How A "Superbaby" Is Helping To Find Muscular Dystrophy Treatments

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a baby boy with unusually big muscles — caused by a gene mutation — is helping scientists to discover new muscular dystrophy drugs. "Myostatin was discovered in mice in 1992 in Lee's Johns Hopkins lab. In 1996 he proved its importance by showing that mice without the myostatin-producing gene got twice as big. The next year he discovered that the bulging Belgian Blue cow was a myostatin mutant, the first of eight prized cattle breeds later found to have the mutation. The company he had co-founded, MetaMorphix, is working on manipulating myostatin to beef up livestock. Wyeth picked up the rights to develop a drug for humans. Its experimental antibody drug produced bulked-up mice in 2002, and results of a trial in adults with muscular dystrophy are expected as early as March."

Comments

Re:Pics of the mice

[Anonymous Coward]

But the dietary supplements don't work anywhere near as well as whatever happened to the baby, and we're not allowed to go around punching random genes out of babies, which is why the baby is news.

How long..

[zyl0x]

..until this kind of gene therapy is available on the black market or to the general public? Maybe the Olympics will have to start doing genetic tests for enhanced performance genes. Kinda weird to think of it that way.

Re:Muscles are attractive

[CRCulver]

Muscles are attractive, but these days muscles aren't more likely to increase the survival of your children, so how long might it take until they're no longer found attractive? You could argue that they might even be an unnecessary waste of resources, so might their attractiveness diminish?

Regardless of the usefulness of muscles to attract members of the opposite sex, even in this modern world one still gets a rush of endorphins after banging on them that's just great, giving a strong motivation to many people to keep up with exercise.

Re:More GM Food

[DrKyle]

Real problems? I don't think we geneticists can solve the world's real problems, so we will just try and do what little we can to help out. Making more nutritious food won't fix fucked up foreign policies that deal with food aid or make the supply chain more efficient, that's the problem of people who work in those industries.

It's like saying OLPC shouldn't exist because it doesn't solve the core problems of the third world, it will only help children get more education. It may not fix the problem, but it is the little bit that the tech industry can do to help.

Tell me, how does what YOU do save the world? I doubt that porn and world of warcraft quite make the cut.