Eek-a-Mouse
The New Ice Age
Hello Friends,
Imagine that you have a dream: a vast wild field of tall grasses; regal woolly mammoths grazing; gentle giants roaming the country-side.
Now imagine you wake up and look out your bedroom window, bleary-eyed, barely awake, and you see majestic woolly mice scurrying among your vegetable garden with the squirrels. Well, now, you can have that.
Thanks to modern science!
I live in a house with five cats. Sometimes more, when we foster felines (kittens mostly) out of the local shelter.
Because all these felis cati roam my domicile halls, I rarely see a mouse. On the occasion I do, it's usually a young little thing that has somehow found its way through my porous field stone foundation, slipped into my kitchen via the many ancient secret passage ways in my old colonial, and has made a home under my oven (seeking burnt crumbs, probably).
Usually, mice provoke in me or any of my cats more nothing than a mild amusement. When a mouse appears, I pull out the trusty old Havahart and quickly dispatch it to the local park. I don't kill them. We don't like to kill anything that appears in our home, often capturing and shooing bugs back out into the yard.
Recently, I have seen a bunch of articles this week about mice. In the first one, scientist recently created a woolly mouse. Straight from Jurastic Park, they fused the recovered genetic material from a woolly mammoth remains with a mouse's genes.
"We didn't know they were going to be this cute."
Ben Lamm, Colossal's co-founder and CEO
This act is supposedly the first step towards the woolly mammoth de-extinction.
Imagine elephant sized monsters with enormous tusks roaming the tundra of upstate New York and northern New England like they did at the end of the last ice age. Of course, the irony is that our planet is warming, and so the cold adaptability of such animals seems almost cruel.
Personally, I think this falls under the broad heading of just because we can, doesn't mean we should. The company, Colossal, is working to save animal species, which is amazing, but… skirting the whole natural selection thing seems potentially dangerous, and cruel to an entity that was never meant to be in this world in its present environment.
The other discovery I saw this week came from our friends at MIT, who (get all the sciency stuff in this one) injected mice with nanoparticles that contained a damage-suppressing protein material from our old friends the tardigrades to see if it would make the mice more resistant to cancer treatment side-effects.
Tardigrades produce a protein that protects their DNA from radiation-induced damage. This inspired researchers to stimulate cells with this unique tardigrade protein to bolster DNA defenses in murine cells.
https://www.the-scientist.com/tardigrade-protein-shields-mouse-cells-from-radiation-72747
These little brave furry heroes are going to be implanted with foreign stuff from brave, even tinier animals and exposed to radiation to help people.
A noble cause, indeed.
What if we combined both of these efforts? We could make nearly indestructible woolly mice.
All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth.
The final words of the 1953 movie War of the Worlds
Happy reading and happy writing,
David
What a fun, fantastic post, David. I savored every word of your smart and quietly humorous piece.