I haven’t been following his story very closely, so I don’t know if what I’m about to say is news or not, but:
1.) Have you seen this story about an artist commissioning a genetic engineering company to splice phosphorescnt jellyfish genes into a rabbit, creating a rabbit that glows under UV light? It made the national news, the front page of the Boston Globe, an apparently has its own web site.
Well,
2.) Isn’t is suspicious that in all the pictures the rabbit glows VERY uniformly over its hair, skin, and eyes, and even its “dead” tissues? You’d think there’d be a little variation.
3.) Isn’t it suspicious that the rabbit itself isn’t available for viewing, kinda like Piltdown Man?
4.) Doesn’t the “artist” look suspiciously like Joey Skaggs, the guy responsible for media hoaxes that look and feel a lot like this one? (You can find info on him in The Big Book of Hoaxes, Paradox Press, 1996, pp. 140-143).Skaggs evidently sees himself as a performance artist who yanks the media’s chain, coming up with outrageous hoaxes that et taken for the real thing. There are rarely, if ever, retractions printed by the media, who would rather the public forget the whole thing.
Just a few thoughts.
Yeah, right.
Outrageous claims and some controversy. Jazzy visuals. This has the smell of hoax all over it. I might turn out to be wrong, but I doubt it.
CalMeacham! I thought the same thing. “Eduardo Kac” does look quite a bit like Joey, and this is exactly the kind of stunt he would pull.
I am quite the skeptic anyway, but you are right, this rabbit looks too perfectly flourescent. The whole thing just doesn’t seem on the up and up to me.
Skaggs has fooled many credible sources, so the fact that the Boston Globe printed it doesn’t mean anything.
And nobody has been able to see this rabbit? Well, I have Darwin’s Missing Link in my hall closet but nobody gets to check that out either. You will all just have to trust me. :rolleyes:
Did anyone else realize immediately that anything white glows under a black-light? The fact that the bunny is already an albino makes it just a little too easy.
By the way, I forgot to thank you for he link. Many thanks, little*bit.
Not verything white glows under blacklight. But white things that have been bleached do glo under blacklights. When I went through the blacklight tunnel at the Hayden Planetariun in NYC (Before the recent rebuilding) I saw the sailor’s suits glowing impressively.
The Bunny Rabbit on he site does look like what you see through a Find-R-Scope or other multichannel plate IR viewer, but suspect that what they did was simpler – they just adjusted the color balance on a color photo.
I’m not quite up to date on the topic of bioluminescence, but I do know that dead cells as a rule do not lumin…, lu…, umm…, give off light, due simply to the fact that it requires a specific light giving chemical reaction to occur, and dead cells are not exactly the most chemically active things.
As for how the rabbit got green, I was able to give are friend Eduardo Kac and his rabbit a healthy green glow with 5 min. and Adobe PhotoShop (Simply take the pic, add a new layer, selection fill lime green at 25% opacity, then crank the green contrast over to 100%. He’ll be glowing like Chernobyl when your done.)
I sent a note to the editors of ‘Beyond 2000’ – http://www.beyond2000.com – where I first saw the bunny. They admit to faking the picture, but still believe the guys story. Their reply below:
Dan,
Thanks for trying to keep us on the straight and narrow but since this feat
is actually scientifically achieveable it isn’t a very good topic for a
hoax. I hope you wrote to every news outlet that covered this story ; )
I understand that my colleague has already replied that the picture was
created by me as an illustration rather than a depiction of reality. Yes I
did base it on the photo from Kac’s website but I didn’t consider that to be
genuine image for reasons very similar to those noted by you.
The lack of viewing well yes that is somewhat suspect… probably because it
doesn’t look all that impressive. As to the artist he doesn’t really look
like Joey Skaggs at all and he has credible and widespread web presence
which would be time consumingly difficult to fake (possible: sure, likely:
no). It is also very un-Skaggs-like to actually provide such widespread
supporting material.
We will however keep you posted and if for whatever reason it is all lies we
will publically admit it.
Thanks for the update. I have to admit that I have not researched either Kacs or Skaggs very heavily (awfully similar names, though, huh?), but I’m not very convinced that this isn’t a hoax. Beyond2000 seems to think that
a.) It is easily doable to splice the bioluminescence genes from a jellyfish onto a rabbit’s and still have them work very well. This seems to me to be like splicing frog genes into dinosaurs and expecting them to be able to change sex to reproduce. I suspect it’s all a little bit harder than that.
b.) There’s just too much material on the site and too much of a web presence for this to be a hoax. I submit that the folks at Beyond2000 would not make very good scam artists. Saying that it’s too much work to put all of that material together for this to be a hoax suggests that you think a hoax is not something you put a lot of time into. But a true hoax artist WOULD see it that way – the hoax is a work of art. It’s a lot of work to build up a web presence over a period of time and to fill a lot of web pages with pseudo-profound blather, but if you want to be a convincing hoaxer that is precisely what you do.
Introduction of GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) genes is a relatively common procedure in genetic research–the protein is linked to the main modifications as a marker. It will not, however, produce anything like that rabbit. For real info on GFP-enhanced transgenic animals (with real pix), try
Thanks, Balance. You have confirmed what I suspected.
It’s too bad, though. If the transgenetic glowing bunnis escaped, we could look forward to warm summer evenings with our significant others, watching the fireflies and the rabbits blinking on and off in the dark.
There’s still hope! Have a look at this brochurefrom CLONTECH.
Note that the handsome green mice are decidedly lacking in fur, however. This just won’t cut it for bunnies. Bunnies must be fuzzy. It should be possible to add GFP to the fur (it’s only another protein, after all), but I don’t know how quickly it’ll break down in dead hairs (no, not dead hares!) Also, it requires a UV (black light) source.
The healthy glow you’re looking for is based on an active chemical reaction involving luciferase–I can’t think of any way to make that happen in hair. However, if you introduced the luciferase reaction into a short-furred rabbit’s skin cells (a much more difficult process than adding GFP), you might get a nicely luminescent bunny without the black lights.
Interestingly enough, The Washington Post has just run an article about this bunny. Apparently, Kac, the artist, is claiming he essentially commissioned it, while the lab is saying it was created for scientific purposes. I’m glad I remembered reading this thread!