Glowing Monkeys

[Panda]

Scientists have created marmosets that glow green in order to better understand diseases by inserting a gene that codes for fluorescent protein production in jellyfish into the monkey embryos.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=818883

Cute Marmoset:


I think that's neat that they are trying to find cures for diseases like
Alzheimer's and genetic engineering has come a long way, but that adorable monkey is far from being like Goku (Monkey King or DBZ character) in a metaphorical sense.

[smoth]

"japan makes glow in the dark monkeys"

nothing abnormal here... sound about par for the course...

[Forboding Angel]

"japan makes glow in the dark monkeys"

nothing abnormal here... sound about par for the course...

I'd have to agree lol

[PicassoCT]

This is Super Mutant Sam Fisher Green Monkey.. he is better than everything on the Intertubes, worship him!


Fun aside this is fantastic, just imagine glowing Metastasen, showing how Cancer travells and why, where some of these little killers survive Chemotheraphie...

Also intersting would a Variation to see were some longterm Viruses (Malaria) are hidding...

Great News thx for posting..

[jcnossen]

Shouldn't take more than 10 years before we can order custom genetically engineered pets from the internet right? I'd like a blue monkey, with enlarged red eyes and wings..

[Gota]

I want a manticore plz.

[Snipawolf]

Nice avatar JC!

[Pressure Line]

Shouldn't take more than 10 years before we can order custom genetically engineered pets from the internet right? I'd like a blue monkey, with enlarged red eyes and wings..

I just want a clone of my Blue Heeler :/ Although the mini-tiger (a tiger thats GE'd to be about the size of a labrador when fully grown) in one of the Arthur C Clarke novels (Nemesis i think) would be neat

[daan 79]

For medical usses its a huge step forward but indeed the danger it will step beyond this erea is really worring. I think we breed pets just to the limits(With some really funny or pitty results.) But injecting stuff after or during burth really opens a whole new chapter. There are to much financial benefiths with all these experiments .

[AF]

For medical usses its a huge step forward but indeed the danger it will step beyond this erea is really worring. I think we breed pets just to the limits(With some really funny or pitty results.) But injecting stuff after or during burth really opens a whole new chapter. There are to much financial benefiths with all these experiments .

We were doing this long before we researched genetics. A lot of breeds of dogs are incapable of reproducing without human aided insemination because the breeding has made them physically incapable of intercourse

[PicassoCT]

For all those OMG - Gods Creations will run around outside glowing bright.. Drama Queens ready to get going calm down. Glowing Animals have outside of human society no chance of survival.

And Drama is the source of life... brave new world that has no drama in it, without Drama no development/death, without development no evolution! With Stagnation- it goes for beeing beat on the head by those who didn┬┤t stall..

[smoth]

wait until humans start wanting it, then we become the green men....

[Erom]

I'd love to see a pic of these guys under UV, to see how much they fluoresce.

[smoth]

google image search will return some results.

[daan 79]

[SwiftSpear]

I'm convinced Genetic Engineers are just nerds trying to compete in some giant "coolest pet" competition.

[Panda]

Those are some really cute creatures, but I can't think of any way they would survive in the wild either. Bioluminescence usually occurs in sea creatures, mushrooms, microorganisms, and insects that live in environments where it's beneficial to have that ability, but a monkey, rabbit or some other mammal would probably get killed because of it.

[Snipawolf]

I'm convinced Genetic Engineers are just nerds trying to compete in some giant "coolest pet" competition.

If I'm a genetic engineer, I'm going to cut out the limitation of a dragonfly's size, increase its metabolism, add poison glands and preferably a stinger and/or fangs. Screw coolest/cutest pet, I want HUGE dragonflies flying around and consuming or killing everything in sight.

Too bad that's one childhood dream that will never come to fruition (for everyone else's sake).

[Panda]

Despite geneticists claims that new species are created by mechanisms of natural selection such as genetic drift (That's the geneticists' explanation for how dogs evolved from the gray wolf.), I'm skeptical as to whether they could do something like that. It's a very complicated issue and that complexity the exact reason as to why they're having such difficulty determining what causes the phenotypic expression (observable appearance of a trait) of and curing things like Alzheimer's disease.

For example, there are many genes that interact to influence brain chemistry and brain chemistry can be influenced by outside factors like stress. The interaction between all of these variables is, theoretically, what causes your brain to function the way that it does.

There are even claims out there that say that the herpes virus is linked to this disease because it has been found to occur in 90% of the plaque samples from cadavers of Alzheimer's patients. Yet, other studies show (with very reliable results) that the placebo or nocebo (Opposite of placebo effect often found in treatments used by Voodoo practitioners in order to cure a psychosomatically affected illness) effect can greatly reduce the risk of an illness from ever occurring or get rid of it completely.

[Argh]

It's a very complicated issue and that complexity the exact reason as to why they're having such difficulty determining what causes the phenotypic expression (observable appearance of a trait) of and curing things like Alzheimer's disease.

From what little of the for-dummies stuff in Scientific American I've read lately, it appears that the real problem there is that:

A. "junk" sequences of DNA have turned out to be quite important to the formation of things that have profound effects on the final structure and function of an organism through changes in their cells.

B. It's increasingly clear that DNA isn't like computer code in the classical sense, where you put in 1 + 1 and get 2, but is more like quantum computational systems, where one system may output 2, but it'll eventually, under certain circumstances, interact with other DNA and produce 3 or 5.

Hence the specialization of our body cells is probably being caused by a few hundred different starting inputs to various genes, not just one gene doing everything that makes a blood cell a blood cell. I know that's a "duh", a blood cell isn't a muscle cell- but what's interesting is how far apart the changed DNA usually is. It's like somebody turns on a light in Brooklyn, and that causes a door to open in San Diego. But it's not butterfly effect, it's just very complex multi-input quantum mechanical machinery.

I find it fascinating that one day we'll probably have quantum processors doing more or less the same thing, and that probably soon afterwards we'll be able to do to-design organisms, so much less crude than the gene-insertion stuff that we're doing today, because we'll have computational environments that can more accurately model reality's fuzzy complexity and we'll be able to build machines that can output both the correct genes and the starting sequences needed to start the cascade.

What we're doing now, for all of it's amazing science, seems like ripping out a big chunk of a distributed computing system, sticking in a bunch of new inputs, outputs and processors and hoping that it does something vaguely useful and doesn't kill the organism.

This glow-gene thing's been applied to a lot of organisms (I remember reading about it applied to tobacco leaves at one point IIRC) so it's a fairly well-understood piece of machinery- stick here, activate thus, and it probably won't overwrite anything vital.

But I don't think we'll have glowing people soon.

Because, who knows? Maybe if you glow, you're stupid. Or you can't eat certain proteins. Or see in the full range of color. Or your skin won't make one of the chemicals it needs to be fully healthy without fur. I'm all for a future where we can actually try to improve upon Nature, but I think we're still more in the black-magic stages than anybody likes to admit.