Human Language Gene Changes How Mice Squeak 185
archatheist writes "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have engineered a mouse whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for a different (human) version. This is interesting because the gene is implicated in human language, and this has changed how mice squeak. 'In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives.' The academic paper was published in Cell."
Re:Life imitates art? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do the monkey next (Score:5, Informative)
Hasn't that been done already ?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4860483760049380308 [google.com]
Re:Where is the line? (Score:4, Informative)
The linked article seems to disagree with you:
Stanford University's Irving Weissman has injected human neural stem cells from aborted fetuses into the brains of fetal mice, where they have integrated and grown into human neurons and glia that intermingle with mouse brain cells, making up about 1 percent of the tissue in their brains.
Re:Basal Ganglia - SHIT! (Score:3, Informative)
Hah! And here I am again with no mod points.
Re:Massive reverse engineering job (Score:5, Informative)
Today's biology is finite component analysis done at a massive scale.. Figuring out how a machine as big as a person works is going to take millennium
Maybe not, high-throughput molecular biology is getting better all the time.
-With the genome sequenced we have a rough idea of how many genes there are and can find homologies between genes, so you can begin clustering genes by presumed function.
-With mutagenesis screens, you can sometimes identify most of the genes involved in a given process.
-High-throughput protein interaction studies can identify complexes, grouping proteins into functional groups.
-There's an attempt to make a knockout mouse [wikipedia.org] for every gene in their genome.
None of those will give you the full story for any one gene, nor will any give you good stories for most of the genes by themselves. But used together, we can have a rough idea of what genes do what, and can take a closer look at what we need to. This gene, FOXP2 for example, was not chosen at random.
And that's just with technology I've heard of that exists now. I don't know much about genomics, and we certainly are going to continue to invent ways to get research done faster. I think the human genome project came in under budget and ahead of schedule largely due to technology that was advanced as the project was underway. It's too early to make such long forecasts.
Re:Where is the line? (Score:3, Informative)
secondly, the mouse's immune system's gonna just reject and kill the cells as soon as they are put into the mouse,
They'd be using SCID [wikipedia.org] mice. These mice are often used for xenografts, sometimes with human tissue. For example, here's an abstract [nih.gov] describing a study in which researchers implanted human ovarian tissue into SCID mice, and the tissue actually developed into something resembling a functional human ovary. I think I saw the lead researcher give a talk, she thought these tissues would be functional with hormone stimulation.
Re:this can only end.. (Score:2, Informative)
Quit letting your opinion be swayed by your bitterness over the fact that a browser from a company you don't like is widely used. If you really have trouble using a non-IE browser, that reflects only on your own abilities.
This polemic is not about the user. The trouble is not in using another browser, the trouble is writing websites for IE. It is a frustrating fucking nightmare. It is such a mess that anybody who has written a website in the last 5 or 6 years can not believe that people would choose IE of their own free will. Of course, the mess is transparent to the user who will blame the website if it does not look right in IE.
Now, I know that the IE situation has gotten better (but is still pretty bad) since IE7, but IE6 just won't die because its quirkiness caused a kind of lock in: corporate intranet sites are written for it and they are too expensive to correct. For these people, using another browser really has become impossible. Whether this corporate lock in was deliberate is debatable, but that is the reason the EU gets involved.
Good Data Points, Not So Good Connections (Score:5, Informative)
TF(academic)A is a very well done piece of work. I'm glad to see this, as opposed to the junior high school comprehension level press releases usually presented as science. As such, my criticisms are offered respectfully.
The FOXP2 gene cannot be said to be directly involved in language. The referenced works state that altering it disrupts some aspects of language production. There are many more ways that disruptions can occur through third variables or more general systems. In this case, altering the gene causes alteration in the dopamine system, which feeds the spiny neurons. Dopaminergic activity on spiny neurons causes inhibitory signals in the gamma range (~40 HZ) to be sent to the neurons in Hebbian cellular assemblies (a primary processing unit), synchronizing them and causing them to perform their function. This may well happen in the basal ganglia, but also happens over much of the cortex. This is a general system, responsible for a great deal of brain function. To claim it is part of language is not wrong, but is improper in that it is inaccurate due to over-specificity. As evidence, the well studied dopaminergic disorder Parkinson's does cause language disruption as noted in TFA, but clearly does so only as a specific example of a global phenomenon.
Similarly, specific changes due to specific allele substitutions can only be said to be true if and only if substituting other alleles into the same locations do not cause similar changes. There is no evidence that the example referenced is as specific as is implied by the statement as presented.
The statement that studying mice as 'the only feasible way' to study the relationship between humans and chimps appears so skewed that I wonder if it is a misstatement or misinterpretation. In any case, direct comparison studies have been done with excellent results. My old boss at NIH did volumetric comparisons on chimps brains using MRI, looking for left/right asymmetry in the language areas. In all of a dozen or so cases, he found it, to a degree similar to that in humans. In all but one cases, the left was greater than the right, also as found in humans. The one exception is not a difference, but rather a supporting similarity. The language centers are usually on the left because they are usually contralateral to the dominant hand, usually the right. In a dozen or so humans, chances are one or so will be left handed, with language centers on the right, just as was seen in the chimps. Studying mice is certainly fruitful and the results may well generalize to primate comparison studies. But to say it's the only feasible way to compare primate data is very wrong.
Re:The Ethics of Sentient Life (Score:4, Informative)
Sentient is a loaded word, it doesn't really mean what most people associate to it. By definition any thing that reacts to a given stimulus could be argued to be sentient given that experiencing a "sensation" must happen to cause the reaction. Most people believe sentient includes the concept of self awareness, it doesn't and this is a fine distinction to remember.
Re:Where is the line? (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately I believe people will cross many such lines way before human society is ready.
So what? Human societies (of which there are many) still on occasional can't come to grips with basic human behavior which has been around for longer than humanity has.
It seems to me that society has some obligation to keep up to speed on what's going on in technology, science, and the forefront of human advancement. What good are uninformed regulations? My view is that there's some flawed game theory here. That is, proponents of "banning" certain technological advancements think it's merely a choice between banning a technology versus allowing the technology (along with any new harms introduced by the new technology). However, this ignores that other less squeamish societies will continue to advance in these areas. What is more likely is that the technology will be developed anyway, but the more Luddite society will receive less of the benefit and more of the harm. I especially don't appreciate it when someone tries to aggravate a problem (for recent examples, see global warming via the banning of nuclear power plants or the war on terrorism) in order to gain power or implement their own social experiment.
Finally, my view is that the code of laws and rules that underlie society are reactive. Society just doesn't do entirely new issues very well. We need examples first in order to make relatively good decisions.
And I think most of us would prefer to live in a world where certain experiments shouldn't be done on humans.
And most of us would like to live in a world where certain other experiments should be and are performed on humans.
As I see it, uninformed morality is equivalent to no morality. There are benefits and drawbacks to any new technology. If you don't know what those benefits and drawbacks are, then you can't make a rational decision about the technology.
Having said that, your general concern about creating "human-like" animals seems reasonable. As I see it, certain cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and primates (the great apes) are probably already sufficiently intelligent (even though that intelligence might not be similar to human intelligence) that we should grant them many of the rights we grant humans (in particular, to not be food animals). I just don't think it is that relevant or useful to base your argument on how unprepared society will be for such changes.