There was a lot of noise and scurrying around this month as Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans, and Oliver Smithies won the Nobel prize for medicine.
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They won the prize for their work on the creation of so-called “knock-out mice” – and we are not talking about furry heavy-weight boxers here.
In essence, their research made it possible to knock specific genes out of the rat genome. This allows scientists to breed a rat that lacks a specific gene and then to see what is wrong with the animal – thus getting a clearer idea of the gene’s function.
Whereas this kind of gene targeting may lead to enormous advances for the treatment of disease in humans, it does leave one feeling uneasy, or appalled, at the fate of the poor knock-out mice.
They deleted my genes
By chance being born with some genetic problem is bad enough. But knowing that there is some guy in a white coat who planned it this way makes it a lot harder to come to terms with.
A recent study, published in the journal nature, reports how knock-out mice were bred to lack a key gene related to fertility.
Mice bred to lack this gene involved with the last stage of sperm formation produced few mature sperm, and the few that were produced had abnormally shaped heads and immobile tails, Reuters Health reported.
And to cap the humiliation,, they also had smaller testicles. Indeed, what kind of a rat are you if you can’t procreate?
Sedate the masses
Indeed, the development of knock-out mice may well be one of the major junctures in rat history, rivalling the relevance of those first tentative steps into the cold white sterility of the lab a hundred years ago.
And, as if to pre-empt a post-Stockholm rodent backlash, researchers this month reported, also in the journal Nature, that they had found a new way to anaesthetise rats.
“They gave the rats injections containing capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, and a derivative of the common local anaesthetic lidocaine. Working in concert, these chemicals targeted pain-sensing neurons, stopping them from transmitting "ouch" signals to the brain,” Reuters Health reported.
“The rats were placed on an uncomfortable heat source and had their paws pricked, but showed no signs of feeling pain and moved and behaved normally, according to Reuters Health.
It is of course rather important to know when you are standing on something hot, just as it is useful to be able to distinguish a cold stove plate from a hot one.
Starvation tactics
And in similarly disconcerting news, French researchers have managed to instigate anorexic-like behaviour in mice – and that without exposing them to an overload of fashion magazines. They did it by stimulating certain receptors in the brain that have been tied to addictive behaviour.
If, indeed, the objective is to prevent a revolt in mice unhappy with Stockholm, inducing anorexia and anaesthetising threatening mice sounds like a very good strategy.
Strategic error?
Yet, before the Nobel announcement was made we reported that so-called “super mice” may pose a significant risk to certain human communities. This was, in fact, quite widely reported.
Thus, the decision to give the Nobel to the knock-out researchers may well have been a political error – if nothing else, it shows great insensitivity to mice all over the world, and is likely to ramp up existing inter-specie tensions.
The calculated risk, of course, is that through new genetic tools, and otherwise, any insurgency will be quashed…
Yet, as you read this, chances are that somewhere in your home a rat is quietly going about his business, biding his time, waiting for night to set in. – (Marcus Low, Health24)
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