Rollover to turn the light off
The Nagy lab has been making very impressive GFP mice for years. They focus on using transgenic mice and embryonic stem cells to better understand development and genetic disease. Check out the massive library of flurorescent mice made by the Nagy Lab and their colleagues. Each one uses an inducible promoter to permanently activate the fluorescent marker. Very handy. If you have library access, pull Dr. Nagy’s latest review article in Development 2005 Dec;132(23):5130-2.
posted by futureBen at 10:05 pm
I’m probably just in a bad mood today, but this report from The Interdisciplinary Canter for Technology Analysis & Forecasting at Tel-Aviv University really annoys me. I’m not entirely sure why though. It may be somewhat accurate for all I know, the annoying part is the commoditization of things that haven’t happened yet. Every investor wants little chips that do things better and cheaper so that they can reduce overhead and raise profit. If a nano/biotech revolution did sweep the world, they don’t understand that it could also destroy commerce. Imagine self replicating and self repairing medical diagnostic equiptment. How do you sell it when anybody can just make a copy? The ultimate technologies will be not only accesible but manufacturable by the smallest mountain village. And the only comodities will be innovation and raw materials. The true revolution will be a reconciliation between industrial and agrarian. And that will be all kinds of bad for multinational corporations and globalization. It is my fervent hope that every single widget they are hoping for is rendered obsolete by something they couldn’t possibly imagine. And all of their planing and panel discussion will have wrought nothing but their doom! As long as I’m dreaming, I would be the creator of that technology. And I would laugh…into the night. I am also bothered by all of those little technologesque illustrations so liberally applied. Those are way tacky.
posted by futureBen at 10:23 am
Genetic Savings and Clone offers to clone your prized cats for $32,000. Instead of transfering the nucleus from the donor to an egg this company tranfers over the packaged DNA. The idea behind Chromatin Transfer, I presume, is that the epigenetic milleu of the egg nucleus properly regulates the donor DNA to develop properly.
What is interesting about this company isn’t so much the technology, or even if its a good idea to clone a cat when there are so many up for adoption. What interests me is that its a biotech company that deals in a luxury item. At what point will geneticly modified animals become affordable?(If you call $32,000 affordable.) The initial overhead would be much higher, but once a new line was developed it could be bred normaly. Yeah, right. The company that did that would be legislated right out of existence.
posted by futureBen at 7:48 pm
