The New York Times is reporting that researchers have bred a baby monkey who carries a gene from a jellyfish. Now, the jellyfish gene isn’t supposed to do anything; it’s just to prove that the alteration (insertion of a gene) can be done. The article says (and I trust this is a small enough except to not be a copyright infringement):
Is anyone else disturbed by this? I am not an animal-rights activist; I eat meat, wear leather, and do not object to some testing on animals, so I’m having to give some thought to what, precisely, I don’t like about this. In the meantime, I thought I’d throw the subject open for discussion and see what you guys think of it.
The one thing I can see that’s wrong with it is that it would probably take one hell of a lot of monkeys to get it right for a large number of diseases. That said, if the cure for AIDS is hidden in the genes of some monkey somewhere then they can take as long as they like.
Wow. I’m no animal rights activist either but I don’t know that I like that idea as well. I mean, I couldn’t do it myself. But I couldn’t do irritant tests on poor little bunnies’ eyes either
The gene isn’t “supposed” to do anything? LOL, and I thought I didn’t know about genetics!
I, like you, can’t put my finger on why this is fundamentally different from any other form of animal testing, but I also don’t know much about animal testing either. Not that I don’t care, I just don’t see that animals have rights comparable to people. Not like I’d do tests on my own pet, of course.
The best part about all of this is the scientist’s name: Dr. Schatten. It’s German for “shadow.” If there is a name that says “cartoonish-super-villain” more than that, I haven’t heard it.
The report said that the gene that they introduced into the monkey (actually, several hundred monkeys; this was the only one where evidence of the gene could be found) was the jellyfish gene that controlled phosphorescence (sp?).
How cool is that? More testing needs to be done, but if this gene were to awake from its dormant state in the monkey’s offspring (via some natural mutation), we could very well have a monkey that can glow in the dark.
Now, this is just my opinion, but what good is building an unholy army of the night, with Dr. Shadow holding the reigns, if all his minions glow in the dark?
Why not a monkey that could fly? C’mon Dr. Shadow, use your imagination! Sheesh… jellyfish…even I could’ve come up with something better than jellyfish… (as you can tell just from my handle, I’ll never amount to anything more than a goon).
Apparently that fluorescent thing isn’t as useless as we thought. If you carry one with you at night you’ll never get run over, if your power goes you can still have a nightlight, you could trick your neighbours into thinking you’d had a toxic gas leak…the possibilities are endless.
Oh, and you can track diseases with it as well (see below).
Here’s a link to a reuters site on the little guy.
Some quotes (in case the link disappears, I don’t know how reuters works).
Damn! There goes the flying monkey hypothesis.
This eases my mind a bit. They’d have a non-tested “cure”, say, and then we create the monkeys with the disease and see if the cure works.
Something interesting here, too…
(the Times requires registration, but it’s not that big a deal–just sex, age, and income)
I dunno, Jodi, off the top of my head, it just sounds like more animal testing to me. So they’re testing genes instead of makeup, what’s the difference? [shrug]
This one will work. Gotta be careful how you get the reuters links because they set up “session IDs” for some reason. All the quotes from above were from this article.
Reuters Schmeuters. Forget that link too. I don’t know why I can’t get there…they must not allow links from external pages. But it’s on the main page of http://www.reuters.com
I’ll happily support tests on monkeys if the end result is the discovery of the butler gene.
I can understand being against it if you’re against animal testing. But you claim in the OP, Jodi, not to be against it, in general. Right now we’re creating lab animals whose sole purpose in life is to be tested until they die. This is the same thing.
The only difference here is that we’re creating a completly new type of animal, one that’s never been seen on Earth before.
Maybe the objection is that if we’re doing that, we should study the life, not the death, of said animals.
Or maybe the objection is that we’re going too fast in our pursuit of knowledge. Scientists combine a jellyfish with a monkey and instead of celebrating that accomplishment scientists are saying “OK, now what?” Then they think about breeding them with cancer and seeing what happens. Maybe the objection lies in the fact that the scientists aren’t taking a step back and looking at what they’ve accomplished, but rushing blindly into a new area of science before they’re ready for the consequences of their actions. Stack too many giants on top of one another’s shoulders, and one of them will eventually lose its balance.
One step at a time. Glow-in-the-dark Monkey is merely the first phase of Dr. Shadow’s master plan to create the Monkey X-Men. We’ll have teleporting psychic monkeys that can shoot death rays from their eyes in no time.
We actually do something akin to genetically engineering intentionally-diseased monkeys already. Laboratory rats used for testing potential carcinogens are bred specifically to be susceptible to cancer. This allows a smaller number of lab rats to be used in a carcinogeneity trial – both in the exposed group and in the control group.
What’s to be disturbed about? We’ve exploited animals for since before the dawn of recorded history. We’ve used them for food, companionship, labor, and even shelter. What’s not to like about genetically altering them to serve our needs in other ways?
I personally am not bothered at all by this sort of experimentation. It does not seem needlessly cruel, nor are there alternative methods available. Considering the enormous potential benefits, I have to come down on the side of the scientists here.
My family had a german shepherd named ‘Schatten’. Very sweet dog, got his name because he always followed my Dad around when he went to pick up my Mom for work, eventually they realized he didn’t have a home and brought him home with us. Protected us for 13 years.
