Rabbits Who Glow in the Dark
Two baby rabbits glowing in the dark among their six littermates.
What would you think, as a mother, if you gave birth and then discovered, that same night, that two of your babies were glowing in the dark?
I’d be freaked out. You probably would , too. And there’s every reason to think that the mother rabbit in this weird experiment is quite troubled by what she’s seeing. A mother knows when something is wrong.
To make the babies glow, the researchers injected jellyfish DNA into a mother rabbit’s embryos. The altered embryos were then inserted back into the mother. And what’s the point of this latest piece of “research” at the Universities of Istanbul and Hawaii?
According to Professor Stefan Moisyadi at the University of Hawaii, it’s just a kind of proof-of-concept experiment – and one that’s been such a success that they plan to use the same method to inject genes into all kinds of animals in order to produce proteins to create new drugs.
“The final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactives to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can not afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build, and be able to produce their own protein-based medication in animals.”
In other words, “modified” rabbits and goats and mice and sheep will have been turned into biological factories, churning out medicines and hormones and genes and cosmetic ingredients to suit whatever the latest perceived need of a human world that has lost all connection to the animals themselves. Whatever animal can be re-engineered to produce whatever ingredient will just be grist for the mill.
P.S. No word from the researchers, of course, on what became of the two green-glowing bunnies, their littermates, or their mother.