GloFish: one step closer to Jurassic Park

 

    When I was in elementary school, my friends and I used to play this game on the computers called Duck Life. Duck Life was a franchise, plenty of games, but there was a continuous story throughout them all. I forget which game it was, but one of the Duck Life games had a story along the lines of: the previous game's duck was unbeatable, therefore, the only way to surpass it, is to genetically modify new ducks into freaks of nature that can swim, run, and climb faster than a normal duck. I always thought this one was the coolest, much to the disagreement of my friends. Growing up on Jurassic Park, specifically the book by Micheal Critchon, I always liked the idea of genetically modifying a creature into a new form, whether it was modifying my duck to have massive gorilla arms to climb Mount Fiji, or filling in the gaps of dinosaur DNA with that of modern reptiles to produce the featherless dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, something about the idea was just so neat to me.

     My little god complex aside; this happens everywhere! While not dinosaurs, genetic modification is a common technique nowadays in the pet industry. For many, many centuries, animals were bred for desirable traits, including pets like dogs and cats. This is different from genetic engineering, as where breeding focuses a lot more on the phenotypes, and breeding for desired traits, genetic engineering focuses on altering the DNA itself into a new form. The article focuses in on a new genetically engineered fish called GloFish, which were modified to express fluorescent proteins they do not typically express in nature. The first GloFish was actually made using Green Fluorescence Protein extracted from jellyfish; the same one used in this year's genetics lab. Since then, due to advances in technology and computers increasing in power significantly, many more colors are now available on the market. I think this also highlights a darker side of genetics, were, theoretically, organisms can be genetically modified into more dangerous versions of existing organisms. With increasing accessibility to genomic information due to massive online gene banks, it's only a matter of time before some sort of bioterrorism event happens where someone somewhere somehow gives a mantis x-ray vision and destroys the local Walmart supercenter. 

Sources:

https://247wallst.com/technology-3/2025/10/12/genetically-engineered-pets-are-here-and-you-can-buy-one-for-7/

https://petreader.net/the-origins-of-glofish-a-brief-history/