Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

Good

How do you feel about the following?

Hypoallergenic cats - just as cuddly, but sniff free
A beagle who glows red in ultraviolet light
A goat whose milk contains antibodies to cure human ills
Salmon designed to grow to twice their normal size, even in winter
Enviropigs whose excrement contains 50% less phosphorous

Anthes takes a tour through the weird world of modified animals, be it via genetic engineering, cloning or robotics. We are coming on in leaps and bounds in what we can achieve with biotechnology and combining the electronics revolution with animals. Along the way Anthes raises ethical questions about whether we have the right to modify nature or if animals should have their own rights. There is a comprehensive set of notes if show more you want to explore more of the details she mentions. Anthes also gets to meet some of the movers and shakers in the fields she is investigating and also some of the animals, taking great delight to meet cloned cats and buys her own fluorescent fish. The possibilities for biotechnology are growing all the time and although Anthes makes clear that it is but a tool that can be used for good or ill you can’t help but feel a little trepidation about how it could be used for ill at the same time as being excited about how it could be used for good. The recent news of modified and highly armed dolphins escaping, with shades of [we3] http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/383961/Military-dolphins-trained-to-attack-u... shows one possible nightmare scenario and can we be comfortable with remote controlled insects in the hands of governments pursuing a surveillance society strategy? At the same time it’s exciting to see that experiments on paralysed rats may offer hope for people who have been paralysed through accidents or that animal prosthetics are finding uses in human prostheses and that there are some new exciting therapies for some brain diseases coming. Although reality is more prosaic than say [oryx and crake] or [the windup girl] we should be thinking hard about these issues and Anthes book is a great place to start. You can see Winter, the dolphin with a prosthetic tail that Anthes spends some time with, here http://www.seewinter.com/ and it is inspiring to see that Winter is used to help children who have lost a limb come to terms with that.

Overall - Anthes writes with great intelligence and enthusiasm on her subject and I’d highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject. show less

Pop science survey for voters, consumers, and parents of future scientists. Not technical, no charts or illustrations or bibliography. Thorough notes and index. A quick and fascinating read. I had some idea of some of what's been going on, but there was plenty of new information, too.

One thing I should have known but didn't is that wolves weren't reintroduced to Yellowstone just for their own sake. The elk were overpopulating the park, eating the trees... now that the wolves are back, the elk herds are of a more manageable size. This was mentioned to get the reader to think about how extinct animals leave holes in the 'webs' of ecosystems, and to offer justification to consider cloning as one tool to help conservation efforts.

Besides show more cloning, pharming, genetic engineering, prostheses, embedded trackers, and several other techniques and strategies are surveyed. I do recommend this quick read.

Btw, one of the few (only?) books mentioned is one of my favorites on the subject: [b:Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals|6953508|Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals|Hal Herzog|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1369453733s/6953508.jpg|7188492], which I highly recommend. show less

A brief but interesting overview of biotechnology as it relates to animals, including genetic engineering and cloning. The prospects range from the altruistic (goats with elevated levels of lysozyme in their milk, aimed at preventing childhood diarrhea) to the dystopian (the theory of breeding animals with lower receptors for pain as a solution to modern farming's faults). Although Anthes looks at the potential negatives of the technology, as well as the ethical dilemmas it poses, the book ultimately comes off as biased due to her including a "vision" of a future where biotech (inc is used freely and positively. It's too easy to be starry eyed about technology that has not yet proven its utility.

Very thoroughly researched, Anthes examines the myriad biotechnology fields today from genetic engineering to cyborgs to prosthetics. I'm biased, but the opening chapters on genetics and cloning were well done (looked at other reviews and I am unsurprised to see people use that M word even if the science is doing). Re: genetic modification, she writes in the last chapter "The important thing is that we do not throw the genetically modified baby out with the bathwater. We spend so much time discussing the ethics of using our emerging scientific capabilities that we forget that NOT using them had ethical implications of its own." There are both good and bad ways tech can be used, but remember these are just tools- it is our responsibility show more to use them ethically and reasonably. show less

Short, interesting and lovely footnotes. If you're interested in science or the future, this is a very good read.

I guess if you really like the techy stuff....

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who desires a guide to the future of biological science and technology.