No problem, says nature!
She’s in a giving mood this millennium. What else you want? Some crocodiles with sonar, maybe a feathered dog, hey—how about some gorillas with scales? Genetic splicing is apparently limited only by your imagination, funding, and willingness to fight off snake apes. The Canadian researchers at least had good reason for their spunk meddling; their process has some impressive potential for the pharmaceutical industry. Insulin is already being “farmed” in animals for human use, but differences in chemical composition results in varying degrees of effectiveness, depending on the animal. By altering these mice to produce genetically identical human insulin in their sperm, the Canadian scientists expect to have a new, completely safe, and entirely effective method for producing high-quality medicine on demand.
Taking a money shot in the veins from Mickey once in a while is a small price to pay for that kind of progress.
But the researchers soon realized that tiny mice have tiny mouse orgasms—not producing a lot of the desired substance—and instead moved on to re-create their experiment in larger animals, eventually settling on boars and cattle, which can produce more than 300 ml of semen up to three times a week on average. Though these HGH experiments are being performed only with semen for the time being (because if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing grossly), eventually the hope is to encode the modified gene sequence so the hormone is produced in more amenable substances like cow’s or goat’s milk…
Or pig urine!
No kidding. That is a specific goal. The researchers involved in these experiments hoped to farm something slightly less horrific than mutant mouse semen (and really, who could blame them?) and so began looking toward replicating the results in other fluids. And either some guy just totally missed the point of this exercise, or else had some really unsettling sexual priorities:
Scientist 1: Does it have to be rat jizz? I mean, sure we’re extracting the pure chemical from the substance, and using the end product isn’t like letting a mouse pop one off into your veins, but it’s still pretty weird. I’m not sure how people will feel about this.
Scientist 2: Well, what if we splice it into a more socially acceptable fluid?
Scientist 1: Yeah, yeah! Like blood or, hell, even milk!
Scientist 2: Or pig piss!
Scientist 1: Yeah, I… wait, what?
Scientist 2: Think about it! You could drink all the pig piss you wanted, and it would even be good for you!
Scientist 1: I hate everything about working with you.
The only potential downside to using something like milk would be the waiting period: Not only would you have to wait until the genetically modified animals reach sexual maturity to begin farming, but you’d have to wait for them to lactate, too. Honestly, though, we as consumers already have to wait that long for normal dairy products, I think we can wait a few extra weeks to avoid mainlining mouse man-batter.
Another key concern of genetic experimentation in general is that of containment viability. Modified genes tend to carry over naturally, after all, and it takes only one pair of star-crossed cow lovers and a broken section of fence to introduce the traits to other cattle. Cattle that have other uses. Cattle that produce milk.
Cattle that you eat.
Methods of Ensuring Your Meat Is Safe (In Order of Difficulty)
• Burn everything to ash.
• Consume only products you grow yourself.
• Stop eating meat (this includes bacon).
If this does happen, you would not only have a nearly untraceable dose of pharmaceutical-grade drugs in the food supply, like that aforementioned insulin, but that would also further narrow the gap between those previously isolated laboratory animals and humans. Perhaps this interbreeding leads to medicinally fortified foodstuffs, or perhaps it leads to a Grilled Ham and Insulin sandwich that, while undoubtedly delicious, is unfortunately always served with a heaping side of hypoglycaemic coma. That example is just to illustrate a point, though; the real problem is much larger.
While consuming genetically modified animals won’t alter our own genetic code, the fact that our livestock is now one step closer to humanity opens a gateway to a multitude of diseases and mutations that can cross over between species, not to mention some potential for unforeseen changes to the source animal. So at first you just have lab mice ejaculating human protein, but what if that starts to carry over in reproduction? If just one animal gets out, natural selection would start to take hold. The altered gene might become hereditary, and then we all get to find out exactly what effects a human gene in the mouse population can have. What’s your wager? Is the end result the walking incarnation of hugs, like a real-life Mickey Mouse, or something more akin to the drugged-out psychoses of the Rats of NIMH? Is human growth hormone too obscure a worry to illustrate this danger? Well, try this horror hat on for size and tells me how it fits:
Most Popular Mouse Phrases (If Mice Could Speak)
• Foodfoodfoodfood.
• I like climbing!
• I poop where I stand!
German scientists have successfully modified a batch of mice with a human gene for speech. Now, I know what you’re thinking:
“What? Fuck that.”
But it’s true! In an effort to better understand the evolution of human language, they’ve spliced a gene called FOXP2 into some lab mice. Humans with a low FOXP2 count can suffer from anything from speech disorders to cognitive inhibition, and though a relative of this gene is present in all sorts of animals, the strain in humans is entirely unique to our species.
Well, it used to be, anyway.
What did we talk about earlier in this chapter? Remember how amenable nature seems to be to changes in genetic structure? If you want talking mice, nature is probably quite happy to oblige.
There’s actually evidence of change happening already: The enhanced German mice showed drastically increased nerve activity in the language center of their brains, for one. They can’t speak or anything yet—this shit is crazy, not retarded—and even if the language centers were amplified to human levels, that doesn’t mean anything like human speech would develop. But it does mean that they’re now better at communicating with one another. That’s a clear biological improvement. In terms of evolution, that means it’s likely to favor a gene and pass it on to future generations. That’s not idle speculation, either; the scientists in charge of this experiment freely admit that, though this research was initiated just to study the evolution of human speech, it could well give these mice a push down that same evolutionary path.
If there’s one thing we don’t want communicating and coordinating with one another, it’s rodents. Disease-spreading creatures that have already, at least once in history, participated in the near total destruction of the human race, thanks to their role in spreading the Black Death. And that was without boosted language skills and human sperm! Now they can not only jizz disease on your face, but ask you who your daddy is while doing it.
Isn’t progress wonderful?
17. BIOTECH LETHALITY
SOME OF THE WORLD’S most devastating diseases, from the H1N1 “swine flu” to SARS, have made the jump from animal to man naturally. Though transspecies diseases have fortunately been relatively low mortality in recent years, new variants of the flu have historically been potential extinction-level events. Consider the Spanish flu of 1918, whose total estimated death count varies from 30 to 50 million. That’s more fatalities within a year than in most of America’s major wars of the last century. It actually was a kind of swine flu; it jumped from pigs to humans and eventually wiped out the equivalent of a large country. Talk about your rags-to-riches story! We’re now more reliant on livestock than ever, and it’s all conglomerated—roughly 80 percent of America’s beef is currently processed by less than half a dozen companies, and a full third of the entire country’s milk comes from one single solitary company. You can easily see why an outbreak in a food processing factory, in today’s
world, could kill on a much larger scale than it could’ve a century ago. Thanks to corporate rule, we not only wear the same brand of T-shirts, buy the same brand of coffee, and watch the same TV shows, but we also share a common pool of food products. And that’s where we drink all of our milk from!
Out of the contagion pool!
Less Disturbing Pools Than the “Contagion Pool”
• Unchlorinated swingers’ hot tub
• Disused hobo bathhouse
• Office pool on estimated time of coworker’s newborn baby suffering crib death.
According to the above numbers, if a major dairy supply were to be contaminated, there’s a one in three chance that you’d end up drinking it. So here’s a worrying thought: We have security measures at airports and train stations… but how well-protected and monitored are the dairies? Terrorists got pilots’ licenses; I’m betting that they can get jobs as milk skimmers at the competitive rate of three fifty an hour and half a pound of free cheese per meal break.
To make matters worse, not only is there contamination in our food distribution, the actual livestock themselves aren’t much better. Thanks to the overuse of antibiotics in feed animals, superresistant diseases are rapidly on the rise. That cow whose sole purpose in life is to turn its ass into delicious cheeseburgers isn’t exactly going to get primary care; farmers have chosen to mass dose their herds with antibiotics and hope to catch what they can. This not only leads to a reduced efficiency in the cows’ immune systems, but in our species’ as well. That cow’s last meal probably contains those same antibiotics (I mean, what’s he gonna order, steak?) and that makes it your current meal, if you then eat said cow. So human antibiotics have an overall reduction in efficiency because of mass-medicated cattle, and that sucks (fuck you, cows—no wonder we eat you), but Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, an epidemiologist with the CDC, actually thinks that, just considering the sheer amount of antibiotics dumped into the food supply, antibiotic overdose in animals may actually endanger the human race more than any potential overdose in the humans themselves.
But this is all so nebulous: Biotech “affecting the immune systems of cattle” isn’t exactly a sexy apocalypse. So let’s consider the actual effects one of these animal-spread pathogens could take. For example, Toxoplasma gondii. It lives most of its life in rats, but can only mature to adulthood in the belly of a feline. When it’s ready, it causes the host rat to seek out and loiter around cat urine—because where there’s cat piss, there are cats—and, when the rat is inevitably eaten, the parasite is successfully transferred to the feline host. Toxoplasma gondii is an organism that possesses its host and fosters a death wish, because it can thrive only if the host dies. But fuck those rats, anyway. That couldn’t possibly affect you, right?
Well, actually, half of the entire human population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Not “throughout history.” Not just “at risk.” But literally and presently fully infected.
Right.
Fucking.
Now.
Arguments Against Owning a Cat
• They pee on everything.
• They don’t really do tricks.
• They don’t really like you.
• They’re infested with things that infect your brain and drive you insane.
This is particularly bad, because severe cases of toxoplasmosis manifest as full-blown paranoid schizophrenia: voices, delusions, hysteria—the works. Toxoplasmosis is the reason that pregnant women aren’t supposed to handle cat litter, why newborn babies aren’t supposed to be around cats, and though there’s no actual basis to believe it, it certainly goes a long way toward explaining crazy cat-collecting ladies if they’re actually infected by mind-controlling parasites harbored within the cats themselves. Even in minor cases in people whose immune systems aren’t compromised (fifty/fifty chance says that’s you), the majority of infected males suffer from neuroses, guilt, and nervousness from even mild cases, while infected females are more aggressive and outgoing… and have drastically heightened sex drives. That explains why those cat ladies put out so easy, am I right, fellas? Hell yeah! Maybe our parasites can get together and high-five later.
It’s basically a viral parasite that transforms women into ballcrushers and men into pussies. That’s a little unsettling, but hey, gender roles are different in modern times anyway. No harm, no foul. Until you consider that these side effects could be dangerously exploited, because—like it or not—the modern military remains primarily male. Not hard to see the appeal of a biologically engineered toxoplasma used as a weapon—an army of butch Jack Dempsey hard-asses instantly emasculated into nebbish, Woody Allen-style timidity, too insecure about their manhood to order a steak correctly, much less fire eighteen bullets into the face of a rampaging RoboNazi (hey, it’s the future, right? I’m just assuming we’ll fight enemies a little cooler and less ambiguous than “brown people who don’t live on this continent” by then).
And remember, those are mild cases. In addition to schizophrenia, severe cases manifest side effects like blindness, cerebral palsy, severely diminished coordination, and even death. Toxoplasma infections are mostly kept in check by our immune systems, so severe cases are rare. But then, there are any number of reasons why our immune systems might not be up to snuff, from the serious—such as AIDS or chemotherapy—to something as mundane as the flu. With half of the population already harboring gondii parasites, any immune-suppressing assistance at all, and gondii could start wiping us all out.
But as terrible as the severe cases can be, we’re still alive. If we catch it in time, it might not be an apocalyptic-level event, even if superstrains were engineered. But keep in mind that it takes only one mutation for the host roles to change.
If that happens, we could very well become the rats, gestating the parasite until it decides it’s time to move on to something better. So maybe tomorrow’s the day you wake up loving the distinct musk of lion piss, and it’s some lion’s turn to get uncontrollably horny and schizo. Don’t outright dismiss the likelihood of this kind of mutation, either. Consider that with military funding and advances in modern science, it would be a snap to modify a few strands of DNA and let a modified gondii loose. It sure would make the army’s job a lot easier, after all, if all of their enemies inexplicably began loving the smell of recently plucked hand grenades.
But hey, guys, look at the bright side: If there’s a death wish–inspiring parasite living in all of our brains, at least it’s paying the rent in skanks.
So far, we’ve talked about how biotechnology has not only elevated the threat level of the viruses themselves, but also, through our extensive use of agricultural biotechnology, created a mass contaminate pool larger than any in the history of the human race; we all drink from the same watering hole (technically it’s a milk hole, but that’s just pornographic), so let’s move on from the general dangers and really home in on sweet, sweet genocide: In August 2000, a bacterium named Klebsiella pneumoniae (that’s right, in the same genus as that other world-destroying bacteria) was discovered in New York University’s Tisch Hospital. Dr. Roger Wetherbee, a physician there, describes it most succinctly in this excerpt from a New Yorker article:
“It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had.” The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’”
That sounds like dialogue from a bad action movie. Did he dramatically remove his glasses after saying “my God”? Did motherfucking lightning strike when he said “this is an organism that basically we can’t treat”? Thankfully, this episode in New York was the only major outbreak of this strain in the United States. But unfortunately, this particular strain of Klebsiella had refined itself so extensively in the clinical environment—thriving on weak patients, i
mmunizing itself to antibiotics—that it couldn’t even be killed with industrial disinfectants.
Industrial disinfectants are hard core; I think that’s what finally killed John Wayne; I think that’s what finally toppled Communism—hell, that’s probably what killed disco! Though a form of bleach did eventually kill Klebsiella pneumoniae, it was eventually proven resistant to everything from ammonia to phenol. This sounds unkillable, like the goddamn Highlander of bacterium. I think disease just found its first superhero.
If You Liked That Murphy Brown Reference, You May Also Enjoy
• Lattes
• Khaki
• Your grandchildren
• Chicks in shoulder pads
• Paisley
Huge precautions were taken, and hospital staff basically donned biohazard suits and flamethrowers to burn the infected before they could be turned. That hospital should have been more sterile than a Murphy Brown episode, and yet still the bacteria thrived. Patients started getting bloodstream infections from the bacterium, which is the most lethal infection one can get, before hospital staff eventually contained it. By that time, nearly half of all those infected had died. This was in a space as confined as a university hospital, with strict containment procedures and experience in combating the spread of disease. Imagine if this outbreak had occurred anywhere else? With this high a mortality rate, it could have halved the world’s population practically overnight.
Thank God our dairies are so well protected!
But hey, why even develop new microscopic murderers when the classics never go out of style? Scientists found they were recently able to synthesize the polio virus from scratch, presumably in an effort to give us all tiny T-rex arms so we can’t fight back when the government Thought Clerics come a-calling. It’s been theorized that the same process, a rather simple one by all indications, could also be used to synthetically manufacture similar viruses. But any contender would have to have a simple cell structure like polio, so they still can’t do anything too complicated, and at least that’s somewhat consoling… if you stop reading this chapter right now.
Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody Page 12
