Word: brinster
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...getting foreign genes into a living, breathing mouse and then activating them turned out to be extremely tricky. A dramatic success occurred in 1982, when Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, Richard Palmiter of the University of Washington in Seattle and their colleagues concocted a sort of two-part genetic mongrel. They fused a gene that produces rat growth hormone to a powerful regulatory switch cleaved from a mouse gene. That construct in hand, the scientists mated normal male and female mice, and then removed the fertilized eggs from the female before...
...variety of tissues. These offspring, spurred on by the extra portion of growth hormone, ballooned to twice the size of normal mice. What is more, because the new gene was present in all their cells, including their sex cells, it was passed along to the next generation. Says Brinster: "We're now doing work on the seventh generation of Supermouse...
...champion bull or a prize hog, for example--could keep producing sperm indefinitely, even after death, using lesser specimens as surrogate spermmakers. Stem cells also give rise to new stem cells, which can then be harvested and frozen in turn. As a result, says Pennsylvania veterinary physiologist Ralph Brinster, a co-author of both studies, "we can make any individual male biologically immortal...
...implications of the experiment for medicine, agriculture and biological research are enormous. The most obvious application would be the creation of giant pigs, sheep and cattle, capable of yielding vast quantities of meat and milk. "If we can make bigger mice," says Microbiologist Ralph Brinster, of the University of Pennsylvania, "we can make bigger cows...
...will shed some light on certain inherited disorders. "In a sense," says Palmiter, "the big mice are models of pituitary giantism in humans." It may also help scientists unravel the mysteries of how a fertilized egg becomes a living organism and how gene regulation goes awry in cancer. Concludes Brinster: "This study provides another system in which we can examine the regulation and control of genes, and that is one of the most important issues in biology...
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