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Asked by lisaloo to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 17 Jun 2013.
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Sam Geen answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Humans don’t tend to do this, but there are plenty of colourful animals out there. Perhaps one day people could add animal genes to our genes to make colourful skin. I don’t know how easy this is to do, though!
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Robert Woolfson answered on 17 Jun 2013:
I’ll start out by saying my biology isn’t great. However, our skin colour partly controls how we react to sun through melanin, which is what darkens skin if we spend time in the sun. If we could change the way melanin is produced so instead of darkening skin, it turned it green, then maybe.
Don’t know if it’s possible, but it does sound fun to try and find out.
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Biology makes a whole rainbow of amazing colours, so we know that life can make pretty much any colour at all. Appearance is controlled by an animals or plants genes. These two facts means that in theory it could happen, but how exactly it would happen is very tricky to answer. Sometimes when genes change (called mutation) it can have no bad affects at all, but more often it means that the animal or plant forms in an odd way that makes it difficult or impossible to live normally, or at all. This way the good mutations end up in the next generation of animals or plants, while the bad mutations never get passed on. Now, a baby is formed from the genes of it’s parents, so actually if a baby was born in a fancy colour it would mean that a mutation happened in either the egg or the sperm it was formed by. What an interesting world it would be if we had bright green and orange babies!
Comments
lisaloo commented on :
Thanks! sounds interesting. The type of thing not to experiment with humans though!
Sam commented on :
Depends – people use all kinds of plastic surgery, pierced ears, make-up, etc. Maybe one day you can go into a beauty salon and get green skin!