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Muscle Mice
SilasMortimer writes "Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have accomplished that for which humankind has been desperate since the dawn of civilization: turning sad, injured regular mice into angry, beefed-up super-mice. Well, okay, there's no official word in the article about the rodents' emotional states, but certainly when stem cells were injected into mice with leg injuries, the muscle grew back... almost twice as big as it was before the injury [abstract, supplemental material (PDF)]. This has many exciting implications, from better healing after injuries to slowing down the aging process to a spike in the number of cases of Generalized Anxiety Disorder among cats. I, for one, refuse to perpetuate outdated memes. (But feel free to make up for the lack.)"
If these mice are bred with those given previously discovered treatments to make them smarter and fearless, we might be in trouble.
Stem-cell-enhanced fingers may lead to first posts.
I for one welcome our new fearless super intelligent roid rage mice overlords
All medical research PR sounds like a viagra spam to me.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I predict they won't even wait for this to be perfected.
Someone in a third world country is likely brewing up a batch of stem cells in their "lab" as we speak.
Maybe they will have it ready in time for London. Weight lifting, you were a sport once. Now it's just magic show where everyone wonders how they make the trick work.
"So, what do you want to do tonight Muscles?"
"Same thing we do every night Pinky, PUMP SOME IRON!"
I can only start to see how this could go wrong. From tumors to having a lung grown in the leg... I fear we might have face some interesting surprises during more extensive testing.
"Machine-guns for Algernon"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The reason steroids are illegal in sports is because they are damaging to the health. People think you should be able to compete in events without doing weird, unhealthy stuff like that. A lot of performance enhancing substances are perfectly legal, and everyone does them, like powdered protein, or creatine. If you don't use protein, it's really depressing how many cans of tunafish you have to eat to make up for it. These are so unlikely to damage your health that anyone can use them without special help from a doctor, and without health problems.
There is a scale, and of course steroids of course are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and have a lot of negative health effects. Other things, like blood doping, is mostly safe, but still carries risks and is hard to do by yourself, so it is kind of in the middle. Diet drugs are in the middle, but are legal. Protein is on the safe side. If this new technique ends up on the safe side, it will be legal. If it ends up on the unsafe side, it will be illegal. If it ends up in the middle, other random factors will end up determining what side it ends up on.
I don't have the knowledge to comment on whether it will be easy to detect or not.
Qxe4
Every death is a lesson learned. I wouldn't be surprised if China ends up leading the world in advanced medicine, as they have two vital advantages: The money to pay for it, and the willingness to press ahead with potential technologies rather than spending ten years on five types of animal study and regulatory bickering.
Mice evolved to survive by breeding. They are already running at the limits of reproduction rate for an organism of their size. Twenty day gestation, and ready for a new litter to be concieved almost as soon as the previous is out. A female can pop out upwards of a hundred offspring each year easily, all of whome will be ready to breed themselves in three months. It's just not getting any higher.
" ... deliberately injure muscle fibers ... "
That's what exercise does. I damages the cells which are then repaired by the body's normal systems. I suspect stem cell treatment just speed this up.
America, Home of the Brave.