Category Archives: Transhuman News

Nazneen Rahman at the day job: head of genetics, Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital. Photograph: Wellcome

Ive had an exciting and unusual few weeks. My group published a scientific paper revealing a new genetic cause of a childhood kidney cancer called Wilms tumour. This discovery has been of immediate benefit to families, providing an explanation for why their child got cancer, and information about cancer risks for other family members. During the same period, I also released my second album of original songs, called Answers No Questions. On one day, I found myself singing live on Radio London in the morning and talking genetics to the World Service in the evening.

Over the past few weeks, I have found it increasingly difficult to know quite how to answer the ubiquitous question what do you do?

For most of my adult life, I have replied: Im a scientist and a doctor. It is an accurate description. I am professor of human genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and head of cancer genetics at the Royal Marsden Hospital. For 20 years, my work has focused on identifying gene mutations that predispose us to getting cancer and then using that information to help patients and their families.

But I am also a singer-songwriter. This is a smaller activity than my science, but far more than hobby. I release music that people pay good money to experience.

As my music has become better known, more and more people have asked me about my unusual career combination. Dubiously, admiringly, wistfully, jealously, but most often simply because they are intrigued by the motivations and the practicalities.

This has forced me to consider how, if at all, these parts of my life are related. At first, I was adamant they were distinct facets of my character. I railed against modern societys pervasive need to simplify and pigeon-hole the human spirit. Most people have multiple passions and drivers. I am fascinated by these subterranean pursuits. One of the joys of sharing my previously secret musical existence (its not been all joy but thats another column) is that many scientists now share their secret passions with me pot throwing, flugel playing, novelty cakemaking, fire eating scientists are as wondrously idiosyncratic in their appetites as the rest of society.

I also rail against the cliche that people are drawn to science and music because they both have a mathematical basis. It may be true for some, but it has no relevance to my passion for music. I was singing complex harmonies to pop songs long before I learned the theory of music. I am an intuitive, emotional, spontaneous songwriter with little idea of the key, notes or time I am composing in until I have to write it down. There is little science in my music, but I have come to believe there may be music in my science. There is a kinship in how I do science and how I make music that flouts the division of science and the arts that our education system promotes.

My branch of science is genetics. Genetics is underpinned by a simple four-letter DNA code (designated by A, C, G, T). This code dictates how our bodies work. And how they can fail. This beautiful code is framed, shaped, constrained and enhanced by a multitudinous orchestra of associates that determine when, how, where, how long and how strong different parts of the code are played in each of our 30tn cells. DNA is also extraordinary in being able to copy itself with unbelievable accuracy while retaining the ability to mutate and evolve. The sophisticated controls and balances are breathtaking in their elegance. Our recent childhood cancer gene discovery revealed some insights into these control mechanisms and how cancer can occur if they go wrong. Studying genetics provides an endless variety of patterns to unravel, problems to solve, questions to answer. Gratifyingly, it also provides endless opportunities to bring benefits to humanity. In a hundred lifetimes I would not run out of genetic questions that excite me.

Music is underpinned by a simple 12-letter note code (designated by C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). These notes can be layered in almost infinite ways to produce music. In a hundred lifetimes I would not run out of music to write. My challenge has never been about finding the time to write songs, it has always been about finding the time to not lose songs. Snippets of music and lyrics are my constant companions. Most disappear into the clouds like lost balloons. But every now and again, I reach up, grab a string and tie one down, just before it is lost for ever.

Science and music make me feel like Im swimming in infinity pools of possibility, but within structures that keep me from drowning. The potential and expectation to keep delivering new things can be daunting to scientists and artists. The DNA code in genetics and the note code in music are my lifelines. They let me be audacious and unfettered. They give me confidence to dive in, even when I cant see the shore on the other side.

And the practicalities of delivering science and music are quite similar for me. Science is typically funded as three- to five-year projects. For example, I am currently leading a 4m collaborative programme, called the Transforming Genetic Medicine Initiative, which is building the knowledge base, tools and processes needed to deliver genetic medicine. To get science funding, you need to present, in great detail, a persuasive, innovative concept that seems worthwhile and feasible. But once you receive the funding there is considerable creative licence to alter the project, within the overall concept, because science is fast moving. You cannot predict everything you will do at the cutting-edge of knowledge, five years in advance.

My albums have also had three-year lifespans, though I didnt plan it that way. I dont plan them at all. My songs tend to be stories about the complexities of everyday life, inspired by words, subjects or images that briefly, randomly, ensnare me. I dont know what the songs will be about before I write them. There is no overall concept for the albums, at least not consciously. And yet I see now that each album had a central theme that wasnt apparent to me when I was writing them. Cant Clip My Wings, which I released in 2014, includes songs about how we adapt to loss. Lost loves, lost lives, lost dreams. My new album, Answers No Questions, includes songs about choice the complexities, burdens, excitement, pain and joys of making choices.

As I am writing this, I wonder if I am forcing these connections, if they are a post-hoc construct that allows me to give a more pleasing answer to why I am both scientist and songwriter. But I have truly come to believe that, in me, science and music are different manifestations of the same need. A central deep desire to create new things elegant, beautiful, new things. It doesnt much matter if its a scientific discovery, a clinic protocol that makes things easier for patients or a song that tells a human story from a fresh perspective. When it works it feels amazing. Even when it doesnt work, the journey is always paved with nuggets of enlightenment that feed into future creations.

So what do I do?

I think, at my core, I am a creative, though it would be perplexing to many if I started to describe myself this way. Science and music are the mediums in which I happen to create, undoubtedly an unusual combination. But maybe only because we are relentlessly conditioned, from an early age, to believe we must choose whether we are in the science or the arts camp. People from the arts camp routinely tell me they were hopeless at science, sometimes apologetically, sometimes as a badge of honour, a mark of their creativity. Likewise, scientists worry that any proficiency in creativity might be interpreted as a deficiency in objectivity, the bedrock of science. It seems our society has lapsed into considering activity in the sciences and the arts a zero-sum game. It is not.

What would happen if we stopped constraining ourselves and our children in this way? If we embraced and fostered fluid boundaries between the sciences and the arts? If many more people were able to cross freely in and out of both worlds, successfully and unapologetically?

I believe science, art, individuals and society would reap countless benefits.

Answers No Questions is out now; nazneenrahman.com

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Nazneen Rahman: 'Science and music are mediums in which I create' - The Guardian

JUNE 18, 2017

THERES A SCENE in Antoine de Saint-Exuprys The Little Prince where the alien prince, fallen to Earth, comes across a fox. Come and play with me, he proposes to the fox, who replies, I cant play with you. Im not tamed. The prince, whos never heard the word tamed before, asks what it means. Its something thats too often neglected, the fox tells him. It means, to create ties. [] If you tame me, well need each other. Youll be the only boy in the world for me. Ill be the only fox in the world for you. [] [I]f you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.

In 1952, nine years after Saint-Exuprys book was published, the Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev set out, like the Little Prince, to tame a fox or rather, foxes. His goal was to better understand how domesticated dogs evolved from the wolf, and he proposed to do this by domesticating the silver fox, the wolfs genetic cousin. By mimicking the wolfs transformation with a close relative, Belyaev thought, we could better understand one of the great mysteries of prehistory: the dogs route to domestication.

We know more about this process now than we did when Belyaev embarked on his research project decades ago. To his scientific peers, Belyaevs belief that he could replicate 10,000 years of evolution and breeding in a few decades with a species that had never been domesticated before, seemed entirely fanciful. But he turned out to be right: within a few years of starting his experiment, the foxes were already showing signs of domestication; within decades, they were on their way to becoming their own species. How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) traces the history of Belyaevs experiment against the background of first the Soviet Union and then postCold War Russia. Its co-authored by the geneticist Lyudmila Trut, who joined Belyaevs team early on and has been the lead researcher of the fox domestication project since 1959, and the evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin.

Domesticated animals exist in a peculiar gray area between the world of humanity and the rest of nature. From the Book of Genesis to the modern environmental movement, we tend to understand nature as something that we stand apart from and exert power over, whether to dominate or to protect. But cats, dogs, horses, and other domesticated creatures exist in a liminal space between these two worlds. As W. G. Sebald says of the dog, His left (domesticated) eye is attentively fixed on us; the right (wild) one has a little less light, strikes us as averted and alien.

Domestication is not simply the engineering of a change in animal behavior; it is a matter, as Dugatkin and Trut write in their opening pages, of constructing a brand new biological creature. Dogs, after all, are a separate species from wolves, and housecats are so different from their feline cousins that its not entirely clear from which species they were domesticated (though most biologists agree that it was probably the Middle Eastern wildcat). Domestication is not just a question of selectively breeding some traits at the expense of others; its about fundamentally changing the animal.

Across species, domesticated animals seem to share a number of traits that differentiate them from their wild counterparts. Most have shorter faces and curly and floppy tails, traits associated with delayed physiological development and remaining in a stage of perpetual adolescence; biologists refer to this as neoteny. Domestic animals also tend to develop different coloration patterns, and unlike their wild cousins, who mate only once a year, theyre fertile year round. Other traits are significant but harder to measure: a dog may not have the same apparent aptitude for solving puzzles as a wolf, but will display more social intelligence in its ability to manipulate human emotions.

The riddle of domestication has always been how to unravel this ball of traits, and learn how they came to be associated with one another. Were early domestic animals selected for their usefulness to humans (cats for pest control, dogs for security and hunting), and then socialized from there? Were their neotenic traits necessary for their domestication, as animals that remained juveniles were perhaps easier to train? Was the wolfs nature as a pack animal, and responsiveness to socialization and group identity, crucial to its taming? And what of the superficial aesthetic differences do they have any bearing on domestication? Farmers raising cows, after all, had nothing to gain from their cows having black-and-white spotted hides, Dugatkin and Trut note. Why would pig farmers have cared whether their pigs had curly tails?

Belyaevs hypothesis was that the single most important defining trait was comfort around human beings. Zebra and deer, for example, share many traits in common with horses but have long resisted any attempts at domestication. Zebra, under constant threat from predators, have developed a fierce defensiveness, whereas deer remain skittish and are universally nervous around humans. What separates both of these animals from their close genetic cousin the horse is the latters tolerance of humans. Early attempts to domesticate horses, DNA evidence suggests, were based on selecting for agreeableness and manipulating the horses innate fear response.

Among the numerous traits that identify domestic animals, then, Belyaev used as his sole criterion tolerance for human beings. Foxes tend to be either aggressive or skittish around humans; Belyaev and his team focused on those that seemed least defensive. These were bred together, and successive generations were likewise measured for their tolerance for humans, with the researchers hoping that eventually this quality could be bred in offspring.

Within three breeding seasons, the researchers were seeing results: Some of the pups of the foxes theyd selected were a little calmer than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, Trut and Dugatkin write. They would still sneer and react aggressively sometimes when their keepers approached them, but at other times they seemed almost indifferent. Even more surprising, though, was how quickly these behavioral changes were accompanied by other differences. In a matter of years, hormones associated with stress decreased, while levels of serotonin (which decreases anxiety and elevates ones mood) increased. The foxes went from being merely indifferent around the researchers to actively soliciting their affection. Eventually, their tails would even wag at the sight of humans something no other animal besides a dog has been known to do.

Selecting for tameness also led to a series of physical changes: Belyaevs foxes had bushier tails, shorter faces, lighter fur. Which is to say: Traits that were not in any way selected for nonetheless began to assert themselves. At one point, the foxes began making a sound that at first confounded Trut and her team, until she realized that they appeared to be mimicking human laughter. As they ultimately concluded, the tame foxes were making this noise in order to attract human attention and prolong interaction with people. They were displaying the same kind of social intelligence that dogs do when they perform tricks for their masters.

The fox experiment bore out Belyaevs initial hypothesis about tolerance for humans as the key to domestication. These results suggest that many of the various other traits associated with domestication are in fact already latent in animals genetic codes; its just that, in the wild, these traits are inactive, rarely expressing themselves. Selective breeding can allow them to come to the fore relatively quickly. Shake up the fox genome by placing foxes in a new world where calm behavior toward humans is the ultimate currency, Dugatkin and Trut conclude, and youll get lots of other changes mottled fur, curly, wagging tails, and better social cognition as well.

The story of Belyaev and Truts decades-long experiment is fascinating, though in How to Tame a Foxs telling some important details get left out. In crafting a heartwarming story of how easy it was to create docile, loving pets, Dugatkin and Trut dont dwell on the fact that they were also trying to create exceptionally aggressive foxes to further test the hypothesis. Nor were they just breeding foxes: other species, including rats and beavers, were also bred for both aggressiveness and tameness. According to one anecdotal report of the project that isnt mentioned in the book, Soviet officials had planned to use the most aggressive beavers as a line of defense against a possible US invasion. One wonders what other strange tidbits might have come to light had the authors not chosen to selectively shape their narrative. As a result, the book itself feels much like its subjects: bred for tameness.

It might have been better had How to Tame a Fox not been co-written by one of the principal researchers, so as to introduce a modicum of objectivity and critical distance into the writing. At times the book reads like a third-person memoir: Pushinka [one of the foxes] lay by Lyudmilas feet while she worked at her desk, and she loved for Lyudmila to play with her and take her for walks around the area. A favorite game was when Lyudmila would hide a treat in her pocket and Pushinka would try to snatch it out. Such passages are often lovely and do help to convey the remarkable level of domestication the foxes had achieved in such a small span of years (and only the coldest hearted wont melt at the photos of the foxes themselves). But in a book that largely skimps on the scientific and philosophical implications of its narrative, they can feel a bit too sentimental. It is also odd to read passages that describe Trut as a woman of great warmth and an unassuming demeanor, whose formidable energy and determination made her a force to be reckoned with when she is also listed as a co-author of the book.

One thing How to Tame a Fox does reveal is the precariousness inherent in government-funded research, with lessons that go far beyond Soviet Russia. In the early 50s, when Belyaev began his project, the entire field of genetics was under assault in the USSR. A well-placed friend of Stalin, Trofim Lysenko, had promised that he could increase crop yields by freezing seeds before planting. Lysenkos claim was not only false, it ran counter to the prevailing understanding of crop genetics. Since Lysenko knew geneticists could unmask him as a fraud, he began a campaign to discredit the entire discipline, labeling them as saboteurs. Thus, when Belyaev first described his research program to Trut, he told her it could not appear to have anything to do with genetics; instead, it had to be described as an inquiry into fox physiology.

After Stalins death, Lysenkos stranglehold on the discipline loosened, and geneticists could once again work without fear of reprisal. But with the fall of the Soviet Union and the economic crash of the 1990s, research budgets were slashed, and the project nearly ended for lack of funds. Trut took to begging passersby for food to feed her starving animals; eventually she was forced to sell some of the domestic foxes for pets, and some in the control groups for fur. Only an internationally published paper on her results saved the project, triggering a fundraising campaign that kept the animals alive.

Belyaev died in 1986, but he had hoped to one day write a book himself, which he planned to call Man Is Making a New Friend. How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) is not far off from what Belyaev envisioned: written for a general audience, it chronicles the story of a scientific gambit that was more successful that even its creators had dreamed. Its an inspiring reminder of how much we still dont know about the world, and how much can be learned by taking bold chances. Its also a cautionary tale about the risks of state-funded science that has nearly as much relevance to Trumps United States, where federal research budgets are in danger of being slashed right and left, as it does to Stalins Russia.

But Belyaevs experiment didnt just produce new knowledge; it also created a new species of animal, one thats become entirely dependent on humans, and its worth asking what the ethical and philosophical consequences of this might be. Some scientists believe that wolves actively participated in their own domestication; thousands of years ago, certain wolves may have made the calculation that, by sucking up to humans, they could live an easier life. These wolves gave up autonomy and freedom in exchange for food, shelter, and protection. The gamble ultimately paid off: there are now only about three hundred thousand wolves in the wild, and over half a billion dogs.

But a dogs life is not an easy one, especially without a human being to care for it. Many contemporary breeds lack the skills to fend for themselves, having depended on their masters for generations. Perhaps in the future wild foxes will go extinct, and the only foxes that remain will be the domesticated ones, the ones that have endeared themselves to humans to such a degree that even in times of strife and scarcity we will look out for them. But the precarious state of Belyaevs project may well signal another outcome, one in which these foxes, whove thrown their all in with their human protectors, may find a darker fate awaiting them. If the money to keep the program going dries up, and theres no market for them as pets, what then? In The Little Prince, Saint-Exuprys protagonist does indeed tame his new friend, but before he does the fox offers this warning: People have forgotten this truth. But you mustnt forget it. You become responsible for what youve tamed.

Colin Dickey is the author, most recently, of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.

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Making New Friends: The Genetics of Animal Domestication - lareviewofbooks