"Modified human embryonic stem cells showed supernatural resistance against radiation" ... if that sentence doesn't freak you out, I don't know what will.
Everything that comes out of China you just have to take with a grain of salt. So much of life there is geared toward propping up the fanatical, voracious Chinese Communist Party. You just sort of have to assume that what you're hearing is very possibly a lie of some kind.
Is this a lie? I don't know. I hope it is. But I don't know.
A team of military medical scientists in China says it has inserted a gene from the microscopic water bear into human embryonic stem cells and significantly increased these cells' resistance to radiation.
They said success in this unprecedented experiment could lead to super-tough soldiers who could survive nuclear fallout.
Do note that this is a report from the South China Morning Post. That's a newspaper out of Hong Kong. There are some uncertainties about its reliability and independence from the CCP, but so far as we can tell it's a heck of a lot better than, say, the Global Times.
The experiments in question here involved taking genetic material from a water bear and inserting it into human DNA. The water bear is among the strongest species of animals ever discovered, able to withstand unbelievably extreme circumstances including unprotected exposure to outer space and — this is important — high levels of radiation.
In their laboratory experiment, nearly 90 per cent of the human embryonic cells carrying the water bear gene survived a lethal exposure to X-ray radiation, according to the team led by professor Yue Wen with the radiation biotechnology laboratory at the Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing.
Yeah I mean I don't even really know what that would look like. You just, what, eat some nuclear fallout on some toast and then regenerate?
I guess it's more complicated than that. Apparently there are some health concerns at play here:
The shielding proteins are "unique to the water bears. The immunity response after cross-species expression is unknown, and it can lead to some safety issues", they wrote.
I'm sure the CCP is very concerned about these "safety issues" as they work towards creating superhuman soldiers.
