Spawning Something Fishy

[n2doc]

Some years ago, a friend suggested that I play a practical joke on the British public. His idea was that I should mix the popular dislike of biotechnology with the widely-held suspicion that other Europeans are swindling the system, and write an April Fool’s Day article in which I would claim that the French had genetically engineered a breed of tiny sheep — sheep the size of rabbits. With such small sheep, you could keep many more on one field; and since European farm subsidies are calculated per sheep….

He and I amused ourselves with the thought of indignant readers spluttering into their coffee. But I’m no longer tempted to make up stories about biotechnology: reality is weirder than anything I’m likely to invent. For example, the other day I met a man — his name is Goro Yoshizaki — who wants to breed bluefin tuna from mackerel.

At first, I thought he was joking. After all, it’s a bit like saying you want to breed elephants from hamsters. It’s not just that tuna are much bigger than mackerel (a fully grown tuna can weigh more than 1,300 pounds (600 kg) and reach more than 13 feet (4 meters) in length, whereas the typical mackerel is a mere snackerel). It’s that part of what makes a mackerel a mackerel is that when they mate and reproduce, you get more mackerel — not sharks, or minnows, or tuna, or anything else. But after hearing him out, I was persuaded that his plan might just work.

The idea hinges on the fact that, to a surprising extent, lifeforms are a kind of fancy Lego, built from interchangeable parts. This is true at the genetic level: copy a gene from a jellyfish and put it into the genome of a rabbit, a mackerel, or an alfalfa plant, and the organism will incorporate the gene and make the jellyfish protein. But it is also true for cells. Let me give you an example.

more (interesting read):

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/spawning-something-fishy/index.html

[midnight]

1. I'm far from the field of science, but I have been reading info.

about cells taken from one's own body, and then injected into damaged areas to re-create healthy vertebra and bone of the spine. I wish their was more movement in this area. But your post about biotechnology being Weider than anything you're likely to invent, gave me renewed interest that we are not to far from my initial interest in biotechnology-rejuvenating the body.