While reading my book for AP Biology, Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, I learned that science can be kind of crazy. These scientists were doing the most insane experiments! The main focus on this book was how similar fish are to mammals and how mammals ultimately evolved from fish. They mainly did experiments on embryos, or more specifically shark embryos, even though they did experiment on others as well. They would inject these shark embryos with various chemicals to see if they could solve the mystery behind development and what purpose genes served in it. In doing so they were able to mutate these embryos to extract the reaction they desired. They discovered how one gene that forms a specific part of the body (such as a limb or fin) when moved around, would form a duplicate of what it would have originally formed. That means some of these sharks grew up having duplicate fins.
I have to say what horrified me the most is their experiments on fly's and mice. The pictures they put in my head seemed like something that could only be created out of a horror story. In this case they were working specifically on eyes, and what did they discover? Well, they found out that they can mess with the DNA or genes and form eyes whenever they wanted. Need an extra eye? They knew how to make that possible, even to the extent of making a fly eye appear in the place of a mouse's eye. That's right. Mice had fly eyes and fly's had mice eyes. Freaky, right? While this book is very interesting, I can say that it has scarred me a few times.
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