possible.
There is no rational moral basis for conferring rights on animal
How about it is wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on a living creature? Animals are not simply property anymore than people are simply property. You're right on there being a cutoff and I don't know exactly where the cutoff is, but speaking purely objectively, there is a difference between torturing an animal of higher order and killing some bacteria on a countertop. I think the average idiot can understand that.
Even then, civil rights are an entirely human creation. There is nothing inherent in being human that says we have a right to free speech, but not a right to kill each other. All rights are based in social contract.
What color is the sky in your world? Black or white?
Really, when Cthulhu comes to swallow your soul and the only thing you can do is contort your face in terror and scream like a helpless girl, I hope you remember you have no rights.
An animal is no more an "object" than a person is an "object." You lack any sort of scale, or sense of insight. Some animals exhibit more altruistic behaviors than your post does. Moral absolutism like yours is not the only way. I can decry stepping on mice for nothing more than relieving stress as unethical and still feel its ok for a cat (or desparate human) to kill one to eat it. There's a whole "scale" truly unethical to mildly unethical to thats ok, to thats a really good thing to do. Animals do exhibit sentient behaviors on a varying scale (just like people do) it's loosely proportional to the size complexity of its brain, but its there. Have you never read any Douglas Adams or any Lovecraft or any thing that has caused your imagination wonder for a moment what if? Have you ever even questioned your own beliefs?
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.
It is interesting that this thread sparked a discussion of the morality of manipulating the genes of these mice to cause deliberate malformations that are not in the best interest of the mice.
..
Why would we suddenly have attitudes towards mice that are any different from other animals in our charge? We selectively breed pigs specifically for desired ratios of fat to flesh; breed chickens using hormones that result in an "adult" chicken in a fraction of the conventional time; inject bovine with hormones to stimulate lactation and production; all in an effort that is not in the best interest of the animals, but in the best [immediate] interest of the purveyor.
Looking to the human world, and we turn a blind eye (I apologize for that really mixed up metaphor) from rampant genocide (genocide: a friendly name for killing everyone of a particular genus) in The Sudan because it's in the best interest of Chevron, we never did hold Union Carbide/Dow Chemical to task and provide meaningfully relief to the citizens of Bhopal, but let Texas jail Dianne Wilson for hanging a f*cking protest banner all the while
we don't even raise a whisper about the human genetic mutilation caused by chemical contaminations in Vietnam, Halabja, Toulouse, Venice, Midland - MI, New Plymouth - New Zealand, etc..
Since we clearly do not care about our fellow man and child, but are content to let the corporations dictate the new morality, why the hell should we give a rat's ass about the welfare of a mouse ?
If we accept the theory that we may take liberties with the members of the Mus genus, since we are the superior beings and our benefit outweighs the detriment inflicted, then it is an easy step to rationalize the ill treatment of the third world, and anyone living in Michigan, as justifiable if it in any way benefits the upper middle classes, and that is exactly what we have done.
How we treat our animals today is how we will treat each other tomorrow.
Yeah, but before long we'll have the entire cat genome figured out, problem solved...then we'll need to start working on the dog genome....
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
I've got a bunch of friends in various biology majors. Although they are all animal lovers (one wants to go to school to be a vet when he graduates), they have all worked in the labs doing a lot of experiments on mice. And they all agree, that the more time you spend around the things the less you feel that they are cute little animals that we shouldn't be experimenting on.
They are cruel, cannibalistic, disgusting animals. They will breed constantly and eat their own children, or perhaps just nibble off half of an ear and leave them to live. Anyone who's kept mice as pets know that having more than one only really works out with two females - a mixed pair will breed a million babies (and then eat them) and with two males one will eventually kill the other over territory.
So, yes, while I think it should be done in as painless of a manner as possible (and to actual justifiable scientific benefit), I think that killing a few of them to save human lives is completely worth it.
Of course, I'm sure anyone looking at humanity from a far enough vantage point would feel the same about us. Doesn't make them wrong, though, from that viewpoint.
I'm kind of amazed that at no point is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Mouse House mentioned anywhere in the article. ORNL has been in the mouse genetics business for decades with a large number of genetic variants available on site.
Not long ago, they relocated to a new facility.
http://bio.lsd.ornl.gov/mgd/news/MH/Sept2003.html
Actually, that sounds like a pretty damn cool idea. Any reason one couldn't use a tattooing dye/ink that absorbed daytime light to glow in the dark/night? Has anyone ever heard of something like this being done?
Well, we do have light-emitting biochemical modifications added to cells which can emit light in the IR and UV bands, or in standard luminescence red/blue/green. Can't see why this couldn't be a tattoo. Originally, it's thought that tattoos were a method of treating illness and providing protection, so it's not that radical an idea, as it existed in the Bronze Age at the very least.
Is there a substance that would, if applied in a tattoo-like manner, be non-toxic to humans but have a lifetime glow effect (even if it did need to charge in the sun). Hell, I'd pay extra for that.
Again, most of the alterations that are done are non-toxic by design, as opposed to some that have an aptotic messenger component that can trigger cell death on receipt of a signal that triggers the pathway. Can't see why this wouldn't be a good idea.
We already have, for example, tattoos placed over medical implants that are activated by magnetism to read blood sugar levels (usually there's a specialized watch placed on them, but the tattoo is really just a marker so you know where to place it). So using them for glow-in-the-dark luminescent tattoos with medical sensor capabilities is merely just taking a number of concepts I've heard of here at the UW Medical Center research seminars and making it reality.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We'll get the drugs and the anaesthesia ready. See you then. Word of warning, there have been very few studies about opiods and heart attack and use of the specific opiod recepter blocker drug we have. We will induce a heart attack, then try to see how our drug works to help your heart recover. So, yearh, see you tomorrow (might want to write a will first, just in case, you know...)
we should breed cats who can DDR.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Absolutely, because if they enjoy torturing they probably pose a risk to the people around them. The actual animals I could give a crap about, one way or the other.
Rights are one side of the social contract, something that animals are not even capable of comprehending, much less participating in. You don't want to hurt animals? Fine. You want me not to do it? I can accomodate that (within reason), it costs me nothing. But applying "rights" to animals is just plain silly - morality is a human concept.
For the truth in advertising, I eat meat. It is wrong to eat meat unless the animal from which it came was slaughtered in the most humane way possible.
Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. If animals are so endowed with an abundance of rights, what gives you the right to take their lives for your own enjoyment, regardless of how humanely they were killed?
That's the plain truth of it - we kill animals, grind up their flesh, and turn them into nuggets. Every day. By the millions. And then we have all this handwaving about whether a few thousand lab mice enjoy being inbred to the point of being half-blind and generally barely aware of their surroundings (and growing tumors on top of that).
sic transit gloria mundi
They're not "just mice", they're medical research mice. It's hard to test a new drug when the test mice don't have the disease the drug is trying to cure.
Maybe not
Is it playing God or using our natural faculties for the betterment of mankind? Where do you draw the line? Is it ok to make glow-in-the-dark mice, but not mice with 6 legs? What about glow-in-the-dark mice versus glow-in-the-dark E-choli (I did the latter back in high school)? Or glow-in-the-dark people?
Is inflicting some minor medical condition on a GM mouse any LESS cruel than raising chickens in wire cages, killing and eating them? What about cutting down a tree? Killing a small spider because they make you nervous?
All of the things I mentioned involve people killing things for their own ends. Pretty much every animal in nature, including humans, is willing to kill something weaker or powerless to sustain itself. Humans are the only creature that stop to think about it. (Note that we generally still do it, but just moralize over the decision on occasion.)
It seems to me that it is pretty moot debating about using mice to find cures for diseases, when you might be wearing wool, leather, silk, and eating a ham sandwich. I suppose that you could argue about the degree of suffering that is being infliced upon animals by the various fashions that we use them, but I think I'd much rather be a lab mouse that is bread to have cancer than be a pig in a stockyard. At least I'd have people pumping me full of drugs in an effor to cure me.
Interestingly, because of the central point of my poasting, that it seems a universal law that the more powerful species will prey on weaker species, I have to say that I am *glad* we have not encountered alien lifeforms. There is a good chance that when we meet them, we will size them up as dinner, they will do the same, and someone will get eaten.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Then I realized that given the makeup of
heh. If only that were the case. The makeup of slashdot is computer nerds, who generally know very little about science, but think it's "cool". Just look at all the dumb jokes that get posted in every single science story. There aren't two cultures (science and the humanities), but three cultures, science, humanities, and technology. There's a little crossover between the sciences and technologies, with each group thinking they understand the other (but really don't).
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