Alba the Rabbit Glowing bunny rabbits aren't just for Sherlock Holmes reboots and acid trips anymore. Alba was the name of a genetically modified "glowing" rabbit created as an artistic work by contemporary artist Eduardo Kac, produced in collaboration with French geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine. A mutant glow-in-the-dark rabbit is at the centre of a transatlantic tug of war between an artist who claims he dreamed her up and the French scientists who created her. Alba was born in February 1998 at the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Paris, or according to another article Born in April 2000. Edouardo Kac planned to display Alba in Avignon, and then take her to live with his family in Chicago. He intended his green fluorescent bunny project to encapsulate the theme of biotechnology and its relation to family life and public debate. The rabbit is part of a transgenic art project called "GFP Bunny" by Chicago artist Eduardo Kac. The project not only comprises the creation of the fluorescent rabbit, but also the public dialogue generated by the project and the integration of the transgenic animal into society. "GFP Bunny" has raised many ethical questions and sparked an international controversy about whether Alba should be considered art at all. "Transgenic art brings out a debate on important social issues surrounding genetics that are affecting and will affect everyone's lives decades to come," Kac is quoted as saying. Kac is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Some of his work is featured in "Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics" at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington, an exhibition that ran from April 4 to August 28, 2002. In daylight, Alba looks like a normal albino rabbit. But each of her cells contains the gene for a fluorescent protein taken from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria. In UV light, her body glows bright green. The French scientists modified the gene to make the glow twice as strong as normal, and inserted it into a fertilised rabbit egg cell. Houdebine used the GFP gene found in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, that fluoresces green when exposed to blue light. This is a protein used in many standard biological experiments involving fluorescence. When Alba was exposed to such light, she would literally glow green — though photos by Kac showing the entire organism, including its hair, glowing a uniform green have had their veracity challenged. Kac says the scientists did this "as a labour of love based on our mutual understanding of the importance of developing this project. They know my work and understand my commitment." But that isn't the way the scientists see it. In fact, says Olivier Réchauchère of INRA, they had been working on fluorescent rabbits for 18 months before Kac approached them. The work was part of their research into techniques for tagging embryos. Rechauchere says that while the scientists were initially prepared to let Kac display a mutant rabbit in Avignon, at no point did they agree to him taking her home. But the institute refused to hand her over. Animal rights activists and some religious leaders have denounced Alba's creators for exploiting the animal and tampering with nature. Moreover, scientists who investigate legitimate uses for the fluorescent protein criticize the practice of creating art by genetic engineering. The Avignon event was cancelled by the institute's director, following concerns about the transport and security of a transgenic animal, and protests from animal rights activists. Eduardo Kac has described Alba as an animal that does not exist in nature. In an article published in The Boston Globe, Houdebine admitted creating Alba for Kac and stated that Alba has a 'particularly mellow and sweet disposition.' This article generated a global media scandal, which caused Houdebine to distance himself from Kac's work. All subsequent media articles present variations on Houdebine's disengagement effort. Alba's lifespan is an open question. In 2002, a US reporter called INRA (France), where Houdebine works, and was told that Alba had died. The reporter published an article stating that Alba was dead but the only evidence she provided was to quote Houdebine as saying: "I was informed one day that bunny was dead without any reason. So, rabbits die often. It was about 4 years old, which is a normal lifespan in our facilities." In the 2007 European Molecular Biology Organization Members Meeting in Barcelona, Louis-Marie Houdebine presented in detail his version of the reality of 'The GFP rabbit story', placing emphasis on sensationalism by journalists and the TV media. Scientists from the University of Hawaii recently collaborated with a team from Istanbul, Turkey, where a couple of bright green lab rabbits were just born as part of a larger effort to better understand hereditary illness and make cheaper medicine. Also: Glow-in-the-dark bunnies! This isn't some inhumane magic trick. The rabbits are part of a genetic manipulation experiment, one that the researchers hope will shed some light on hereditary diseases and hopefully lead the way to producing drugs to help cure them. The embryos of the two green rabbits were injected with a fluorescent protein from jellyfish DNA, giving them the "glowing gene" that makes them green under a blacklight. The glowing effect is just to show that the genetic manipulation technique works, and in future experiments, researchers could inject beneficial DNA into the rabbits so that they might be used to produce medicine. But for now, these bunnies just glow. "These rabbits are like a light bulb glowing, like an LED light all over their body," Dr. Stefan Moisyadi from the University of Hawaii told the local KHON news station. "And on top of it, their fur is beginning to grow and the greenness is shining right through their fur. It's so intense." Don't worry. It doesn't hurt the little bunnies. Moisyadi says that the glowing rabbits will live long normal and healthy lives, pointing to a study from CalTech that yielded glowing mice that showed no adverse side effects. And who could forget the glowing dog from South Korea or the radioactive-like kitten from the Mayo Clinic who might hold the key for an AIDS vaccine? GFP is completely harmless; other than emitting the fluorescent light, it doesn't affect the organism in any way. How is this useful to scientists? Cell biologists can genetically modify cells or embryos by adding GFP, and then observe them under UV light. In this way, researchers might observe in real time the effects of a new drug as it moves through the body, or facilitate tumor removal by making certain cancer cells more visible. As they experiment with bigger and bigger animals, the researchers gain a better understanding of how genetic manipulation works. Moisyadi hopes that one day they'll "create bio-reactors that basically produce pharmaceuticals that can be made a lot cheaper." Next up are a batch of glowing sheep that will move the Hawaii-Istanbul team's research forward. And believe it or not, these won't be the first glowing sheep to show up in this weird world we live in. Next thing you know we will have glowing pink elephants everywhere! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba_(rabbit) https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16-mutant-bunny/ http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/03_02/bunny_art.shtml https://gizmodo.com/these-glow-in-the-dark-rabbits-will-help-cure-diseases-1126757841 http://www.ekac.org/bionews.html

The Angora Rabbit Project The Angora project or Angora rabbit project was a Nazi SS endeavor in cuniculture during World War II that bred Angora rabbits to provide Angora wool and fur, as well as meat. The Angora rabbit's hair and pelt is known for strength and durability, and it was also "associated with luxurious evening wear, [and] would be an elegant solution for keeping SS officers and the German military warm and able to endure rough wartime conditions". Angora rabbits were raised in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Trawniki. A bound volume entitled Angora that belonged to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, was discovered in a farmhouse with his other papers near the end of World War II. It tells the story of the Angora rabbit project that operated in the Nazi death camps. Chicago Tribune war correspondent Sigrid Schultz found the book in its hiding place near Himmler's alpine villa, and described the significance of the Angora project: Inside the album were nearly 150 photographs of bunnies; page after page of well-keep angora rabbits posed alone or with smiling Aryan women or well-groomed SS officers lovingly stroking the bunnies' pristine white fur. Other pages have photographs of the sanitary, modern huts that the rabbits inhabited, rows of white hutches where the bunnies ate a prescribed diet and received some the best veterinary care available. On the top of one of the pages, beneath three photographs of rabbit hutches, "Buchenwald" is written in elegant script. The photo album that Schultz had uncovered was some of the last remaining evidence of Project Angora, an obscure program begun by Himmler for the purpose of producing enough angora wool to make warm clothes for several branches of the German military. The project officially began in 1941 with 6,500 rabbits. Rabbit breeding wasn't particularly new to Germany, the angora had been introduced to the country from the United Kingdom sometime in the 17th century and the country took to breeding the rabbits with a typical German rigor. Records show that by the mid-1930s there were between 65 and 100 rabbit breeders registered with the state. Himmler must have seen the native resource as a boon of sorts; angora wool, a fiber associated with luxurious evening wear, would be an elegant solution for keeping SS officers and the German military warm and able to endure rough wartime conditions. Himmler got the idea for utilising rabbits for wool production after reading of a small-scale scheme that was started during the First World War. He wrote at the time: 'Throughout Europe it is my intention to establish breeding stations in concentration camps' and even decreed that they should be kept in pens where they had 'plenty of space.' At one point, a Reich Specialized Group of Rabbit Breeders was formed and customized cutlery was produced for the group–along with the scrapbook, the dinner knives from the set are one of the only material objects that seem to have survived. By 1943, Project Angora had bred nearly 65,000 rabbits, producing over 10,000 pounds of wool. The photo albums shows sweaters produced for the German air force, socks produced for their navy and long underwear for ground troops. It's hard to gauge whether or not the program was a success, but we do know that the coddled rabbits lived in close proximity to human prisoners. The well-fed rabbits were housed in some of the Nazi regime's most notorious concentration camps: Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen, and nearly thirty more camps around central Europe. The contrast between the brutality of the camps, with their cruel disregard for human life, and the well-cared for rabbits is deeply unnerving. This jarring context makes the remnants of the program–the book found by Schultz–seem all the more sinister. In the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings starved to death, rabbits enjoyed beautifully prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care. The rabbits were raised for their soft, warm fur, which was shaved and used for, among other things, the linings of jackets for Luftwaffe pilots. Himmler, in a 1943 speech (referring to the prisoners that endured forced labor), stated: "We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals[,] will assume a decent attitude toward these human animals; but it is a crime against our blood to worry about these people." Few accounts of the Angora project have survived, though American soldiers at one camp reported that when prisoners were asked to slaughter the rabbits at the end of the war to make stew, they couldn't bear to do it. Today, Himmler's Angora book is housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Photographs, charts and maps from the book are among the more than 27,000 images available in the Wisconsin Historical Society's digital collections. Angora was featured in a Wisconsin Historical Images online gallery in March 2007

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angora_project https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nazis-secretly-bred-angora-rabbits-at-concentration-camps https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2433171/Operation-Munchkin-Nazi-plan-breed-giant-Angora-rabbits-clothes.html

 

 

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