SACRAMENTO — Proposed legislation to protect animals from “Frankenstein”-like medical experimentation died in the state Senate on Thursday, and supporters blame election year politics for its demise.

Assembly Bill 1382 by Assemblymember Leticia Castillo (R-Home Gardens) would have banned the sale of genetically modified animals in California, such as glow-in-the-dark rabbits and horned “unicorn” horses.

While the business of cosmetically modified, futuristic-looking pets remains in its infancy, animal rights groups worry that eventually the creatures will be created, sold and later discarded in crowded municipal shelters.

Castillo’s bill passed unanimously in the Assembly earlier this year and sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee in June with bipartisan support.

On Thursday, the legislation died in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The chair of that powerful committee is Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) whose sister, Clarissa Cervantes, is challenging Castillo in the Nov. 3 election.

Cervantes never brought up the bill during Thursday’s hearing, which effectively kills it. Cervantes’ office didn’t respond to requests about why the legislation died.

Judie Mancuso, the founder of Social Compassion in Legislation, the bill’s sponsor, called the outcome “ludicrous.”

“When you’ve worked in the Capitol as long as I have, you understand that good bills can become political assets or political liabilities during an election cycle,” said Mancuso.

Castillo pledged Thursday to continue her focus on animals and cosmetic genetic engineering.

“This bill was never about politics — it was about protecting animals from being turned into novelty products,” Castillo said in a statement. “I’m disappointed AB 1382 did not move forward, but I am not done fighting for these animals. The technology that makes ‘designer pets’ possible isn’t going away, and neither am I.”

A 2025 Wired article entitled “Your Next Pet Could Be a Glowing Rabbit” profiled a Texas company seeking to create gene-edited pets. Josie Zayner, the founder of the company, told the Times in July that she opposed Castillo’s bill.

Castillo, at a hearing earlier this year, said she understands the concept of gene-editing animals for health reasons, but doesn’t want to see the alterations for cosmetic reasons.

Glow-in-the dark fish were exempt from her bill, which proposed civil penalties of at least $5,000.

Though the Judicial Council of California, the policy-making body for the courts, reviewed the legislation and didn’t have any fiscal concerns about it, the Senate Appropriations Committee analysis warned of “potentially significant workload cost pressures to the state funded trial court system” to resolve any civil cases related to the bill.

“The fiscal impact of this bill to the courts will depend on many unknowns, including the number of cases filed and the factors unique to each case,” the analysis stated.

The Democratic-controlled legislature uses appropriations committees to cull through hundreds of bills placed on what is referred to as the “suspense file.”

Officially, the suspense file is a tool for legislative leaders to evaluate costly bills by weighing them against one another and deciding what to advance to a vote by the Senate and Assembly. Unofficially, it’s used as a way for Democrats who control the Legislature to kill controversial bills out of the public eye.

California Democrats are making an aggressive push to unseat Castillo from the Assembly in the November election, Politico reported.

Castillo defeated Clarissa Cervantes in 2024 by nearly 600 votes to represent parts of Riverside County and San Bernardino County. Castillo lost to then-Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes in 2022.

After the bill was moved to the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this year, animal advocates reached out to state Senate Pro Tempore Monique Limón’s office to question the move.

“It’s my belief that there is some kind of political game going on,” Michelle Kelly, chief executive of the nonprofit welfare organization Los Angeles Rabbit Foundation, told the Times last month.

“Why would anyone not want to move forward with this bill?” Kelly said.

A representative for Limón declined to comment.

Clusters are the largest gravitationally bound things in the universe, thousands of galaxies held together in a vast reservoir of hot gas, gas so hot it glows in X-rays rather than visible light. But they do not stop at a tidy, neat edge. They taper away into the surrounding darkness, and they are still being fed, drawing in fresh material along enormous threads of gas that run between them like the strands of a web. Those outskirts are the interesting part, because they are where the universe is still assembling itself. They are also very faint, which is why so little is known about them.

The eROSITA telescope, launched in 2019 aboard the joint Russian and German Spektrum-RG mission, has now published its second major data release. Built from three complete surveys of the sky, DR2 contains close to two million X-ray sources across the western half of the sky, about twice as many as the first release. Roughly 1.9 million are point like, mostly stars and feeding supermassive black holes. Some 64,000 are extended: galaxy clusters, nearby galaxies and the shredded remains of supernovae.

Galaxy cluster A3266 in X-rays, linked by a filament of hot gas to a neighbouring galaxy group. The Bonn team measured the faint outer glow for the first time and found gas hotter and denser than the models predict (Credit : Jakob Dietl/Uni Bonn/eROSITA-DE)

Within that haul, Thomas Reiprich and Jakob Dietl at Bonn’s Argelander Institute went after a single object. A3266 is a massive cluster connected by a filament of gas to a neighbouring group of galaxies, and their team became the first to measure the faint X-ray glow in its outer reaches.

Our current theories of how cosmic structure formed match what eROSITA sees, that’s reassuring. The interesting news is in the detail, where they don’t quite match. The gas in the outskirts and in the filament runs hotter and denser than predicted, and contains comparatively little in the way of heavy elements.

The Perseus cluster, one of the brightest X-ray objects in the sky. The diffuse glow is gas hot enough to shine in X-rays, and it holds more mass than all the cluster’s stars together (Credit : X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/V. Olivares et al.; Optical/IR: DSS; H-alpha: CFHT/SITELLE; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)

Heavy elements, anything past hydrogen and helium, are manufactured inside stars and flung out when those stars die. Gas that is short of them has therefore never spent much time near a galaxy, which marks it as relatively pristine material arriving from the wider cosmic web rather than something expelled from the cluster itself. Yet it’s warmer and denser than models predict for gas of that kind. The two facts pull against each other, and reconciling them means adjusting our picture of how matter actually falls into a cluster: how quickly it heats, how thoroughly it mixes with what is already there and how much enriched gas the galaxies push back out to meet it.

Before eROSITA, the only X-ray survey of the whole sky came from ROSAT in 1990, so astronomers waited the best part of three decades for a successor. And eROSITA itself has been in safe mode since February 2022, with no return to science operations. There is a lesson in that about the value of surveying everything, whether or not you know yet what you are looking for.

Source : Homing In on the X-Ray Sky