Scientists used light to turn mice into stone-cold killers

Researchers at Yale University are controlling the brains of normal mice and turning them into killing machines. That's right, ATS....The researchers say that the purpose of the experiment is to better understand brain networks not to develop military applications.

You've never seen such a sight in your life.

A team of scientists used brain control to turn about a dozen ordinary mice into killing machines. They employed a technique called optogenetics that manipulates neurons using light to make the fluffy critters go all Hulk on prey. With the light switched off, the mice were mostly chill, sometimes even scurrying around their cages to avoid prey or toys made to resemble prey. But when the switch was on, things got ugly. Crickets in cages were attacked and beheaded, and plastic toys that looked like prey received powerful bites that would've been lethal. The scientists are not trying to create a monster. “Basically, we are trying to understand how large brain networks work,” said Ivan de Araujo, an author of the study, published Thursday in the journal Cell. Araujo, an associate professor of psychiatry and physiology at Yale University, and his co-authors, Wenfei Han of Yale and Milton Canteras, a neurobiologist at the University of São Paulo, sought to answer a long-standing question in their field: What parts of the brain trigger certain motor responses. In neurobiology, studying the complex brain functions that govern predatory behavior is a good way to do that.

This is creepy and cool at the same time; creep-kool. Isn't this how a lot of horror movies start? Scientists testing on people or animals but then the experiment goes awry and the evil of their efforts is unleashed upon the world.....? This has bad written all over it; especially if this can affect people. What says ATS?

www.washingtonpost.com...

This is the almost the exact scenario in the movie 28 days later. Scientists in the movie were trying to understand anger and rage and testing inhibitors on monkeys......monkeys escaped, and zombie apocalypse ensues......

I better start fortifying the bunker

Maybe in the MARINES...

originally posted by: annoyedpharmacist
This is the almost the exact scenario in the movie 28 days later. Scientists in the movie were trying to understand anger and rage and testing inhibitors on monkeys......monkeys escaped, and zombie apocalypse ensues......

I better start fortifying the bunker

Yeah, this sounds like one step closer to zhombies.......ARGH!

Not for researched for military use? You get bet your ass the military will use it though..

a reply to: Misterlondon

Or weaponize it on others...
NO wonder they trained and put out those manuals...

a reply to: lostbook

Wow.....one for the "OFF" file! Hint, the last word is "file", and the first is "oh". If they admit to being able to do this with mice, what are they able to do, and actually doing, with people?

originally posted by: lostbook
They employed a technique called optogenetics that manipulates neurons using light...

Scientists testing on people or animals but then the experiment goes awry and the evil of their efforts is unleashed upon the world.....? This has bad written all over it; especially if this can affect people. What says ATS?

It's a picky picky procedure. First, you have to sensitize the neurons to light, so there's a virus that carries in a gene mod.

Then, since skulls are notoriously opaque, you have to drill a hole and cement in a fiberoptic probe that illuminates the bits you are testing. That is the big thing coming out of the mouse's skull in the video.

The other two pictures that don't show it are the 'control' mice. Any optogenetic mouse will forever have that big honkin' optic probe glued to his skull until he's sacrificed.

You can't really do that with people. So, no. No, it's not going to be 28 Days Later. This is an expensive, tricky bit of science that doesn't really just happen by magic. The journos like to pitch it as if you just shine some sort of flashlight on them and they become killers but it doesn't work that way.