Mutation Creates SuperKid 747
Tzarius writes "It's not exactly regular Slashdot fare, but the NYTimes has a story about a kid in Berlin (now 4 years old) who was born with naturally massive muscles. It's not a new condition, but it apparently hasn't been recorded in humans before. It also looks like the cause is a suppression of the myostatin protein, which could be reproducible." Reader Spazmasta adds "A gene that blocks production of a muscle-limiting protein (called myostatin) has been found in a abnormally muscular German baby. This news comes apparently 7 years after researchers at Johns Hopkins created 'mighty mice' through a related approach, turning off the gene that produces the muscle-limiting protein. I, for one, welcome our new myostatin-free overlords."
There must be a major downside... (Score:5, Interesting)
Long term effects (Score:1, Interesting)
What do you think the long term effects of this such a proposed treatment on humans might be by limiting this natural growth limiter?
I'm not necessarily speaking religiously, but isn't some of this stuff supposed to be here for a reason?
*never* been found in humans? (Score:5, Interesting)
For an example, there was a kid in my teeny little high school who had a muscular growth mutation. His muscles grew so much so fast that he had regular surgery to remove the excess lumps and knots of muscle. He didn't resemble a body builder. He looked like a mutation with lumps all over his body and scars where they had done surgery. I read this article and wondered if he has the same mutation.
uberkind (Score:4, Interesting)
What I want to know is:
A. How soon will myostatin inhibiting pills become available and:
B. How soon before jock dads start feeding them to their toddlers.
Re:There must be a major downside... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There must be a major downside... (Score:5, Interesting)
of course, they don't really know. He may live to be 90, still be able to lift 2-3 times his weight, and show no ill effects.
Re:Will be used in athletics for a limited time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, that hasn't stopped numerous companies selling "myostatin inhibitors", but from what I've read, none of them actually work.
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. In the wild (i.e., in the hunter-gatherer mode of living that represents most of human existence to date) it's obviously useful to be strong -- but you also have to be lean enough to be fast on your feet, and be able to run long distances, and most important, not burn up too many calories just sitting there. Big huge people don't handle "lean times" (and no wild animal is ever too far away from potential starvation) nearly as well as little, wiry ones.
The pre-industrial agricultural period (roughly speaking, 8000 BC to 1800 AD -- again, a damn big chunk of time) probably exacerbated this with its frequent episodes of famine. These days, we regard it as an aberration when a few million people are starving to death somewhere; for most of recorded history, that has been a fear with which everyone had to live, all the time.
Dire wolves and sabretooth tigers died out. Grey wolves and mountain lions are still here.
Re:Will be used in athletics for a limited time... (Score:3, Interesting)
The increase in muscle came with no additional work, the mice were essential sedentary, but still gained 15-25% muscle mass.
Re:here's a picture of his asscrack! (Score:5, Interesting)
And I thought I was the only one...
I've always wondered about that. My sister's kids are built like tanks... incredibly solid bodies, large and very strong. My kids however, are more normal, what you'd typically expect for kids (at least their bodies... they all have "interesting" personalities just like their parents
Her oldest child is now eight. He's a sweet boy, but he's had a fair amount of medical problems. He's the biggest and strongest in his class though, which can be good... or bad, and not suprisingly, he excels at athletics.
I have a feeling that the interest in this will be huge and some day there might be some skinny, sickly kid named Steve Rogers who gets and injection and goes on to fight America's enemies as some kind of super soldier.
Muscular Dystrophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There must be a major downside... (Score:3, Interesting)
muscular dystrophy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:There must be a major downside... (Score:4, Interesting)
Myostatin blockers (Score:5, Interesting)
Myostatin and Myostatin Inhibitors: The Next Big Supplement Scam [ast-ss.com]
Don't know if this is the first. (Score:3, Interesting)
I once saw a program on Discovery about the guy whos muscles grew indefinitelly, even w/o any physical activity. He had to have them removed surgically from time to time.
I'm not sure if that was the same condition, but I don't think I'd like to have it.
Robert
Natural Selection for Pro Athletes (Score:3, Interesting)
They happen 'all the time' -- often enough -- but they mostly just don't result in an advantage that'll make you more successful, natural selection wise.
You'd have to think, though, that dying at 35 might not stop some people. Tonight's the NBA draft. There's a 7 foot-5 inch European center who'll get taken mid-lottery or so. The kid has a growth hormone problem, diagnosed, that he's being treated for; teams regard it as an advantage, pretty clearly. Andre the Giant didn't live to old age, but he sure could pull down a paycheck in the meantime. If you take a look at steroid use, you'll see a bunch of people who might think this'd be worth it...
...making them less likely to reproduce and have their children reproduce, probably, unless the gruopie factor outweighs the difference. Selected against, on balance.
(I love the popular idea that natural selection and evolution are constantly "improving the product." Super muscles! Rabbits get faster and faster, snakes get more and more poisonous! -- that idea. Sometimes the faster rabbits run out and get eaten by hawks before their more cautious friends. Sometimes a big brain means you're more likely to kill your mother during childbirth, reducing your chances of thriving and reproducing yourself. "Better" in that 6 Million Dollar Man sense isn't necessarily an evolutionary advantage at all.)
Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
A recent paper indicated that myostatin might normally function to keep satellite cells quiescent. Without myostatin, he said, the satellite cells might be so active building muscle that they become depleted early in life. ... will his satellite cells be used up so that his muscles start to deflate when he is 30 or so?
I'm wondering if that could be it. But then getting weak after age 30 doesn't sound like a big deal to me because humans' reproductive peak occurs well below that age. Any bio people have a clue about any other possibilities?
Selective use (Score:3, Interesting)
In general, I'm with the parent poster on this one - more is not always better, and there is likely a down side to this. However, as humans really can't say one way or the other. Perhaps you need this mutation AND another one, two, or 12 to really be "better". Even a "bad" mutation may be good when taken with another set of modifications we don't know about. Embrace genetic diversity.
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
As was already mentioned by several other people, the food intake is one factor. I won't go into that again.
What I will go into is the situation humans evolved in. Humans didn't evolve as brave muscular cavemen wrestling sabertooth tigers in 1-on-1 combat. Au contraire. It was more like a stealth game, if you will.
It was a rather small and wimpy fruit eating ape, only suddenly there were less and less trees with fruit. It had to find a new source of food.
Now contrary to popular belief (e.g., among rabid vegetarian zealots) not all animals can eat grass and leaves. Raw grass and leaves contain an enzyme that prevents you from extracting the protein in it. Unless you have the _very_ specialized digestive system of a herbivore, _or_ can boil those plants (high temperature destroys that enzyme), you can't survive on leaves. That ape didn't fit either category. (We're still millions of years before taming the fire.)
There is, howver, one thing that any animal can digest, and provides all the aminoacids needed: meat. Yes. Sorry, vegans. The human species evolved on _meat_.
There was another problem, however: that ape couldn't hunt. It didn't have the speed to catch an antelope, nor the claws or teeth to kill it with.
It had to survive by basically stealing food killed by the carnivores. The problem not ending up as second course for those carnivores.
It was a game of stealth, speed and cunning, not one of brutal hand-to-hand combat. Evolving into something more muscular and slower was _not_ an option. A small ape twice as muscular still can't kill a tiger with its bare hands.
The correct evolutionary path was to become more agile and, most importantly, _smarter_. Being able to improvise a plan raised your survival chances a lot more. And conversely, having a supply of meat allowed you to have a bigger brain. This cycle is what put us on the evolutionary course to what we are today.
I.e., in a way, yes, the correct evolutionary course was to become a scrawny smart geek. That was the survival trait.
And you can see it in how the species evolved. In the original ape, the male was about twice as big as the female, much more muscular and had bigger teeth and jaws. It was originally supposed to be, yes, the muscular jock that can defend his woman.
What the species evolved into, was something where the two genders are a lot more comparably sized. Most of the muscle advantage disappeared, and the big jaws were lost too.
It's easy to extrapolate that the brave and muscular jocks were the first to get out of the gene pool. That was not a survival trait.
Re:*never* been found in humans? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
This could possibly be a great tool to enhance the health of our country. Muscles use energy to maintain, so if we could make people a tad more muscular, diets could become alot easier.
I'm not saying give everyone huge muscles, but if we can moderate it and allow people to attain and maintain a healy muscle tone, it would do wonders for those who do not have the time (or the desire) to go to the gym often.
I hope people can see how useful a tool like this could be. While it's true new technologies can be dangerous, they often have astoundingly good applications that can be lost by blindly banning them out of fear.
Will the Olympics allow mutants to compete? (Score:4, Interesting)
Very Bad - Known in the Horse world as HYPP (Score:2, Interesting)
Space Exploration and Myostatin (Score:2, Interesting)
In Zero-gravity, muscles atrophy rather quickly. Perhaps mystatin inhibition is part of an answer? If there was less Myostatin present in a given astronaut, perhaps muscles would rebuild themselves at a given rate. The rate would certainly vary with dose and individual, but I think there may be a possibility here for removing a serious limiting factor for long, manned space voyages.
Research must be done, but what does everyone here think?
"Better" isn't usually what we think it is (Score:3, Interesting)
Faster rabbit -- sometimes runs out and gets nabbed by a hawk when the more cautious ones are holding back.
Higher metabolism and endothermism -- requires more energy to keep going. (Similar cost for huge muscles.)
There's a popular idea that things are getting "better" through natural selection and evolution. The things is, our ideas of what "better" would be are usually kind of silly and superficial. "Better adapted" is probably the way to think about it.
Imagine a genetic trend toward, say, bolder, more aggressive personalities, as Nazi eugenicists would have wanted things to go. People who aren't afraid of life, who'll go out and seize it and try to change things for the better! Great, right? Except maybe a more cautious social nature is a heck of a good thing, given how complex human society is. Maybe personalities like that would be a disaster: wars, instability in our societies, and so on.
Bodies like G(r)eek Gods (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, although the scientists are moving cautiously on this, the bodybuilding-supplement industry has already jumped on the bandwagon (as usual). There's already a "natural" product (their quotes) on the market that claims to block myostatin. As always, I take their claims with several pounds of salt
Obviously I'll wait for the real scientists' findings, but a drug for this could be a real lifesaver for the modern geek^H^H^H^H white collar worker. Basically it causes your body to spend all its extra resources building & fueling muscle, instead of growing fat cells and dealing with hyperglycemia. We'd all be in great shape; that is, until the inevitable post-apocalyptic famine hit
Melanin and Founder's Effect (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree - your example of melanin doesn't really apply, because of environmental factors. Europeans are predominantly white due to the European lifestyle and climate, whereby considerable amounts of time are spent indoors, and (certianly in Britain), it isn't that sunny for most of the year. To quote Wikipedia: "As with peoples that migrated northward, those with light skin that migrated southward had to acclimate to the much stronger solar radiation."
Melanin production has very little, if anything, to do with the founder's effect, and more to do with adaption to changing environments...it's just a really bad example to use for your case.
This is a child’s misfortune. (Score:5, Interesting)
This condition has been documented in animals, which have all died at a fairly young age.
This is just this child's misfortune to be the first documented human case.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are quite correct in this. However what many people fail to see is that the cycles of starvation/famine that the "old world" had are quite similar to our boom and bust cycles of business. There would be good years and bad years and most of it was predicated on weather and later on the planning skills of the leaders. This is drawn into even sharper focus when you understand that the economies of the "old world" were agricultural. When food was not produced at a certain level everyone suffered because the "money supply" was directly tied to agricultural goods.
I find it odd that people do not realize that the same ups and downs that put people out of business, starve famalies, put strain on the workers, etc. have been going on since before recorded history. It is even funnier when people try to lay the blame for the natural cucle of things at the feet of one person (the president/fed. chairman/Ken Lay/grandmother) when all of humanity has not been able to eradicate this cycle of change and we have been trying since before anyone can remember or document.
Re:*never* been found in humans? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's different about the Berlin kid is he has the myostatin mutation on both chromosomes. His mother and father both had the mutation, and both passed it on.
I just hope that this isn't going to cause the child health problems. If one copy of the gene can produce Flex Wheeler, and allow a man to carry 330-pound curbstones by hand, two copies could be disastrous. He could end up completely immobilized by his own overgrown muscle tissue.
New drug based on the discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, can Steve Rogers' SuperSoldier formula be far behind?
Re:There must be a major downside... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can tell it is a problem you've never had... I have.
He specifically said: waist and thighs
Typical/Average/Normal clothes expect a specific ratio between waist and thigh size.
If you are a bodybuilder/weightlifter in good shape then your waist will typically be smaller, and your thighs bigger.
Finding a pair of pants that fits the thighs means getting a waist size that is about 8 inches too big.
You have to get the pants over the thighs before you get anywhere close to the waist...
Myostatin blocker available (Score:5, Interesting)
Cytodyne Technologies (same company who sells Xenadrine an Ephedra based (lately in the US ephedra free fat burner))
Anyway, the product is called Myo-Blast CSP^3.
Anyone interested might consider Juiced Protein from Pinnacle (pretty OK taste compared to other protein shakes)
Why ? Why not. I am not a Gym freak, but I do st 45-60 minutes weight training +
40-60 minutes cardio
While I am against steroids I happily take an algae based product or bioengineered protein
as a little experiment - at the end probably they makes less harm than a bigmac
ahm + I am a vegetarian who does lotsa sports so extra protein is welcome
for those who might wonder: myostatin is responsible for skeletal muscle! Your tongue, and your heart muscle won't grow bigger than it is if you block that enzyme (I hope it really)
I recommed these searches "myostatin cow" : http://images.google.com/images?q=myostatin%20cow
myostatin:
http:
cheers
Re:PHOTO HERE (Score:5, Interesting)
It's particularly interesting that this [the German child's case] is the first time it's been recorded from infancy - that seems very odd!
What a coincidence (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were a researcher who had solved the various difficulties (heart problems, etc.) with the process, and I wanted a secret human trial, I'd find a mother which already had one gene as a cover and make sure there was no information available on the father to give away the fact he did not contain the other gene, or falsify it if there were. Then, I'd act real surprised when the baby was born.
It could be legit, but the rarity of the mutation makes the whole thing sound suspicious to me
Re:Well that's new (?) (Score:4, Interesting)
good for astronauts too? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Someone.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:*never* been found in humans? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:dear god (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Humans are strong. No, like,
Primates of all sorts sport a good deal of muscle, and moreso, a very efficiently designed skeletal and tendon system. Whereas many animals focus their real strength in specialized parts of their body (usually the thighs for running, or jaws for biting), the human+primate bodies have it strongly built throughout their torso, shoulders, arms, etc.
Long before brains came along, primates were already happily cookin' along with a hefty dose of strength/weight ratio. Hands were pretty helpful too.
If this seems counter-intuitive, think about it for a moment: Take an animal weighing as much as you (St. Bernard, a whitetail deer, and a juvenile tiger).
St. Bernard: Can't lift nearly as much as you with his jaws. Can't carry nearly as much on his back. Can certainly bite harder, and pull more. The torque his neck can create twisting isn't going to compare with the torque your body can produce with a similar motion. Leverage, and advantage: human.
Whitetail deer: Strong neck, but a human can overpower the torque. Powerful thighs, which can easily outrun and outleap a man, no contest there, but can't carry the same weight on their back (no, they can't, ask the Laaps). Lifting strength, torquing strength, etc, all less than humans, and with a body definetly not designed to use leverage.
Juvenile tiger: Let's declaw this kitty for simplicity. Pointy bits are, of course, a major evolutionary advantage, but that's not what we're gauging here. First, the spring-like back of all felines is powerful, but can't bear a tremendous amount of weight on it. Note that cats tend to drag their kill, not hoist it and go. (With the notable exception of cheetahs, who tend to tree their prey). Having spoken with a tiger trainer on this subject before, he's indicated that a tiger's forearms aren't incredibly strong; most people at the same weight could "arm-wrestle" a tiger and win, so to speak. Tigers gain most of their knock-down power from lunging their body and hitting with the shoulders; again, back to powerful legs. Twisting torque isn't a forte of theirs; they rely instead on a tight bite at the neck, and their body weight, to bring most prey down.
As a last example; an animal your weight, were one to tie 15 lbs. weights to each of their arms and legs, would be very unlikely to be able to move at all. A human being, while not able to move
Re:This is a childs misfortune. (Score:4, Interesting)