Retroviral Engineering

[Matt the Czar]

I have heard of people who feel like animals on the inside but want it to show on the outside. Would it be possible to use retroviruses to make a full transition?




(p.s. : South Park has shown us that surgery in this case is , , and)

 

[GoodGame]

I have heard of people who feel like animals on the inside but want it to show on the outside. Would it be possible to use retroviruses to make a full transition?




(p.s. : South Park has shown us that surgery in this case is , , and)

Is this a joke thread or do you want to know more about retrovirii?

 

[peter grimes]

Furry troll?

 

[emzie]

Simple answer: no.

Complex answer: there's more to your makeup than the DNA you carry. Genetic engineering might let you say, become very hairy, but not change your morphology in a meaningful way.

If you're looking for a sci-fi way to become a furry, Avatar is a good start.

 

[GoodGame]

I'm confused, because humans are animals already

 

[El_Machinae]

It would be very, very tough. A cat looks like a cat because its genes cause it to grow to be cat-like while it's an embryo. Turning a human embryo into a cat embryo using retroviral engineering might be in the realm of near-term sci-fi, but turning a person into a cat-person would require the specific transformations of individual cells. In other words, instead of just changing the genome, you'd need to change the expression pattern of each cell-type in your body.

I think that retroviral engineering of people is going to happen in a fairly important way in the next 15 years (and so it's an awesome field for someone in highschool to aspire to), but the specific scenario in the OP strike me as nigh impossible. That said,there could be new genius insights that then lead to my mind being blown.

 

[Souron]

If you could make retroviruses that change the dna of cells in a living human, the first application would probably be fighting cancer. Which is a better prospect than making cosmetic changes, though perhaps less exciting.

 

[El_Machinae]

My signature contains links to the type of research I am hoping for.

 

[MrCynical]

It might just be theoretically possible to convert the DNA of a human embryo at the single celled stage with a sufficient number of retroviral steps. It would be completely impractical to do it though. We're only just experimenting with retroviruses to insert small pieces of DNA, and we don't have an awful lot of control over the process. Since you'd basically be ending up with an animal embryo at the end of the process it would be pointless anyway.

It wouldn't work with an adult. Your DNA is important, but there's only so much it can do. Even if you somehow edited the DNA of every cell in your body to that of, say, a cat you'd still look mostly human. You might get fur at a pinch, but it wouldn't give you a tail, claws, etc or any change in the skeleton and hence overall body shape. Your body is already grown, from a human template. Plus the incompatible biochemistry between the cat DNA and the human proteins making up your cells would kill you.

I'd file this idea as "not conclusively proven impossible". It would take huge advances in genetic engineering, a total understanding of how human and animal biology works, and the ability to extend that to make large scale changes to an adult body possible. It would almost certainly be more difficult than e.g. figuring out how to cure all diseases.

 

[Vmedvil]

This Youtube Video has some Stuff that is somewhat near Retroviral Engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCUEc7TxsXk