A sign from humans playing god

Sometimes, it seems, certain ideas just won't let you abandon them.

It all started with a little cartoon character I invented on a psychology quiz in high school. (Yes, I had extra time and drew him in the margin - shut up, you can only wish you were ever half that cool.) His name was Sparky the Slow-Learning Lab Rat, for, in comic and tragic symbolism of so many facets of the human condition, he just couldn't stop pushing the proverbial lever despite the unceasing shocks. Here's a shoddy yet evocative re-imagining:

He was soon followed by Lumpy the Morbidly Obese Lab Rat, who lumbered along in a textbook for that very same course. Here's a scan:

Charming fellow, isn't he? These two misfits were going to be the beginnings of a children's (or warped adults') book series about a pack of lab rodents with bizarre "superpowers." Their adventures would be not only hilarious and oh-so-witty in their biting interspecies social commentary, but would also be delightfully offensive enough that PETA wouldn't usurp the texts as treatises against animal testing.

Unfortunately, my gallows humor Muse must have been occupied with other projects at the time, for nothing ever came of this one.

Flash ahead several years, and enter a story off the AP news wire, bearing the intriguing slug "mouse ranching," all about the strange, exotic and highly amusing world of genetically engineering custom mice for use in medical research:

BAR HARBOR, Maine (AP) – When it comes to the price of mice, you pay more for defects.
A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
Always a mainstay of scientific research, mice have become a critical tool in the quest for new drugs and medical treatments.
It turns out that a mouse's genes are so similar to a person's that with proper manipulation – either by man or nature – they can produce an animal with an ailment akin to virtually any human medical condition. Mice with Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and countless other ailments are being used to study both the illnesses themselves and potential treatments.

Arthritic mice, cancerous mice, epileptic mice, demented mice–add a mouse with Tourette's, and you've got yourself some high class comedy right there. But wait...

Mice were the obvious choice for breeding experiments. Small, docile and more than willing to reproduce, they were also readily available from the collections of Victorian mouse fanciers who bred the animals to have interesting coat colors and patterns. Many of today's most popular lab mouse strains are direct descendants of those original "fancy mice."

It just keeps getting better: Sir Reginald Von Pelt III, Esquire, the Dandy Fancy Mouse!

To complete my rodentian tableau of contemporary mankind, I would also need a doomsday cultist mouse with a Messiah complex, a mouse exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome that becomes attached to its captors, a Leibnizian/Panglossian "best of all possible worlds" mouse that keeps its chronic and irrational optimism throughout its sick and sadistic suffering and, of course, the resistant nihilist mouse that spends all its time self-mutilating and writing melodramatic poetry in what it deep down knows to be a futile search for meaning in the entire affair.

I think this enterprise has some true potential–plus, current discourse on bioethical issues and human rights issues like torture would provide cultural resonance. Not to mention...

And the award for sheer weirdness goes to Xenogen, an Alameda, Calif., outfit that can hitch the gene of interest to one that codes for the protein that makes fireflies glow. The result: Whenever and wherever the gene being studied switches on inside the mouse, it glows.

Luminescent mice to boot? That means one sure guarantor of coolness is also in the bag: shininess.

Publishers, you know how to reach me.