Ok so one of my buddies told me that if you can extract the genes of an animal such as a bird and inject it into a human bloodstream, the subject would slowly grow wings and gain flight abilities. Would this be possible?
Yeahhh, the bolded section is impossible and idiotic. But it may gain some birdlike characteristics involving immunity to certain deseases that normal humans would fall victim to. But overall, I doubt anything would happen, besides possibly getting an infection from having birdy stuff in your bloodstream. I dont know, Im a noob. But I bet you'd get a better answer by googling your question.
That has to be one of the stupidest things I've heard of you should smack your friend across the face next time you see him. 1)Simply injecting genes into you would do nothing. 2)Your body would treat it as foreign and proceed to kill it 3)He obviously has no idea how genes and DNA work.
Maybe, just maybe, if you crack open bird eggs and inject the insides into your bloodstream.....you'll die.
Well, don't be to quick to shoot em down guys. Injecting said gene into an embrionic cell would have this effect. It has been proven with fireflies and bunnies. The bunny glows. I sorry if you don't believe me but it was on the news like two years ago.
Yes thats called genetic engeneering but I think more along the lines of if you take a bird stab a syringe into it draw its blood and inject yourself with it you magically sprout wings and fly.
This. Genetic engineering is possible and is done frequently to plants, and things like gene therapy to correct single enzymes or proteins have been done in humans, but nothing as drastic as growing wings is even close to possible(yet). That was a jellyfish gene, but yea, that is genetic engineering and it is completely possible. Food for thought: one of my biology textbooks years ago mentioned genetic engineering, and as one of the potential possibilities for human modification mentioned in it was green skin that performs photosynthesis. Take the gene for chlorophyll from a plant, and use it to replace the gene for human skin pigment(melanin). Now, it isn't as easy as that because our cells don't have the support structures to make photosynthetic skin possible, but as an extreme form of genetic engineering, something along those lines might happen in animal trials in our lifetime.
Your friend does meth, it is only proven in animal studies with embrios to work, once your body has developed and all the cell know what they should be it won't work, and wing may be possible but flight most likely not seeing as he would also need the gene for extremely light bones, which in turn would make them a very fragile person that literally in old age would break every bone in their body.
That would be a cool basis for a videogame. Stab animals to take their powers. I have a sick and twisted mind some times. On Topic: Please, add another smack onto the list you have to give him. Gene engineering does not work this way at all. As mentioned prior, the foreign substance would be rejected as foreign. Now while I personally believe that at some point in humanity's existance we will discover how to do something similar to this, at the same time it probably won't be in our lifetimes. Unless, of course, we become immortals. Then expect human to bird syringes in let's say, oh, how about 2, maybe 3 millenium? That sounds about right to me. If the genes were not rejected and killed it still would not affect your genes. Your cells would have to share genes, and doing that would be like combining the sperm and egg of a duck and a tiger. As cool as it may sound, not possible.
Would that be a Diger or a Tiguck? Either way, the second those exist I am SOOO adopting one and naming him Bartholomew. And also, just thought I'd add that I got to do that jellyfish experiment with E-coli or something in 5th grade. We took the genes from the jellyfish (well they had been pre-removed and put in syringes or something, I forget) and we mixed it with the bacteria and then after a while we put the bacteria under a microscope and as the new generations of bacteria were born, they were glowing green. Was pretty cool and fun to do. However, the bacteria didn't start growing tentacles and morphing into a full jellyfish. So something as drastic as what your friend described, as stated already, isn't possible... at least not within this lifetime and with our current understanding of genetic engineering...
I don't know which is a worse scenario. A) This is spam. B) You're completely serious. Either way, this falls below par for my faith in humanity, and doesn't constitute much of a discussion.
Protip: When he says that one of his friends told him this, he really means he thinks that this would actually happen. OP is proof that science is dead.
lol In response: I think to do something like that the genes of each animal would need to be extracted and spliced, then the chromosomes that are being replaced by the opposite species would need to be removed, and replaced by the appropriate ones. Which is possible, but not likely to happen unless people can keep cells alive for about 27 months.
Wow. Idiocy reigns. Injecting genes ANYWHERE has no effect, not in your blood stream, not in an embryo, not ANYWHERE. It does NOTHING. The only way to change the genetic traits of something is when its in its embryonic stage and this can be done in only 2 ways: 1.) Splice some genetic data from another creature into the DNA of the one you are trying to change. Depending on where this data is placed, it will have different effects. Just think of genetic data as a series of numbers. If you have say, 123456789 and you want to get 123456987, you would have to get the right numbers, 987, and replace 789 with 987 in that precise spot only. Of course, the real process is much simpler and also much more complicated. Gene's only consist of a series of 4 'numbers' which in certain orders constitute the genetic code. Knowing what code to place and exactly where to place it in a series of trillions of 'numbers' is whats required to have controlled change in genetic makeup. 2.) The second way is uncontrolled and this is done by injecting certain drugs into the embryo that mess up certain proteins that are responsible for replicating DNA, creating errors in the code which have completely 'random' results.