Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (75 page)

Susie Rewer of the U.K. knitted a 5-foot-long scarf—while running in a marathon
.

Artist:
Chef

Song:
“Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)”
Story:
The TV cartoon comedy
South Park
is just as popular in the U.K. as it is in the U.S., and this song appeared in the 1998 episode “Chef Aid.” Chef (voiced by soul singer Isaac Hayes) bakes his homemade confections, “chocolate salty balls,” to sell at a fund-raiser. The whole song is a string of double entendres—Chef really
is
singing about baked goods when he croons “Say, everybody, have you seen my balls? They’re big and salty and brown.” On Christmas 1998, “Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)” hit #1 in the U.K.

Artist:
The Cheeky Girls
Song:
“The Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum)”
Story:
Pop singers Gabriela and Monica Irimia, 20-year-old Romanian twins who’d been trained in opera and ballet, appeared on the British TV talent show
Popstars: The Rivals
in 2002. They didn’t win—the judges thought they were terrible singers, and one called their woeful attempt “cheeky.” But since the twins were attractive and at least memorable, offers for record deals began to pour in. Just a few weeks after their losing appearance on
Popstars
, “The Cheeky Girls” signed with Multiply Records and released “The Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum),” a thumping electronic/dance song with lyrics made up almost entirely of the repeated, tunelessly sung phrases “cheeky girls,” and “touch my bum.” “The Cheeky Song” peaked at #2 on the British pop chart.

If you die at work, there’s a 1% chance that the cause of death will be drowning
.

MANIMALS!

Hey! You got your sheep in my DNA! Well, you got your DNA in my sheep! Two great parts of nature that go great together. Or do they?

S
O LONG, SPIDER-MAN
In 2009 senators Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) introduced an interesting piece of legislation: the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act. Just like it sounds, the bill would have made it illegal for scientists—mad or otherwise—to create creatures that are part human and part…something other than human. The reasoning went, if you made a “catwoman” in your basement laboratory, you could go to prison for 10 years and be fined up to $1 million. (Though that would be totally worth it.)

The bill was mostly laughed at, and it never made it to the Senate floor for a vote, but, as silly as it seems, it’s not as farfetched as it might sound. All around the world, scientists are hard at work trying to do just what the bill sought to outlaw. Here are just a few, and the creatures they’ve created.

I Am the Egg-Cow-Man:
In April 2008, a team of scientists at Newcastle University in England extracted an unfertilized egg cell from a cow, removed its nucleus—where most of a cell’s DNA resides—and replaced it with the nucleus of a cell taken from another animal. They then gave the egg a tiny electric shock, which “activated” it, meaning that the inserted DNA began to do its work, and the cell started dividing. In other words, it was alive. And the DNA they inserted into the cow egg was
human
(taken from a skin cell). The Newcastle scientists had successfully cloned a human-animal hybrid, possibly for the first time in history. (There have been a handful of unverifiable claims since 2003.) Did it go on to become a cow with hands and feet? Or a human with horns and hooves? No—the cells stopped dividing after about three days. But the team hopes to repeat the experiment and get an egg to keep dividing for about six days—at which time it should begin creating embryonic stem cells (ES cells), the “building block” cells found in embryos that go on to become more than 200 different types of cells in the body. The cells would be almost completely human—they’d have 99.99% human DNA and only .01% cow DNA. But, if successful, the procedure would allow scientists to skirt around laws forbidding or restricting the use of “normal” human embryos for stem-cell production. The scientists performing such experiments say they would never allow the cow-human hybrids to divide for more than a few days, and would never implant such an egg into a cow and attempt to bring it to term.

Every July, people gather along the railroad tracks in Laguna Niguel, CA, and drop their drawers for “Moon Amtrak Day.” More than 8,000 mooners participated in 2008
.

I Squeak, Therefore I Am:
Stanford University professor Irving Weissman and a team of researchers have created mice with brains that are part human. Hoping to learn more about brain cancers, Weissman extracted human embryonic brain stem cells—the kind that go on to become various types of brain cells—and injected them into the brains of adult mice. The cells survived and even traveled to different areas of the brains and matured into different types of brain cells. (The researchers created special markers that allowed them to keep track of the injected human cells.) The tests resulted in mice with brains whose cells were about 1% human. The next step: inject human brain stem cells not into
adult
mice but into fetal mice still in the womb. That, Weissman says, would result in mice that have much higher human brain content…perhaps as much as 100%. Before moving ahead, Weissman went to Stanford’s ethics department to make sure he wasn’t crossing any lines. Law professor Hank Greely, chair of the school’s ethics committee, gave the study the go-ahead with one condition: If the mice started showing any humanlike behaviors, they’d have to be destroyed immediately.

I’d Like Some Mutton and a Little Liver:
In March 2007, Professor Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada-Reno announced that he had successfully injected sheep fetuses with human stem cells. The result: sheep that grew organs that were part human. Some had livers, for example, that were made up of as much as 40% human liver cells. Zanjani hopes the research may one day lead to sheep being raised only for the human organs in their bodies—which could be transplanted into humans who need them. The scientists could conceivably create sheep that are tailor-made for specific people. For example, a sheep could be injected with your bone marrow in order to grow organs suitable just for you. Zanjani insists that the work is ethical and medically necessary, and that the sheep are not monsters. “We haven’t seen them act as anything but sheep,” he says.

Piggy, Bloody Piggy:
Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program in Rochester, Minnesota, performed similar human stem cell injections into fetal pigs, and now has a group of pigs that have pig blood cells
and
human blood cells running through their veins. But it gets weirder: Some of the blood cells are both. Their DNA contains both human and pig genes. Platt hopes the work might lead to pigs being raised for their human blood and organs, but there are several hurdles, including the fact that some porcine (pig) viruses can be passed on to humans.

Just Call Me “Babe”:
Human/animal hybrids are actually nothing new. If you know anyone with an artificial valve in their heart, then there’s a good chance you already
know
a human/animal hybrid. Thousands of people each year receive heart valves harvested from either pigs or cows. That, technically, makes these people hybrids.

BONUS

Evan Balaban, a behavioral neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, has produced
bird-bird
hybrids: He took brain cells from embryonic quails and transferred them into the brains of embryonic chickens. When the chickens later hatched and grew up, they didn’t “cluck” or “cock-a-doodle-doo” like normal chickens…they trilled like quail. And they bobbed their heads just like quail do. Balaban said the work upended the long-held belief that these behaviors are learned, showing conclusively that they are not only hard-wired—but that they can be transferred to entirely different species.

FOUR ACTUAL BAND NAMES

• Test Icicles

• The Tony Danza Tap Dance

• Black King Acid and the Womb Star Orchestra

• Gay for Johnny Depp

Q: What do you get when you cross a turkey with an octopus? A: Drumsticks for everyone!

FATHER OF THE
PARANORMAL

The name Charles Fort may not ring any bells, but chances are you’re familiar with his work. Without him, the world might never have heard of blood raining from the sky, the Bermuda Triangle, or spontaneous human combustion. And he brought his strange stories to us through years of obsessive research—and a filing system made of shoeboxes
.

T
HE SCRIBBLER
Charles Hoy Fort was a writer who made his living selling short stories to literary magazines in the early 1900s. But it wasn’t much of a living: Though Fort had a knack for spinning yarns, the magazines didn’t pay well, and he didn’t sell enough stories to keep afloat. His wife, Anna, was the real breadwinner; she worked long hours in a hotel laundry to make ends meet while Fort sat at home, scribbling out stories at the kitchen table.

Fort was a bit of a hermit, and he didn’t think he had enough life experience to base his stories on his own adventures. So he compensated by spending long hours at the New York Public Library, researching the details he needed to make his stories interesting and believable. Whenever he had trouble concentrating, he’d go to the library and do more research.

WRITER’S BLOCK

In time the trips to the library became a sort of crutch: Fort would struggle with his stories for an hour or two in the morning, then give up and head off to the library, where he’d spend the rest of the day randomly reading books, newspapers, and magazines from around the world, all the while taking copious notes.

By 1912 writing had become such a struggle that Fort put his stories aside entirely. He now spent all of his time at the library, compulsively researching anything and everything that struck his fancy, with no particular goal in mind other than to satisfy his own curiosity.

He still took plenty of notes. Before he left for the library each morning, he used a ruler to carefully tear pieces of scrap paper into neat 1 ½″ by 2 ½″ strips. He’d stuff his pockets full of them, and by the time he returned home later in the day, he’d have hundreds of new handwritten notes ready to be filed away. He lined the walls of the couple’s tiny Hell’s Kitchen tenement flat with hundreds of cubbyholes made of shoeboxes and stored his notes in them; over the next couple of years, he amassed a collection of over 40,000 individual strips of paper, each of which he carefully dated, cross-referenced, and filed, using more than 1,300 different subject categories. (If you’ve ever been to Uncle John’s house, you know that he and Fort have a lot in common.)

What do groundhogs, woodchucks, and marmots have in common? They’re all the same critter
.