Genetic Modification Produces Mighty Mouse

Identity Missing writes "An Ohio laboratory has produced genetically modified mice which 'can run five to six kilometres at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill, for up to six hours before stopping,' as well as a number of other remarkable feats. An enzyme called phosphoenolypyruvate carboxykinases (PEPCK-C) is apparently responsible, and we should hope that the scientists are correct in saying that athletes won't be modifying their genes any time soon to get it, because it apparently makes the mice more aggressive. If anyone feels a super villain coming on, at least we can rely on these Mighty Mice. A video demonstrates just how much these little guys beat the competition."

Comments

What Are We Doing Tonight Brain?

[AmIAnAi]

The Same thing we do every night Pinky. Try to take over the world.

Re:What Are We Doing Tonight Brain?

[ZeroExistenZ]

But Brain, why the toga? No one's worn those in years. Except for that one really strange man in Lancaster-Shire.

Well, you know the next step...

[NotQuiteReal]

Someone will just have to build a better mousetrap!

Re:Well, you know the next step...

[salec]

Or GM the cats same way, too!

Re:Well, you know the next step...

[c_sd_m]

Depends on the side effects and permanence of the enhancement.

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernon's grave in the bak yard.

Re:Well, you know the next step...

[Carthag]

Tex Avery already explored the possibilites of the ever escalating war of ever-growing mice & cats, cf. King-Size Canary (1947). It doesn't bode well for us if we go down that line.

Re:Well, you know the next step...

[Belacgod]

They'll be taken out by the Toyota cats and mice.

Damn Japanese imports.

I for one

[WormholeFiend]

hope that these rodents don't escape the lab.

Ordinary mice are hard enough to control as pests...

Re:I for one

[welcher]

It seems unlikely that this would actually confer a selective advantage on the mouse - being able to run like crazy but need almost twice as much food doesnt sound like a good strategy to me.

Re:I for one

[Daniel Dvorkin]

My suspicion is that they wouldn't do well in the wild. Aggression and strength in the natural world have to be balanced with food requirements, which is basically why not every living thing is super-strong, super-fast, and super-tough. Dire wolves are gone for a reason ... These mice "eat twice as much and weigh half as much," which sounds great to people living in the modern industrialized world, but is a pretty serious liability for a wild animal.

Also, they may be amazingly tough for mice, but you know, they're still mice. No matter how big and strong they may be, there are still plenty of critters bigger and stronger than they. If their aggression translates into a lack of caution around predators, then they'd essentially be nothing but a nice lean snack for health-conscious cats. ;)

Re:I for one

[eastlight_jim]

A mouse like this will face a penalty for its increased speed. For a start, they will require more food (a scarce enough resource for any wild mouse) and since PEPCK is involved in gluconeogenesis (the manufacture of glucose from precursors such as protein and lipids) they will likely have a harder time laying down the fat needed to survuive the colder months.

Also, since these are albino mice they will likely face increased threat from predation (like most other albino animals) and thus face a significant selective pressure against them.

Hopefully the scientists won't let them escape but if they do, natural selection should lead to them being removed from the gene pool quite quickly.

Re:I for one

[kurzweilfreak]

I'm sure they remembered to build in a Lysine Contingency. It's SOP in these cases, ya know...

So

[hcdejong]

Acme Labs is at it again?

Re:So

[nogginthenog]

Sound smore like the Rats of NIMH

Whatever you do...

[lonesome_coder]

...don't make them angry. You wouldn't like them when they are angry...

obligatory response

[ByOhTek]

In Soviet Russia, meme botches you!

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Here I come to save the day!

Cool.

[Stanistani]

Overclocked mice! Do they have an overheat problem?

PEBCAK?

[Blakey Rat]

Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard? I had no idea it could be applied for this purpose!

I have a mighty mouse....

[NPN_Transistor]

I have a mighty mouse, yet it can't "run five to six kilometres at a speed of 20 meters per minute on a treadmill", feel aggression, or do "a number of other remarkable feats". All it does is sit in my hand and make clicking noises when I try to pet it. It runs a lot longer than "six hours", but it doesn't seem to do anything else. It doesn't seem to have any eyes or a tail either. I think it might be defective... maybe I should return it to Apple.

If they experimented on humans this much...

[porkThreeWays]

I've always wondered what would be possible if humans were regularly experimented on in the same fashion. Of course it's unethical, but I bet we'd have humans that can live 300 years and run 10,000 miles at a clip if we cut out the middle man ;)

Re:If they experimented on humans this much...

[Scrameustache]

Why is it unethical? If you could save thousands of lives by curing a disease, but curing the disease required potentially deadly experiments on a few people, wouldn't it be unethical NOT to proceed with the research? You first.

Re:If they experimented on humans this much...

[FleaPlus]

You first.

Apparently many researchers who do muscle augmentation research have to turn down eager calls from athletes and their coaches who want to be human test subjects, looking for any way to boost their abilities.

Re:If they experimented on humans this much...

[AdmiralDouglas]

Just don't forget that their are numerous requirements from politics that keep this sort of thing from happening. Look at Cancer research. A scientist doing a study on his treatment isn't going to let just anyone sign up, he's going to turn down anyone who is in a later stage of cancer because they're likely going to die anyway and his numbers will look terrible.

Most research doesn't want to use someone who is terminally ill because their reports start to look bad. They aren't going to stack the odds against themselves. So now it requires people who are moderately healthy to try this stuff on. And did you notice the number of mice it is taking to do this study accurately? 500. 500 people who are moderately healthy. Now it's one thing if it's a beauty product, or some fat reducing pill. But it's quite another when it's a dangerous operation that very easily could kill you.

And now back to the subject at hand, these mice have had their genetics messed with. These guys were part of this experiment before they were born. I agree, that if we could get consenting, well-informed volunteers for this it would be great, but how do you inform an embryo? How do you get consent?

And as for the cracks between all those areas, there ARE many studies that they do on humans. These are the studies that have a pretty light chance of killing or maiming you, and therefore also have a pretty light chance of giving you super powers (like these mice). Low Risk, Low reward.

Mighty?

[robably]

So the modified mouse runs on the treadmill for six hours, while the normal mouse has a nice sit down and watches it. Maybe this modification just makes mice stupid.

Smarter mouse?

[oo7tushar]

All I see is the that the "slower" mouse realizes that they're going nowhere on the treadmill.

RTFA much?

[cduffy]

Ten times as many mitochondria in the muscles.

Re:RTFA much?

[nomadic]

I think you mean midichloridians.

Re:RTFA much?

[GeckoX]

Again, RTFA. It's right there. They live longer, age slower. 3 year old mice having babies...as mentioned in the article, for a mouse that's like an 80 year old human having a baby.

Anything else you'd like summed up from the article? ;)

Steroids make people more agressive, too.

[mr_mischief]

I see little reason to think that we'll see any social arguments about this genetic modification that we don't already see about a) steroids, hormones, and precursors or b) genetic modifications in general.

Isn't this linked to the Wired article from over three years ago about experiments at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in which researchers were messing with PPAR-delta and got similar results? Where's the reference to earlier work on the subject?

This has me worried

[rbanzai]

Originally genetic modification was just things like making mice glow. Now they're creating results that would be appealing to exactly the wrong people: the military.

As soon as a science has military application it gets billions poured into it. Even if there are beneficial offshoots to the research that follows the repercussions are usually awful. Think atom bombs and biological weapons.

It is not unreasonable at this point to wonder where we're going to end up as a species. If we can genetically create human beings with abilities that far outpace anything an unmodified can do will that become the norm?

In my lifetime (40 years) genetic modification has gone from theory to fact. I am worried that it will be horribly abused.

Re:This has me worried

[TheMeuge]

As soon as a science has military application it gets billions poured into it. Even if there are beneficial offshoots to the research that follows the repercussions are usually awful. Think atom bombs and biological weapons.

You have a twisted view of the world, my friend.

I think a far more rational way of interpreting what happens is that the offshoots are awful (atom bombs, biological weapons), while the repercussions are beneficial (infectious disease research, nuclear power). Far more people are living longer, and better lives because of military-driven advancements in science, then the number of people that have been harmed or killed by the inventions that follow.

Re:This has me worried

[C0rinthian]

Simple. You can tie little packages of Freedom to their backs and drop them into the Middle East.

Of course, by "Freedom" I mean "High-Power Explosives"

Re:This has me worried

[cyphercell]

give them the plague, it will be way more mobile than before.

Re:20 meters to minute? Awesome!

[SQLGuru]

Yes, but what... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen genetically modified with PEPCK-C swallow?

Layne

Spidey sense?

[SpuriousLogic]

Anyone else remember this from SpiderMan? The serum that is used on Norman Oswald was first used on mice to turn them into super mice, but had the side effect of making them incredibly aggressive....

The first thing I thought of was...

[Faw]

Captain America and the super-soldier serum.

They need to create "Bunny" version

[denis-The-menace]

The Energizer battery company would pay big $ for such a LIVING mascot.
With all that $, they'll be able to fund future research...

Re:20 meters to minute? Awesome!

[Clanked]

A european or african swallow?

Mighty Mouse

[Arancaytar]

Does it come with two buttons?

Site not Slashdotted?

[JJRRutgers]

A direct link to a Quicktime movie on the headline and the host server didn't get slashdotted? I wonder if they applied the same genetic modification to the server?

unethical? get over it!

[m2943]

But Professor Hanson played this down. "Right now, this is impossible to do - putting a gene into muscle. It's unethical.

I'm tired of people claiming that it's "unethical" to enhance one's body--or destroy it for that matter. What substances I ingest or what modifications I make to my body is my own business. Even genetic modifications to one's own children aren't automatically "unethical".

Genetic engineering on humans is going to happen. Get over it.

20 (meters per minute) = 0.745645431 mph

[John Sokol]

20 (meters per minute) = 0.745645431 mph
  that doesn't seem very fast for a mouse. Maybe running for 6 hours is amazing though.

  Mice can run up to 4 Kilometers per hour this is around 2.48548477 mph
        See: http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/figsonly/207/22/3839

    So they are running at around 30% of there maximum speed.

    To put that into some perspective humans walk at around 3mph. and sprint for short distances at 20 Mph.
    A 4 Minute mile is 15 Mph, this is considered very good for a runner.

    The Marathon world record time running a 42.195 kilometers distance is 2 hours 4 minutes and 26 seconds, set in the Berlin Marathon by Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia on September 30, 2007.
    This required an average speed of 13 Miles per hour for 2 hours. Just amazing really.

    For regular humans in a Marathon the average time is more like to 4 hours or around 6.5 Mph.
          http://www.marathonguide.com/features/Articles/2005RecapOverview.cfm

    So to compare this with mice a humans peak is 15Mph (4 minute Mile) so 30% of peak is is 4.5 Mph.

    This accomplishment for mice is roughly equal to humans running at 4.5 Mph for 6 hours. for 27 miles or 43.452 kilometers just over a marathon distance. 6 Hour times are well below average and would be the slow runners in a marathon.

    So the mice are running a slow Marathon! Well below a human average.