Friday, June 15, 2007

Of Mice and Men -- and HuMice?

From the same artist who brought us POP! The First Male Pregnancy, complete with ultrasound and EKG and Videoclip on YouTube, we now have Clyven, the world's first transgenic HuMouse (well, aside from the one at Stanford that was recently the subject of target article in the American Journal of Bioethics).

According to the website of cutting-edge RYT hospital (who also brings us NanoDocs, Genochoice and "all the miracles of modern medicine" here's the scoop on how Clyven came to be:

"Margaret A. Keyes, M.D., Ph.D., is a researcher in genetic medicine and Professor of Cell Biology and Genetics at RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center. She is exploring the use of embryonic stem cells as a means to cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

By implanting human brain cells (grown from a human embryo's stem cells) into a mouse engineered to have Alzheimer's, Dr. Keyes inadvertently made a remarkable and startling discovery: she not only cured the mouse's Alzheimer's Disease, but the animal soon developed the relative intelligence of a human being.

After extensive consideration by RYT Hospital's Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), it was decided that this mouse would be placed under a new study led by Dr. Keyes' lab."

You can chat via neuro-dialogue interface with Clyven and test your intelligence against his in the cheese maze!

Providing much food for thought...

[Editor's note, added June 21, 2007 at 11:03 am: the above site is merely one artist's entertaining, fantastical rendition of possible developments in science -- neither POP, nor Genochoice, nor Nanodocs are 'real' -- we've blogged about POP before, here, noting that's the artist's knowledge of the science is very impressive]

3 comments:

LB said...

My hamster wanted to chat with the HuMouse, but then the universe just exploded.

Andrea Kalfoglou said...

This is a hoax everyone. Take a deep breath and laugh a little.

Unknown said...

http://www.biopoliticaltimes.org/article.php?id=4705
mousey brains on crack...or is that the researcher?
"
If visible human-like characteristics might arise, have all those involved in these experiments, including animal care staff, been informed and educated about this?"

"Henry Greely, who has studied proposals by his Stanford colleague Irving Weissman to create human-mouse chimeras, believes "there is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on the animals."

He had also asked the committee for an opinion about a "thought experiment" - about the ethics of making chimeric mice with brains that are a hundred percent human. As long as the mice's brains continued to look mouse-like, he told the Washington Post, they could be used for research.

"But if there were any sign that they were taking on a "distinctly human architecture," he said, they could be killed."

What is wrong with these boys who torture animals? Eventually they go on to torture humans.