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Speedy Gonzales, the super-engineered mouse

I remember, a few years ago, reading Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins.
What that guy said, amongst many other interesting things, was that eating less was the key to longevity. Basically, eating food (like red meat), delivers free radicals in your organism. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules and they react with your cells, creating the aging process.
So eating less, delays the aging process.

Proof? In the quoted experiment, underfed mice could live up to 30% longer than normally fed mice! It makes sense, when we think that obese people have lower life span… (ok that’s not that relevant, but…)

But now, a new genetically modified mouse can do more than that, more sexually active, runs faster, longer, lives longer as well, eats 60% more, needs 40% more oxygen, does not get fat.
Scientists have genetically engineered the mouse, so that the expression of one only enzyme is multiplied. Fat being efficiently turned into glucose… That mouse is skinnier than the others!

When you look at all those possibilities, just enhancing the importance of one enzyme, creates so much difference in the body of that mouse, you wonder all the variations that could be made to the human species!
Of course those will happen. Publications will be made and fall into other hands. Some people will get that knowledge and experiment in countries or in places where regulations are not enforced or nonexistant.

Soon there will be successful and less successful attempts. The less succesful we will never hear of. The successful ones will be highly advertized for the first, but if you watch Heroes or X-men, you might fear that people will not react that well to another new human species that would supposedly been superior. Would you like that if an Engineered Human got the job you wanted? And that happened to you all your life? Just because they learn faster, and think faster than you do? Let’s face it… they’ll be a threat, and we’d be jealous. But those “mutants” will breed and soon, we will not be able to make a difference.

We can not compete. Aldous Huxley had it right. To my belief, people will just have to live with the fact that other people will have been better optimized to do specific tasks.
And that’s not a little step.

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