This is a picture of Alba, the genetically engineered albino bunny with a Green Flourescent Protein.
GFP Bunny is a living work of modern art created in the year 2000.
Alba, the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene.
Read more about it at:
http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html
As we enter the year 2002, perhaps this is a good time and place for a broader discussion of the human genome project.
Begun in 1990, the U.S. Human Genome Project is a 13-year effort coordinated by the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The project originally was planned to last 15 years, but effective resource and technological advances have accelerated the expected completion date to 2003.
http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/