Friday, November 02, 2007

Time to Pay Attention


The middle mouse here is a chimera. It represents the first time a normal, healthy animal has been created from two distantly related species. Two two species being a regular old house mouse and a wood mouse.

No big deal, right? Who really cares what craziness scientists come up with in the lab?

What if this little bit of information is added:

"Their genes (speaking of the two mice) differ by as much as 18 percent, about 12 times the difference between human and chimpanzee."

Say the human is the "house mouse" and the chimpanzee is the "wood mouse"...only closer genetically.

Now do you care what craziness scientists are doing in the lab?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fascinating. A crazy world can only produce craziness. I'm moving to Mars. My husband is related to someone there. I am just related to the monkeys here.

Autumn Song said...

That's very scary.

Shawn said...

I do care. I know I should keep up with it more. I love that you do. It's fascinating. As long as they stick to mice ... and a Frankenmouse doesn't come out of it, I guess I"m OK with this one. For now.

bella said...

god this kind of stuff scares the shit out of me.
It feels so far away, so much in the unknown, so beyond my own daily life, and that is part of what makes it so upsetting.
We have no ethics yet, as a society and people, for what we have the capacity to do and create. This is the part that frightens me.
As always, you are getting me to WAKE UP and see things I've been close from or to, or to see things in new ways.

Shannon said...

I don't mean to impose fear here, just awareness. We need laws in place to prevent this, and we need guidelines for how the new species will be treated when someone breaks those laws. Will it have human rights? I believe most scientists won't want to cross this line, but there eventually will be one who is curious enough to do it.