A former British spy chief says he wants a more open debate on the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and warns against dismissing as conspiracy the idea that it might have come from a laboratory.

Sir Richard Dearlove doubled down on his belief the virus that causes COVID-19 was engineered and escaped by accident from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first victims were identified.

His opinion contrasts with a prevailing view among scientific experts as well as the US and British intelligence communities that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was not man-made.

The intervention comes as a team of scientists from the World Health Organisation (WHO) prepares to fly to China this week to investigate the origin of a disease that has killed more than half a million people globally.

"I subscribe to the theory that it's an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute (of Virology)," said Sir Richard, who served as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, between 1999 and 2004.

"I am not saying anything other than it was the result of an accident and that the virus is the consequence of gain-of-function experiments that were being conducted in Wuhan, which I don't think are particularly sinister."

Sir Richard was referring to a type of scientific research that can be carried out to modify viruses.

"There is an accumulation of evidence that this is something that has to be openly discussed in the scientific community," the former spy chief said.

"If we are going to have an inquiry in the UK - which I'm sure will happen - about the pandemic and government policy, it will have to start with the science. Where did this virus actually come from?"

But the widely held view among scientists is that the novel coronavirus most likely occurred naturally.

They believe it probably passed from an animal - the prime suspect is a bat - to a human, possibly via an intermediary species, but without any genetic engineering or man-made modifications.

"There is no doubt that this was a natural event," said Dr Rachael Tarlinton, an associate professor of veterinary virology at the University of Nottingham.

"The artificial release theories seem to be a form of 'magical thinking' - a simplistic solution to a complex problem where if someone can be blamed then that someone can be removed and the problem go away," she said in an email exchange.

"Unfortunately real life just doesn't work this way - manipulating viruses in the lab to change their pathogenicity is actually quite difficult and unpredictable and any group that had the ability to work on something like this would be well aware of how hard this is," she said.

"We knew spillover from animals was a risk The virus may have passed through an intermediate species on its way into the human population from bats but we may never know which animal this was - candidates include pangolins and small carnivores like palm civets or mongooses. Unfortunately we can't go back in time and start monitoring from before the outbreak so we only have very patchy samples to try and work this out from."

This lack of a clear evidence trail is viewed with suspicion by some.

So too is the fact that the virus was so well adapted to transmitting among people and throughout different parts of the body from the moment it was first identified late last year.

The existence in Wuhan of two laboratories that have conducted research into coronaviruses in bats is also seen by those supportive of the lab theory to be more than just a coincidence.

A top official at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has drawn the most suspicion, has said there is "no way the virus came from us".

Yuan Zhiming, a vice director at the institute, was quoted by a Chinese state broadcaster in April as saying: "We have a strict regulatory regimen. We have a code of conduct for research so we are confident of that.

"Why are there rumours?" he asked. "Because the Institute of Virology [is] in Wuhan people can't help but make associations, which I think is understandable. But it is bad when some are deliberately trying to mislead people. This is entirely based on speculation."

He also denied that the virus was man-made.

With COVID-19 responsible for so much death and economic damage, the mystery about its origin has become a highly-political topic as well as a scientific one.

Story continues

It has added fuel to already heated hostilities between the United States and China.

US President Donald Trump, who blames Beijing for the pandemic, claimed in April that he had seen evidence it had come from a laboratory.

The US intelligence community took the unusual step of releasing a statement to say it concurred with the consensus view that the disease was not man-made, but spies are investigating whether the virus might have been held in a laboratory and leaked accidentally.

It's understood that Britain's intelligence and security services don't believe the theory that the virus was manufactured.

Sir Richard said: "I am just staggered. They clearly haven't read the science. And they haven't attempted to understand it. The onus is now on the leadership of China to explain why the theory and the hypothesis that it could be engineered is wrong."

Sir Richard first spoke about his coronavirus theory in The Daily Telegraph last month.

He told Sky News his thinking has been shaped in part by the work of a British clinical scientist called Professor Angus Dalgleish and Birger Sorensen, chairman of Norwegian company Immunor, which is seeking to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

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The two men have published a paper offering an alternative theory on a vaccine for coronavirus.

They have written other related coronavirus papers, including one that explores their belief it is more likely the virus was manipulated in a laboratory than occurring naturally.

This research has yet to be accepted by a journal for publication.

The pair said they wanted to challenge work on the origin of COVID-19 published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine in March, which ruled out lab-meddling.

"I thought the whole point of a scientific journal was that you put forward some speculation and you opened it up to debate," said Professor Dalgleish, who is a professor of oncology at the Institute for Infection and Immunity at St George's University London. He is also principal of the Institute for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy.

"Disagree all you want - that's how you get to the right answers."

He and Mr Sorensen say they have gone against the scientific consensus before with their research on treatment for HIV.

"We maintained a very good friendship and working relationship," the British clinician said, explaining how they came to collaborate on COVID-19. He also holds stock options in Mr Sorensen's vaccine company.

Sir Richard challenged Nature to publish the two men's paper on the origin of the virus.

Sky News understands that it was submitted but not accepted.

Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief of Nature, said she was not permitted to discuss individual papers and whether or not they had been received or turned down.

However, as an editor and previously a researcher, she said it was crucial to keep an open mind when it comes to science and to engage in discussion.

"But in the end if one doesn't see many publications in favour of a certain theory, one has to conclude that that's because there isn't robust evidence in favour of that theory. Rather than seeking alternative explanations for that. Because after all it is that focus on the evidence in support of a theory which is the focus of research and how conclusions are made," she said.

Professor Kristian Andersen at the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, a medical research facility in California, was lead author on the March paper t
hat argued the new coronavirus evolved naturally and not from a laboratory.

He defended his work and attacked the vaccine paper by Mr Sorensen and Professor Dalgleish, describing it as "complete nonsense, unintelligible, and not even remotely scientific - leading the authors to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2".

In an emailed statement, sent by a colleague, Professor Andersen added: "As we describe in our paper, all the data strongly suggest that this is a natural virus - no scientific data has been put forward suggesting otherwise, including in the present 'study'."

Mr Sorensen defended his approach.

"What nonsense? He is nonsense. He has no support. He says [originating from a laboratory] cannot happen. Of course this can happen," he said.

Sky News has spoken to four other scientists who believe that the lab theory should not be ruled out, though they did not say it was more likely than a natural explanation.

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Professor Richard Ebright of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey was dismissive of the Dalgleish-Sorensen paper but he took issue with Professor Andersen's piece in Nature too, describing it as opinion.

"The op-ed's conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 genome shows no signatures of purposeful human manipulation is correct," he said in an email exchange.

"The absence of signatures rules out the possibility the virus was engineered using methods that leave signatures. However, the absence of signatures of manipulation does not rule out the possibility the virus was engineered using widely employed - including at WIV - methods that do not leave signatures. The op-ed does not even address the possibility that an unpublished WIV bat coronavirus could be the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2."

He pushed back on condemning those who consider a lab leak as conspiracy theorists.

"By definition, an accident cannot be a 'conspiracy'," he said.

"Persons who use term 'conspiracy theory' to describe possibility of accidental release reveal themselves to be unable to read, unable to reason, or uninterested in truth."

He signalled that the only way to reach the truth would be through an independent, forensic investigation, which would require access to places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In Australia, Professor Nikolai Petrovsky at Flinders University is also keeping an open mind.

He said normally a virus that jumps from an animal takes time to become good at infecting a human.

"Whereas what appears to have happened with COVID-19 is from day one it was perfectly adapted to infect humans and to transmit between humans which is why it's been such a big problem," he said.

"So then you have to ask: well, how did that happen?

"One possibility of course is that it was just a massive fluke... The other possibility that you have to consider in terms of where its origins may come from is: Has this virus seen human cells before in a situation we simply weren't aware of? And so one of those situations would be if the virus had been growing in human cells in the laboratory."

He too was concerned about scientific research that supports the lab theory not being published.

"It's always fraught with difficulty when you have a scientific question that runs up against a political issue," Professor Petrovsky said. "I think that COVID-19 and its origins is one of those areas where unfortunately we have enormous amount of politics overlaid over the science. And so it gets harder to get to the truth in that context."

Continued here:
Coronavirus: Former MI6 boss says theory COVID-19 came from Wuhan lab must not be dismissed as conspiracy - Yahoo News UK

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Brian Allan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Chris Stone, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Holly Tuten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jennifer Kuzma, North Carolina State University, and Natalie Kofler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(THE CONVERSATION) This summer, for the first time, genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the U.S.

On May 1, 2020, the company Oxitec received an experimental use permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to release millions of GM mosquitoes (labeled by Oxitec as OX5034) every week over the next two years in Florida and Texas. Females of this mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, transmit dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika viruses. When these lab-bred GM males are released and mate with wild females, their female offspring die. Continual, large-scale releases of these OX5034 GM males should eventually cause the temporary collapse of a wild population.

However, as vector biologists, geneticists, policy experts and bioethicists, we are concerned that current government oversight and scientific evaluation of GM mosquitoes do not ensure their responsible deployment.

Genetic engineering for disease control

Coral reefs that can withstand rising sea temperatures, American chestnut trees that can survive blight and mosquitoes that cant spread disease are examples of how genetic engineering may transform the natural world.

Genetic engineering offers an unprecedented opportunity for humans to reshape the fundamental structure of the biological world. Yet, as new advances in genetic decoding and gene editing emerge with speed and enthusiasm, the ecological systems they could alter remain enormously complex and understudied.

Recently, no group of organisms has received more attention for genetic modification than mosquitoes to yield inviable offspring or make them unsuitable for disease transmission. These strategies hold considerable potential benefits for the hundreds of millions of people impacted by mosquito-borne diseases each year.

Although the EPA approved the permit for Oxitec, state approval is still required. A previously planned release in the Florida Keys of an earlier version of Oxitecs GM mosquito (OX513) was withdrawn in 2018 after a referendum in 2016 indicated significant opposition from local residents. Oxitec has field-trialed their GM mosquitoes in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Panama.

The public forum on Oxitecs recent permit application garnered 31,174 comments opposing release and 56 in support. The EPA considered these during their review process.

Time to reassess risk assessment?

However, it is difficult to assess how EPA regulators weighed and considered public comments and how much of the evidence used in final risk determinations was provided solely by the technology developers.

The closed nature of this risk assessment process is concerning to us.

There is a potential bias and conflict of interest when experimental trials and assessments of ecological risk lack political accountability and are performed by, or in close collaboration with, the technology developers.

This scenario becomes more troubling with a for-profit technology company when cost- and risk-benefit analyses comparing GM mosquitoes to other approaches arent being conducted.

Another concern is that risk assessments tend to focus on only a narrow set of biological parameters such as the potential for the GM mosquito to transmit disease or the potential of the mosquitoes new proteins to trigger an allergic response in people and neglect other important biological, ethical and social considerations.

To address these shortcomings, the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign convened a Critical Conversation on GM mosquitoes. The discussion involved 35 participants from academic, government and nonprofit organizations from around the world with expertise in mosquito biology, community engagement and risk assessment.

A primary takeaway from this conversation was an urgent need to make regulatory procedures more transparent, comprehensive and protected from biases and conflicts of interest. In short, we believe it is time to reassess risk assessment for GM mosquitoes. Here are some of the key elements we recommend.

Steps to make risk assessment more open and comprehensive

First, an official, government-funded registry for GM organisms specifically designed to reproduce in the wild and intended for release in the U.S. would make risk assessments more transparent and accountable. Similar to the U.S. database that lists all human clinical trials, this field trial registry would require all technology developers to disclose intentions to release, information on their GM strategy, scale and location of release and intentions for data collection.

This registry could be presented in a way that protects intellectual property rights, just as therapies entering clinical trials are patent-protected in their registry. The GM organism registry would be updated in real time and made fully available to the public.

Second, a broader set of risks needs to be assessed and an evidence base needs to be generated by third-party researchers. Because each GM mosquito is released into a unique environment, risk assessments and experiments prior to and during trial releases should address local effects on the ecosystem and food webs. They should also probe the disease transmission potential of the mosquitos wild counterparts and ecological competitors, examine evolutionary pressures on disease agents in the mosquito community and track the gene flow between GM and wild mosquitoes.

To identify and assess risks, a commitment of funding is necessary. The U.S. EPAs recent announcement that it would improve general risk assessment analysis for biotechnology products is a good start. But regulatory and funding support for an external advisory committee to review assessments for GM organisms released in the wild is also needed; diverse expertise and local community representation would secure a more fair and comprehensive assessment.

Furthermore, independent researchers and advisers could help guide what data are collected during trials to reduce uncertainty and inform future large-scale releases and risk assessments.

The objective to reduce or even eliminate mosquito-borne disease is laudable. GM mosquitoes could prove to be an important tool in alleviating global health burdens. However, to ensure their success, we believe that regulatory frameworks for open, comprehensive and participatory decision-making are urgently needed.

This article was updated to correct the date that Oxitec withdrew its OX513 trial application to 2018.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-could-be-released-in-florida-and-texas-beginning-this-summer-silver-bullet-or-jumping-the-gun-139710.

Read the original:
Genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in Florida and Texas beginning this summer silver bullet or jumping the gun? - Thehour.com

To capture the speed and audacity of its plan to field a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration reached into science fictions vault for an inspiring moniker: Operation Warp Speed.

The vaccine initiatives name challenges a mantra penned by an actual science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke: Science demands patience.

Patience is essential for those who ply the science of vaccines. But in that field, challenging economic conditions and a forbidding regulatory system converge with the immune systems complexity and the resilience of microscopic pathogens. Add in drug companies preference for big profits and the result is a trash heap of failed and abandoned efforts.

In the last 25 years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved new vaccines for only seven diseases. A vaccine to protect against the Ebola virus won approval just last year, three years after the epidemic in West Africa ended.

But in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and cratered the U.S. economy, Trump has shown little tolerance for sciences deliberate pace. And scientists, with fingers crossed, are falling in line.

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The president declared that he wants 300 million doses enough to protect as many as 90% of Americans developed, manufactured and delivered by January 2021. He has ordered academics, government officials, private companies and the U.S. military to work together to make it so.

That means big and it means fast, Trump said. A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.

The new effort will demand the support, development, testing and assessment of several promising vaccine candidates by scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and companies and academic institutions across the world.

It will require the manufacture, procurement and storage of complex biologic medicines, as well as the vials, needles, syringes and storage equipment needed to deliver them. All will be needed on a massive scale.

And all that materiel will need to be transported, distributed and possibly administered by an army of logistics specialists.

Wherever possible, Operation Warp Speed envisions that many steps that have always followed each other in strict sequence clinical trials and production, for instance, or government approval and supply-chain development be done in parallel.

The program has already awarded a total of $2.16 billion to five companies with vaccine candidates at different stages of development.

To lead the effort, Trump tapped immunologist Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical venture capitalist and former chairman of vaccines at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. The U.S. Armys most senior logistics and procurement specialist, Gen. Gustave Perna, will be the operations chief operating officer. Both expressed confidence in the operations success.

Perna called the project herculean. Slaoui, who has been criticized for holding a major stake in at least one of the vaccine makers that stands to benefit from Operation Warp Speed, told Trump we will do the best we can.

The time is short and the stakes are high. Just over four months after the coronavirus announced its presence inside the United States, President Trump is determined to send the country back to work.

With no effective treatment in sight, and no indication that the coronavirus would magically disappear, as Trump has frequently predicted, a vaccine will be the ultimate game changer in the pandemic, according Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations leading expert on the outbreak.

Theres never a guarantee of success, Fauci said. But he added that he was cautiously optimistic that by winter, at least one of nearly a dozen promising vaccine candidates would have shown itself to be safe and effective in inducing immunity in humans.

Vaccine scientists are similarly cautious, especially of a testing schedule that will compress both the size and duration of safety and effectiveness trials and even overlap them in a bid to save time.

Its fine for politicians to say were going to have a vaccine next month, said Mayo Clinic immunologist Dr. Gregory Poland. But the literature is littered with false starts and unanticipated safety effects in vaccines.

Poland noted that a vaccines rarer side effects are often not recognized until its put into broad use. To ferret out an adverse outcome that only occurs in one person in 100,000, for instance, a company would need to test it in 384,250 people from broad backgrounds and with a variety of medical conditions, he said.

Such large trials are unlikely in the rush to field a vaccine, Poland said, and he fears the result could be a dangerous erosion of public trust. The yearly flu shot carries a risk of less than 1 in 1 million cases of the neurological complication Guillain-Barre syndrome, he said. And even with that low a risk, close to half of Americans refuse to get it.

You have a whole spectrum of people out there who wont be reassured by any amount of information, Poland said. If we dont pay strict attention to safety, this is going to backfire.

Money may help. Congress approved $8.3 billion in early March to fund federal agencies pandemic response. And scientists across the world have been scrambling to design vaccines to protect a population with no immunity to the deadly new pathogen.

Scientists in China, Kazakhstan, India, Russia, Germany, Sweden and the United States have brought 10 potential COVID-19 vaccines to the point where they are being evaluated in humans in some form. Another 115 are considered by the World Health Organization to be in the preclinical stage of development.

In some cases, these preclinical vaccine candidates are scarcely off the drawing board. In others, they are still being tweaked or tested in cells. Some are being tried in lab animals.

The prospective vaccines range widely in their design and novelty. There are those that challenge a persons immune system with a killed or attenuated virus, the traditional approach used by the polio vaccine and other immunizations. Others are products of genetic engineering and have never been tried in a vaccine before.

The vaccine candidates also vary in their ease of manufacture, the number of doses a patient needs to gain lasting immunity, and the way they are administered.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn has said his agency evaluated about 10 vaccine candidates in early studies. By late May, it had narrowed its focus to five candidates that will begin a rapid and sometimes overlapping progression through human studies of safety and effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the groundwork for large-scale production is already being laid. Trump has said that the U.S. military may aid in the manufacture, and companies with the capability to produce vaccines will be recruited to do so.

Given the pressing urgency of the administrations deadline, vaccine candidates that can be produced fastest, transported most easily and administered to patients most efficiently will likely win the most and earliest support, experts said.

The redundancy built into Operation Warp Speed may also prove a vital safeguard against failure.

If the coronavirus shows signs that it is mutating in ways that could make one vaccine candidate ineffective, the scientific judges could swiftly shift their preferences toward a competitor that can be adapted more readily to changes in the virus. If rare but untoward effects show up with broader use, back-up vaccines could be brought on line. Some vaccines will be found to work better or worse in specific
populations, and can be used accordingly.

The result will be an evolving panoply of vaccine choices, not only because some will be ready earlier than others, but because some will be more effective than others in certain populations.

There will be of necessity multiple types of vaccines, Poland said.

Michael S. Kinch, who directs the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis, said that while there are pitfalls inherent to Operation Warp Speed, another pandemic offers comforting reassurance that in fielding the right drug, patience is an essential virtue.

In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the first generation of drugs was mediocre at best, he said. As scientists learned more about the virus and the disease it causes, the medicines became more effective.

That may be a model for what were going to have here, Kinch said. We may not get the best vaccine up front. But hopefully it will be good enough and will be replaced later by better vaccines. We have may just have to live with that until we get a better one.

Read more from the original source:
Can Operation Warp Speed have a COVID-19 vaccine this year? - Los Angeles Times

During a March 15, 2020 interview, beginning at the 27:40 time point, Dr Ralph Baric, noted coronavirus scientist at the University of North Carolina, said the following when asked about the animal origin of the human COVID-19 pandemic:

As far as I know they [the Chinese] have not identified the actual reservoir species. There were reports about pangolins [scaly anteaters] as being potentially being the intermediate host, but pangolins viruses are 88-90% identical to SARS-2 [COVID-19] in comparison civet and racoon dog strains of SARS coronavirus were 99.8 identical to SARS coronavirus from 2003. In other words, you are talking about a handful of mutations between civet strains, racoon dog strains and human strains in 2003. Pangolins have over 3,000 nucleotide changes - no way they are the reservoir species [for COVID-19], absolutely no chance.

Here is what Dr Baric was saying.

It was logical to conclude that the coronavirus from the human 2003 SARS outbreak could have originated in animals because the coronavirus circulating in the civet and racoon dog populations was 99.8 per cent the same as the coronavirus eventually found in humans. That would, therefore, require only a relative handful of naturally-occurring mutations to jump to humans.

In contrast, pangolin coronaviruses are only 88-90 per cent the same as COVID-19. The huge number of naturally-occurring mutations required for pangolins to act as a reservoir species and intermediate host for COVID-19 would make it practically impossible.

Despite that, an article published by scientists from Guangzhou, China on May 7, 2020 in the prestigious journal Nature directly contradicts the comments made by Dr Baric, concluding:

The isolation of a coronavirus that is highly related to SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] in pangolins suggests that they have the potential to act as the intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19].

The Guangzhou scientists concede that the bat coronavirus RaTG13, which is actually BtCoV/4991, has about a 96 per centsequence identity to SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] at the whole-genome level and it is reasonable to assume that bats are the native host of SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19].

Agreeing with Dr Baric, the authors admit that, although genetically similar, it is unlikely that coronaviruses usually found in pangolins are directly linked to the outbreak because of their overall substantial sequence differences from COVID-19.

The Guangzhou group states, however, that the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of a pangolin coronavirus is nearly identical to the same structure in COVID-19, having only a single amino acid difference.

The Chinese scientists claim that a pangolin coronavirus appears to have donated the RBD to COVID-19, presumably through some type of recombinant event occurring between a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus inside a pangolin host.

The close identity of COVID-19s RBD to that of pangolins has been widely reported, but the recombinant scenario suggested by the Guangzhou research team is purely speculatively for which they provide no supporting data.

Chinas own scientists may have inadvertently stumbled upon the truth. A far more likely explanation is that the pangolin RBD was inserted into a bat coronavirus by genetic engineering.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)

See original here:
Here`s what China`s scientists have to say about the origin of COVID-19 - WION

CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing is one of the most powerful tools available to modern science, but genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in food are subject to some tight regulations. Now, researchers at North Carolina State University have created a new version of CRISPR that lets scientists edit crops without introducing new DNA, meaning they technically arent GMOs.

CRISPR-Cas9 allows for precise cut-n-paste edits to DNA in living cells. An RNA guide sequence directs the system to the target section of the genome. Once there, an enzyme, usually Cas9, snips out the sequence then deletes it or replaces it with something else. In this way, scientists can cut out problem genes, such as those that cause disease, or add new beneficial ones, such as giving crops better pest resistance.

For the new study, the researchers tweaked the process to make a cleaner edit in plants. It uses a process known as lipofection, where positively-charged lipids are used to build a kind of bubble around the Cas9 and RNA mechanisms. When injected into the organism, this bubble binds to and fuses with the cellular membrane, which pushes the CRISPR system into the cell itself. The method also uses a Cas9 protein itself, rather than the Cas9 DNA sequence.

The team tested the method by introducing fluorescent proteins into tobacco plants. And sure enough, after 48 hours the edited plants were glowing, indicating it had worked.

Wusheng Liu/NC State University

The new method has a few advantages over existing ones, the team says. Its easier to target the desired genetic sequence, and opens up new crops that couldnt be edited with existing methods. Plus, the protein only lasts for a few days before degrading, which reduces off-target edits.

But the most important advantage is that the resulting crops arent considered GMOs. Since the new method doesnt use Cas9 DNA, it doesnt introduce foreign DNA into the plant, which is an important distinction.

This was the first time anyone has come up with a method to deliver the Cas9 protein through lipofection into plant cells, says Wusheng Liu, lead author of the study. Our major achievement was to make that happen. Also, since many consumers prefer non-GMO specialty crops, this method delivers the Cas9 protein in a non-GMO manner.

As useful as genetic engineering can be, the term GMO has negative connotations for many people, who believe there are health concerns with eating these crops or meats. Other problems include the chance of modified plants or animals escaping into the wild, where they can spread their new genes to the native population, affecting ecosystems.

As such, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have regulations on which edited crops and animals are allowed in food. And theyve decided that the line is drawn at introducing foreign genes into an organism.

It makes sense. Humans have been genetically-engineering plants and animals for millennia, through selective breeding. Many of our most widely-eaten crops are bigger, tastier, and easier to eat or grow, to the point that they hardly resemble their wild counterparts anymore.

CRISPR and other gene-editing tools can be the next generation of this process. By removing problematic genes or ensuring that specific ones are turned on or off, scientists arent really creating anything new. Some individuals naturally have mutations that do the same thing all the scientists are really doing is removing the element of chance, genetically.

In 2015, a new type of salmon became the first genetically engineered animal approved by the FDA for human consumption. In 2016, a Swedish scientist grew, harvested and served up CRISPR cabbage after approval by the Swedish Board of Agriculture. In both cases, the products were allowed because they were functionally identical to wild-type organisms the scientists had just chosen beneficial genes from an existing natural pool, without introducing foreign DNA.

That said, the rules aren't the same everywhere. In 2018 the Court of Justice of the European Union somewhat controversially ruled that tough GMO laws applied to crops that had been edited even if new DNA hadn't been inserted. The issue will likely remain fragmented, but for the NC State team at least, their crops aren't GMOs according to their own country's regulations.

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome before the new method becomes viable. The team says that lipofection can only be done if the outer wall of the plant cell is removed first. This kind of plant cell, known as a protoplast, allows scientists to more easily tweak the genes, but it isnt possible in all types of crops, and even when it does work, its a complex process.

Instead, the researchers are exploring other options that dont require removing the cell wall at all. One such alternative is to use CRISPR to introduce the Cas9 protein into pollen grains, which can then go on to fertilize another plant. Some of the offspring will have the required genetic edits from day one.

The researchers plan to investigate this latter method in tomatoes and hemp first, before moving onto others.

The new study was published in the journal Plant Cell Reports.

Source: NC State University

Read the original here:
New CRISPR method edits crops without technically making them GMOs - New Atlas

Nature can help heal nature. Scientists and businesses increasingly are looking to biology to use the natural resources we extract more productively and to tackle climate change.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic broke, climate change was the most complex and pressing challenge of our times. Indeed, there is a link. Climate change is a threat multiplier that, scientists argue, is raising the risk of infectious diseases by, for instance, depriving animals of the genetic diversity they need to control viruses that through zoonotic transfer can be transferred to humans.

A Bio Revolution is underway that could make a contribution to broader efforts to slow or reverse climate change. This revolution is being propelled by rapid advances in our ability to sequence DNA and use that information to engineer genes to cure human disease, to innovate new forms of biology-based manufacturing and to improve yield and resilience in farming aided by ever more sophisticated (and cheaper) computing, data analytics and engineering.

By 2040 to 2050, the research finds that these 400 applications alone could reduce annual average man-made greenhouse-gas emissions by 7 to 9 percent from 2018 emissions levels.

In a new report, "The Bio Revolution: Innovations transforming economies, societies and our lives," the McKinsey Global Institute research compiled a library of about 400 applications, almost all of which are scientifically feasible today, that could have direct economic impact of up to $4 trillion a year over the next 10 to 20 years. Taking into account potential knock-on effects, new applications yet to emerge and additional scientific breakthroughs, the full potential could be far larger.

Undoubtedly many challenges are ahead, and some of the science remains to be fully developed. However, by 2040 to 2050, the research finds that these 400 applications alone could reduce annual average man-made greenhouse gas emissions by 7 to 9 percent from 2018 emissions levels. This is the equivalent of up to eight times the total carbon dioxide emissions of the global airline industry in 2018.

Debate about how to slow climate change has tended to focus on the burning of fossil fuels, but increasingly the role of food systems is coming into focus. Raising animals for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5 percent of global GHG emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Today, one-third of all cropland is used to produce animal feed.

A shift toward alternative proteins could reduce carbon emissions, free up cropland for human use or habitat restoration and, indeed, prevent deforestation in the first place. The taste and texture of plant-based meat substitutes is getting close to animal protein, and these products are competing with animal meats in grocery aisles and restaurant menus. Plant-based milk accounts for 15 percent of retail milk sales in the United States and 8 percent in Britain.

The new frontier, however, is cultured meat and seafood using tissue-culture technology. There are major technical challenges in finding a cost-effective way of growing cells, but lab-grown protein could compete on cost with conventional animal production within 10 years. Singapore-based Shio Meats is already trying out its lab-grown shrimp in dumplings.

The other fast-developing area of innovation with potentially large implications for sustainability is increasing use of biological means to manufacture materials, chemicals and energy.

The potential is enormous. As much as 60 percent of the worlds physical inputs are already biological (think wood or animals reared for food) or nonbiological (such as plastics, cement and aviation fuels) but that could be produced, or substituted for, using biology.

Fermentation, for centuries used to make bread and brew beer, is being used to create fabrics such as artificial spider silk. One cosmetics company is selling skincare products using moisturizing oil squalene made from genetically engineered yeast rather than processing liver oil from endangered deep-sea sharks. Leather is being made from mushroom roots instead of animal hide.

Biotech company Zymergen is creating renewable biomaterials for optical films used in displays; hard, scratch-proof coatings; and flexible electronics circuits. Nylon, for instance, is already being made using genetically engineered yeast instead of petrochemicals.

Some companies are using genetically engineered microbes to create biofuels for the aviation and marine industries. One startup is using microorganisms to create an alternative to traditional cement that produces far fewer carbon emissions during its manufacture.

In Norway, cruise ship and ferry company Hurtigruten is planning to power its ships by processing fish waste from the fishing and animal-feed industries into a liquid oil. However, while some of these innovations have come to market, a major challenge is competing on cost with products made the traditional way.

There are also new possibilities for carbon capture given widespread deforestation. Reforesting and less human land use has to be the answer, but biological innovations also can help.

For instance, genetically engineered plants potentially can store more carbon dioxide for longer periods than their natural counterparts Algae have a carbon-dioxide fixation efficiency of up to 50 times higher than terrestrial plants.

For now, healthcare is the most advanced strand of the Biological Revolution. But the next frontier is innovations that reduce the human footprint on the natural world. There are many challenges ahead, but also huge promise.

More:
A bio revolution to heal the natural world | Greenbiz - GreenBiz

The recent exchanges on Ethiopias acceptance of genetically modified (GM) crops and the resulting report of USDA praising the steps our country has taken continue to be informative. My understanding of the debates surrounding GM foods suggests that neat explanations about their usefulness grossly disregard the muddy footprints and messy stories of the technology while the voices of vilification and blanket rejection tend to thrive more on emotional appeal than rigorous science. Lets start with the basics.The 21st century is said to be the century of biology and ecology. Thus, for Ethiopia, as one of the globes top 50 centers of biodiversity, where better to capitalize on than in understanding and developing its crop and animal varieties and fulfill its long-held potential of being Africas breadbasket. Ethiopia is one of the few centers where domestication of crops was practiced at the dawn of agriculture and the country has contributed to the worlds collection of cultivable species such crops as Teff, coffee, enset, sorghum, millet, etc. It means that our farmers are not new to the genetic modification of organisms since every domestication effort involves selective breeding and recombination of desired characteristics. We also have adopted several foreign plant species (maize, wheat, barley, tomatoes, potatoes, pepper, etc.) some of them only a few centuries ago, without much consideration for their effects on our indigenous species.Despite these impressive records, our agricultural system stayed firmly rooted in its ancient practices which suffer from abysmal efficiency and very poor productivity. As a result, Ethiopia remains a net importer of crops both for human consumption and for its expanding industries, and there seems to be no natural end to this depressing trend. The consequence is not only a shrinking of profit base for many of the industries but also the misplaced use of the meager hard currency obtained from the export of some raw materials with all the negative impacts on our capacity in importing more useful technologies.

Ironically, Ethiopia has no shortage of cultivable/irrigable land or population able or willing to participate in modern agricultural practices. In fact, Ethiopias farming community is estimated to be above 80% of the population but is unable to feed itself properly let alone supply raw materials for the manufacturing sector. The production by small scale farmers in Ethiopia is demonstrably incapable of keeping pace with the population growth as tens of millions of our people still depend on food handouts every single year and many more live in precarious situations. Therefore, it is pertinent that the country becomes self-sufficient at least for feeding the population with all possible means. And, this is not a very hard task given the scale of its cultivable land and the disproportionately large population whose livelihood is dependent on farming.The most relevant question is thus how to end this absurdity and persistent tragedy without drastically affecting the livelihood of our farmers and disrupting the biodiversity balance. For a very long period of time, Ethiopia lacked the capacity to introduce mechanized farming and other relevant agricultural technologies. Further, it lagged far behind many (African) countries in developing its policies and relevant practices with regard to the application of plant genetic engineering technology. Arguably the most unhelpful effort on part of the Ethiopian government in the last decade has been the introduction of the Biosafety Proclamation No. 655/2009. It is possible that this proclamation was enacted as a genuine effort to protect the local farmers and the countrys agriculture sector from control by a few foreign biotech industries and create a formidable safeguard against potential fallouts from untended consequences of releasing GM crops. However, it is clear from the outset that the proclamation lacked proper scrutiny by all the relevant stakeholders, not least farmers representatives or experts from agricultural research centers in the country. In addition, it failed to recognize the potential of local agro-biotechnology research and innovation and was oblivious to the rapidly changing focus of the debate and policy shifts surrounding this emerging technology from around the world. Thus, our Biosafety Proclamation No. 655/2009 was, by international standards, relatively outdated as soon as it was hastily passed by the parliament (hence the justification for a later amendment as Proclamation No. 896/2015).It is unclear why modern GM organisms are so divisive and treated as highly toxic materials that should be feared and avoided at all costs. Rigorous analysis done by scientific institutions such as the UK Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has demonstrated that such organisms are at least as safe as their counterparts produced by conventional breeding techniques. For example, the GM cotton that Ethiopia is said to have started cultivating is the widely known Bt variety. In short, Bt is abbreviated from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium species that naturally occurs in soil and produces highly specific insecticidal proteins. This bacterium has been in use, in one form or another, as the most effective, naturally occurring, and environmentally friendly bioinsecticide for more than half-century. Bt spray is currently the dominant bioinsecticide in the world and is authorized for use even by organic farmers worldwide. Therefore, we are talking about a well-characterized gene of a bacterium (which might as well be dwelling in our soils all along). Plants expressing this gene have been tested for more than two decades in several countries and in a wide range of ecological settings for the properties they have been designed for, with no confirmed case of ill effect as food or feed.I suspect that Ethiopia has been misled or pressured into adopting an overly cautious interpretation of the precautionary principle as was the case in the past in some EU countries. In my opinion, the EU and its policies on GM products (even as progressive as they currently are) cannot be a good lead for Ethiopia. For one, farming practices in the EU are already highly productive even without the need for the introduction of GM. In addition, the sheer proportion of the population involved in the agricultural sector in Ethiopia means that unreasonable restrictions on agricultural biotechnology can have far-reaching consequences. For Ethiopia, the better place to look for inspiration is other developing countries around the world in Latin America, Asia, and in the continent of Africa itself for our capacities and needs are likely to be similar.

India, for example, started commercial farming of Bt-cotton in 2002 and at the moment, about 25% of its agricultural land is covered with this variety, the highest proportion in the world. In our continent, South Africa is the pioneer in providing permits for the commercial cultivation of GM crops for GM cotton and maize starting in 1997. Egypt has been commercially farming Bt-maize hybrid since 2008, using seeds procured from South Africa (it has since suspended the cultivation due to the lack of proper biosafety laws and other local issues). Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and, our neighboring countries, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique have all tested and/or adopted the cultivation of GM crops. Furthermore, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda are pursuing various genetic modifications to the cassava plant, a staple crop for over half a billion people around the world. It is disingenuous, to say the least, to assert that all of these countries are either threatened or duped into accepting this technology to the detriment of the wellbeing of their population and ecosystems.Ethiopia, on the other hand, despite having several, experienced agricultural research institutions, is missing out for far too long on the development of its genetic research capacity and utilization of available biotechnologies, especially as compared to many of these African countries. As a commenta
ry on this site made it clear, the Ethiopian team negotiating the Cartagena Protocol, led by Dr. Tewolde-Birhan Gebre-Egziabher, played a key role in formulating a strong African position and had become the continents de-facto representative. This had been appreciated and acknowledged by several African countries at that time. Whether this fact can make Ethiopia assume a Pan-Africanist leadership position in the environmental issues is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. What is important is the fact that the Cartagena Protocol aims mainly to provide an adequate level of protection to worldwide biodiversity by placing a stringent control on the transboundary movement, transit, handling and use of all living modified organisms that may have adverse effects on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. What it is not is an outright ban on the development, test or use of GM organisms for food or feed. In addition, several of the major African countries have since moved on and have come to realize that application GM crops, transgenic technology, and genetic engineering know-how could have a transformative effect on parts their economies provided that these are supported by a strong monitoring regimen. As a result, and contrary to its supposed pan-African leadership, Ethiopia is currently an outlier in the continent when it comes to the exploration of this powerful technology that can potentially transform the living standards of millions of people. Many of the countries that are said to be hesitant in accepting this agricultural biotechnology lack either the capacity to adapt and manage it or the actual need for a rapid transformation of their agricultural practices (they are either food self-sufficient or have no industrial base to supply to or both). In other words, we may as well have once been the continents leading voice against GM organisms but it has become apparent that we are leading the wrong league and it is not where we belong it is unbecoming to our great nation.What Ethiopia urgently needs is a dynamic regulatory system and strong scientific capacity for the evaluation, authorization, and monitoring of imported GM crops. It also needs to rebuild and expand its capability for fundamental research with the aim of developing local GM species using state-of-the-art methodology. Public-private biotechnology partnerships should be encouraged to work on genetic identification and improvements even in our own indigenous species of plants and animals. Furthermore, since we are negotiating for accession to the World Trade Organization, it is the most relevant time to substantially revise or repeal the Biosafety Proclamation No. 655/2009 (including its latest incarnation, Proclamation No. 896/2015) and streamline other relevant laws in accordance with international standards.

To this writer, the question is not to be why Ethiopia allowed the commercial cultivation of Bt-cotton and has authorized a confined field trial of Bt-maize. It is whether it had conducted a thorough analysis of the existing problems in the sector and identified the effectiveness of these particular strains of GM crops as cost-effective and sustainable solutions. It is not a case of re-inventing the wheel but of identifying our desirable targets and requirements, learning from the front-runners, and applying an appropriate level of precautionary principles. The temporary setbacks in Burkina Faso, Africas largest producer of cotton at one point, and some regions in India demonstrate that the process of introducing GM crops is far from being a turn-key situation. It requires the collaboration of laboratory scientists, policymakers, market leaders, and farmers (end-users) in identifying the required crop characteristic and quality that is suitable for the specific condition of the locality.In conclusion, agricultural gene-modification technology has sufficiently demonstrated its worth after more than two decades of commercial application and this is reflected in its widespread global adoption.Therefore, the excessive hesitance of its acceptance by Ethiopia and campaigners that support this stance is unjustifiable either socially, economically, or more importantly, scientifically.

Main Image: Children at a farm in Hawzen, Tigray region. Ethiopia Observer file.

This article is published under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Please cite Ethiopia Observer prominently and link clearly to the original article if you republish. If you have any queries, please contact us at ethiopiaobserver@protonmail.com. Check individual images for licensing details.

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Why Ethiopia needs to embrace gene-modification technology - ethiopiaobserver.com

Takeaways

Scientists have made progress growing human liver in the lab.

The challenge has been to direct stems cells to grow into a mature, functioning adult organ.

This study shows that stem cells can be programmed, using genetic engineering, to grow from immature cells into mature tissue.

When a tiny lab-grown liver was transplanted into mice with liver disease, it extended the lives of the sick animals.

Imagine if researchers could program stem cells, which have the potential to grow into all cell types in the body, so that they could generate an entire human organ. This would allow scientists to manufacture tissues for testing drugs and reduce the demand for transplant organs by having new ones grown directly from a patients cells.

Im a researcher working in this new field called synthetic biology focused on creating new biological parts and redesigning existing biological systems. In a new paper, my colleagues and I showed progress in one of the key challenges with lab-grown organs figuring out the genes necessary to produce the variety of mature cells needed to construct a functioning liver.

Induced pluripotent stem cells, a subgroup of stem cells, are capable of producing cells that can build entire organs in the human body. But they can do this job only if they receive the right quantity of growth signals at the right time from their environment. If this happens, they eventually give rise to different cell types that can assemble and mature in the form of human organs and tissues.

The tissues researchers generate from pluripotent stem cells can provide a unique source for personalized medicine from transplantation to novel drug discovery.

But unfortunately, synthetic tissues from stem cells are not always suitable for transplant or drug testing because they contain unwanted cells from other tissues, or lack the tissue maturity and a complete network of blood vessels necessary for bringing oxygen and nutrients needed to nurture an organ. That is why having a framework to assess whether these lab-grown cells and tissues are doing their job, and how to make them more like human organs, is critical.

Inspired by this challenge, I was determined to establish a synthetic biology method to read and write, or program, tissue development. I am trying to do this using the genetic language of stem cells, similar to what is used by nature to form human organs.

I am a researcher specializing in synthetic biology and biological engineering at the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center and McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where the goals are to use engineering approaches to analyze and build novel biological systems and solve human health problems. My lab combines synthetic biology and regenerative medicine in a new field that strives to replace, regrow or repair diseased organs or tissues.

I chose to focus on growing new human livers because this organ is vital for controlling most levels of chemicals like proteins or sugar in the blood. The liver also breaks down harmful chemicals and metabolizes many drugs in our body. But the liver tissue is also vulnerable and can be damaged and destroyed by many diseases, such as hepatitis or fatty liver disease. There is a shortage of donor organs, which limits liver transplantation.

To make synthetic organs and tissues, scientists need to be able to control stem cells so that they can form into different types of cells, such as liver cells and blood vessel cells. The goal is to mature these stem cells into miniorgans, or organoids, containing blood vessels and the correct adult cell types that would be found in a natural organ.

One way to orchestrate maturation of synthetic tissues is to determine the list of genes needed to induce a group of stem cells to grow, mature and evolve into a complete and functioning organ. To derive this list I worked with Patrick Cahan and Samira Kiani to first use computational analysis to identify genes involved in transforming a group of stem cells into a mature functioning liver. Then our team led by two of my students Jeremy Velazquez and Ryan LeGraw used genetic engineering to alter specific genes we had identified and used them to help build and mature human liver tissues from stem cells.

The tissue is grown from a layer of genetically engineered stem cells in a petri dish. The function of genetic programs together with nutrients is to orchestrate formation of liver organoids over the course of 15 to 17 days.

I and my colleagues first compared the active genes in fetal liver organoids we had grown in the lab with those in adult human livers using a computational analysis to get a list of genes needed for driving fetal liver organoids to mature into adult organs.

We then used genetic engineering to tweak genes and the resulting proteins that the stem cells needed to mature further toward an adult liver. In the course of about 17 days we generated tiny several millimeters in width but more mature liver tissues with a range of cells typically found in livers in the third trimester of human pregnancies.

Like a mature human liver, these synthetic livers were able to store, synthesize and metabolize nutrients. Though our lab-grown livers were small, we are hopeful that we can scale them up in the future. While they share many similar features with adult livers, they arent perfect and our team still has work to do. For example, we still need to improve the capacity of the liver tissue to metabolize a variety of drugs. We also need to make it safer and more efficacious for eventual application in humans.

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Our study demonstrates the ability of these lab livers to mature and develop a functional network of blood vessels in just two and a half weeks. We believe this approach can pave the path for the manufacture of other organs with vasculature via genetic programming.

The liver organoids provide several key features of an adult human liver such as production of key blood proteins and regulation of bile a chemical important for digestion of food.

When we implanted the lab-grown liver tissues into mice suffering from liver disease, it increased the life span. We named our organoids designer organoids, as they are generated via a genetic design.

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Genetic engineering transformed stem cells into working mini-livers that extended the life of mice with liver disease - The Conversation US

How seriously does one take Dr Li-Meng Yan? And how seriously does one take the paper Unusual Features of the Sars-CoV2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of its Probable Synthetic Route, published by her and co-authors, under the aegis of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, New York, on September 14? As the title suggests, the paper claims the coronavirus was man-made, in a laboratory.

The paper was uploaded on open-source research repository Zenodo, run by CERN, and was reported by Hindustan Times on Wednesday (bit.ly/33uFyy4). It wasnt as widely reported as Dr Yans comments in Loose Women, a segment of a TV show hosted by a UK TV channel, on which she pretty much said the same thing, albeit without any of the scientific arguments -- unsubstantiated ones -- presented in the paper.

Heres what that paper claimed:

One, ZC45, a bat virus, or a closely related variant or mutant, bears a striking similarity with Sars-CoV2, as shown by genome sequencing, with a 94%-100% similarity of key viral proteins.

The spike protein of Sars-CoV2 is essentially a trimer (essentially three parts) each of which has an S1 and S2 part with a furin cleavage site at the boundary between the two. Other research has already established that the human cellular enzyme furin cleaves, or breaks, the S1 and S2 unit at the cleavage site, and that the S1 unit then attaches to the ACE receptor, another protein found on the surface of most human cells. This binding then facilitates the entry of the viral protein into human cells. The virus ability to bind with the receptor, and the presence of the cleavage site that responds to a cannon human enzyme, are the reasons Covid-19 is as infective as it is.

Click here for complete coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic

Both the furin cleavage site, and the binding ability of the spike protein with the ACE2 receptor arent natural, the paper argued.

In their preface to this scientific hypothesis, the authors also claim that the process of creating such a virus in a laboratory could take only six months. They ask for further research and investigation into the origin of the virus. Even if their hypothesis is subsequently proven erroneous, this is a recommendation that no can argue with the origin of the virus needs to be investigated, not so much to assign blame (although there will be some that too), but to prepare for the next virus and the next pandemic.

Dr Yan, currently in the US, where she fled to in late April, is a virologist who used to work at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, and who has for long claimed that China knew of the virus and the fact that human-to-human transmission of the infection was happening, long before it let on. Her claims on the virus being man-made are more recent.

Interestingly, a March paper in Nature titled The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov2, authored by Kristian G Andersen of Californias Scripps Research Institute, argued, again picking on the same two distinctive features of Sars-CoV2, that the virus was natural. The viral protein showed a high affinity to bind with the receptor, they said, but this interaction wasnt ideal or optimal. In plain English this meant that if anyone had set out to engineer the virus, they would have picked the ideal binding relation, not just another optimal one. The paper also said that there were other coronaviruses that had similar cleavage sites and that this wasnt unique to Sars-CoV2.

However, the two papers differ in one significant aspect. The one published in Nature said the genetic data irrefutably show that Sars-CoV2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone. Dr Yans said (again, without substantiation that) a genomic sequence analysis reveals that ZC45, or a closely related bat coronavirus, should be the backbone used for the creation of Sars-CoV2.

Also read|Over 5,000 Indians died in West, East Asian countries amid Covid-19 pandemic: Govt informs Parliament

Dr Yans claims are also being seen through a political lens, with scientists in the US pointing out that the two non-profits that published the paper were linked to Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser and former executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News, casting aspersions on the studys findings.

Clearly, only further research and investigation can shed light on the origin of the virus which has thus far infected 29,927,685 and killed 942,564 around the world. India ended Wednesday with 5,115,846 cases and 83,230 deaths.

But as Vivek Wadhwa, a columnist for this paper, a top technology thinker, and distinguished fellow at Harvard Law Schools Labor and Worklife Program, said in a recent article in Foreign Policy: If genetic engineering wasnt behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. Thats because, genetic engineering with all its potential for good and bad has become democratised, Wadhwa wrote.

Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them.

The rest is here:
Covid-19: What you need to know today - Hindustan Times

GMOs, short for genetically modified organisms, are subject to a lot of controversy.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), GMO seeds are used to plant over 90% of all maize (corn), cotton, and soy grown in the United States, which means that many of the foods you eat likely contain GMOs (1).

Although most notable organizations and research suggest that GMO foods are safe and sustainable, some people claim they may harm your health and the environment.

This article helps explain what GMOs are, provides a balanced explanation of their pros and cons, and gives guidance on how to identify GMO foods.

GMO, which stands for genetically modified organism, refers to any organism whose DNA has been modified using genetic engineering technology.

In the food industry, GMO crops have had genes added to them for various reasons, such as improving their growth, nutritional content, sustainability, pest resistance, and ease of farming (2).

While its possible to naturally give foods desirable traits through selective breeding, this process takes many generations. Also, breeders may struggle to determine which genetic change has led to a new trait.

Genetic modification significantly accelerates this process by using scientific techniques that give the plant the specific desired trait.

For example, one of the most common GMO crops is Bt corn, which is genetically modified to produce the insecticide Bt toxin. By making this toxin, the corn is able to resist pests, reducing the need for pesticides (3).

GMO crops are incredibly common in the United States, with at least 90% of soy, cotton, and corn being grown through genetic techniques (4).

In fact, its estimated that up to 80% of foods in supermarkets contain ingredients that come from genetically modified crops.

While GMO crops make farming much easier, there is some concern around their potential effect on the environment and their safety for human consumption specifically surrounding illnesses and allergies (5).

However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and USDA maintain that GMOs are safe for human and animal consumption (6).

GMOs are food items that have been made using genetic engineering techniques. They comprise 90% of soy, cotton, and corn grown in the United States and are deemed safe for human consumption.

GMO foods may offer several advantages to the grower and consumer.

For starters, many GMO crops have been genetically modified to express a gene that protects them against pests and insects.

For example, the Bt gene is commonly genetically engineered into crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans. It comes from a naturally occurring bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis.

This gene produces a protein that is toxic to several pests and insects, which gives the GMO plants a natural resistance. As such, the GMO crops dont need to be exposed to harmful pesticides as often (7).

In fact, an analysis of 147 studies from 2014 found that GMO technology has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37% and increased crop yields by 22% (8).

Other GMO crops have been modified with genes that help them survive stressful conditions, such as droughts, and resist diseases like blights, resulting in a higher yield for farmers (9, 10, 11).

Together, these factors help lower the costs for the farmers and consumers because it allows a greater crop yield and growth through harsher conditions.

Additionally, genetic modification can increase the nutritional value of foods. For example, rice high in beta carotene, also called golden rice, was developed to help prevent blindness in regions where local diets are chronically deficient in vitamin A (12).

Moreover, genetic modification may be used simply to enhance the flavor and appearance of foods, such as the non-browning apple (13).

In addition, current research suggests that GMO foods are safe for consumption (14).

GMO foods are easier and less costly for farmers to grow, which makes them cheaper for the consumer. GMO techniques may also enhance foods nutrients, flavor, and appearance.

Although current research suggests that GMO foods are safe, there is some concern around their long-term safety and environmental impact (14).

Here are some of the key concerns around GMO consumption.

There is some concern that GMO foods may trigger an allergic reaction.

This is because GMO foods contain foreign genes, so some people worry that they harbor genes from foods that may prompt an allergic reaction.

A study from the mid-1990s found that adding a protein from Brazil nuts to GMO soybeans could trigger an allergic reaction in people sensitive to Brazil nuts. However, after scientists discovered this, they quickly abandoned this GMO food (15).

Although allergy concerns are valid, there have been no reports of allergic reactions to GMO foods currently on the market.

According to the FDA, researchers who develop GMO foods run tests to ensure that allergens arent transferred from one food to another (16).

In addition, research has shown that GMO foods are no likelier to trigger allergies than their non-GMO counterparts (17).

Yet, if you have a soy allergy, both GMO and non-GMO soy products will prompt an allergic reaction.

Similarly, theres a common concern that GMO foods may aid the progression of cancers.

Because cancers are caused by DNA mutations, some people fear that eating foods with added genes may affect your DNA.

This worry may stem partly from an early mice study, which linked GMO intake to a higher risk of tumors and early death. However, this study was later retracted because it was poorly designed (18, 19, 20).

Currently, no human research ties GMO intake to cancers.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) has stated that theres no evidence to link GMO food intake to an increased or decreased risk of cancer (21).

All the same, no long-term human studies exist. Thus, more long-term human research is needed.

Although GMO crops are convenient for farmers, there are environmental concerns.

Most GMO crops are resistant to herbicides, such as Roundup. This means that farmers can use Roundup without fear of it harming their own crops.

However, a growing number of weeds have developed resistance to this herbicide over time. This has led to even more Roundup being sprayed on crops to kill the resistant weeds because they can affect the crop harvest (22, 23, 24).

Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate are subject to controversy because animal and test-tube studies have linked them to various diseases (25, 26, 27).

Still, a review of multiple studies concluded that the low amounts of glyphosate present on GMO foods are safe for human consumption (28).

GMO crops also allow for fewer pesticide applications, which is a positive for the environment.

That said, more long-term human research is necessary.

The main concerns around GMOs involve allergies, cancer, and environmental issues all of which may affect the consumer. While current research suggests few risks, more long-term research is needed.

Although GMO foods appear safe for consumption, some people wish to avoid them. Still, this is difficult since most foods in your supermarket are made with ingredients from GMO crops.

GMO crops grown and sold in the United States include corn, soybean, canola, sugar beet, alfalfa, cotton, potatoes, papaya, summer squash, and a few apple varieties (29).

In the United States, no regulations currently mandate the labeling of GMO foods.

Yet, as of January 2022, the USDA will require food manufacturers to label all foods containing GMO ingredients (6).

That said, the labels wont say GMO but instead the term bioengineered food. It will display either as the USDA bioengineered food symbol, listed on or near the ingredients, or as a scannable code on the package with directions, such as Scan
here for more information (6).

Presently, some foods may have a third-party Non-GMO project verified label, which indicates that the product contains no GMOs. However, this label is voluntary.

Its also worth noting that any food labeled 100% organic does not contain any GMO ingredients, because U.S. law prohibits this. However, if a product is simply labeled organic, it may contain some GMOs (30).

In the European Union (EU), foods with more than 0.9% GMO ingredients must list genetically modified or produced from genetically modified [name of food]. For foods without packaging, these words must be listed near the item, such as on the supermarket shelf (31).

Until the new regulations come into place in the United States, there is no clear way to tell if a food contains GMO ingredients.

However, you can try to avoid GMO foods by eating locally, as many small farms are unlikely to use GMO seeds. Alternatively, you can avoid foods that contain ingredients from the GMO crops listed above.

Until the 2022 USDA rule takes effect, its hard to determine which foods contain GMOs in the United States. You can avoid GMOs by limiting GMO ingredients, eating locally, looking for third-party non-GMO labels, or buying 100% organic.

GMOs are foods that have been modified using genetic techniques.

Most foods in your local supermarket contain GMO ingredients because theyre easier and more cost-effective for farmers, which makes them cheaper for the consumer.

In the United States, foods grown using GMO techniques include corn, soybean, canola, sugar beet, alfalfa, cotton, potatoes, papaya, summer squash, and a few varieties of apples.

Although current research suggests that GMO foods are safe for consumption, some people are concerned about their potential health effects. Due to a lack of long-term human studies, more research is needed.

In the United States, its currently not mandatory to label foods that contain GMOs. However, as of 2022, all foods that contain GMO ingredients must have the term bioengineered food somewhere on the packaging or a scannable code to show that it has GMO ingredients.

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GMOs: Pros and Cons, Backed by Evidence - Healthline

Its unlikely a coincidence that countries run by women have done far better controlling corona than countries run by men. Theyre less obsessed with being right and more focused on taking care of things (and people). Thats just basic biology: When women step out of the spotlight to assess what needs doing, they dont have to worry about losing their masculinity.

That said, among the impossible happenings last week was Dick Cheney launching the hashtag #RealMenWearMasks to coax guys with fragile egos to cover up. A whole industry has popped up to make masks macho enough for real men: whiskey bottle masks, Darth Vader masks, mustache masks. Seriously, this is a real thing.

Part of whats wrong with our vision of right, no doubt, is our bloated diet of advice books, columns, TV shows, videos, Instagram feeds. They school us in right way to be content, raise children, have sex, succeed, be a man. It goes without saying these generalities almost never apply to individual cases. Whats right for which man? Which kids? Succeed at what? Content with what?

Whats right is what works in any given space, time, context. Newtons laws of gravity are wrong if you want to explore a black hole, but can be right enough to get spacecraft around the solar system.

What matters is finding the right way to thrive in whatever world youre in.

Coronas environment is us, its all-too-welcoming hosts. Its found the right way to use us to get it where it wants to go.

What do we have that corona doesnt? Well, weve got science, weve got art, weve got fun.

Science tells us whats true, whats possible. Art reminds us of what it means to be human, what matters. Play lets us fool around with crazy ideas that might turn out to be brilliant. Between them, weve got tools for creating a sustainable equilibrium that preserves the best and discards the worst of our ideas for vaccines, for prevention, even policing.

Meanwhile, weve got families and friends we care about. Weve got orchestras playing for houseplants, ballerinas dancing at home with their dogs and cats, Zoom charades, cat videos, now even dancing Karen videos. Weve got magicians. Weve even got search tools that reveal exactly how Houdini made that elephant disappear.

Viruses mutate to survive, to take advantage of changing environments. Corona cant live without us. So it learns all about our lungs, our hearts, our behavior, our global health system, the better to spread and grow strong. In turn, it teaches us about ourselves.

Black people, in a weirdly analogous way, have been learning about white peoples worlds for centuriesin order to survive. Most white people havent felt the same need to learn about Black peoples worlds. So to some, scenes of brutality seemed to come almost out of the blue (pun intended)an elephant if there ever was one, trampling on people for realon their freedoms, yes, but also literally on their lives. What does that teach us about ourselves?

In the end, we must co-evolve. Like the spinning Earth, we roll along together, or not at all.

Trevor Noah recently said that if mutation is coronas secret weapon, then were going to have to mutate to fight back.

He concentrates, muttering to himself: Mutate! Mutate! Mutate!

A third eye appears on his forehead. He cant see it, of course, because its a part of himself.

He shrugs his shoulders. I guess nothing happened.

Maybe were already adapting and just dont know it.

Photographs: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images; Andrea Savorani Neri/Getty Images; Steve Pfost/Getty Images

More From WIRED on Covid-19

Go here to see the original:
Keeping Up With the Coronasor Why the Virus Is Winning - WIRED

Peers are preparing plans to legalise the gene-editing of crops in England, a move that scientists say would offer the nation a chance to develop and grow hardier, more nutritious varieties. The legislation would also open the door to gene-editing of animals.

The change will be proposed when the current Agriculture Bill reaches its committee stages in the House of Lords next month, and is supported by a wide number of peers who believe such a move is long overdue. At present, the practice is highly restricted by EU regulations.

The plan would involve introducing an amendment to the bill to give the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs the power to make changes to the Environmental Protection Act, alterations that would no longer restrict gene-editing in England. The rest of the UK would need separate legislation.

Gene-editing of plants and animals is controlled by the same strict European laws that govern genetically modified (GM) organisms. However, scientists say gene-editing is cheaper, faster, simpler, safer and more precise than GM technology.

As they point out, GM technology involves the transfer of entire genes or groups of genes from one species to another while the more recently developed techniques of gene-editing merely involve making slight changes to existing genes in a plant or animal and are considered to be just as safe as traditional plant breeding techniques.

Early benefits for UK agriculture could include gluten-free wheat, disease-resistant sugar beet and potatoes that are even healthier than those that we have now, said plant scientist Professor David Baulcombe of Cambridge University.

This enthusiasm is also shared by peers who have argued that the wide use of gene editing of crops could give the nation a key advantage in agriculture and in the food industry after Brexit.

Peers have argued gene editing could give the nation a key advantage after Brexit

I would like [to send] a clear message in this bill that we will move forward to allow gene editing in our research programmes, said Lord Cameron during last weeks reading of the bill. This is a way of speeding up the natural methods of farm breeding to ensure that we can improve the environmental and nutritional outcomes of feeding our ever-expanding human population.

And there was clear evidence that the government would also be sympathetic to such a move. On gene editing, the government agrees that the EU approach is unscientific, said Lord Gardiner, who was responding for the government.

By freeing gene-editing from the expensive restrictions imposed by the EU on the growing of GM plants it will also be possible for small and medium-sized enterprises to set up new projects, say supporters.

At present only major corporations can pay the costs of the rigorous trials required when growing GM plants. We are looking for a brighter, greener, more innovative future, and this bill helps farmers produce that, said Conservative peer Lord Dobbs last week.

Link:
Lords seek to allow gene-editing in UK 'to produce healthy, hardier crops' - The Guardian

Pirates or no pirates, the islands of the Caribbean were settled and resettled by at least three successive waves of colonists from the American mainland, according to a new study.

The examination of ancient DNA from 93 islanders who lived between 400 and 3200 years ago reveals a complex population history and ties to broader, inter-continental human expansions in both North and South America, according to an international research team.

The DNA evidence adds to the archaeological data and enables us to test specific hypotheses as to how the Caribbean was first settled, says Hannes Schroeder from Denmarks University of Copenhagen, a senior author on a paper in the journal Science.

The Caribbean was one of the last regions in the Americas to be settled. Archaeological evidence suggests the first residents arrived about 8000 years ago, and that 3000 years later humans were widely dispersed.

However, much of the settlement history has relied on interpretations from archaeological findings, such as the stylistic comparison of artefact collections between Caribbean sites and those from the surrounding mainland.

While these approaches have illuminated broad-scale population movements, many of the more nuanced aspects of Caribbean population history remain unknown.

To try to fill these gaps, a team led by Kathrin Ngele from Germanys Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History analysed the genomes of the 93 islanders using bone fragments excavated from 16 archaeological sites in Cuba, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe.

Due to the regions warm climate, the DNA were not very well preserved, but targeted enrichment techniques allow the researchers to extract new information.

This leads them to believe that there were at least three different population dispersals into the region: two earlier dispersals into the western Caribbean, one of which seems to be linked to earlier population dispersals in North America, and a third, more recent wave, which originated in South America.

And rather than a hinderance, it seems that the Caribbean Sea served as something of an aquatic motorway.

Big bodies of water are traditionally considered barriers for humans and ancient fisher hunter-gatherer communities are usually not perceived as great seafarers, says Ngele.

Our results continue to challenge that view, as they suggest there was repeated interaction between the islands and the mainland.

The researchers also report genetic differences between early settlers and newcomers from South America who, according to archaeological evidence, entered the region around 2800 years ago.

Although the different groups were present in the Caribbean at the same time, we found surprisingly little evidence of admixture between them, says Cosimo Posth, from the Max Planck Institute.

Continue reading here:
Human waves populated the Caribbean islands - Cosmos

Shown above are two different 3D views of TetX7 (green), a tetracycline-destroying enzyme that causes resistance to all tetracycline antibiotics (the small multicolored molecule in the center). Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that genes that confer the power to destroy tetracyclines are widespread in bacteria that live in the soil and on people. (Video: Timothy Wencewicz)

The latest generation of tetracyclines a class of powerful, first-line antibiotics was designed to thwart the two most common ways bacteria resist such drugs. But a new study from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that genes representing yet another method of resistance are widespread in bacteria that live in the soil and on people. Some of these genes confer the power to destroy all tetracyclines, including the latest generation of these antibiotics.

However, the researchers have created a chemical compound that shields tetracyclines from destruction. When the chemical compound was given in combination with tetracyclines as part of the new study, the antibiotics lethal effects were restored.

The findings, available online in Communications Biology, indicate an emerging threat to one of the most widely used classes of antibiotics but also a promising way to protect against that threat.

We first found tetracycline-destroying genes five years ago in harmless environmental bacteria, and we said at the time that there was a risk the genes could get into bacteria that cause disease, leading to infections that would be very difficult to treat, said co-senior authorGautam Dantas, professor of pathology and immunology and of molecular microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Once we started looking for these genes in clinical samples, we found them immediately. The fact that we were able to find them so rapidly tells me that these genes are more widespread than we thought. Its no longer a theoretical risk that this will be a problem in the clinic. Its already a problem.

In 2015, Dantas, also a professor of biomedical engineering, andTimothy Wencewicz, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, discovered 10 different genes that each gave bacteria the ability to dice up the toxic part of the tetracycline molecule, thereby inactivating the drug. These genes code for proteins the researchers dubbed tetracycline destructases.

But they didnt know how widespread such genes were. To find out, Dantas and first author Andrew Gasparrini then a graduate student in Dantas lab screened 53 soil, 176 human stool, two animal feces, and 13 latrine samples for genes similar to the 10 theyd already found. The survey yielded 69 additional possible tetracycline-destructase genes.

Then they cloned some of the genes intoE. colibacteria that had no resistance to tetracyclines and tested whether the genetically modified bacteria survived exposure to the drugs.E. colithat had received supposed destructase genes from soil bacteria inactivated some of the tetracyclines.E. colithat had received genes from bacteria associated with people destroyed all 11 tetracyclines.

The scary thing is that one of the tetracycline destructases we found in human-associated bacteria Tet(X7) may have evolved from an ancestral destructase in soil bacteria, but it has a broader range and enhanced efficiency, said Wencewicz, who is a co-senior author on the new study. Usually theres a trade-off between how broad an enzyme is and how efficient it is. But Tet(X7) manages to be broad and efficient, and thats a potentially deadly combination.

In the first screen, the researchers had found tetracycline-destructase genes only in bacteria not known to cause disease in people. To find out whether disease-causing species also carried such genes, the scientists scanned the genetic sequences of clinical samples Dantas had collected over the years. They found Tet(X7) in a bacterium that had caused a lung infection and sent a man to intensive care in Pakistan in 2016.

Tetracyclines have been around since the 1940s. They are one of the most widely used classes of antibiotics, used for diseases ranging from pneumonia, to skin or urinary tract infections, to stomach ulcers, as well as in agriculture and aquaculture. In recent decades, mounting antibiotic resistance has driven pharmaceutical companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a new generation of tetracyclines that is impervious to the two most common resistance strategies: expelling drugs from the bacterial cell before they can do harm, and fortifying vulnerable parts of the bacterial cell.

The emergence of a third method of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria could be disastrous for public health. To better understand how Tet(X7) works, co-senior author Niraj Tolia, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, and co-author Hirdesh Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher in Tolias lab, solved the structure of the protein.

I established that Tet(X7) is very similar to known structures but way more active, and we dont really know why because the part that interacts with the tetracycline rings is the same, Kumar said. Im now taking a molecular dynamics approach so we can see the protein in action. If we can understand why it is so efficient, we can design even better inhibitors.

Wencewicz and colleagues previouslydesigned a chemical compoundthat preserves the potency of tetracyclines by preventing destructases from chewing up the antibiotics. In the most recent study, co-author Jana L. Markley, a postdoctoral researcher in Wencewiczs lab, evaluated that inhibitor against the bacterium from the patient in Pakistan and its powerful Tet(X7) destructase. Adding the compound made the bacteria two to four times more sensitive to all three of the latest generation of tetracyclines.

Our team has a motto extending the wise words of Benjamin Franklin: In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and antibiotic resistance, Wencewicz said. Antibiotic resistance is going to happen. We need to get ahead of it and design inhibitors now to protect our antibiotics, because if we wait until it becomes a crisis, its too late.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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Antibiotic-destroying genes widespread in bacteria in soil and on people | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis - Washington University in...

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A gene is the basic physical and function unity of heredity. Genetic engineering is the changing the structure of the genes of a living things in order to make it healthier, stronger and more useful to human. Changing DNA in cell is to understand their biology. Genetic engineering are currently used in both animal and plant cells this modifications are helps to improve performance of cell.

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Is there now a way to genetically engineer crops to create food that people can confidently consider natural?

Gene-editing technology sounds like it might offer this possibility. By altering an organisms genetic material, or genome, without introducing genes from other species, advocates of genome editing argue the technique can sidestep most of the difficult ethical and regulatory challenges plaguing organisms with added transgenes, which are genes from other species. Some even argue these cisgenic products are natural enough to count as organic.

As ethicists specializing in how technology alters human-nature relations, we can understand why advocates see the ethics this way. If crossing species lines is the measure of whether a technique counts as natural or not, then genome editing appears to have the potential to pass a naturalness test.

Genome editing, its boosters say, can make changes that look almost evolutionary. Arguably, these changes could have happened by themselves through the natural course of events, if anyone had the patience to wait for them. Conventional breeding for potatoes resistant to late blight is theoretically possible, for example, but it would take a lot of time.

Although we understand the potential advantages of speed, we dont think an ethics hinging on the idea of cisgenesis is adequate. We propose a better ethical lens to use in its place.

Our work is part of a four-year projectfunded by the Norwegian Research Council scrutinizing how gene editing could change how we think about food. The work brings together researchers from universities and scientific institutes in Norway, the U.K. and the U.S. to compare a range of techniques for producing useful new crops.

Our project is not focused on the safety of the crops under development, something that obviously requires concerted scientific investigation of its own. Although the safety of humans and the health of the environment is ethically crucial when developing new foods, other ethical issues must also be considered.

To see this, consider how objections against genetically modified organisms go far beyond safety. Ethical issues around food sovereignty range broadly across farmer choice, excess corporate power, economic security and other concerns. Ethical acceptability requires a much higher bar than safety alone.

Although we believe gene editing may have promise for addressing the agricultural challenges caused by rising global populations, climate change and the overuse of chemical pesticides, we dont think an ethical analysis based entirely on crossing species lines and naturalness is adequate.

It is already clear that arguing gene-edited food is ethical based on species lines has not satisfied all of gene editings critics. As Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular biologist cautious about gene editing, has said, Whether or not the DNA sequences come from closely related species is irrelevant, the process of genetic engineering is the same, involving the same risks and unpredictabilities, as with transgenesis.

Comments of this kind suggest talking about species lines is an unreliable guide. Species and subspecies boundaries are notoriously infirm. Charles Darwin himself conceded in Origin of Species, I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.

The 2005 edition of the Mammal Species of the World demonstrated this arbitrariness by collapsing all 12 subspecies of American cougars down to one Puma concolor cougar overnight. In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force revised the Felidae family again.

If species lines are not clear, claiming naturalness based on not crossing species lines is, in our view, a shaky guide. The lack of clarity matters because a premature ethical green light could mean a premature regulatory green light, with broad implications for both agricultural producers and consumers.

We think a more reliable ethical measure is to ask about how a technique for crop breeding interferes with the integrity of the organism being altered.

The term integrity already has application in environmental ethics, ecology, cell biology, interhuman ethics, organic agriculture and genetics.

A unifying theme in all these domains is that integrity points toward some kind of functional wholeness of an organism, a cell, a genome or an ecological system. The idea of maintaining integrity tracks a central intuition about being cautious before interfering too much with living systems and their components.

The integrity lens makes it clear why the ethics of gene editing may not be radically different from the ethics of genetic modification using transgenes. The cell wall is still penetrated by the gene-editing components. The genome of the organism is cut at a site chosen by the scientist, and a repair is initiated which (it is hoped) will result in a desired change to the organism. When it comes to the techniques involved with gene editing a crop or other food for a desired trait, integrity is compromised at several levels and none has anything to do with crossing species lines. The integrity lens makes it clear the ethics is not resolved by debating naturalness or species boundaries.

Negotiation of each others integrity is a necessary part of human-to-human relations. Adopted as an ethical practice in the field of biotechnology, it might provide a better guide in attempts to accommodate different ethical, ecological and cultural priorities in policymaking. An ethic with a central place for discussion of integrity promises a framework that is both more flexible and discerning.

As new breeding techniques create new ethical debates over food, we think the ethical toolbox needs updating. Talking about crossing species lines simply isnt enough. If Darwin had known about gene editing, we think he would have agreed.

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Read more:
Ethicists: We need more flexible tools for evaluating gene-edited food - The Conversation US

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Growing up in a village

I was born in a Greek village where land and food self-sufficiency were everything. My father had a few strips of land where he raised enough food for his family and the family of his brother who lost his life during the war years of the 1940s. My father cultivated wheat, barley, lentils, vine grapes for wine, and olive trees for oil.

Animals made our lives possible and easier. We had a mule, a donkey, goats, sheep, chickens, dogs and cats.

I learned to respect and love these animals. I could not conceive life without them.

My most interesting agrarian memory comes from our harvesting of grapes during the heat of Summer in late August. My sisters and cousins would fill wicker baskets with ripe bunches of white, blue and red grapes, load them on the donkey, and my younger cousin, George, and I would take them home. We would unload the baskets and pour the grapes into the linos, a rectangular stone and cement enclosure a meter high with a cement bottom. One of the stone walls of the linos had a hole that allowed the liquid wine to drain to a small cement pit below.

After filling the linos with the ripe and tasty fruits of Dionysos, George and I washed our legs and entered the soft hills of grapes, which we treaded to pulp while laughing and having fun.

In America

At age eighteen I left the village for America where I discovered the beauty and pleasures of Greek civilization and much, much more. This happened slowly.

Like other young Greeks and most foreign students from many countries, I saw America as a land of opportunity for those with technical knowledge and skills. This pushed my love for the Greek classics to the back recesses of my mind. In 1961, when I arrived in America, I simply wanted some education that would enable me to earn a good living. I had a vague notion of a good life.

However, my education in zoology and Greek history and the history of science and my work on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency brought me face to face with modernity and I did not like it. I could not stand looking at skyscrapers and cringed at seeing gigantic tractors crushing the land. I had the feeling I had to turn to classical thought. If I were to survive the hubris and crimes of technicians armed to the teeth, I would have to have the support of my ancestors.

I read Pythagorean writings with great interest. Pythagoras was a sixth century BCE philosopher of heavens and Earth. He said number was the constituent of everything in the cosmos. He thought music and songs had a healing and educational effect, invigorating humans with inner harmony. He even said he heard the music of the spherical planets moving around the Sun, which he equated to a large fire at the center of the cosmos. He called that firethe House of Zeus. He was in love with animals and life. He was against destroying or eating any living thing, animals in particular. He was certain there was a brotherhood between humans and animals. He urged the Greeks to stop eating meat and never sacrifice animals to the gods.

I read Xenophon, an Athenian military man and historian who flourished in the first half of fourth century BCE. I agreed with his theory and conviction that agriculture was a school for courage, freedom, military training, and the raising of food and civilization.

Then the fourth century BCE philosopher Aristotle came into my life like a breath of fresh air. In contrast to the dry and uninspiring classes I took while studying zoology at the University of Illinois, the writings of Aristotle brought me in touch with the roots of zoology. His works on animals, especially hisHistory of Animals,lifted me to heavens. They were insightful, riveting, enormously important, and pioneering. They explained to me the origins, complexity, and beauty of the animal kingdom, the perfection of nature, and the meaning and importance of the science of zoology, which Aristotle invented.

At work

I cannot say these Hellenic scientific and philosophical insights blended nicely with my life. After a couple of years on Capitol Hill, in 1979, I started working for the US Environmental Protection Agency. For the first time, I began to grasp what America was all about.

I was so embarrassed the United States had fallen so low: pretending its scientists at the EPA and other agencies like the US Department of Agriculture could employ science in the regulation of the abominable chemical weapons it called pesticides. Those deleterious chemicals kill more than unwanted insects and weeds. They kill all life. They should have never reached agriculture, a political, cultural and scientific process of raising food and civilization.

I was confused, and not a little concerned about this gigantic country I had chosen as my second home.

Decoding scientific research

Unable to influence or change policy, I turned to research and writing. Scientists often publish important work. But to protect themselves, they garble their stories and publish them in obscure journals read by few people.

I tracked down dozens of those stories, which I decoded and merged with the highlights of the stories I heard from my EPA colleagues, who also gave me their memos and briefings. In addition, I met a few outstanding scientists who answered my questions: about pesticides, agriculture, animal farms, water, endangered species, biodiversity, politics. They worked for universities or the federal departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

Out of this chronic investigation, the picture that emerged was disturbing and just as deleterious as that about pesticides.

The plight of animals

The industrialization of agriculture started in late nineteenth century. Machines replaced animals in the cultivation of the land and the irrigation and harvesting of crops. The size of the farms expanded without limits. Stone and wooden fences between farms became obsolete. The new mechanized farm surpassed the slave-run plantation. Almost nothing could stand on its way, least of all animals.

The factory farm, sometimes described as meat processing operation, put domesticated animals in the maws of machine feeding, slaughter, and sales to the insatiable appetites of meat-eating humans the industry calls consumers. Armies of academic and for profit corporate scientists issue false claims that confuse the public by legitimizing the inhuman treatment of animals.

Most of these agribusiness scientists teach and do research and extension at land-grant universities funded by the federal and state governments and industry. They are a parody of the original agricultural colleges founded by theMorrill Act of 1862.

Congressman Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont introduced the land grant college bill and President Abraham Lincoln signed it. Morrill and Lincoln inspired that great innovation to help family farmers. Now these 76 schools have become thebrains of agribusiness, thinking and inventing all the gadgetry and machinery and chemicals fueling Americas gigantic farms and agribusiness.

Land-grant universities designed animal farms. It does not bother them that it is wrong treating animals like inanimate things good only for eating.

Animals are living beings. They have feelings of enjoyment and fear. Those who have pet dogs and cats see their pets like their children. I have had dogs all my life. They are my best friends. I speak to them in Greek and English. They look at me straight in the eyes and shake their tales. I saw once a few days old calf in a farm at the Central Valley of California. It had tags on both ears. It turned and looked at me, his big eyes telling me of its horrible fate, taken away from its mother and expecting slaughter soon, so the farmer might sell veal.

At another time, in a visit to China, I saw a white bull in absolute terror written all over its eyes.

Animals probably coevolved with humans and, for millennia, were indispensable to human survival and civilizat
ion.

With some exceptions, most people have been eating domesticated and wild animals for millennia. However, the difference between traditional people and modern people eating animals is fundamental.

Traditional people ate animals because they often had to. Those living in mountainous regions with limited access to fishing or growing fruits and vegetables, relied on sheep and goats. Ancient Greeks, for example, ate primarily wheat and barley bread, cheese, olive oil, fruits and vegetables, and every so often they ate the meat of sheep and goats and even sacrificed them to their gods.

In contrast, modern animal farms completely dissolve any contacts people have had with animals or the natural world. They make animals dead meat through mechanical slaughter. Ordering a hamburger is no different from ordering French fries. Both have been made commodities of a cruel factory.

Mechanizing the slaughter of animals is the last straw of human violence against animals. It dehumanizes the relationship of people with animals. It undermines the philosophical and biological connections humans have had with the natural world.

Gaming the system

In practical political terms, the brutal treatment of animals has been increasing corruption among farmers, ranchers, butchers, and consumers. Large farmers / ranchers game the system. Their money power trumps our meager protection of human health and that of the natural world: laws defining and protecting organic food, meaning food raised without synthetic chemicals and without the genetic engineering of crops; laws designed to prevent pollution of the water we drink and laws protecting endanger species.

Large ranchers / meat companies are monopolizing the slaughtering of animals, forcing out of business smaller companies competing with them. In 1986, thelargest 4 poultry processing companiescontrolled 35 percent of the market. In 2015, they slaughtered 51 percent of the countryspoultry.

With the virus plague all over the country and in the slaughtering plants, and with the non-existent regulatory regime of the Trump administration,meat monopoliesendanger workers, farmers and those eating meat.

Meat monopolies are also taking over a large part of the slaughter of grass-fed animals. Which is to say, they occupy a significant niche in organic food production, pretending their organic brand shows a concern for human health and the environment.

The risks and effects of animal farms

Large farmers /ranchers, and slaughter companies put cattle, pigs, and chickens and turkeys by the hundreds and thousands next to each other in confined spaces. According to PETA, an animal welfare organization, factory farm animals are flooding the country with huge amounts of toxic and pathogenicwaste:

Animals on factory farms generate many times the amount of excrement produced by the entire U.S. population, and this waste pollutes the air we breathe and the water we drink. Every second, our nations factory farms create roughly 89,000 pounds of waste, which contains highly concentrated chemical and bacterial toxinsall without the benefit of waste-treatment systems.

At about 2010, theCenters for Disease Control and Preventionissued a study that justifies the concerns of PETA. The study concluded: Concentrated animal feeding operations [CAFOs] or large industrial animal farms can cause a myriad of environmental and public health problems.

The study reported that even the air close to CAFOs is unhealthy:

The most typical pollutants found in air surrounding CAFOs are ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and particulate matter, all of which have varying human health risks.

These risks are serious. The CDC study summarized the health effects of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and particulate matter in the air:

The CDC report also listed some of the pathogens found in the enormous amounts of manure in the CAFOs:

Sources of infection from pathogens include fecal-oral transmission, inhalation, drinking water, or incidental water consumption during recreational water activities.The potential for transfer of pathogens among animals is higher in confinement, as there are more animals in a smaller amount of space.Healthy or asymptomatic animals may carry microbial agents that can infect humans, who can then spread that infection throughout a community, before the infection is discovered among animals. (emphasis mine)

For us, in 2020, living through the corona virus plague, these results are terrifying. The sources for the pandemic are all over the United States, in thousands upon thousands of CAFOs. Yet, the US government has been turning a blind eye, allowing these festering disease factories to go on.

Despite the grave risks to both animals and people, the owners of these large animal feeding operations refuse to shut them down, much less face the responsibility for the colossal and toxic and pathogenic wastes of their factories. They pour all those rivers of filth and plague into lagoons.

The stench from those wastes is powerful enough to make life unbearable to powerless and, usually, minority communities neighboring animal farms. This is especially blatant in east North Carolina where blacks live not far from millions of pigs confined for feeding and slaughter in giantindustrial hog farms.

CAFOs are equally dangerous to wildlife. Their waste lagoons become death lakes for flying and migrating birds. In addition, during storms, waste lagoons overflow into creeks, rivers and ground water aquifers harming both wildlife and humans.

To prevent plagues among thousands of caged animals and plagues from escaping animal farms, agribusiness workers add antibiotics and hormones to the pesticide-rich and genetically engineered feed animals eat. This guarantees the consumers of those animals also eat meat rich in antibiotics, pesticides, hormones and genetically engineered crops and potentially pathogenic diseases.

The other significant consequences of mass slaughter of animals is water pollution and the gases these animals emit into the atmosphere.

Manure gives off methane and nitrous oxide, which, respectively, are 23 and 300 times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. These emissions from manure have been affecting climate change in a significant degree.

According to theHumane Society, the countrys largest animal protection organization, There is no question that the meat, egg, and dairy industries contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Thesociety encourages each individual to take important, daily steps to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change:

Stop eating meat

For these reasons (ethical, political, environmental and existential), vegetarianism is more timely and important now than ever before.

Stop eating meat. Stop being a consumer cannibalizing other living creatures. That way, you send an unmistakable message to careless administrations, like the hazardous administration of Trump, corporate exploiters, meat monopolists and profiteers and eaters of animals. You tell those unethical and violent business and political guys that you are not going to continue supporting their hazardous business.

Second, abandoning meat means you help our chances of surviving the colossal climate change around the corner.

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The Virtues of Not Eating Animals - CounterPunch

She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

Midnight Robber (2000) is about a woman, divided. Raised on the high-tech utopian planet of Touissant, Tan-Tan grows up on a planet populated by the descendants of a Caribbean diaspora, where all labor is performed by an all-seeing AI. But when she is exiled to Touissants parallel universe twin planet, the no-tech New Half-Way Tree, with her sexually abusive father, she becomes divided between good and evil Tan-Tans. To make herself and New Half-Way Tree whole, she adopts the persona of the legendary Robber Queen and becomes a legend herself. It is a wondrous blend of science fictional tropes and Caribbean mythology written in a Caribbean vernacular which vividly recalls the history of slavery and imperialism that shaped Touissant and its people, published at a time when diverse voices and perspectives within science fiction were blossoming.

Science fiction has long been dominated by white, Western perspectives. Vernes tech-forward adventures and Wells sociological allegories established two distinctive styles, but still centered on white imperialism and class struggle. Subsequent futures depicted in Verne-like pulp and Golden Age stories, where lone white heroes conquered evil powers or alien planets, mirrored colonialist history and the subjugation of non-white races. The civil rights era saw the incorporation of more Wellsian sociological concerns, and an increase in the number of non-white faces in the future, but they were often tokensparts of a dominant white monoculture. Important figures that presaged modern diversity included Star Treks Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. Nichols was the first black woman to play a non-servant character on TV; though her glorified secretary role frustrated Nichols, her presence was a political act, showing there was space for black people in the future.

Another key figure was the musician and poet Sun Ra, who laid the aesthetic foundation for what would become known as the Afrofuturist movement (the term coined by Mark Dery in a 1994 essay), which showed pride in black history and imagined the future through a black cultural lens. Within science fiction, the foundational work of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler painted realistic futures in which the histories and cultural differences of people of color had a place. Finally, an important modern figure in the decentralization of the dominant Western perspective is Nalo Hopkinson.

A similarly long-standing paradigm lies at the heart of biology, extending back to Darwins theoretical and Mendels practical frameworks for the evolution of genetic traits via natural selection. Our natures werent determined by experience, as Lamarck posited, but by genes. Therefore, genes determine our reproductive fitness, and if we can understand genes, we might take our futures into our own hands to better treat disease and ease human suffering. This theory was tragically over-applied, even by Darwin, who in Descent of Man (1871) conflated culture with biology, assuming the Wests conquest of indigenous cultures meant white people were genetically superior. After the Nazis committed genocide in the name of an all-white future, ideas and practices based in eugenics declined, as biological understanding of genes matured. The Central Dogma of the 60s maintained the idea of a mechanistic meaning of life, as advances in genetic engineering and the age of genomics enabled our greatest understanding yet of how genes and disease work. The last major barrier between us and our transhumanist future therefore involved understanding how genes determine cellular identity, and as well see, key figures in answering that question are stem cells.

***

Hopkinson was born December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her mother was a library technician and her father wrote, taught, and acted. Growing up, Hopkinson was immersed in the Caribbean literary scene, fed on a steady diet of theater, dance, readings, and visual arts exhibitions. She loved to readfrom folklore, to classical literature, to Kurt Vonnegutand loved science fiction, from Spock and Uhura on Star Trek, to Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Delany. Despite being surrounded by a vibrant writing community, it didnt occur to her to become a writer herself. What they were writing was poetry and mimetic fiction, Hopkinson said, whereas I was reading science fiction and fantasy. It wasnt until I was 16 and stumbled upon an anthology of stories written at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop that I realized there were places where you could be taught how to write fiction. Growing up, her family moved often, from Jamaica to Guyana to Trinidad and back, but in 1977, they moved to Toronto to get treatment for her fathers chronic kidney disease, and Hopkinson suddenly became a minority, thousands of miles from home.

Development can be described as an orderly alienation. In mammals, zygotes divide and subsets of cells become functionally specialized into, say, neurons or liver cells. Following the discovery of DNA as the genetic material in the 1950s, a question arose: did dividing cells retain all genes from the zygote, or were genes lost as it specialized? British embryologist John Gurdon addressed this question in a series of experiments in the 60s using frogs. Gurdon transplanted nuclei from varyingly differentiated cells into oocytes stripped of their genetic material to see if a new frog was made. He found the more differentiated a cell was, the lower the chance of success, but the successes confirmed that no genetic material was lost. Meanwhile, Canadian biologists Ernest McCulloch and James Till were transplanting bone marrow to treat irradiated mice when they noticed it caused lumps in the mices spleens, and the number of lumps correlated with the cellular dosage. Their lab subsequently demonstrated that each lump was a clonal colony from a single donor cell, and a subset of those cells was self-renewing and could form further colonies of any blood cell type. They had discovered hematopoietic stem cells. In 1981 the first embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from mice were successfully propagated in culture by British biologist Martin Evans, winning him the Nobel Prize in 2007. This breakthrough allowed biologists to alter genes in ESCs, then use Gurdons technique to create transgenic mice with that alteration in every cellcreating the first animal models of disease.

In 1982, one year after Evans discovery, Hopkinson graduated with honors from York University. She worked in the arts, as a library clerk, government culture research officer, and grants officer for the Toronto Arts Council, but wouldnt begin publishing her own fiction until she was 34. [I had been] politicized by feminist and Caribbean literature into valuing writing that spoke of particular cultural experiences of living under colonialism/patriarchy, and also of writing in ones own vernacular speech, Hopkinson said. In other words, I had models for strong fiction, and I knew intimately the body of work to which I would be responding. Then I discovered that Delany was a black man, which opened up a space for me in SF/F that I hadnt known I needed. She sought out more science fiction by black authors and found Butler, Charles Saunders, and Steven Barnes. Then the famous feminist science fiction author and editor Judy Merril offered an evening course in writing science fiction through a Toronto college, Hopkinson said. The course never ran, but it prompted me to write my first adult attempt at a science fiction story. Judy met once with the handful of us she would have accepted into the course and showed us how to run our own writing workshop without her. Hopkinsons dream of attending Clarion came true in 1995, with Delany as an instructor. Her early short stories channeled her love of myth and folklore, and her first book, written in Caribbean dialect, married Caribbean myth to the science fictional trappings of black marke
t organ harvesting. Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) follows a young single mother as shes torn between her ancestral culture and modern life in a post-economic collapse Toronto. It won the Aspect and Locus Awards for Best First Novel, and Hopkinson was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

In 1996, Dolly the Sheep was created using Gurdons technique to determine if mammalian cells also could revert to more a more primitive, pluripotent state. Widespread animal cloning attempts soon followed, (something Hopkinson used as a science fictional element in Brown Girl) but it was inefficient, and often produced abnormal animals. Ideas of human cloning captured the public imagination as stem cell research exploded onto the scene. One ready source for human ESC (hESC) materials was from embryos which would otherwise be destroyed following in vitro fertilization (IVF) but the U.S. passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibited federal funding of research that destroyed such embryos. Nevertheless, in 1998 Wisconsin researcher James Thomson, using private funding, successfully isolated and cultured hESCs. Soon after, researchers around the world figured out how to nudge cells down different lineages, with ideas that transplant rejection and genetic disease would soon become things of the past, sliding neatly into the hole that the failure of genetic engineering techniques had left behind. But another blow to the stem cell research community came in 2001, when President Bushs stem cell ban limited research in the U.S. to nineteen existing cell lines.

In the late 1990s, another piece of technology capturing the public imagination was the internet, which promised to bring the world together in unprecedented ways. One such way was through private listservs, the kind used by writer and academic Alondra Nelson to create a space for students and artists to explore Afrofuturist ideas about technology, space, freedom, culture and art with science fiction at the center. It was wonderful, Hopkinson said. It gave me a place to talk and debate with like-minded people about the conjunction of blackness and science fiction without being shouted down by white men or having to teach Racism 101. Connections create communities, which in turn create movements, and in 1999, Delanys essay, Racism and Science Fiction, prompted a call for more meaningful discussions around race in the SF community. In response, Hopkinson became a co-founder of the Carl Brandon society, which works to increase awareness and representation of people of color in the community.

Hopkinsons second novel, Robber, was a breakthrough success and was nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree Awards. She would also release Skin Folk (2001), a collection of stories in which mythical figures of West African and Afro-Caribbean culture walk among us, which would win the World Fantasy Award and was selected as one ofThe New York Times Best Books of the Year. Hopkinson also obtained masters degree in fiction writing (which helped alleviate U.S. border hassles when traveling for speaking engagements) during which she wrote The Salt Roads (2003). I knew it would take a level of research, focus and concentration I was struggling to maintain, Hopkinson said. I figured it would help to have a mentor to coach me through it. That turned out to be James Morrow, and he did so admirably. Roads is a masterful work of slipstream literary fantasy that follows the lives of women scattered through time, bound together by the salt uniting all black life. It was nominated for a Nebula and won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Hopkinson also edited anthologies centering around different cultures and perspectives, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), and So Long, Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004). She also came out with the award-winning novelThe New Moons Arms in 2007, in which a peri-menopausal woman in a fictional Caribbean town is confronted by her past and the changes she must make to keep her family in her life.

While the stem cell ban hamstrung hESC work, Gurdons research facilitated yet another scientific breakthrough. Researchers began untangling how gene expression changed as stem cells differentiated, and in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University reported the successful creation of mouse stem cells from differentiated cells. Using a list of 24 pluripotency-associated genes, Yamanaka systematically tested different gene combinations on terminally differentiated cells. He found four genesthereafter known as Yamanaka factorsthat could turn them into induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and he and Gurdon would share a 2012 Nobel prize. In 2009, President Obama lifted restrictions on hESC research, and the first clinical trial involving products made using stem cells happened that year. The first human trials using hESCs to treat spinal injuries happened in 2014, and the first iPSC clinical trials for blindness began this past December.

Hopkinson, too, encountered complications and delays at points in her career. For years, Hopkinson suffered escalating symptoms from fibromyalgia, a chronic disease that runs in her family, which interfered with her writing, causing Hopkinson and her partner to struggle with poverty and homelessness. But in 2011, Hopkinson applied to become a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. It seemed in many ways tailor-made for me, Hopkinson said. They specifically wanted a science fiction writer (unheard of in North American Creative Writing departments); they wanted someone with expertise working with a diverse range of people; they were willing to hire someone without a PhD, if their publications were sufficient; they were offering the security of tenure. She got the job, and thanks to a steady paycheck and the benefits of the mild California climate, she got back to writing. Her YA novel, The Chaos (2012), coming-of-age novelSister Mine (2013), and another short story collection, Falling in Love with Hominids (2015) soon followed. Her recent work includes House of Whispers (2018-present), a series in DC Comics Sandman Universe, the final collected volume of which is due out this June. Hopkinson also received an honorary doctorate in 2016 from Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., and was Guest of Honor at 2017 Worldcon, a year in which women and people of color dominated the historically white, male ballot.

While the Yamanaka factors meant that iPSCs became a standard lab technique, iPSCs are not identical to hESCs. Fascinatingly, two of these factors act together to maintain the silencing of large swaths of DNA. Back in the 1980s, researchers discovered that some regions of DNA are modified by small methyl groups, which can be passed down through cell division. Different cell types have different DNA methylation patterns, and their distribution is far from random; they accumulate in the promoter regions just upstream of genes where their on/off switches are, and the greater the number of methyl groups, the lesser the genes expression. Furthermore, epigenetic modifications, like methylation, can be laid down by our environments (via diet, or stress) which can also be passed down through generations. Even some diseases, like fibromyalgia, have recently been implicated as such an epigenetic disease. Turns out that the long-standing biological paradigm that rejected Lamarck also missed the bigger picture: Nature is, in fact, intimately informed by nurture and environment.

In the past 150 years, we have seen ideas of community grow and expand as the world became more connected, so that they now encompass the globe. The histories of science fiction and biology are full of stories of pioneers opening new doorsbe they doors of greater representation or greater understanding, or bothand others following. If evolution has taught us anything, its that nature abhors a monoculture, and the universe tends towards diversification; healthy communities are ones which understand that we are not apart from the world,
but of it, and that diversity of types, be they cells or perspectives, is a strength.

Kelly Lagor is a scientist by day and a science fiction writer by night. Her work has appeared at Tor.com and other places, and you can find her tweeting about all kinds of nonsense @klagor

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On the Origins of Modern Biology and the Fantastic: Part 19 Nalo Hopkinson and Stem Cell Research - tor.com

Octant, a company backed by Andreessen Horowitz just now unveiling itself publicly to the world, is using the tools of synthetic biology to buck the latest trends in drug discovery.

As the pharmaceuticals industry turns its attention to precision medicine the search for ever more tailored treatments for specific diseases using genetic engineering Octant is using the same technologies to engage in drug discovery and diagnostics on a mass scale.

The companys technology genetically engineers DNA to act as an identifier for the most common drug receptors inside the human genome. Basically, its creating QR codes that can flag and identify how different protein receptors in cells respond to chemicals. These are the biological sensors which help control everything from immune responses to the senses of sight and smell, the firing of neurons; even the release of hormones and communications between cells in the body are regulated.

Our discovery platform was designed to map and measure the interconnected relationships between chemicals, multiple drug receptor pathways and diseases, enabling us to engineer multi-targeted drugs in a more rational way, across a wide spectrum of targets, said Sri Kosuri, Octants co-founder and chief executive officer, in a statement.

Octants work is based on a technology first developed at the University of California Los Angeles by Kosuri and a team of researchers, which slashed the cost of making genetic sequences to $2 per gene from $50 to $100 per gene.

Our method gives any lab that wants the power to build its own DNA sequences, Kosuri said in a 2018 statement. This is the first time that, without a million dollars, an average lab can make 10,000 genes from scratch.

Joining Kosuri in launching Octant is Ramsey Homsany, a longtime friend of Kosuris, and a former executive at Google and Dropbox . Homsany happened to have a background in molecular biology from school, and when Kosuri would talk about the implications of the technology he developed, the two men knew they needed to for a company.

We use these new tools to know which bar code is going with which construct or genetic variant or pathway that were working with [and] all of that fits into a single well, said Kosuri. What you can do on top of that is small molecule screening we can do that with thousands of different wells at a time. So we can build these maps between chemicals and targets and pathways that are essential to drug development.

Before coming to UCLA, Kosuri had a long history with companies developing products based on synthetic biology on both the coasts. Through some initial work that hed done in the early days of the biofuel boom in 2007, Kosuri was connected with Flagship Ventures, and the imminent Harvard-based synthetic biologist George Church . He also served as a scientific advisor to Gen9, a company acquired by the multi-billion dollar synthetic biology powerhouse, Ginkgo Bioworks.

Some of the most valuable drugs in history work on complex sets of drug targets, which is why Octants focus on polypharmacology is so compelling, said Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Gingko Bioworks, and a member of the Octant board, in a statement. Octant is engineering a lot of luck and cost out of the drug discovery equation with its novel platform and unique big data biology insights, which will drive the companys internal development programs as well as potential partnerships.

The new technology arrives at a unique moment in the industry where pharmaceutical companies are moving to target treatments for diseases that are tied to specific mutations, rather than look at treatments for more common disease problems, said Homsany.

People are dropping common disease problems, he said. The biggest players are dropping these cases and it seems like that just didnt make sense to us. So we thought about how would a company take these new technologies and apply them in a way that could solve some of this.

One reason for the industrys turn away from the big diseases that affect large swaths of the population is that new therapies are emerging to treat these conditions which dont rely on drugs. While they wouldnt get into specifics, Octant co-founders are pursuing treatments for what Kosuri said were conditions in the metabolic space and in the neuropsychiatric space.

Helping them pursue those targets, since Octant is very much a drug development company, is $30 million in financing from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz .

Drug discovery remains a process of trial and error. Using its deep expertise in synthetic biology, the Octant team has engineered human cells that provide real-time, precise and complete readouts of the complex interactions and effects that drug molecules have within living cells, said Jorge Conde, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and member of the Octant board of directors. By querying biology at this unprecedented scale, Octant has the potential to systematically create exhaustive maps of drug targets and corresponding, novel treatments for our most intractable diseases.

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Emerging from stealth, Octant is bringing the tools of synthetic biology to large scale drug discovery - TechCrunch

If humanity is ever going to settle down on Mars, we may need to become a little less human.

Crewed missions to Mars, which NASA wants to start flying in the 2030s, will be tough on astronauts, exposing them to high radiation loads, bone-wasting microgravity and other hazards for several years at a time. But these pioneers should still be able to make it back to Earth in relatively good nick, agency officials have said.

It might be a different story for those who choose not to come home, however. If we want to stay safe and healthy while living permanently on Mars, or any other world beyond our home planet, we may need to make some tweaks to our species' basic blueprint, experts say.

Related: Space radiation threat to astronauts explained (infographic)

Genetic engineering and other advanced technologies "may need to come into play if people want to live and work and thrive, and establish their family, and stay on Mars," Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said on May 12 during a webinar hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences called "Alienating Mars: Challenges of Space Colonization."

"That's when these kinds of technologies might be critical or necessary," she said.

Genetic enhancement may not be restricted to the pages of sci-fi novels for much longer. For example, scientists have already inserted genes from tardigrades tiny, adorable and famously tough animals that can survive the vacuum of space into human cells in the laboratory. The engineered cells exhibited a greater resistance to radiation than their normal counterparts, said fellow webinar participant Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, the medical school of Cornell University in New York City.

NASA and other space agencies already take measures to protect their astronauts physically, via spacecraft shielding, and pharmacologically via a variety of medicines. So, it's not a huge conceptual leap to consider protecting them genetically as well, provided that these measures are proven to be safe, Mason said.

"And are we maybe ethically bound to do so?" he said during the webinar. "I think if it's a long enough mission, you might have to do something, assuming it's safe, which we can't say yet."

Tardigrades and "extremophile" microbes, such as the radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, "are a great, basically natural reservoir of amazing traits and talents in biology," added Mason, who has been studying the effects of long-term spaceflight on NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. (Kelly spent nearly a year aboard the International Space Station in 2015 and 2016.) "Maybe we use some of them."

Harnessing these traits might also someday allow astronauts to journey farther than Mars, out to some even more exotic and dangerous cosmic locales. For instance, a crewed journey to the Jupiter moon Europa, which harbors a huge ocean beneath its icy shell, is out of the question at the moment. In addition to being very cold, Europa lies in the heart of Jupiter's powerful radiation belts.

"If we ever get there, those are the cases where the human body would be almost completely fried by the amount of radiation," Mason said. "There, it would be certain death unless you did something, including every kind of shielding you could possibly provide."

Genetic engineering at least lets us consider the possibility of sending astronauts to Europa, which is widely regarded as one of the solar system's best bets to harbor alien life. (The Jovian satellite is a high priority for NASA's robotic program of planetary exploration. In the mid-2020s, the agency will launch a mission called Europa Clipper, which will assess the moon's habitability during dozens of flybys. And Congress has ordered NASA to develop a robotic Europa lander as well, though this remains a concept mission at the moment.)

Related: The 6 most likely places to find alien life

Genetic engineering almost certainly won't be restricted to pioneering astronauts and colonists. Recent advances in synthetic biology herald a future in which "designer microbes" help colonists establish a foothold on the Red Planet, Lynch said.

"These are some of the things that we can actually do to help us make things we need, help us make materials to build our habitats," she said. "And these are a lot of things that scientists are researching right now to create these kinds of things for our trip to Mars."

Some researchers and exploration advocates have even suggested using designer microbes to terraform Mars, turning it into a world much more comfortable for humans. This possibility obviously raises big ethical questions, especially considering that Mars may have hosted life in the ancient past and might still host it today, in subsurface lakes or aquifers. (Permanently changing our own genomes for radiation protection or any other reason may also strike some folks as ethically dubious, of course.)

Most astrobiologists argue against terraforming Mars, stressing that we don't want to snuff out or fundamentally alter a native ecosystem that may have arisen on the Red Planet. That would be both unethical and unscientific, Lynch said.

After all, she said, one of the main reasons we're exploring Mars is to determine if Earth is the only world to host life.

"And how can we do that if we go and change the planet before we go and find out if life actually was living there?" Lynch said.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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Colonizing Mars may require humanity to tweak its DNA - Space.com