The Wiki Man | 6 September 2008

A friend of mine, a professor at an Ivy League university, specialises in research into transgenic mice, learning how DNA modifications affect intelligence and memory. A few years ago, after some genetic tinkering, he created a batch of mice of quite spectacular dimwittedness. They were useless in the maze, ditzily wandering about with no sense of spatial awareness and incapable of finding the cheese after repeated attempts. This wasn’t the only interesting thing about these mice. Every one of them had a most unusual pigmentation, at least for mice: they were blond.

This was huge. ‘You’ve found the blond gene — phone the Sun!’ ‘Um, I was thinking more in terms of Nature or Scientific American,’ he said. He didn’t even follow my advice when I suggested cheese might be the wrong lure, since the blond mice were probably on a low-fat diet, and would probably only go for alcopops. By the time I’d recommended making a mouse-sized model of Chinawhite, he’d stopped listening altogether.