Of Mice and HuMice

(Hat tip to Linda MacDonald Glenn at Women’s Bioethics Project) From the same artist who brought us POP! The First Male Pregnancy, complete with ultrasound and EKG and Videoclip on YouTube, we now have the art installation Clyven, purporting to be the world’s first transgenic HuMouse (well, aside from the one at Stanford that was recently the subject of target article in the American Journal of Bioethics).

According to the website of the imaginary RYT hospital (who also brings us the fanciful NanoDocs, Genochoice and “all the miracles of modern medicine") here’s the scoop on how Clyven came to be:

“Margaret A. Keyes, M.D., Ph.D., is a researcher in genetic medicine and Professor of Cell Biology and Genetics at RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center. She is exploring the use of embryonic stem cells as a means to cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

By implanting human brain cells (grown from a human embryo’s stem cells) into a mouse engineered to have Alzheimer’s, Dr. Keyes inadvertently made a remarkable and startling discovery: she not only cured the mouse’s Alzheimer’s Disease, but the animal soon developed the relative intelligence of a human being.

After extensive consideration by RYT Hospital’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), it was decided that this mouse would be placed under a new study led by Dr. Keyes’ lab.”

You can chat via neuro-dialogue interface with Clyven and test your intelligence against his in the cheese maze!

Congrats to the artists behind this project!