'Supermodel' glow-in-the-dark pocket monkeys created A team of crack Japanese boffins has at last achieved one of humanity's most important scientific goals - namely, the creation of small monkeys which glow green when exposed to ultraviolet light. Unsatisfactory one-off fluorescent primates had been created previously, but the new, cutting-edge fluoro-monkeys' abilities are …
My views on vivisection and related issues are mixed but, "Hey, we've made them glow in the dark, now we can give them Parkinson's", does sound less than delightful.
But never mind, as long as we get something out of it, it doesn't matter what degree of suffering is caused.
Mine's the fake fur.
"Regardless of how much the researchers try to force a nonhuman primate to have features of human beings, numerous, significant and inexorable species differences will ultimately negate the biomedical utility of any research done on them."
So I'd suggest these plonkers put their body where their mouths are and volunteer, after all, if anyone, they can help overcome these "numerous, significant and inexorable species differences" - oh wait, that's right, they're just a bunch of attention-whoring hypocrites on a moral crusade.
Idiots like that should be cleansed from the genepool - under scientific observation so that the hypocrisy gene can be excised as soon as possible ....
Anon/black helicopter, because I don't want the family of my friends' friends terrorized by a bunch of rabid loonies ...
It's easy to test and see if the gene has been expressed in the monkeys and their offspring.So they want to prove the technology.
But I'm with the BUAV on this one, seems a bit cruel and pointless. They're living thinking creatures - I might feel guiltily ok about research on AIDS. But this is just wrong.
"After a few generations (not long), the jungle will be full of glowing marmosets!"
No it won't. I can't help thinking that Darwinian natural selection will tend to select against glowing marmosets - if they glow in the dark, they are easily caught and eaten.
Tell me they have blue hair. (You gotta have blue hair.)
As for the anti-vivisectionists, perhaps they'd like to google the name "Thalidomide" to see why tests are done on animals. (Personally, I think we should do the tests on political activists, but I understand that rats and marmosets are much closer to humans.)
http://www.cracked.com/article_15801_p2.html
"The researchers justify continuation of these experiments with a lot of fancy talk about tracking the genetic markers and learning how to create stable, transgenic monkeys for future experiments. But, in the end we all know that, like us, they really only wanted to throw decadent and hilarious monkey raves. "
With a background in evolutionary biology more than genetics, I can say we really wouldn't have to worry about this gene being spread around in the wild - monkey eating creatures will soon solve the problem with a diet of easy-to-find tasty primate kebabs.
If humans had had a glow in the dark gene, it would have been similarly removed from our genetic makeup by keen-eyed sabre-tooth tigers a long time ago!
I don't think this is cruel. I just want to know where I can get one - but I'd prefer a blue glow to green.
No they won't. Can you imagine being a glowing marmoset and trying to hide from a predator?
Also the BUAV just need to shut the [flip] up. These animals are really quite similar to us, so why wouldn't they tell us about ourselves?
Actually, you know what? Lets create a glow in the dark Human instead! Yeah! That's much less likely to be 'morally reprehensible'.
Paris because I'm hoping she'd agree to help me with the subject's conception.
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The monkey does not glow in the dark - it glows when shone with UV light.
Only if the predators could see in UV, and had a UV light to shine on the monkey would it be more visible.
Valid concerns about this are certainly that they could get into the wild, spark new genetic diseases etc.
The overall benefit should out weigh the costs and risks if the scientists conducting this study are smart and not cruel to the poor animals.
Being able to glow in UV allows us to "see" organs, tissue, and body systems literally in a new light. It may make it easier to see the cause of some problems, and the effects of some solutions and medicine.
The are also able to study gene splicing and manipulation (surely the wave of the future).
So maybe they can try to harness the regenerative properties of starfish, and find a way to add them to our COLLECTIVE!!
Oh my, we should be careful that we don't become the BORG!
I'm still waiting for anti-vivisectionist and anti-animal-testing to propose a viable alternative. What I don't understand is whether they'd prefer new medicines to get used on humans before we even know what they do, or not to be developed at all.
And the point about biological differences invalidating animal tests is near the top of the list of biggest piles of bullshit ever spouted. If that was true, we wouldn't be doing animal tests, duh.
Sorry you are greatly mislead. We have been tagging GFP to proteins in tissue cultures for literally years so that we can see how the proteins interact using confocal microscopy, this is a boring everyday tech.
For years we have also been either deleting genes in mice or fruit flies or adding in new or mutated genes that mimic deleted, duplicated or mutated genes in various human disease states. These are then termed "transgenic organisms"
The importance of this is that these were the first transgenic primates, and as such make a much better system to model human disease states using transgene technology. The GFP was merely used to prove that an arbitary gene had succesfully been inserted into the genome of the organism as proof of concept, the fact that it glows has no other significance whatsoever, none whatsoever.
Apart from a nice new model organism, this is just very old technology being applied to a new species and frankly we should be cynical of all the hype that the media stir up whenever this is done. (it was done in mice and rabbits10 years ago, google "Alba the GFP bunny".
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