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Posts Tagged “

genetic engineering

posthumans

Posthumans, Rise Up And Destroy Hollywood!

Why is Hollywood trying to poison everybody against posthumans? Whenever you see someone going beyond standard-issue humanity in movies or TV, it's portrayed as monstrous and evil. Whether it's cyborgs, mutants or humans hacking their bodies, Hollywood exercises its anti-posthuman agenda. Meanwhile, novels have been celebrating the customizers and reinventers for years now. What can we do to derail Hollywood's insidious campaign against our posthuman brothers and sisters? The first step is understanding where it comes from. More »

mad genetic engineering

No, Bitches, It's Not a Designer Baby

It's inevitable: the media has not only confused human reproductive cloning with "designer babies," but in fact they have confused a stem cell experiment with designer babies too. I love my sensationalist science as much as the next person, but the London Times has gone batshit with its reports that a GM human embryo could lead to "designer babies" out there in the wilds of science land. Now all these anti-baby engineering groups are going nuts because nobody has bothered to explain the science to them. Even Wired picked up the story, though thankfully without the "designer baby" crap. So what's the deal? When will you get your designer baby with wings and mutant powers? More »

splice

Hard Scifi Flick "Splice" Actually Based on Internet-Rumor Science

Turns out that the hard science underpinning Splice, a forthcoming flick about genetic engineering directed by Vincenzo "Cube" Natali, is actually not so hard. In a recent interview, the director claims his inspiration to do a genetic chimera movie was seeing a now-famous image of a mouse with a human ear grafted onto its back. "It was such a crazy, shocking weird image that I was inspired to write a story about genetic splicing," he said. Unfortunately, what he saw wasn't genetic splicing at all. More »

mad science

Genetic Engineers Create Mice With Proto-Wings

Mice and bats like this one share a genetic ancestor, and now they may become one species again. Yesterday, scientists announced they'd engineered mice with proto-bat wings. Researchers added bat genes to the mouse genome, and the results were "mice with abnormally long forelimbs." Those long limbs are the first evolutionary step towards wings. More importantly, towards mice with wings. Or people. More »

evolution

It's a GMO Holiday With Glowing Red Kitty, Glowing Green Bunny

Just hold 'em under fluorescent bulbs, and they're like living, purring holiday lights! A Korean team of genetic engineers has created a super race of glowing red kitties. What everyone seems to have forgotten is that several years ago, bio-artist Eduardo Kac had some French engineers build him a glowing green bunny. More »

social control

We Have Engineered You to Enjoy Being Eaten

No mouse should look into that "I'm gonna chomp you" face and not run squeaking in the other direction. And yet a mouse has done it, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers who genetically engineered it to not fear cats. More »

entropist

Give Me Some (Artificial) Skin

In Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel Perfume, a psychotic perfumer goes to murderous lengths to create the ultimate scent. He kills a young woman to incorporate her natural smell into his latest cologne - and he is himself later ripped apart by people driven into a state of bloodlust by the power of his creations. But the outer limits of personal beauty may no longer require us to kill. Indeed, it's now possible to grow human flesh specifically for the cosmetics industry - bypassing murder with a trip to the specialty science lab. More »

Freeman Dyson Goes Wild Forever-young physicist Freeman Dyson, now 83, has long been beloved by scifi writers for his extremely fucking cool ideas. He invented the Dyson Sphere, featured in a Star Trek: TNG episode, where the crew visits a sun wrapped entirely in an artificial sphere that captures every bit of solar energy available (you can see a Dyson Ring in Halo). Now Dyson is battling it out with neo-Luddite Wendell Berry in the NY Times Book Review. Read the old crank getting crankier! [NYBOB]

genetic engineering

GMO Eggplants With Built-in Pesticide

Eggplant has always had a dodgy reputation, and some Cornell researchers working with India's Sathguru Management Consultants have just made the plump purple fruit even weirder. They've rigged the eggplant genome to express a "natural insecticide" that will drive away pesky fruit and shoot borers, bugs which routinely ravage crops throughout India, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. The bug-killing eggplants are called Bt eggplants because their new insecticide-producing powers come from the spliced-in genes of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt eggplants will likely hit your tastebuds in 2009, and are the first GMO to come to Southeast Asia. Are they safe? Cornell reports: More »