Rats on order

When you have to take people around – people that you would not normally mix with in your social or professional life – there are many interesting things that you learn in conversation.

And this is what happened when I met some of the speakers of the Asia Autoimmunity Forum on Friday night for dinner, and then again for a hike toward the HSBC Tree Top Walk – I say toward, because it closes at 5 and we started out at 4:15pm and arrived there to see the door being locked.

My aunt is on the organising committee of the forum and she asked me to play host to one of the speaker’s wife during the time the forum was on.

Although I’d met her two years earlier, it’s always a stressful time for me thinking of where to bring this well-traveled woman. I mean these people are well-read, well-informed. There’s hardly anything they don’t know about.

And if you can’t reply with opinions intelligently, you look… well, stupid. And the more you talk, you realise how stupid you are. So I try to keep quiet and listen more.

Anyway, I’m writing this just to take down some of the more interesting things I learnt in conversation with them.

Interesting thing 1: Dr Goodpasture who was nominated for the Nobel Prize eight times but never won.

The virologist has a rare disease named after him that he also discovered that destroys the kidneys and lungs. (This is why the autoimmunity people know about him.)

Anyway, he made many important contributions to medicine especially for his ability to replicate viruses in the embryo of a chicken egg. One might think nothing of it, but his method is used even up to today in modern science to propagate pure viruses for experimentation. Before this, scientists could never get enough pure viruses to conduct their experiments. And as a result, many vaccines such as for smallpox, could be mass produced.

The doctors around the dinner table speculated that he never actually won any Nobel Prize because his treatment of mumps in the US caused many kids to die or be permanently paralysed. (Although a random search on the Internet, doesn’t actually say this. But on some searches it says the Goodpasture invented the vaccine, but it is John Enders’ vaccine that is more widely used today.)

Interesting thing 2: (which I think is more interesting than Interesting thing 1) Did you know that you can order rats with any genetic thing you want? And you can have a rat in say two – three months after ordering?

I was told that it is hard – perhaps impossible to keep breeding rats for experimental use. Yes, I had wondered before how we seem to be having an un-ending supply of lab rats.

Okay, so we have found ways to freeze cells slowly. Slowly is a key word here. When you freeze things too fast (this I learnt when reading about food and cooking) icicles form in the cells and destroy the cell structure. This is why when you chuck a banana into the freezer it turns black. Or food turns mushy when you thaw it. That’s because its cell structure has been destroyed.

So, the rat cells are now stored. And these cells have certain genetic traits – depression, cancer… whatever.

And you can order with the genetic specification you want. Please send me five depressed rats please.

Interesting thing 3: (Okay, more like interesting thought) I was talking about how when killifish eggs are hatched, that the temperature and the acidity of water is monitored by breeders because the sex of the killifish is determined at the time when the egg hatches.

The doctor found that fascinating and wondered if studies had been done on humans to find if matters like pH and temperature (of the testicle, vagina, womb, etc) could also influence the outcome of the sex of your baby.