Kitabı oku: «The Shape of Shit to Come»

CHAPTER 1: GENES
The mouse that did not roar, but instead made another surprising animal noise

This was no ordinary mouse. In January 2012, Japanese scientists announced they had genetically engineered a new kind of mouse. A mouse unlike other mice. Those mice squeaked. Not this mouse. This mouse went where no other mouse had, sonically speaking, gone before. This mouse tweeted, like a bird.

Lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura of Osaka University’s well-named School of Frontier Biosciences said of the process that led to this fantastical creation: ‘We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen.’

That’s right: they wanted to see what would happen. And what did happen? A mouse tweeted like a bird. It’s fucked up.

Biotech – which is short for biotechnology, which is short for biological technology, which is not short for anything – is running wild. The building blocks of nature are a minefield. And the minefield is on fire. Not a day goes by without a headline like ‘Genetic breakthrough could slow – or halt – the ageing process’ or ‘Why hating brussels sprouts could be in your DNA’ or ‘Glowing Cats Shed Light On AIDS’. (I deliberately didn’t look at that last story – preferring my own reverie.)

The mysteries of life itself are being unravelled before our eyes. Think of the ramifications, and also the implications. We are gaining the ability to mess with human genes – possibly changing characteristics, for good or ill, for generations to come.

Some call this playing God. But why should we not play God? Why should He have all the fun? Maybe He was wrong in having the mice squeak and birds tweet. Maybe it’s time to mix that whole game right up. From now on, maybe we should treat mice that merely squeak with the disdain they deserve.

But who gets to play God? Many bleeding-edge geneticists have a sort of punk-rock DIY libertarian aesthetic that favours posting gene codes on the Internet so anyone can knock up new strains in the garage. It’s a world of out-there ideas. Veteran future-watcher and renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson believes the biotech revolution will be fun, and educative: he believes we should welcome gene-splicing kits in the homeplace. He even joyfully envisages biotech kids’ games ‘where you give the child some eggs and seeds and a kit for writing the genomes and see what comes out’.

See what comes out? See what comes out? I’ll tell you what’ll ‘come out’ of giving children the power to bend nature: a catalogue of horrors, that’s what. Jurassic Park? Jurassic Fucking Reindeer-Shark, more like.

What can we learn from the really weird animals?

Like latterday Dr Dolittles, life scientists seem to want to talk to the animals, by making animals that talk. Or at least, animals that glow in the dark.

Life science has acquired an odd public reputation – forever synonymous with importing rabbits and mice on ferries for kicks. But the life scientists are certainly getting up to some pretty intriguing experiments. Most experiments are, when all is said and done, tedious as all hell. But these are experiments. It’s like they’re on E, but with the ‘E’ standing for ‘Experiment’. Or ‘Extreme Shit Being Done With Animals’.

Scientists in the Netherlands have injected cows with the protein lactoferrin derived from humans. Found in breast milk and tears, this little bit of Homo sapiens would allegedly help boost cows’ immune systems. (Cows swimming with human tears? It’s already happened.) Goats on a farm run by Utah State University have been genetically modified with spider genes so they produce silk in their milk. You think it’s milk, but no … it’s silk! Or, at least, silky milk (milky silk?). Then there is ANDi, the world’s first transgenic monkey (‘transgenic’ means combining genes).

ANDi, whose name contains ‘DNA’ backwards, was born following experiments conducted by researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University. ANDi was no common or garden transgenic monkey: he was a transgenic monkey with some jellyfish DNA spliced into him. That is, jellyfish DNA was cut and pasted – literally – into monkey DNA. If you hold a torch up to ANDi, he glows a bit green.

So on some levels these animal experiments seem quite mind-bending, and on others a bit silly. In choosing to create a chimerical mythic creature anew the scientists eschewed classical models like the Chimera itself – lion, goat and snake – in favour of a slightly fluorescent monkey. (Of course, slightly fluorescent monkeys could easily lead on to slightly fluorescent human beings: not just useful for finding people in the dark, but also fun in the bedchamber.)

What the scientists love most, though, is fucking up mice. Everyone remembers the most famous transgenic mouse, the so-called Vacanti mouse (named after its inventor, the MIT professor Charles Vacanti), burdened with what appeared to be a ruddy great human ear on its back. This mouse had a ruddy great ear on its back, but couldn’t even hear through it. So that’s odd. In a full-page New York Times ad one anti-testing group labelled this striking image ‘an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back’ – which was actually incorrect. The ‘ear’ was just cartilage grown into the shape of a human ear, although you can sort of see how this misapprehension might have taken hold, what with it looking like a mouse with an ear on its fucking back.

Anyway, transgenic mice are everywhere. In 2007, biologists in Cleveland conjured up a so-called ‘supermouse’ that could run six kilometres without pausing for breath or sustenance. That’s one hell of a useful mouse. It could carry very small packages or messages on paper. Hang on, there’s e-mail for that. It’s useful. It’ll come to me …

So-called ‘smart mice’ have been engineered at Princeton. Altered with an extra gene that boosts the neurotransmitter NMDA (N.B., not MDMA – that would be a different experiment entirely), the mice get a brainpower boost and outperform ordinary mice in various mouse-cleverness tests. Sadly, they also scare more easily. Meanwhile, Larry Young at Emory University transferred a gene from the monogamous prairie vole into the hitherto promiscuous lab mouse – and created monogamous mice. So there’s a lot of stuff going on with mice. Less shagging around, in one instance.

But this is not just mutants for mutants’ sake (not always). Some of these experiments on animals are showing humanity a brave new dawn in the here and now. Geneticists also based in Cleveland are producing transgenic mosquitoes that do not carry malaria, which in Cayman Island trials have started squeezing out mosquitoes that do. So that’s good, because malaria is bad.

Then there’s using animals to develop stuff useful for humans in a more direct way – by means of xenotransplantation: the breeding of animals for harvesting organs to transplant into humans. Renowned fertility expert and television star Lord Robert Winston is working on breeding GM pigs whose hearts can be transplanted into humans.

The heart of a pig is about the same size as the heart of a man. If liberally covered in human protein, it may be accepted by the human body. And, okay, it sounds wrong – putting the heart of a pig into a man. But is it wrong? Clearly it is. But is it? It’s the heart of a pig. But they’re putting it into a man. Is that wrong? There are risks for safety in all of this (no, really) – for example, of contracting animal viruses. Plus it might make you go off sausages, which just isn’t worth the risk. (Maybe this is why Robert Winston is so twinkly eyed on the telly: he has just been bending nature on the sly.)

Even the supermice could have human applications. The Cleveland mice lived longer, ate more without getting fat and had more sex; some humans might also want to live longer, eat more without getting fat and have more sex. Could not supermice lead to genetically enhanced supermen? The researchers said that was not the aim of the project, before pointing out that humans do also possess this highly active gene for an enzyme called phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (PEPCK). ‘But this is not something that you’d do to a human,’ said Professor Richard Hanson of Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University.

He has not even thought about it. No way. Not even once. Going down in history as the creator of a new breed of superbeings has never even begun to occur to him. ‘It’s completely wrong,’ he added.

(He can’t stop thinking about it.)

Anyway, one group of scientists is making mice monogamous, while another is making them randy. And that is what experimenting on animals is all about.