Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (39 page)

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The glue and tags stay put until the seals undergo their annual molt and then simply fall off, leaving no lasting scars.

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You can see Winter swim with your own eyes, via the live webcam on the aquarium’s website (
www.seewinter.com
).

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The breakthrough was too late for Buck, who eventually died of liver cancer. “Even though he never got Neuticles, he changed the world,” Miller says.

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Since MRI machines require a subject to lie motionless inside a narrow tube for an extended period of time, it’s been tricky to get good scans of animals that are awake. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, recently showed that we can get dogs to be good MRI subjects through simple training. Using nothing more than positive reinforcement, Berns and his colleagues taught Callie, a two-year-old mutt, and McKenzie, a three-year-old border collie, to climb into the MRI tube, position their snouts on a chin rest, and then lie there, motionless, until the scan was complete.

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Neutering may be tough on dogs, but veterinarians and animal welfare groups overwhelmingly support the practice as a way to drastically reduce the number of unwanted pets in the world.

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For women, however, Miller has created a special line of Neuticle jewelry; for a small fee, the discerning lady can now wear real, 100 percent genuine, fake testicles around her neck.

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Some of the AKC’s breed guidelines simply describe characteristics of healthy animals, explaining that certain dogs should have silky and glossy coats, or a smooth gait, or a full set of well-aligned teeth. But other stipulations reflect seemingly arbitrary aesthetic preferences. Consider the Labrador retriever, America’s prototypical family dog. Labs that want a shot in the show ring better have black or brown noses. According to the AKC, “a thoroughly pink nose … is a disqualification.” A Lab’s eyes should be hazel or brown. “Black or yellow eyes give a harsh expression and are undesirable,” the AKC says. As for coat color? “A small white spot on the chest is permissible, but not desirable.”

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The United Kingdom has banned tail docking in dogs, with a few limited exceptions.

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External prostheses have limitations even for human patients. As a boy, Fitzpatrick witnessed that firsthand. His uncle had a wooden leg, and one day, while they were sailing, Fitzpatrick accidentally knocked it overboard. “I watched it float away,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is crap.’”

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To be fair, it was tenth on their list of ten possible uses for a remotely guided rodent.

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That’s not unusual—our attitudes toward different species are hugely inconsistent. (It’s right there in the title of Herzog’s book:
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat
.)

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They also respond to different wavelengths of light. Add one kind of opsin to a mouse neuron and it will fire whenever you bathe it in blue light. Using a different opsin lets you silence the neuron with yellow light.

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The Backyard Brains website keeps a running tally of how many people have eavesdropped on neural activity for the first time, thanks to the SpikerBox. As of June 2012, the total was 15,809 people and counting.

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For the most part, invertebrates (such as cockroaches) are not protected by federal or institutional regulations on animal research and experimentation. It’s not clear whether or how the government would respond if Gage and Marzullo decided to sell, say, robo-rat kits, but any use of vertebrates, such as rodents or birds, would likely open them up to more legal scrutiny.

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The pair rarely lets a teaching opportunity pass them by. While on a flight together, they once posted a sign on the airplane bathroom door advertising FREE NEUROSCIENCE LESSONS at seats 33A and 33B.

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For example, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, the breed that gave my Milo half of his DNA, have been bred to have domed heads. The result is a skull that’s too small and underdeveloped for the dogs’ brains, causing spinal cord problems, brain damage, and chronic pain in many Cavaliers.