electron zoo

The future is now — a five-year-old child who is genetically mutated to be twice as muscular as average children and have half the body fat has been discovered in Germany. I assume a lot of people are thinking that this is the result of some kind of pollution (like in X-Men), or alien experimentation with our race (like in X-Files). Well, that would of course be fascinating, but if science fiction is the magic eight ball in this case, shake shake, would we ever hear about it? Outlook Not Good.

However, science fiction and ancient legend are in agreement about the existence of people who are unnaturally strong. When looking at a story about Hercules, for example, people today just assume the storytellers exaggerated the character’s strength. That’s probably still true, but wouldn’t it be pretty fascinating if historians began to use this information to see ancient Greek and Roman myths in a new light? Every culture has it’s own tall tales about strong men that no one believes anymore, so perhaps this discovery will lend new credibility to those legends?

Some articles are suggesting that this discovery could potentially lead to potential genetic treatments of disorders like muscular dystrophy. But if they could treat patients with muscle problems, what’s to stop this vein of genetic modification from becoming the next steroids, or even worse, from becoming a kind of genetic modification that children are not to be born without? Speaking of science fiction, I am terrified of living in a world like that of Gattaca.