Creating Supersoldiers: Genetic Monkey Business?

Scientists this week have announced the creation of supersoldier ants, and the first mixed-embryo monkeys.

Source: Dateline Zero

They have created what Rob Waugh at The Daily Maildescribes as “nightmarish supersoldier” ants — man-made “monster ants” with freakishly huge heads and terrifying jaws.

“Ancient genes have been reawakened by dab of hormones,” Waugh explained.

Authors Dr Rajendhran Rajakumar, from McGill University, Canada, and colleagues wrote: “We uncovered an ancestral development potential to produce a novel supersoldier subcaste that has been retained throughout a hyperdiverse ant genus that evolved 35 to 60 million years ago.”

One thing genetic researchers are interested in is better understanding of “ancestral development toolkits.” These toolkits could be opened and certain traits might be activated at will.

Rob Waugh writes that researchers claim that “results suggest that holding on to ancestral development toolkits may play an important role in evolving new physical traits.”

Meanwhile…

US researchers said Thursday they have created the world’s first mixed-embryo monkeys by merging cells from up to six different embryos, in what could be a big advance for medical research.

An article at News.Yahoo.com reports:

Attempts to create melded primates have failed in the past, but scientists in the western state of Oregon succeeded by altering the method used to make mice.

The breakthrough came when they mixed cells together from very early stage rhesus monkey embryos, in a state known as totipotent, when they are able to give rise to a whole animal as well as the placenta and other life-sustaining tissues.

There’s more about the moneys at The Daily Mail.

After Monkeys and Ants: Neanderthals and Marsonauts?

One might think that geneticists aren’t being that ambitious. But I would disagree with that. I think that the kind of people creating ‘supersoldier’ ants, and mixed-embryo monkeys are thinking big. Very big consider the following related posts:

• GODLIKE: Mammoth to be ‘resurrected’ soon. Neanderthals could follow
• Scientists Planning to Clone Neanderthals

The research on the mixed-embryo monkeys has been published online ahead of the release of the January 20 issue of the journal Cell. Lead researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University says: “The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs. The possibilities for science are enormous.”

What sorts of possibilities does this open up, exactly? The Yahoo! News article points out that scientists use rhesus monkeys to study HIV/AIDS drugs, research vaccines for rabies, smallpox and polio, and to study potential uses for embryonic stem cells. “They have also been launched into space on test missions by the US and Russia,” the article reads.

That last bit is important, because scientists have also become keenly interested in getting to Mars. And one likely plan to set up a permanent base on Mars involves using genetically altered human clones — people designed to handle Mars’ environment.

In an article titled ‘How We Will Terraform Mars,’ Jackson Shankel points out:

It may, however, be ultimately impossible to fine tune Mars’ climate to support human life as we know it today. In the centuries it takes for us to get to this point, it might just be easier to engineer humans to tolerate the conditions that we can produce on Mars. As Kim Stanley Robinson pointed out in his Mars Trilogy, humans do not just terraform Mars, Mars aeroforms us.

Incidentally, ‘marsonauts’ have already done at least one dry-run. The “Mars500″ mission returned from a simulated human expedition this past November.

It would seem more likely that a program to create manufactured humans to head to Mars would trump an extremely long-term plan to terraform that planet. Both approaches open up their own unique set of ethical considerations. But genetically altered humans would be cheaper and faster.

Read full post at Dateline Zero