Maggi mee pets

Oh, my baby sis FlowerMoonFish told me two amazingly bad Shakespeare jokes this morning when I called Singapore:

Q: What are the two names of the king of Scotland?
A: Duncan, and Mark, because in Macbeth they say "Mark, mark, King of Scotland.

Q: Who was the first Singaporean/Malaysian in Shakespeare?
A: Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, because he goes "Is it? Is it?"

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This fellow's created an amazingly comprehensive hoax: a retail display of Genpets, artificially engineered animals sold in a state of suspended animation which will wake up and imprint on you when you take them home and open the package. You have a choice between one- and three-year lifespans, and different personalities designated Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet (hmm...Mat Jambul Ke Hutan Bawa Ibu Ular is the mnemonic for the rainbow in Malay). There's even a reseller catalogue (PDF), for those who want to make some money on this amazing innovation.

It's his freaking UNDERGRADUATE art thesis project some more. Some people are frighteningly brilliant, and I don't mean that merely in the sense of academic capability or test scores. It's a combination of native intelligence, imagination, and a certain drive that I'm envious of. My friend AT has it; she put up some music scores on the Internet and now she's had people literally all over the world asking to perform her compositions. (By purely academic standards, I'm pretty smart but I'm still a bum with a major disparity between ambition and drive, writing lame posts for a blog only my friends read.)

He made bloody everything for this, even the PCBs running the little LED "heart monitors" and "Fresh Strips" on the packaging, and the animatronic movement of the Genpets. The official Genpets website is rather alarming (shades of The Island of Dr Moreau) if you don't know it's a project, or an impressive and amusing mimicry of corporate marketing-speak if you do.

I like what Brandejs says about his project:

2. Secondly I’m not against bioengineering, I’m simply hesitant towards where and how and by whom the technology will be used. That’s what this art sums up. Read on if you’re curious.
I don’t ever want to be confused for as a crazy activist, nor do I want to appear as endorsing this technology. Bioengineering could lead to medical breakthroughs that save lives, but will it? This is more a critique of corporate ethics than of technological ethics.

The commercialization of living things per se is nothing new - people have been buying and selling animals and plant seeds since the beginning of human civilisation - but the idea that entirely or partly novel organisms could be brought into being primarily for the financial gain of their creators is disturbing. I'm not sure why. I think it's linked to what E.O. Wilson calls biophilia - an innate human attraction to other life. Along with that attraction comes a certain level of respect, a recognition that these things are independent of us, and a gut feeling that they should not be manipulated arbitrarily in the way inorganic material is.

Couple of examples:

• Innocuous, but weird to think of at first: Cell lines. Cell culture is great, but it's just a little weird to think that these live on so long after the creatures or people they came from are so long dead. For instance, Vero cells (which my lab uses for virus production) came from a monkey back in 1962, and HeLa cells are from the cancer of a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951.
• Totally repugnant: Roundup Ready crops produced by Monsanto. I can see how inserting genes into crops to reduce the amount of pesticides used on them can be a good thing, such as that which produces Bacillus thurigiensis larvicidal toxin (plain English: kills caterpillars), as in cotton, which is another Monsanto product. But creating herbicide-resistant crops so farmers can spray MORE herbicides on their fields? That's damn bloody disgusting.

What's personally disturbing about this project, though, is its similarities to a proposal I wrote as a kid for pets that would be sold packaged in suspended animation, which you could then wake up at home. I remember typing it in this kiddy publishing program on our second computer in Seremban, so I must have been at least nine, but I'm fairly sure I was twelve or younger.

(The comp was an 80286, venerable even at the time. It had a little LED display that said '8 kHz', and a button that said 'Turbo'. If you pressed the turbo button the LEDs changed to '16 kHz' and all our games, which were on 5.25" floppies, ran too fast to play. Yes, that's KILOHertz. =D )

The technology included miniaturization of several mammalian species through genetic engineering. I think they were dogs and dolphins, possibly one more, although I don't remember. Limb-bud stage embryos (although I didn't know the terminology at the time, I'd seen pictures and that was the mental image) would be dried out in sort of a "diapause" state in a chunk of salts and proteins which would be reconstituted into fake amniotic fluid.

The kit would also include artificial gestation chambers and packets of the appropriate dried-out salts and proteins to be reconstituted into fake maternal blood, which the battery-powered chamber would pump through the baby animal. Then when gestation was complete, you'd have a little puppy about four inches high to run around on your desk, or a little dolphin the size of a goldfish to keep in an aquarium and feed guppies.

Bear in mind that at this point in life, I hadn't encountered the idea of artificial uteri a la Lois McMaster Bujold, and had only read about suspended animation a couple of times in Star Trek books. One of the influences on this was reading about that old ah pek Hammond's miniature elephant in Jurassic Park (tore through that in three hours at age ten, haha i'm a such a geek). It's explained that Hammond showed off the elephant to investors as an example of the wonders of GM, although this was false advertising since it was simply an offspring of pygmy elephants, which had been kept tiny by hormonal and diet treatments if I remember correctly.

This also would have been recently after I got my first Sea-Monkeys. The Sea-Monkey manual has this fake retro look, as if it hasn't been updated since the 1960s except for pricing and website address. There's a little pseudo-scientific blurb at the end about suspended animation, including mention of a "bear-like" creature that can live for years dried out and comes back to life when "a drop of water" touches it. I later concluded that they were referring to water bears, which are indeed vaguely bearlike...under the microscope.

I did get Sea-Monkeys again recently, as you can see below. I put some blue food colouring in the water months ago to see if they would take it into their bodies, but they haven't, and it's persisted in the water with no noticeable ill effects for quite a while. Little fishbowl was about $3 at a craft store. I'm letting the water dry out so they'll lay diapausing eggs so I won't have to worry about them when I'm back in Malaysia this fall. When I come back I'll add water and they should hatch. There definitely is something to the "instant pet" concept, but it's largely restricted to plankton and small fish.

Looking back at that project is bringing to mind a conversation EK had with his mom that he told me about: "When I went home I told my mom, 'So, I'm seeing this girl now,' and I knew her first question was going to be 'Is she Jewish?' so I cut her off immediately and said 'No.' Then she asked, 'Does she have Asperger's?'" (His mother's a shrink.) My initial reaction to that was something along the lines of "WTF kind of question is that to ask your kid about his new girlfriend?" but thinking back about how I'd get wrapped up in these insane ideas as a kid...eheheh.

I wish I hadn't thrown away the printout, but a few years later in my mid-teens I found it embarrassing as hell. Teenagers are idiots.