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Museum of Engineered Organisms Opens In Pittsburgh
qeorqe writes "The Center for PostNatural History is a museum and research library about organisms that have been created either by genetic engineering or selective breeding. Included in the collection are Sea Monkeys and GloFish. From the article: 'One of the cool things about natural history museums is that they show you how nature has changed over time, adapting to volatile conditions and extreme challenges. And nothing is more volatile, extreme, or challenging than the human race, so it makes sense that there would be a museum to chronicle just how much we’ve messed with plants, animals, the climate, and in general the world around us. The Center for PostNatural History, opening this week in Pittsburgh, is that museum.'"
Postnatural. Postnatural is just a word. It is used in a sentence like this: "this bread sure is postnatural." What is this PostNatural business? Are we implementing a class for a non-artificial version of a post?
(I tried to join the local Grammar Nazi chapter, but they got upset when I pointed out that they were actually just garden-variety syntactic fascists.)
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Yes. Post-nature began shortly after the invention of agriculture. Given that, I think that if they tried to build a zoo they'd... just have to point people to the nearest farm.
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the museum of engineered orgasms!
they opened a farm.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Oh... Orga-*nisms* ...my bad, I don't want to visit any more.
Garfield isn't exactly gentrified - in the 4900 block of Penn Avenue this place is a good distance from the Carnegie Science Center (north shore) or Natural History / Museum of Art in Oakland.
Out of the way of casual tourism, a couple of blocks from Garfield Artworks and two doors down from a really good Vietnamese restaurant.
Humans: The Nature's way of overcoming the limitations of human-free localized entropy reduction.
Ezekiel 23:20
And at the end of the museum, there's a cafeteria that demonstrates just how delicious these modified organisms are.
Yeah, GloFish and Sea Monkeys are neat and all, but genetically speaking pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. You can find plenty of genetic changes in the produce aisle. Corn from tesointe, wheat with chromosomes from 3 other species, tetraploid potatoes (that won't make you sick), hybrid octaploid strawberries, all kinds of different shapes and colors of squash, eggplant, & tomatoes, seedless citrus, grapes, watermelons, & bananas, stonefruit hybrids, large sweet apples and other fruits bred away from their small sour ancestors, every single brassica, a rainbow of carrots, different speckled beans, and many others, and all the mutations behind these traits, including the less visible ones like altered photoperiod and disease resistance, would be good topics, each with their own history. Oh, and every breed of dog, chicken, cow, ect. I would hope they include these along with the newer genetic engineering examples like GloFish, Bt & HR crops, ect.. I don't think enough people appreciate, or are even aware, of the genetic history of their food and the genetic changes that occurred over the years, or even the changes being made today. I think it'd be kind of neat if they also included some oddities that you don't typically hear of, like white blackberries, pink blueberries, red & pink fleshed apples, citranges, shipova, ect,
I wonder if the concession stand takes the same theme, selling fruits and vegetables along with a little bit on their genetic changes. Triploid apples, papayas with papaya ringspot virus genes, nachos made from corn with the Bt gene...too bad there's no more Flavr Savr tomatoes but they can still use ones with broken lycopene biosynthesis pathways like Huge Lemon Oxheart or White Tomesol, or maybe source a nice dark one like Indigo Rose.
What, changing tactics already?
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The journal "Nature" has published an interview (pdf) with Richard Pell, the museum's curator.
A dalmation kidney.
Maybe a geneticist could start looking into repairing the damage done by reckless selective breeding?