Word: miceli
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...fitting end to a week of endings and beginnings, turning pages and cutting deals, cleaning the mice out of the attic. Linda Tripp was fired from her job at the Pentagon after she refused to resign. Jesse Jackson said he would spend some time in the wilderness after a tabloid revealed he had a secret family, a hidden child. A Gore aide left this greeting on his White House voice mail: "Due to a small but significant clause in the U.S. Constitution, I will be out of the office from Jan. 21, 2001 until Jan. 20, 2005." By the time...
Doing it in monkeys, however, could save lives. For more than a decade, researchers have been working with so-called knock-out and knock-in mice--rodents that have had genes added or effectively subtracted from their genome. By observing these custom-made lab animals, researchers have gleaned invaluable information about the workings of hundreds of illnesses, including arteriosclerosis, sickle-cell anemia and nearly every variety of cancer that afflicts people...
...mice are different from people; they aren't perfect laboratory stand-ins. They don't age precisely the way people do, for example. They don't have monthly menstrual cycles, and their neurological and immune systems differ in important ways. Much better to have a more closely related animal with body systems that are more like ours--which is why primate center senior scientist Gerald Schatten and his colleagues decided to try manipulating the genes of the Rhesus monkey, a close cousin to humans and already the mainstay of many medical experiments...
...ready to try a DNA transfer (see diagram). This first effort was meant only to test the technique, so they decided to use a gene that occurs naturally in jellyfish, where it directs the production of a harmless protein that glows with a greenish light under the right illumination. Mice, rabbits and other creatures who have had the same gene inserted actually do shine dimly; while ANDi (his name is a backward acronym for "inserted DNA") does not, the scientists have detected traces of the gene in his muscle, hair, cheek and blood cells. The researchers suspect that the gene...
...announcement of leptin's discovery was big news to biologists, particularly after Friedman administered it to the obese mice and saw their weight drop by a dramatic 30% within as little as two weeks. A next, obvious step was to look for humans with the same defective gene. In Britain, endocrinologist Stephen O'Rahilly of the University of Cambridge did find a pair of leptin-deficient children, one of whom at age 9 weighed a staggering 208 lbs. After modest leptin treatments were begun, both children began dropping weight at a steady rate that sometimes exceeded 4 lbs. a month...