Slashdot Mirror
Has Anyone Seen My Rabbit?
New submitter geoskd writes "Scientists at the university of Hawaii have created glow in the dark rabbits. Where can I get my hands on one of these critters? It would drive the cats nuts! These guys are missing a bet, they could sell these things for big bucks and use the money to further fund their research. This is the perfect gift for the geek who has "everything"."
The technique used is similar to the glow in the dark cats bred a couple of years ago. The fluorescence isn't the end goal of course; it just happens to be a very obvious marker that their genetic manipulation technique works. According to the researchers, "the final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build, and be able to produce their own protein-based medication in animals."
Why rabbits? These aren't the first people to do this. Another group modified rabbits to produce human C1 inhibitor, but they only get 120 mL of milk per day. Is this economical from a perspective of input feed to output milk?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The drugs are expensive because of the patents on them that allow big pharma to monopolize them. In this case, the people who develop the genes will then be poached by big pharma, or will form their own company, or the university will sell the patents to an IP shop, which will leave us exactly where we were before. But we will have glowing rabbits.
So spare me the homilies about poor people and drugs, and just say "shiny glowing rabbits!!! FTW!!!"
FTFS: "glow in the dark cats"
"Captain Peacock, have you seen my pussy?"
--
BMO
Glowing in the dark would, I imagine, constitute a significant anti-survival trait for a creature such as this... If this trait gets passed on, could the technique be used to bring the rabbit population under control within a few dozen generations in areas where rabbits are nothing more than profound pests?
Or do you think would it reduce their chances of survival so low that they wouldn't even get to breed?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sherlock Holmes: Bluebell, John! I've got Bluebell, the case of the vanishing glow-in-the-dark rabbit. NATO's in an uproar.
(For the uninformed: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942613/quotes?ref_=tttrv_sa_3)
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
Just have to point out, that the jellyfish protein they're talking about is green fluorescent protein (GFP). It fluoresces. This is not glow in the dark. You shine a blue light on GFP, it sends some of it back as green light. The only way it "glows" is if you filter out the blue excitation light you're shining on it. The light shining on the rabbits is actually quite intense compared to the fluorescent light you get back.
At 0:48, they switch from a normal view of the bunnies to a the fluorescence. The reason it's a cut and not just flipping off the lights is that they put a green filter over the camera and set up a bright blue light shining on the bunnies. The green filter filters out the blue light but not the green light from the rabbits. You can see the one rabbit dims for a split second, that's because the beam of blue excitation light moves for a second. Turn off the blue light and those rabbits would go dark along with everything else. I suppose they'd glow for a very short time longer than anything else due to the fluorescence taking slightly longer, but it would be far too fast for you to perceive.
Here's an example of some GFP sample on the microscope. Notice the bright blue light? That's what the article is calling "dark." (The orange filter in that example isn't the one you'd use to see fluorescence, it's what you'd use to keep you from blinding yourself by the blue light while moving the sample around.)
If only it were so easy.
TFS said:
"the final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build"
That BILLION dollars to build a plant meeting FDA style standards might have something to do with the cost. Figure one plant produces medicine for what, maybe a million people who need the drug(s) it produces? That would be $1 billion / 1 million = $1,000 / person just to build the thing. If you had 10 million people buying the medicine and one plant could produce enough for 10 million people, that's $100 / customer.
Add to that, 90% of medications don't make it through all of the trials and testing and get FDA approved. The one that gets approved needs to cover the cost of the nine that didn't make it. What does that R&D cost? Here are the numbers from all of the big pharma companies (All numbers are in millions, so 4,000 means $4 billion)/;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-truly-staggering-cost-of-inventing-new-drugs/
So I'm curious, how do you plan on covering the four or five billion dollar cost of developing a drug, if not buy patenting and selling it? Dollar cost COULD be drastically reduced by reducing safety regulations. Obviously that's trading for human cost, which sounds scary. On the other hand, consider that if the cost was cut by 30%, more people could get the medicine they need. That's the human cost of regulations that make it difficult to get medicine approved - when it costs $5 billion to make a new medicine, people suffer and die from things less expensive medicine could cure. Reducing regulations somewhat might very well reduce a lot of suffering. It's a hard problem. It sure would be nice if there was an easy answer, if you could just call the people who make new medicines evil and that would magically cause medicine to be developed, tested, and produced at no cost.