That cow is making me consider starting to take BGH...
well, keep in mind, that picture has nothing to do with growth hormone or any hormones.
It's just one of the many examples of animals with a double mutation (both copies of the gene), once you have it in your genome, all offspring will naturally get that amount of double muscles and genetically/naturally low bodyfat.
It's one of those genetic abnormalities without any known drawback that we all wish we had and unfortunately is very rare in humans also because in times of famine putting on fat easily has always been more valuable for survival than putting on muscle easily.
To quote wiki on this for example:
"Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy (or myotonic hypertrophy) is a rare genetic condition characterized by reduced body fat and increased skeletal muscle size. Affected individuals have up to twice the usual amount of muscle mass in their bodies. They also tend to have increased muscle strength. Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is not known to cause any medical problems, and affected individuals are intellectually normal. The prevalence of this condition is unknown."
Isn't it cause by the gene that produces myostratin gene being 'switched off'? If so then it could mean that gene therapy could produce the same effects.
No, not really switched off, just producing a less functional or non-functional protein, but technically the gene is still expressed.
It's also not technically a disease but rather a genetic difference. It would be a disadvantage if food and high calories were hard to find but obviously today it would be an advantage.
Gene therapy would not be a good way to go about it, I could easily change it in a person starting from a single cell embryo, just like I would do with a transgenic mice, but otherwise you couldn't justify using permanent genetic modifications on a fully grown person with billions of cells by using dangerous techniques like retroviral vectors (the insertion point is too random and could cause a lot of terrible side effects, mutate etc) and even something like RNA silencing would be completely impractical and prohibitive in cost.
A more likely way would be a protein inhibitor but there are no known ones yet especially ones that would not be toxic, not cause immune reactions and survive digestion or other delivery methods and still end up in the right tissue (there are some fake myostatin inhibitor pills out there but again they are not really what they claim to be)
