Re: primate--false fix?

From: xgl (xli03@emory.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 13 2001 - 13:57:47 MST


On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> John Marlow <johnmarrek@yahoo.com> wrote,
> >Why not try to figure out why the monkeys DON'T get
> >the symptoms and try to apply THAT to humans?
>
> I think this makes a lot more sense! Instead of putting human genes
> that cause disease into monkeys, we should be putting monkey genes
> that prevent disease into humans! (And maybe a little of that
> glow-juice, too!)

        i'm not so sure. intuitively, it seems to me that studying why an
organism *doesn't* get a disease is much more difficule than studying why
it *does*. for one thing, putting a gene in and seeing what changes makes
for easily controled experiments, whereas studying why it *doesn't* do
something requires investigating the entire system -- hundreds of
thousands of genes, emergent properties, etc.

-x



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