Category Archives: Transhuman News

Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a model of an extinct Ice Age mammoth. Photograph: Andrew Nelmerm/Getty Images/Dorling Kindersley

The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.

Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the de-extinction effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant.

Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo, said Prof George Church. Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. Were not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.

The creature, sometimes referred to as a mammophant, would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr.

Until now, the team have stopped at the cell stage, but are now moving towards creating embryos although, they said that it would be many years before any serious attempt at producing a living creature.

Were working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and basically trying to establish embryogenesis in the lab, said Church.

Since starting the project in 2015 the researchers have increased the number of edits where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45.

We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected, he said.

Church said that these modifications could help preserve the Asian elephant, which is endangered, in an altered form. However, others have raised ethical concerns about the project.

Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, said: The proposed de-extinction of mammoths raises a massive ethical issue the mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant. What will happen when the elephant-mammoth hybrid is born? How will it be greeted by elephants?

Church also outlined plans to grow the hybrid animal within an artificial womb rather than recruit a female elephant as a surrogate mother - a plan which some believe will not be achievable within the next decade.

We hope to do the entire procedure ex-vivo (outside a living body), he said. It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species.

He added that his lab is already capable of growing a mouse embryo in an artificial womb for 10 days - halfway through its gestation period.

Were testing the growth of mice ex-vivo. There are experiments in the literature from the 1980s but there hasnt been much interest for a while, he said. Today weve got a whole new set of technology and were taking a fresh look at it.

Churchs team is proposing to rear the embryo in an artificial womb which seems ambitious to say the least the resultant animal would have been deprived of all the pre-birth interactions with its mother, said Cobb.

The woolly mammoth roamed across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America during the last Ice Age and vanished about 4,000 years ago, probably due to a combination of climate change and hunting by humans.

Their closest living relative is the Asian, not the African, elephant.

De-extincting the mammoth has become a realistic prospect because of revolutionary gene editing techniques that allow the precise selection and insertion of DNA from specimens frozen over millennia in Siberian ice.

Church helped develop the most widely used technique, known as Crispr/Cas9, that has transformed genetic engineering since it was first demonstrated in 2012. Derived from a defence system bacteria use to fend off viruses, it allows the cut and paste manipulation of strands of DNA with a precision not seen before.

Gene editing and its ethical implications is one of the key topics under discussion at the Boston conference.

Church, a guest speaker at the meeting, said the mammoth project had two goals: securing an alternative future for the endangered Asian elephant and helping to combat global warming. Woolly mammoths could help prevent tundra permafrost from melting and releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in, said Church. In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.

The scientists intend to engineer elephant skin cells to produce the embryo, or multiple embryos, using cloning techniques. Nuclei from the reprogrammed cells would be placed into elephant egg cells whose own genetic material has been removed. The eggs would then be artificially stimulated to develop into embryos.

Church predicts that age-reversal will become a reality within 10 years as a result of the new developments in genetic engineering.

Excerpt from:
Woolly mammoth on verge of resurrection, scientists reveal - The Guardian

The National Academies of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine today published a report Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance that contends with uses of gene editing for human reproductive purposes, prospects which have been brought into vivid reality since the emergence of new biotechnology tools such as the gene modification system, Crispr-Cas9. The report suggests limitations on genetic engineering to the heritable germline code of embryos, or even earlier upstream in the process, sperm and ovum, which convey information passed on to subsequent generations.

However, the report appears to exclude the public from participation and concludes that clinical trials using heritable germline genome editing should be permitted. They should notnot without public discussion and a more conscious evaluation of how this impacts social standing, stigma and identity, ethics that scientists often tendto cite pro forma and then swiftly scuttle.

The statement is a striking reversal in outlook of leadership since just a year ago in December 2015, when the International Summit on Human Gene Editing was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., a conference which I attended, also drawing Nobel laureates, lawmakers, and bioethicists from across the globe, and declaring that a broad societal consensus be attained before moving ahead with altering heritable code. Indeed, weeks after the Summit, U.S. lawmakers added a rider to an omnibus spending bill to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from spending time or money reviewing applications of gene modification to heritable code.

Unlike more than 40 other countries, and an international treaty Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the U.S. does not have a legal ban on modification to heritable code, but it does have a strong regulatory framework on drugs, and federal agencies treat Crispr-Cas9 as a drug. But the limitations on heritable code are only in effect temporarily in so far that spending is restricted on applications FDA can review.

Marcy Darnovsky, director for the Center for Genetics and Society noted the report appears to send from scientists to lawmakers a green light for proceeding with efforts to engineer the genes and traits that are passed on to future children and generations while noting that it excludes the public from participation in deciding whether human germline modification is acceptable in the first place.

In fact, there are a number of critical arguments on how we determine what is acceptable. The first is technical. The field of genetics is by no means accomplished. A group called the Human Aggregation Consortium just last year revealed that of 192 high frequency genetic variants that had previously been considered pathogenic, only nine are likely harmfulan important clarification for anyone wanting to recode their genome. Most mutations have very small effects on biological traits, and we know very little about how genetic variants enhance or diminish other genetic variants and differ based on genetic background.

Secondly, as Darnovsky, and Hille Haker, a bioethicist from Loyola University in Chicago, have pointed out that gene modification in combination with reproductive technologies to engender a genetically connected child is not a medical necessity. There is a difference between a negative right, which is a freedom from, a harm, and a full positive right, which is a freedom to access or gain some benefits. If a gene-edited child were a full positive right, society would be required to pay for all of its citizens to have children, apply genetic tests, gene modification and in vitro fertilization techniques to anyone who wants one. Importantly, scientists who patent gene modification systems such as Crispr-Cas9 have an interest in selling it as much as possible, which means the scientists themselves cannot be left solely responsible for shaping the moral frameworkthe public has an important role to play in shaping the morays around science today more than ever. Andthe debates are becoming more nuanced and sophisticated as gene editing systems such as Crispr-Cas9 allow us to do things like circumvent the oldcause celebreof altering human embryos, by editing heritable code in the sperm or eggs.

Our genomes are a constantly undergoing alteration and it would be incorrect to conceive of them as sacrosanct. Genes are shuffled with each new generation so its unlikely that gene editing will give some families permanent advantages. The theory of evolution suggests that we adapt to local conditions rather than progress to a more perfect form. But gene modification risks market based eugenics, meaning putting values on certain traits, and seeking to eliminate other traits, when genetic variants that contribute to many features such as autism, neuropsychiatric disorders, may be less a disease as ways of being in the world.

Evolution does not create values, we do. And we risk molding our children into commodities we would like to have, rather than emphasizing the people they can become. Darnovsky wrote the problem is stigmatizing people with disabilities, exacerbating existing inequalities, and introducing new eugenic abuses. Strangely, theres no apparent connection between those dire risks and the recommendation to move ahead. Thephilosopher-scientist Jean Rostand wrote a generation ago, science hasmade us godsevenbeforewe are worthy of beingmen. But those are professional experts. Its time to hear more from the public on what we think.

Jim Kozubek is the author ofModern Prometheus: Editing the Human Genome with Crispr-Cas9

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Jim Kozubek

Jim Kozubek is the author of Modern Prometheus: Editing the Human Genome with Crispr-Cas9 (Cambridge University Press)

Credit: Nick Higgins

View post:
The Public Should Have a Say in Allowing Modification of Our Germline Genetic Code - Scientific American (blog)