Editing human embryos with CRISPR is moving ahead now’s the time to work out the ethics – Phys.Org

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Theres still a way to go from editing single-cell embryos to a full-term designer baby. Credit: ZEISS Microscopy, CC BY-SA

The announcement by researchers in Portland, Oregon that they've successfully modified the genetic material of a human embryo took some people by surprise.

With headlines referring to "groundbreaking" research and "designer babies," you might wonder what the scientists actually accomplished. This was a big step forward, but hardly unexpected. As this kind of work proceeds, it continues to raise questions about ethical issues and how we should we react.

What did researchers actually do?

For a number of years now we have had the ability to alter genetic material in a cell, using a technique called CRISPR.

The DNA that makes up our genome comprises long sequences of base pairs, each base indicated by one of four letters. These letters form a genetic alphabet, and the "words" or "sentences" created from a particular order of letters are the genes that determine our characteristics.

Sometimes words can be "misspelled" or sentences slightly garbled, resulting in a disease or disorder. Genetic engineering is designed to correct those mistakes. CRISPR is a tool that enables scientists to target a specific area of a gene, working like the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word, to remove a section and insert the "correct" sequence.

In the last decade, CRISPR has been the primary tool for those seeking to modify genes human and otherwise. Among other things, it has been used in experiments to make mosquitoes resistant to malaria, genetically modify plants to be resistant to disease, explore the possibility of engineered pets and livestock, and potentially treat some human diseases (including HIV, hemophilia and leukemia).

Up until recently, the focus in humans has been on changing the cells of a single individual, and not changing eggs, sperm and early embryos what are called the "germline" cells that pass traits along to offspring. The theory is that focusing on non-germline cells would limit any unexpected long-term impact of genetic changes on descendants. At the same time, this limitation means that we would have to use the technique in every generation, which affects its potential therapeutic benefit.

Earlier this year, an international committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that, while highlighting the concerns with human germline genetic engineering, laid out a series of safeguards and recommended oversight. The report was widely regarded as opening the door to embryo-editing research.

That is exactly what happened in Oregon. Although this is the first study reported in the United States, similar research has been conducted in China. This new study, however, apparently avoided previous errors we've seen with CRISPR such as changes in other, untargeted parts of the genome, or the desired change not occurring in all cells. Both of these problems had made scientists wary of using CRISPR to make changes in embryos that might eventually be used in a human pregnancy. Evidence of more successful (and thus safer) CRISPR use may lead to additional studies involving human embryos.

What didn't happen in Oregon?

First, this study did not entail the creation of "designer babies," despite some news headlines. The research involved only early stage embryos, outside the womb, none of which was allowed to develop beyond a few days.

In fact, there are a number of existing limits both policy-based and scientific that will create barriers to implanting an edited embryo to achieve the birth of a child. There is a federal ban on funding gene editing research in embryos; in some states, there are also total bans on embryo research, regardless of how funded. In addition, the implantation of an edited human embryos would be regulated under the federal human research regulations, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and potentially the federal rules regarding clinical laboratory testing.

Beyond the regulatory barriers, we are a long way from having the scientific knowledge necessary to design our children. While the Oregon experiment focused on a single gene correction to inherited diseases, there are few human traits that are controlled by one gene. Anything that involves multiple genes or a gene/environment interaction will be less amenable to this type of engineering. Most characteristics we might be interested in designing such as intelligence, personality, athletic or artistic or musical ability are much more complex.

Second, while this is a significant step forward in the science regarding the use of the CRISPR technique, it is only one step. There is a long way to go between this and a cure for various disease and disorders. This is not to say that there aren't concerns. But we have some time to consider the issues before the use of the technique becomes a mainstream medical practice.

So what should we be concerned about?

Taking into account the cautions above, we do need to decide when and how we should use this technique.

Should there be limits on the types of things you can edit in an embryo? If so, what should they entail? These questions also involve deciding who gets to set the limits and control access to the technology.

We may also be concerned about who gets to control the subsequent research using this technology. Should there be state or federal oversight? Keep in mind that we cannot control what happens in other countries. Even in this country it can be difficult to craft guidelines that restrict only the research someone finds objectionable, while allowing other important research to continue. Additionally, the use of assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, for example) is largely unregulated in the U.S., and the decision to put in place restrictions will certainly raise objections from both potential parents and IVF providers.

Moreover, there are important questions about cost and access. Right now most assisted reproductive technologies are available only to higher-income individuals. A handful of states mandate infertility treatment coverage, but it is very limited. How should we regulate access to embryo editing for serious diseases? We are in the midst of a widespread debate about health care, access and cost. If it becomes established and safe, should this technique be part of a basic package of health care services when used to help create a child who does not suffer from a specific genetic problem? What about editing for nonhealth issues or less serious problems are there fairness concerns if only people with sufficient wealth can access?

So far the promise of genetic engineering for disease eradication has not lived up to its hype. Nor have many other milestones, like the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep, resulted in the feared apocalypse. The announcement of the Oregon study is only the next step in a long line of research. Nonetheless, it is sure to bring many of the issues about embryos, stem cell research, genetic engineering and reproductive technologies back into the spotlight. Now is the time to figure out how we want to see this gene-editing path unfold.

Explore further: In US first, scientists edit genes of human embryos (Update)

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Editing human embryos with CRISPR is moving ahead now's the time to work out the ethics - Phys.Org

Infographic: What the US public thinks about tinkering with human genetics – Genetic Literacy Project

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The Pew Research Center published a fascinating roundup of studies that revealed the opinions of the U.S. public on a number of key science-related issues. The researchers wanted to find out what people thought overall about the role of science and scientists in society, but also to see more specifically how far modern humans are willing to go with genetic engineering and automation.

Theresponses showthat people are generally not as worried as youd think about messing with human genetics but when it comes to implanting technology to enhance bodies, doubts proliferate. A strong uneasiness also pervades responses dealing with robots in workplaces.

The Pew Research Center, which carried out thestudy, pinpointed a specific theme in the findings, citing the loss of human control, especially if such developments would be at odds with personal, religious and ethical values as the key source of hesitancy when people think about future technologies. Proposals that give people more control over tech met with more positive response.

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Infographic: What the US public thinks about tinkering with human genetics - Genetic Literacy Project

Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism’s faithful follow it blindly into a future for the elite – The Conversation UK

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The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed
and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

Progress on overdrive will require sacrifices.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby indiv
iduals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic). Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

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Super-intelligence and eternal life: transhumanism's faithful follow it blindly into a future for the elite - The Conversation UK

Explainer: How CRISPR works – Science News for Students

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(for more about Power Words, clickhere)

applicationA particular use or function of something.

base (in genetics) A shortened version of the term nucleobase. These bases are building blocks of DNA and RNA molecules.

biologyThe study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.

Cas9An enzyme that geneticists are now using to help edit genes. It can cut through DNA, allowing it to fix broken genes, splice in new ones or disable certain genes. Cas9 is shepherded to the place it is supposed to make cuts by CRISPRs, a type of genetic guides. The Cas9 enzyme came from bacteria. When viruses invade a bacterium, this enzyme can chop up the germs DNA, making it harmless.

cellThe smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the naked eye, it consists of watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall. Animals are made of anywhere from thousands to trillions of cells, depending on their size. Some organisms, such as yeasts, molds, bacteria and some algae, are composed of only one cell.

chemicalA substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (become bonded together) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H2O.

CRISPRAn abbreviation pronounced crisper for the term clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. These are pieces of RNA, an information-carrying molecule. They are copied from the genetic material of viruses that infect bacteria. When a bacterium encounters a virus that it was previously exposed to, it produces an RNA copy of the CRISPR that contains that virus genetic information. The RNA then guides an enzyme, called Cas9, to cut up the virus and make it harmless. Scientists are now building their own versions of CRISPR RNAs. These lab-made RNAs guide the enzyme to cut specific genes in other organisms. Scientists use them, like a genetic scissors, to edit or alter specific genes so that they can then study how the gene works, repair damage to broken genes, insert new genes or disable harmful ones.

developmental(in biology) An adjective that refers to the changes an organism undergoes from conception through adulthood. Those changes often involve chemistry, size and sometimes even shape.

DNA(short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, double-stranded and spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. It is built on a backbone of phosphorus, oxygen, and carbon atoms. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make.

engineeringThe field of research that uses math and science to solve practical problems.

fieldAn area of study, as in: Her field of research was biology. Also a term to describe a real-world environment in which some research is conducted, such as at sea, in a forest, on a mountaintop or on a city street. It is the opposite of an artificial setting, such as a research laboratory.

fluorescentCapable of absorbing and reemitting light. That reemitted light is known as a fluorescence.

gene(adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for producing a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.

genomeThe complete set of genes or genetic material in a cell or an organism. The study of this genetic inheritance housed within cells is known as genomics.

muscleA type of tissue used to produce movement by contracting its cells, known as muscle fibers. Muscle is rich in a protein, which is why predatory species seek prey containing lots of this tissue.

mutation(v. mutate) Some change that occurs to a gene in an organisms DNA. Some mutations occur naturally. Others can be triggered by outside factors, such as pollution, radiation, medicines or something in the diet. A gene with this change is referred to as a mutant.

nucleusPlural is nuclei. (in biology) A dense structure present in many cells. Typically a single rounded structure encased within a membrane, the nucleus contains the genetic information.

organ(in biology) Various parts of an organism that perform one or more particular functions. For instance, an ovary is an organ that makes eggs, the brain is an organ that interprets nerve signals and a plants roots are organs that take in nutrients and moisture.

palindrome (adj. palindromic) A word, a name or a phrase that has the same ordering of letters when read forwards or backwards. For instance, dad and mom are both palindromes.

proteinCompoundmade from one or more long chains of amino acids. Proteins are an essential part of all living organisms. They form the basis of living cells, muscle and tissues; they also do the work inside of cells. The hemoglobin in blood and the antibodies that attempt to fight infections are among the better-known, stand-alone proteins. Medicines frequently work by latching onto proteins.

RNAA molecule that helps read the genetic information contained in DNA. A cells molecular machinery reads DNA to create RNA, and then reads RNA to create proteins.

tag(in biology) To attach some rugged band or package of instruments onto an animal. Sometimes the tag is used to give each individual a unique identification number. Once attached to the leg, ear or other part of the body of a critter, it can effectively become the animals name. In some instances, a tag can collect information from the environment around the animal as well. This helps scientists understand both the environment and the animals role within it.

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Explainer: How CRISPR works - Science News for Students

Here are the 6 Best Marketing Stunts of 2019 – Inc.

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Call a marketing campaign a stunt and you could be heaping on praise or derision. Droga5 has been famous for them, including a faked graffiti tag of Air Force One. And sometimes the stunts are more like bad pranks. Samsung's outer space selfie promotion literally fell apart when it landed unexpectedly in someone's backyard.

But let's (mostly) pass on the crash landings and, instead, celebrate some of the great marketing stunts that brands pulled off during 2019.

Battle for the Bowl

The Super Bowl has developed an underlying second form of competition: that among the advertisers. Which is understandable, given the millions they spend to create and produce extravagant television spots to catch some attention from consumers.

One of the notable stunts, in the form of an advertisement, was the Bud Light commercial that pit the Bud Night against the world of Game of Thrones. (One created by Droga5, by the way.)

It was a strange crossover in which a major beverage company recruited characters from a big media property hit to kill off the brand mascot. Because sometimes a beer can come across a little flat.

Broadway bound Skittles

If the Super Bowl is the ultimate performance medium of marketing, like a visual slam poetry competition, then the marketers for Skittles have gained fame for everything they do outside of their game day ad. In 2018, it was having four potential ads and then, finally, only one of them airing during the Super Bowl, but then only to one person.

This year, it was another stunt.

Yes, a Broadway musical with a song called Advertising Ruins Everything. People paid hundreds of dollars to see it. Genius and twisted work.

Don't drink the yellow water

You can see plenty of spats in marketing that are contrived and dull. Others can be pretty clever. Here's a story of one that involved Vita Coco coconut water, with thanks to Rebecca Jennings, who wrote about it at Vox.

Self-proclaimed artist and, apparently, amateur MMA fighter Tony Posnanski had written a HuffPost piece, arguing that coconut water was disgusting and then tweeted to Vita Coco that "I would rather drink your social media persons piss than coconut water."

Never throw down a challenge if you're not ready for it.

It apparently threw Posnanski for a loop as he responded with two tweets:

Gotta offer respect when you've been bested.

The woman in the photo was Lane Rawlings, who was the social media person, according to Vox, and, yes, the liquid was her urine. Posnanski did give his address, but the company sent its new product, which supposedly tasted like coconuts rather than coconut water.

Times Square takeover

How do you promote the stage version extension of the wildly popular Harry Potter novels? By taking over 51 display screens in Times Square on a single night and establishing what might be the largest dedicated multimedia presentation in history.

The presentation stretched over four blocks. The secret world of magic isn't so secret.

Measuring up

This turned out to be a pre-April Fool's prank, but was still a good stunt. Apparently people get a bit concerned about people giving accurate heights on dating sites and apps. Tinder decided to announce a height verification feature.

Ad within an ad within an ad

If meta concepts disturb you, or if you just find them annoying, you might want to pass this section by. Actor, writer, and partial Aviation Gin owner Ryan Reynolds was in an unusual Samsung ad:

During an ad for Samsung TVs that shows an ad for his latest movie, an ad for Aviation Gin appears. As the director says, "You bought an ad for your gin within an ad for your movie within an ad for Samsung TV." Reynolds: "Yes. It felt like the right thing to do."

Dismissing the bigger competition

However, as smart as some of these stunts have been, all respect to Burger King, which, in the U.K., has spent a year hiding a McDonald's Big Mac behind every Whopper. The point was that the latter was bigger than the former. You can't see the Big Macs because they're hidden.

It took an entire year to build up to the denouement. And the line, "Thanks you Maccy D's for having our back in 2019."

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Here are the 6 Best Marketing Stunts of 2019 - Inc.

Researchers trace COVID-19’s family tree to battle outbreak and ‘infodemic’ – BioWorld Online

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SEATTLE Tracing the family tree of COVID-19 through its evolving DNA sequence makes it possible to disprove many false claims circulating on social media about the novel coronavirus, and, in particular, that it was generated in a covert biological weapons program.

From everything Ive looked at, there is zero evidence for genetic engineering; it looks like normal evolution, said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who has been using genomes sequences taken from patient samples to track the spread of the virus since Jan. 11.

Thousands of mutations are distributed across the genome. If youre engineering something, you wouldnt do that. There are no signals for biological engineering. It looks like natural evolution, Bedford told attendees of the AAAS meeting on Feb. 14.

Bedford also decried a paper published on the Biorxiv preprint server by scientists at the Indian Institutes of Technology, pointing to an uncanny similarity between COVID-19 and HIV. They claimed to have identified four insertions in the spike glycoprotein of COVID-19, through which the virus binds to the host cell, that are not present in other coronaviruses, but which looked the same as key structural proteins of HIV-1, a finding that they said is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.

The research was very shoddily done, Bedford said. The sequence differences are not unique to COVID-19. Closely related [bat] coronaviruses have these chunks as well. They are small motifs used by nature over and over again.

The paper was swiftly withdrawn from Biorxiv, but the allegations continue to have a life of their own on social media, with stories headlined Scientists confirm COVID-19 is man-made.

Biorxiv has proved an important conduit for rapid publication of legitimate research about the virus, but the controversy around the Indian paper led the website to add a yellow band across all its postings about COVID-19 to stress that these are preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed and should not be reported in news media as established information.

The volume of misinformation about COVID-19 led World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to label it an infodemic. WHO has set up a team to monitor and respond to myths and rumors around the clock.

Along with debunking bioweapon conspiracy theories, the genomes of 100 samples of COVID-19 taken from patients that have been sequenced to date also are providing insights into the epidemiology of the virus. In combination with live case records and mathematical modeling, that gives lie to claims there has been a cover-up, and that far more people have contracted the virus than officially reported.

Comparing virus from different patients and knowing how fast it mutates, makes it possible to say how many cases have occurred. We get upwards of 200,000 total infections, Bedford said. That fits with estimates based on mathematical models published by researchers at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, Imperial College London, he noted.

The family history exposed by the genome sequences debunks another rumor, that COVID-19 crossed to humans from snakes or fish. Based on the genetic analysis, the likelihood is that the virus was transmitted by a bat to another mammal between 20 and 70 years ago. That as-yet-unidentified intermediary passed the virus on to its first human host in the city of Wuhan in late November or early December 2019.

Global cooperation

Virus genomes are being released three to six days after sample collection and shared around the world via GISAID (global initiative on sharing all influenza data). The number of genome sequences and the speed with which they have been published underlines the unprecedented level of global cooperation in tackling the epidemic, Bedford said. In the 2013 2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, it was a year before the first sequence was available; in the case of Zika virus, it took several months. Even with seasonal flu and all the resources thrown at that, updates are monthly, albeit the norm is to sequence and publish multiple genomes at once.

Each of the different COVID-19 sequences varies by a handful of single amino acid point mutations. That forms the basis of the family tree showing how virus samples collected at different times and in different locations, are related.

The technique was used in the West Africa Ebola epidemic, and in tracking the geographical spread of the Zika virus. It is a super-useful tool, Bedford said.

The first five sequences of COVID-19 that were made available on Jan. 11 had little genetic variety, with three being identical and two having slight differences between them.

We know that these sort of coronaviruses mutate at about one mutation per genome, per month. And so just seeing this, we know that all of the five viruses shared a very recent origin, Bedford said.

That was consistent with the supposition that the original source was repeated animal-to-human transmission at the seafood market in Wuhan, where live animals were on sale.

However, by Jan. 19, COVID-19 genomes from Wuhan and Thailand indicated there was human-to-human spread. The genome sequences actually provided an early view of this, before other data streams. I think that was hugely valuable, said Bedford.

Bedfords real-time tracking of the evolution of COVID-19 is posted on the open source website Nextstrain.org. All the genomes analyzed to date are highly related, with at most seven mutations relative to the common ancestor. There is no sign of the virus becoming more virulent or infectious.

As of Feb. 14, there was a total of 47,505 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China, and 16,427 cases that have been clinically confirmed in Hubei province. There have been 1,381 deaths in China, including 121 reported on Friday, while outside China there have been 505 cases in 24 countries, and two deaths.

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Researchers trace COVID-19's family tree to battle outbreak and 'infodemic' - BioWorld Online

Glowing with the flow – Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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In the battle against heart disease, more than 400,000 coronary artery bypass grafting surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year.

While veins from a patients leg are often used in the surgical procedure, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVG), which are grown outside the body using a patients endothelial cells, are proving to be an effective and increasingly popular technique.

The most common reasons for TEVG failure are conditions like blood clots, narrowing of the blood vessels, and atherosclerosis. But what if these grafts could be engineered to detect and even prevent those ailments from occurring?

A team of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences students set out to answer that question for their project in this years International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. The project, dubbed FlowGlo, seeks to use receptors that exist within the walls of human blood vessels to detect shear stress, a warning sign that a blood vessel may be narrowing.

Shear stress is important to detect because it is a marker of a lot of different cardiovascular diseases. When there is narrowing of a blood vessel due to a blood clot, shear stress jumps exponentially, maybe up to 10 times its normal level, said Teagan Stedman, S.B. 22, a bioengineering concentrator. Our idea is to link the activation of these receptors due to some level of shear stress to a modular response.

Shear stress is a function of viscosity and how rapidly different layers of fluid are flowing over each other through a blood vessel. Because the walls of the vessel must move and roll with the strain of blood flow, receptors naturally activate at different levels of shear stress.

For instance, when shear stress rises above 4 Pascals, channels open in one specific protein receptor, Piezo1, and calcium ions enter the cell, signaling the activation. The students engineered Piezo 1 and two other protein receptors to present different colored fluorescent proteins when that activation occurs.

Down the road, instead of using a fluorescent protein, you could possibly swap it out so the cells secrete some kind of clot busting protein to break up the clot and treat it on site, said Patrick Dickinson, A.B. 22, an applied math concentrator. Current clot-busting medication is delivered through an IV, and it is system-wide and much less targeted, so there are greater risks for side effects. We think this could be a more targeted treatment in the long run.

As part of their project, the team gathered feedback from Elena Aikawa, Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Director of the Vascular Biology Program at Brigham and Womens Hospital, who studies tissue-engineered vascular grafts. They also conducted a survey to better understand public perception of genetic engineering ethics, since their technique would require engineered cells to be implanted in the human body.

As they gathered qualitative data, they worked long hours in the lab on intricate experiments. Since beginning the project this summer, the teammates overcame many challenges caused by the difficulty of cloning cells. Relying on the support of their mentor, Timothy Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Pamela Silver at the Harvard Medical School, they brainstormed, troubleshot, and learned volumes about synthetic biology along the way.

I learned that biology is messy, Dickinson said. In a lab setting, there is a lot that is hard to predict. We certainly encountered a lot of frustration and stress along the way, but it was a good window into what research really is.

Now that the competition has concluded, the teams work will be included in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a repository of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems.

For Rahel Imru, it is gratifying to know that future iGEM teams and research groups from around the world could someday build off the research she and her peers have done.

While the weeks leading up to the competition were a whirlwind, the experience was well worth the effort, said Imru, A.B. 21, a biomedical engineering concentrator.

This was my first lab experience, so I definitely learned a lot, she said. I look back and see how much weve grown. Maybe we didnt get all the data and results we wanted to by the end, but for the size of our team and the time that we had, seeing what we are able to accomplish is especially rewarding.

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Glowing with the flow - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

These Quotes Will Bring the Luck You Need on Friday the 13th – Inc.

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This week will include Friday the 13th. Whatever you do on that day, don't walk under a ladder, cross paths with a black cat, or break a mirror! There's no telling what tragedy could result. What gives on this weird superstition? No, it doesn't have anything to do with the Knights Templar. Historically, 13 has long been considered an unlucky number. There also developed the idea of Friday being unlucky. Then Thomas Lawson combined them in his 1907 novel Friday the Thirteenth, and popular culture took over from there.

Luck, then, has become a fundamental necessity every Friday the 13th. But generally speaking, luck isn't a clear cut as it may initially seem. Is it real? There may be a certain randomness to the universe, but is the concept of "luck" the best way to describe it? Does it all shake out in the end? Someone that seems lucky in business could be incredibly unlucky in their personal lives. Is luck good? Does it encourage us to rely on something else, instead of on our own hard work? And if we have luck, can we ever really know it? Cormac McCarthy said, "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." It almost makes it feel...unlucky.

Whether you're a believer in luck or not, here are 13 quotes to put it all in perspective this Friday the 13th:

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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These Quotes Will Bring the Luck You Need on Friday the 13th - Inc.

Aspen Neuro Bags $6.5M to Test Parkinson’s Disease Stem Cell Therapy – Xconomy

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XconomySan Diego

Nearly nine years ago Jeanne Loring and her colleagues at Scripps Research debuted a test that leveraged advances in genomics and data science to determine, without testing in animals, whether human stem cells were pluripotent, or able to become any type of cell in the body.

Being able to prove that has become increasingly important as scientists look to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)mature, specialized cells that have been reprogrammed as immature cells, regaining the capability of becoming any type of cellas material for new regenerative medicines.

Now Loring and Andres Bratt-Leal, who joined her lab in 2012 as a post-doctoral researcher, have founded a biotech that combines stem cell biology and genomics know-how to advance a potential cell therapy for Parkinsons disease.

The startup announced Thursday it raised a seed round of $6.5 million to support its work. Aspens lead drug candidate, which is in preclinical testing, is intended to replace neurons in the brains of people with the disease, which causes those cells to become damaged or die.

When people with Parkinsons disease lose neurons, they also lose a chemical messenger the cells produce, called dopamine. Without dopamine, communication between nerve cells falters, which leads to the debilitating motor problems that characterize the disease. Existing Parkinsons drugs aim to alter dopamine levels. Aspen, however, wants to fix the upstream problem that leads to those lowered levels by reconstructing patients damaged neural networks.

The cell therapy would involve harvesting patients own living cells through a skin biopsy, reprogramming them to immature cells, or iPSCs, then further engineering them to become predisposed to mature into neurons. Once enough of those cells have been grown in the lab, those neuron precursor cells would be delivered directly to the brain.

Using a patients own cells avoids the dangerous immune system reactions that can occur when donor cells are used in such therapies, and obviates the need for immunosuppression drugs. Two cell therapies that use genetic engineering have been approved by the FDA, both of which take and tweak patients T cells into treatments for cancer. Stem cell transplants have been used to treat some cancers.

Aspen worked to ensure the company could ably manufacture a so-called autologous replacement cell therapy, or one from a patients one cells, by improving the process of differentiating iPSCs into dopamine neurons, Loring says. And the group developed another predictive genomic-based test, similar to the effort Loring spearheaded nearly a decade ago to determine whether cells were pluripotent, that can detect which iPSCs are destined to become neurons.

(Bratt-Leal) put his biological engineering expertise into coming up with a way that was reproducible, that we would get the same cells no matter who we got the original cells from, she says.

The company plans to test the therapy in patients that they determine, through genomic testing, have the most common form of Parkinsons, which is referred to as sporadic and arises without a clear genetic predisposition. It also has a second treatment in the works that it intends to develop for patients with familial forms of the disease, and uses a gene editing toolyet to be selectedto alter their stem cells during the reprogramming process.

Howard Federoff, who was most recently vice chancellor for health affairs and CEO of the UC Irvine Health system, is Aspens CEO. Federoff says he has come to believe that Parkinsons patients need more than just to stabilize their disease They need to turn the clock back.

Many companies are working on drugs to treat Parkinsons, but most are meant to manage symptoms rather than reverse the disease. Levodopa, which supplants missing dopamine, is used widely, but it can cause side effects, including involuntary movement called dyskinesia; and, as the disease progresses, the drug eventually stops working between doses.

Aspen claims it is the only company working toward an autologous neuron replacement. The company, however, will need to raise a Series A round to move its drug candidates through Phase 2 proof-of-concept trials, Loring says.

The company raised its seed round from a group of investors including Domain Associates, Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, Axon Ventures, OrbiMed, and Section 32. Initially, it was financed through grants from Summit for Stem Cell, a San Diego-based nonprofit.

Sarah de Crescenzo is an Xconomy editor based in San Diego. You can reach her at sdecrescenzo@xconomy.com.

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Aspen Neuro Bags $6.5M to Test Parkinson's Disease Stem Cell Therapy - Xconomy

Radio Readers BookByte: Cognitive Revolution – HPPR

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When I started with Yuval Noah Hararis Homo Deus,I expected to jog along with a fun and clever assessment of human history and its near future as a cyborg-like merger of human and computer.

But I had trouble early on.

Dr. Harari repeatedly throws out a flurry of proclamations, often sweeping claims as arguments, then follows them with his intended conclusion, sometimes sweeping, head scratching and not always adding up. Then there are terms about which he seems to have a slightly skewed understanding.

I collided with his usage of Cognitive Revolution almost from the start. According to Harari, the "Cognitive Revolution" occurred 70,000 years ago causing the homo sapiens mind to shift, turning the species from an insignificant African ape into modern humans as ruler of the world. I looked for supportive context or attribution in the text, but it wasnt there. Nor was there any footnote for the claim.

I knew the term from a different context entirely. I Googled to be sure. "Cognitive Revolution" was the name of a 1950's multidisciplinary movement (now cognitive science) studying the mind and its workings. Noam Chomsky was one of the pioneers of the field.

I could find no reference about Hararis usage until I added Harari or Homo Deus to the search terms. Then I got hits on Homo Deus and "Sapiens" (his previous book, where The Cognitive Revolution is the title of the very first section of Sapiens). This is where Harari sets out his theory of sapiens cognition as a basis for the next brain change.

In Homo DeusHarari states, this revolution resulted from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brains. another rewiring of our brain will suffice to launch a second cognitive revolution. Using, he continues, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.

I looked for further source information on Hararis claim. The best I came up with was an arguable theory about a population bottleneck some 70,000 to 60,000 years ago caused by an extinction when a volcano in Indonesia, Toba, erupted 74,000 years ago.

The theory, now mostly refuted, was that Tobas eruption lowered temperatures around the world wiping out many species, dropping the human population drastically.

Recent studies looking at sediment cores around the world for 100 years before and 200 years after Toba erupted, showed no signs of species die offs. Any effect was mild enough that it did not show up in the sediment layers.

Depending on the source, Homo Sapiens is believed to have emerged about 300,000 years ago (or even 400,000 years ago) and was in Europe at least by 200,000 years ago. A skull found in Greece was just dated to 210,000 years ago. Throw in speculation about big chills at 195,000 and 150,000 years ago and a possibility that humans dropped to as little as 40 people, or 600 people or a few thousand people or were always not that plentiful or came from a small group which left Africa at some time or other.

In East Asia, human remains in China have been dated to 100,000 years ago. In Japan, there is evidence of watercraft 84,000 years ago, in Honshu. Those early East-Asia dates argue against Hararis theory.

Harari doesnt tell us where he got the term. Did he hear it somewhere and misunderstand it, making assumptions? Could he have stumbled on Cognitive Revolution on his own? Fact checking at the publisher should have revealed this term in prior use. Nor could I find any reference by Harari referencing the 1950s movement of that name in either Sapiens or Homo Deus or elsewhere, including numerous videos.

The same doubt goes for assumptions about brain changes 70,000 years ago. What we have of skulls doesnt show a change in brain dimensions. Harari uses the brain-change at 70,000 years ago version of pre-history to bolster the viability of humans making the next change in our species.

There is very little we can say with certainty about our origins. That makes doubtful Hararis prediction that we are about to re-design our own species by attaching computing devices to our brains.

The real Cognitive Revolution:https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psychology/chapter/reading-the-cognitive-revolution-and-multicultural-psychology/

A nice, brief synopsis of Homo Sapiens:https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-sapiens-modern-humans/

Revisiting and refuting a theory about an extinction at 74,000 years ago:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-humans-weathered-toba-supervolcano-just-fine-180968479/

Concept of Behavioral Modernityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

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Radio Readers BookByte: Cognitive Revolution - HPPR

Why making healthy babies in space should be quite the adventure – Genetic Literacy Project

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Earth is great and all, but with climate change and the extremely highly likely reemergence of dinosaursdue to genetic engineering, we might need to consider inhabiting other planets. Sending out a pioneering colony of carefully-selected humansis today science fiction but, someday, it might save our species.And, if we ever actually docolonize space, were going to need to have babies up there, which might turn out to be more complicated than it is on Earth.

Im not concerned about the actual baby making part we can figure that out with practice. The part thats tricky is the fine-tuned and carefully orchestrated process of human development, particularly in the brain. Cells inmicrogravitydontgrowexactly like cells on Earth, and a whole bunch of them in a developing babys brain may not grow exactly the same either.

Thankfully, theres a researcher for that.UC San Diego scientist Alysson Muotriisusingblossoming clumps of brain cells called brain organoids to understand how neurons proliferate, form synapses, and communicate but in space.

Inlate July, Muotri and his team sent a bunch of organoids to the International Space Station. Previous research has documented the proliferation ofHeLA cells,cancer cells,bone cellsand more, but there is limited information about the gravity-free growth of early brain cells, known as neural progenitor cells, or brain organoids. Suchorganoidshave proven to be a useful model for understanding brain development, so understanding how they develop in the microgravity of space could demonstrate the ways in which human brain development might be affected if we ever become a space-faring society.

Muotri has long been intrigued by research in space, especially theNASA twins study. A while ago, he half-seriously talked about the idea of doing his own biology space study with one of his collaborators, but nothing quite came of it. He dreamed of sending organoids to space, but didnt know if it was possible. Once he met an engineer who convinced him it was feasible to actually build a device to keep organoids alive in space, he decided it was time for takeoff.

Still, he had some trouble selling others, particularly granting organizations, on the idea. Hes funding the project out of his own salary savings and gifts to the lab, with the hope that his first wave of findings will draw attention to his work and convince funding agencies that his research is valuable.

Backed by his own money, the first task was figuring out how to keep the organoids healthyat the International Space Station.

Even on Earth, the organoids require a lot of care to ensure that they are at the proper temperature and growing conditions. For one, theyre kept in a shaker so that they are constantly suspended in a solution, without anchoring down to anything (though that wont be a problem in microgravity). But like living cells in a body, organoids require nutrients, and they also spit out waste. To support these processes, their solutions need to be changed, and the temperature and pH needs to be carefully maintained, like fish in a tank. Organoids require a lot of babysitting, and Muotri simply cant expect the astronauts to spend as much time caring for his cells as he and his students do back on Earth.

So, he collaborated withan engineering team from Kentucky that specializes in sending biological material into space.They developed a shiny red box called theSpace Tango CubeLab.

Space Tango may sound like abad 80s science fiction filmstarringAntonio Banderas, butits actually the name of the company, and the productsthey make aresomuch cooler than 80s sci-fi. The CubeLab essentially functions like a fully automated, climate-controlled mini-laboratory: it can change the media for the cells, monitor their growth, and send the data back to Earth. The astronauts just need to plug it in.

For this very first mission with the organoids, Muotri wants to see how the cells grow and proliferate. Based onprevious research,he predicts that The progenitor cells will proliferate faster and will probably generate a bigger organoid. Although a bigger brain sounds better, this might actually be a problem: if the brain and surrounding skull are too big, it might prevent birth through the birth canal. Its still speculation, but its entirely possible that maybe humans cannot have natural deliveries in space.

The other issue with faster brain development is that large brain volumes have been implicated in the development of autism spectrum disorder. In fact, having a larger brain circumference is one of the mostrobust biomarkers of autism. We dont fully understand how cell proliferation may later in life lead to intellectual problems or cognitive disability, so this gives us a model to understand that, Muotri hopes.

At the moment, we dont know much about the cellular mechanisms that microgravity could directly impact. Using genome sequencing and techniques to detectepigenetic signatures, Muotris team will look to see if the genomes of the organoids have changed. There is definitely an epigenetic signature that changes neurons in space, Muotri insists, thats what we want to figure out.

Of course, organoids cant capture brain developmentin uteroin its full complexity. However, this study could point us to important considerations before we pack our space bags. For example,itspossible that people with certain genetic backgrounds are less susceptible to the (lack of) pressures of microgravity and might fare better in space. However far-fetched, the social implications are staggering. If it turns out that some genetic backgrounds are better adapted to have babies in space, would this dictate who could become space-faring?

Lastly, Muotri would like to compare organoids generated from cells of healthypatients to those from people with Alzheimers or Parkinsons disease. In 2011, a lab down the hall from Muotris at UC San Diego showed thatneurons derived from schizophrenic patientswere different than those derived from neurotypical patients. However, similar in-the-dish research on diseases of the aging brain have been limited. Organoids closelyresembleyoung neural tissue, and it is a lot of work to keep them alive until they start to look like an aging brain. When Muotricompared neurotypical and Alzheimers organoids in Earths gravity, they were indistinguishable. However,this might not be true in space: Maybe in the microgravity of space the organoids will age faster, and we could reveal their [Alzheimers] phenotypes.

Muotri would also like to send the organoids up with even more sensors, including recording arrays that can actually measure the electrical activity of the organoids while theyre in space. Such data could provide clues about the functionality of these brain clumps, in addition to their genetic and anatomical signatures.

Muotris energy and enthusiasm for the project is palpable. But he has one big concern: when the mini-brains were sent into space, there was a 24-hour black out period during launch preparation over which the Space Tango couldnt send back data. Muotri confessed that this was his biggest worry for the mission. But, he still laughed heartily, We just have to hope that everything is going to be okay.

Ashley Juavinett, PhD is a neuroscientist, educator, and writer. She currently works as an Assistant Teaching Professor at UC San Diego, where she is developing novel approaches to teaching and mentoring folks in neuroscience. Follow her on Twitter @analog_ashley

A version of this article was originally published on Massives website as There might be some problems when we try to make babies in space and has been republished here with permission.

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Why making healthy babies in space should be quite the adventure - Genetic Literacy Project

The Slowness of Literature and the Shadow of Knowledge – The New Yorker

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The following was adapted from a speech delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.

Frankfurt, the financial hub of Europe, is home to one of the biggest stock exchanges in the world, where everything is about quick deals and quick money. It is home, too, to a book fair, which also happens to be one of the biggest in the world, and where everything, likewise, is about buying and selling, though the trade is in booksalbeit only the newest ones, which appear in their hundreds of thousands each year. On the occasion of the fair, it is worth thinking about one of literatures most important characteristics: its slowness.

Im not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to usand, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently.

Some sixty years before the birth of Christ, Lucretius wrote his only known work, On the Nature of Things, a didactic poem about how the world is made of atoms. The atomic reality that Lucretius describes is not an isolated phenomenonit is not a separate realm of electrons and nuclei, electromagnetic fields, particles and waves. In Lucretius poem, the atomic dimension exists side by side with the world as we see it every day, with its grassy plains and rivers, its bridges and buildings, its cows and goats, its birds and its sky. Lucretius knew that the two domains are sides of the same coin, that the one does not exist without the other. There is little doubt in my mind that the world today would look different if the progress of science had been anchored in our human reality instead of losing sight of it, for in that recognition lies an obligation and an unceasing correction: we are no greater than the forestwe are no greater even than the tree. And we are made of the same constituents.

Lucretius poem was long forgotten. But when, eventually, it was rediscovered, in the early fifteenth century, it marked a significant prelude to the dawning Renaissance, and, not only may it still be read todayit continues to speak to us, telling us things we have forgotten, or things we perhaps never truly understood.

Literature works slowly not just in history but also in the individual reader. I remember the first time I read the Danish poet Inger Christensen and, in particular, her long poem alphabet. This was in the mid-nineties, some twenty-five years ago now. alphabet is a list of things occurring in the world; in Susanna Nieds English translation, it begins like this:

apricot trees exist, apricot trees existbracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,citrus trees; cicadas exist;cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;killers exist, and doves, and doves;haze, dioxin, and days; daysexist, days and death; and poemsexist; poems, days, death

At the time, twenty-five years ago, I found this poem beautifulthere came from it a very special kind of existential glow. But it did no more than flame up for me in the moment. Then, a few years ago, it resurfaced in my mind. I dont know why. But I read it again, and it had taken on new meaning. Firstly, I sensed a grief in its evocation of objects, animals and plants, as if somehow a shadow were now hanging over them. It could have been the knowledge that at some point we are to die and leave them behind, but it could also have been the knowledge that they might die and leave us behind. There are many animal species we no longer can take for granted.

Secondly, I was now aware of how the poem formally intertwines culture and nature. The entities listed in the poem do not occur randomly but are structured, in two waysalphabetically, and according to the principles of the so-called Fibonacci sequence in mathematics, whereby each number is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. This pattern occurs throughout the natural world, in the genealogy of bees, in the branching of trees and flowers, in petal numbers, pine cones, pineapples, and sunflowers. This underlying structure, to which nature itself is at once oblivious and obedient, belongs quite as much to mysticism as to mathematics. In the words that the poem isolates, calling forth their singular entities and phenomena, the world becomes at once familiar and alien to us, at once sensuous and abstract, comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

Christensen is clearly related to Lucretius. The word that Lucretius used for atom is the same word he used for letter of the alphabet. This was also true of the first of the Greeks to write of the atom: they, too, employed the term for letter of the alphabet. Lucretius repeatedly compares atoms with letters; just as the same few letters may be combined in endless ways to express everything between heaven and earth, the same few atoms may be combined to create heaven and earth and everything in between.

Science and literature alike are readers of the world. And, sooner or later, both lead us to the unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins. In one of her essays, Inger Christensen writes that that boundary, between intelligible and unintelligible, exists within us; science, she writes, conducts the conversation between readability and unreadability using terms such as chaos theory, fractals, and superstrings only because to use the word God would seem overbearing.

Everything exists side by side. Atoms, letters of the alphabet, literature, science, the world. And insight and destruction.

The world in whose midst we now stand, with its skyscrapers and cars, its airports and its banks, also emerged slowly, and, if we were to pinpoint its beginnings, the great upheavals that occurred in Europe around the time of the rediscovery of Lucretius book would be key. The Italian scholar and humanist Poggio Bracciolini unearthed On the Nature of Things in January, 1417. He most likely found the book, perhaps the only copy then in existence, in the German monastery of Fulda, no more than a hundred kilometres from Frankfurt. Some thirty years later, around 1450, Gutenberg developed the printing press. That, too, happened in this region, in Mainz, only forty kilometres from here. Also around this time, the legend of Faust, the learned vagabond who sold his soul to the Devil, took shape in Germany. The roots of the Frankfurt Book Fair go back to that same periodthe first one took place in 1454.

It remains unclear quite how the legend of Faust emerged, but history does make mention of a real Johann Faust, who matches the description, and who is said to have been born twenty-six years after that first book fair, in 1480, at a place called Knittlingen, not a hundred and fifty kilometres from Frankfurt. He is described as a learned charlatan purporting to be skilled in magic, and he appears to have wandered the region with sojourns at its various universities. We know he was in Wrzburg in 1506, a hundred and ten kilometres from Frankfurt, and in Kreuznach in 1507, a hundred and thirty kilometres from here. And we know, too, that in 1509 he was awarded a degree from the University of Heidelberg, only ninety kilometres from here. So we can by no means rule out that Faust, too, attended the book fair at Frankfurt.

Another historical candidate is a certain Johann Fust, who lived from 1400 until 1466. Fust was a goldsmith and a business partner of Gutenbergs, in Mainz, forty kilometres from Frankfurt.

But what about the Devil? Where was he?

If nothing else, we know that he was once in Wartburg, two hundred kilometres from here. In the early fifteen-twenties, the Devil was seen there by a monk who, late one night, sat immersed in his work, translating the Bible into German. The monk called himse
lf Junker Jrg, though his real name was Martin Luther, and he was so enraged at the Devil for interrupting him in his labors that he hurled an ink pot at him.

Here then, in this strangely hybrid world of superstition and rational thought, magic and science, witch burnings and book printing, the reality we now inhabit was founded. The invention of the printing press made it possible to accumulate and disseminate knowledge on a scale hitherto unseen. Here began the slow separation of science from religion which so radically altered our view of the world and ourselves that today we can scarcely believe that anything was ever any different.

So what was the Devil doing there, in the foundation of what was to become the world as we know it?

It can be held, of course, that the Faust legend is a Protestant formation narrative: the tale emerged at the time of the Reformation, and Fausts sin is not necessarily that he seeks knowledge but that he does so while removing himself from God. And, to Goethe, who also hailed from Frankfurt, Fausts sin was secular: he sought knowledge without knowing love.

But its hard to ignore the thought that where man strives for knowledge, the Devil will never be far away. It was the Devil, in the shape of a serpent, who enticed Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, leading to man being banished from Paradise, and it was the Devil whom Faust evoked in his efforts to penetrate the secrets of nature.

With all our technological advances, from the printing press to the airplane and the nuclear-power station, there seems to follow a shadow, unseen and yet perceptible, for the consequences of these advances manifest themselves before our eyes. Karl Benz, who, in 1885, built the first motorcar in a workshop in Mannheim, only eighty kilometres from Frankfurt, could hardly have realized that, in the future, his machinewhich would join places and people together, opening cultures to each other and increasing the radius of human life so considerablywould claim the lives of one and a quarter million people each year, in car crashes. Nor could he have known that carbon-dioxide emissions from cars would be a cause of global warming, rising sea levels, burning forests, growing desert areas, and the extinction of animal species.

This phenomenon, whereby the well-intended action of the one spirals into uncontrollable evil when the one becomes the many, is referred to by French philosopher Michel Serres as the original sin. Diabolically, although each of us may wish only good, by our collective deeds we end up committing evil.

The Devil is associated with transgression; he is its very figure. And, since the endeavor to wrestle from nature its innermost secrets is a transgression, Faust must accordingly seek the Devils help.

The Devil exists to us because transgression puts us at peril. The insight is as old as culture itself. And Faust was as relevant in the fifteen-hundreds as he was in the eighteen-hundreds, when Goethe wrote about him, and in the nineteen-forties, when Thomas Mann wrote about him in his novel Doctor Faustus. Doctor Faustus begins with a scene which, when I read it for the first time, at the age of nineteen, etched itself into my memory. Two young lads, with the oddly sounding names Serenus Zeitblom and Adrian Leverkhn, grow up together in the depths of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and, at the beginning of the novel, Adrians father performs for them some scientific demonstrations. These concern how dead, inanimate matter may behave as if it were alive. Adrian, who will later sell his soul to the Devil, is amused by his fathers reverence of the mysteries of nature and shakes with laughter, whereas Serenus is aghast.

I dont know why that scene etched itself into my memory at the time, when I was nineteen, but I do know why I keep coming back to it: there, in that room, the living and the dead, the authentic and the inauthentic, alchemy and science, the Devil and modernity, all came together. And none of the elements present in that room has become any less significant to us since Mann brought them together, in the nineteen-forties; rather, they have become consolidated, for, since then, the atom has been split, and we have isolated and analyzed DNA, and now ventured into genetic engineering. The scientific opportunities this presents are hugeplants may be improved, food production increased, organs may be grown, even new life created. Man, we could say, has at last become like God. But, in one ancient text, nearly three thousand years old, we can read about what happened to someone else who wanted to become like God:

For thou hast said in thine heartI will ascend into heaven,I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;I will be like the most High.Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell,to the sides of the pit.

Or, to use the words of perhaps the greatest German poet of them all, Friedrich Hlderlin, born a hundred and sixty kilometres from Frankfurt: Nothing makes with greater certainty the earth into a hell, than mans wanting to make it his heaven. Yet the mutual proximity of insight and destruction tells us nothing of the sequence of these things, and the same Hlderlin wrote something else, which is equally true, in one of his unworldly and exquisite poems: But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.

Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken.

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The Slowness of Literature and the Shadow of Knowledge - The New Yorker

Is human genetic engineering ethical? | Debate.org

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As students of a high school summer genetic engineering course, we have decided that human genetic engineering is immoral for the following reasons: It would eliminate talent; as stated in The Incredibles, If everyones super, then no one will be. And Playing God is a dangerous game that inevitably ends with a monster.- AnonymousEveryone will be the same, parents will want the perfect child, therefore, everyone will have the same talents and advantages, so it will not make a big difference in society. If a group of people begins to make superior changes in their offspring, the rest of the population will be left with inferior children unless they too join in the practice of designing their baby. Therefore, the company that produces these changes will be in control of the population.If human genetic engineering were to happen, the various figures of god, which millions of people around the world rely on every day would collapse and becomes us, therefore, reducing faith by having us play the role of a god-like figure. While creating the perfect immune system, only diseases that are already known will be prevented. When a new disease comes along, our immune system will not be comparatively as strong. We came to the opinion that genetically engineering designer babies is wrong because the social-economic divide would become increasingly more noticeable and potentially more hostile.Genetically engineering a privileged embryo to be immune to all known diseases would cause the downfall of the pharmaceutics industry, and consequently the deaths of a great number of underprivileged citizens.

When we try to engineer a child, for that is what an embryo is, a child, we change God's plan for the child. If that child was meant to be born with dyslexia, and you take it from them, not only are we taking away something that they will grow through, but we ourselves are playing god. A parent raises a child with unconditional love. If that child is chosen to be a certain sex, hair color, eye color, IQ and all imperfections have been taken out, how can the love of their parents ever be unconditional?

It is meddling with something beyond our grasp, we are not meant to play God and try to create life in the way we wish it to be. We are all formed in our mothers womb just as he wants us to be. "Ps 139:13 - For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." "Isaiah 44:24 - Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself."

I believe it is unethical because it goes against the Bible. I believe that only God can truly affect the genetics of a human being and the science doesn't stand a chance. It is morally wrong and takes God out of it. After all we are talking about a human life here. No matter what people say, the cells science messes with are human beings.

In the bible it says that we were created in gods image. If we genetic engineer on some one then we are tarnishing the image of God. In the move Gattaca they show that only people of higher class and are modified can be great, but look at steven hawking. Steven hawking has helped contrubute so much and look at his diabilaties.

When will we learn the simple fact that everything man has tried to improve on relating to mother nature and creation has ultimately ended up being a step in the wrong direction? Sometimes irreversible changes we could not have forseen show up decades later. When you put something on this earth that never has and never was intended to be here, you can't possibly see the repercussions it will bring about. There is so much we will never understand about the human body, mind and soul. It is foolish and arrogant to think we can experiment with the human race on this level and say we understand it all. When will we learn? We are not God. If you don't believe in the God who created everything, then most likely you will think man is smart enough and powerful enough to cure any disease, engineer life to last indefinitely, and anything else our heart desires, without any consequences. I'm all for advances in healthcare, but we can't possibly think we can improve on what God created can we? In his ultimate wisdom he created the human race, and the universe. Let's just figure out how to build a car that will last more than 10 years before we start engineering the perfect human race. What do you say?

It leaves people to decide what the "ultimate race" would be like. Genetic engineering doesn't cure diseases as people claim. Genetics in one of the most misunderstood realms of science. (Not that I understand it, but the leading scientist can't come to consensus either.) It is used for growth hormone, insulin production, fertility drugs, and vaccines. Since genetics is so risky and these risks are not fully understood, GE on humans should be restricted to research and experimentation in life or death situations.

Why spend money on creating your own child from chosen traits? Let mother nature take its course. Okay? So people... Dont customize your own child, thats just wrong. It may seem appealing at first because you want your child to be so-called perfect, but hey, no one's perfect. Okay?

In the 21st century, we have seen the vast differences in technological advancements in the developed and developing countries in the world. The poor citizens of developing countries generally have less sophisticated technological gadgets compared to those that are wealthier. If we were to allow genetic engineering, it will certainly create an even larger inequality between the rich and the poor. The affluent ones can simply pay to get muscle enhancements or increase their IQ genetically. However, the poor ones will have to toll and work very hard simply to match up to their rich counterparts. This would certainly create an unbalanced society where the rich will continue to advance and become richer whereas the poor will be left behind in this fast-paced race. Thus, this clear distinction between the two groups: the Genetically Modified and the normal being is known as the Genetic Divide. In such a society, the poor will be extremely disadvantaged and it will be even harder to adopt a meritocratic system. Thus, an equal starting platform will no longer exist. Therefore, genetic engineering should not be pursued as it has the potential to cause an unwanted genetic divide in the society.

Though there are many naysayers out there God does exist. He has more power and love than we could possibly imagine. He has a divine plan for every person and tragedy happens for a reason, the ripple effect is endless even if we are too stubborn to see. We do not have the right to play God. If diseases happen they happen for a reason and though tragic there is always something good that comes out of it. Plus, messing with genetics and increasing lifespans in an unnatural way only contributes to overpopulation that much more.

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Is human genetic engineering ethical? | Debate.org

For synthetic biology to reach its potential, building new chromosomes from scratch must become commonplaceand we may be getting close – Genetic…

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Understand biology and engineer biology. These are the goals of synthetic biology in brief. Due to the developments in sequencing and DNA synthesis, scientists can construct genetic constructs and edit genomes. These tools answer basic research questions and provide biological applications. But synthetic biology can never reach its full potential until artificial genome writing becomes commonplace.

Chromosomes are the hard drives of cells. They contain most of the cells DNA and genes. Bacteria and archaea typically have a single circular chromosome, while eukaryotes contain several linear ones. Besides genetic information, a chromosome contains structural elements. Centromers (that participate in mitosis), telomers (that have a role in maintaining linear chromosome integrity), and origins of replication (that are where DNA replication starts in circular DNA pieces) are some well-known examples.

Artificial chromosomes are chromosomes that have been fully constructed in the lab and assembled within a cell. An important note: artificial chromosomes do not mean artificial life. They function normally within cells and the DNA used is the same as the one found in nature. What is different is their origin they dont come from a DNA template duplication and the genetic information they carry.

The advantages of building a chromosome align with both goals of synthetic biology. The role of many DNA elements is unknown. By recombining, adding, or deleting DNA sequences, we can understand if a genetic part is essential and what does it do. By rewriting a genome from scratch, we can obtain a cell with specific properties and only them! Such cells are invaluable tools for applied and fundamental research.

Current DNA technology makes the construction of short DNA pieces easy and available to most research labs, but the same cannot be said for chromosome assembly. And this is not surprising: a plasmid with a few genes contains a few thousand base pairs; a chromosome several million or billion! As a result, there are very few reported artificial chromosomes reported. The emblematic Yeast 2.0 consortium reported the construction and assembly of six of the yeasts chromosomes. A research group from Switzerland designed and assembled a full bacterial chromosome with its genome minimized to the essential components; so far, they havent managed to insert the chromosome to the organism. A minimal bacterial cell with a synthetic genome was nevertheless announced in 2016 by J. Craig Venter Institute scientists. And recently the molecular biology workhorse, the bacterium E. coli, got its genome replaced by a synthetic variant.

All these works required a huge amount of resources and faced tremendous challenges. And despite the successes, we are a long way from mastering the craft of genome writing. In a recent article, Nili Ostrov and her collaborators in the field of synthetic genomics outline the technological advances needed to reach this goal. They list the following areas of focus: genome design, DNA synthesis, genome editing, and chromosome assembly.

Designing the synthetic chromosome is the first step of a construction workflow. And this step is probably the most critical, as an error there will condemn the whole effort into failure. The information hidden into a genome is too vast to be handled manually. This requires computer aided design tools, which are currently under development. These tools should also predict the effect of alterations in the sequence. Ideally, design software should model how a cell will behave when the synthetic genome replaces its native one.

Chemical DNA synthesis can provide DNA oligos a few hundred base pairs long. This is simply not good enough for chromosome synthesis. DNA synthesis will need to reach the scale of several thousand base pairs, decrease its error rate. And the assembly workflows should minimize the need of iterative cloning steps.

Genome editing is the key to generate many synthetic genome variants. Constructing a chromosome de novo will always be laborious. Genome editing will reduce the need of reconstructing from scratch when we need to insert a few (say, a few thousand) mutations to mimic a certain phenotype. Multiplex genome editing already exists. But instead of 20-50 edits, the techniques should allow for many thousand.

The last step of chromosome writing is the assembly of the final construct. Throwing the smaller DNA parts inside a bakers yeast cell and use its DNA repair system to stitch them up is how its currently done, and it works well. However, the yeast has limitations on what kind of DNA sequences it can work with. For a bigger variety of constructs, we will need more hosts and transformation methods.

Genome writing will accelerate the synthetic biology and genetic engineering applications. In medicine, engineered cells could become accurate disease models, increasing therapeutic efficiency and reducing the need for animal testing. In agriculture, plant cells with engineered genome or plastome can guide breeding and editing efforts to increase productivity and crop robustness. In metabolic engineering, cells will produce compounds optimally. And if we want to adapt organisms for life beyond earths boundaries, chromosome editing will let us test radical redesigns and insert novel properties.

Ostrov and collaborators write that many of the technological breakthroughs can be achieved within the next years. It sounds a bit optimistic, but lets hope we will be pleasantly surprised. Chromosome engineering has the potential to benefit all humankind, but we should be careful to not overhype the potential and promise things we cant deliver. And as the authors say and I couldnt agree more we have to be transparent, ethical, and share the advances globally.

Kostas Vavitsas, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Athens, Greece. He is also community editor for PLOS Synbio and steering committee member of EUSynBioS. Follow him on Twitter @konvavitsas

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For synthetic biology to reach its potential, building new chromosomes from scratch must become commonplaceand we may be getting close - Genetic...

The scientists who are creating a bio-internet of things – MIT Technology Review

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Imagine designing the perfect device for the internet of things. What functions must it have? For a start, it must be able to communicate, both with other devices and with its human overlords. It must be able to store and process information. And it must monitor its environment with a range of sensors. Finally, it will need some kind of built-in motor.

There is no shortage of devices that have many of these features. Most are based on widely available, low-cost devices such as Raspberry Pis, Arduino boards, and the like.

But another set of machines with similar functions is much more plentiful, say Raphael Kim and Stefan Poslad at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. They point out that bacteria communicate effectively and have built-in engines and sensors, as well as powerful information storage and processing architecture.

And that raises an interesting possibility, they say. Why not use bacteria to create a biological version of the internet of things? Today, in a call to action, they lay out some of the thinking and the technologies that could make this possible.

The way bacteria store and process information is an emerging area of research, much of it focused on the bacterial workhorse Escherichia coli. These (and other) bacteria store information in ring-shaped DNA structures called plasmids, which they transmit from one organism to the next in a process called conjugation.

Last year, Federico Tavella at the University of Padua in Italy and colleagues built a circuit in which one strain of immotile E. coli transmitted a simple Hello world message to a motile strain, which carried the information to another location.

This kind of information transmission occurs all the time in the bacterial world, creating a fantastically complex network. But Tavella and cos proof-of-principle experiment shows how it can be exploited to create a kind of bio-internet, say Kim and Poslad.

E. coli make a perfect medium for this network. They are motilethey have a built-in engine in the form of waving, thread-like appendages called flagella, which generate thrust. They have receptors in their cell walls that sense aspects of their environmenttemperature, light, chemicals, etc. They store information in DNA and process it using ribosomes. And they are tiny, allowing them to exist in environments that human-made technologies have trouble accessing.

E. coli are relatively easy to manipulate and engineer as well. The grassroots movement of DIY biology is making biotechnology tools cheaper and more easily available. The Amino Lab, for example, is a genetic engineering kit for schoolchildren, allowing them to reprogram E. coli to glow in the dark, among other things.

This kind of biohacking is becoming relatively common and shows the remarkable potential of a bio-internet of things. Kim and Poslad talk about a wide range of possibilities. Bacteria could be programmed and deployed in different surroundings, such as the sea and smart cities, to sense for toxins and pollutants, gather data, and undertake bioremediation processes, they say.

Bacteria could even be reprogrammed to treat diseases. Harbouring DNA that encode useful hormones, for instance, the bacteria can swim to a chosen destination within the human body, [and] produce and release the hormones when triggered by the microbes internal sensor, they suggest.

Of course, there are various downsides. While genetic engineering makes possible all kinds of amusing experiments, darker possibilities give biosecurity experts sleepless nights. Its not hard to imagine bacteria acting as vectors for various nasty diseases, for example.

Its also easy to lose bacteria. One thing they do not have is the equivalent of GPS. So tracking them is hard. Indeed, it can be almost impossible to track the information they transmit once it is released into the wild.

And therein lies one of the problems with a biological internet of things. The conventional internet is a way of starting with a message at one point in space and re-creating it at another point chosen by the sender. It allows humans, and increasingly devices, to communicate with each other across the planet.

Kim and Poslads bio-internet, on the other hand, offers a way of creating and releasing a message but little in the way of controlling where it ends up. The bionetwork created by bacterial conjugation is so mind-bogglingly vast that information can spread more or less anywhere. Biologists have observed the process of conjugation transferring genetic material from bacteria to yeast, to plants, and even to mammalian cells.

Evolution plays a role too. All living things are subject to its forces. No matter how benign a bacterium might seem, the process of evolution can wreak havoc via mutation and selection, with outcomes that are impossible to predict.

Then there is the problem of bad actors influencing this network. The conventional internet has attracted more than its fair share of individuals who release malware for nefarious purposes. The interest they might have in a biological internet of things is the stuff of nightmares.

Kim and Poslad acknowledge some of these issues, saying that creating a bacteria-based network presents fresh ethical issues. Such challenges offer a rich area for discussion on the wider implication of bacteria driven Internet of Things systems, they conclude with some understatement.

Thats a discussion worth having sooner rather than later.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1910.01974 : The Thing with E. coli: Highlighting Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating Bacteria in IoT and HCI

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The scientists who are creating a bio-internet of things - MIT Technology Review

First genetic engineering therapy approved by the FDA for leukemia – Ars Technica

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Enlarge / Scanning electron micrograph of a human T cell.

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a therapy that involves genetically engineering a patients own cells, the agency announced Wednesday.

The therapy, called Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) by Novartis, will be used to reprogram the immune cells of pediatric and young adult patients with a certain type of leukemia, called B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. During a 22-day out-of-body retraining, patients immune cellsspecifically T cells that patrol the body and destroy enemiesget a new gene that allows them to identify and attack the leukemia cells.

Such therapies, called CAR-T therapies, have shown potential for effectively knocking back cancers in several trials, raising hopes of researchers and patients alike. But they come with severe safety concernsplus potentially hefty price tags.

Nevertheless, the FDA announced its approval with fanfare and optimism, calling it a historic action. In the announcement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said:

Were entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patients own cells to attack a deadly cancer. New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine and create an inflection point in our ability to treat and even cure many intractable illnesses. At the FDA, were committed to helping expedite the development and review of groundbreaking treatments that have the potential to be life-saving.

Like all CAR-T therapies, Kymriah involves reprograming body-guard T cells to contain a gene that codes for a protein called chimeric antigen receptor or CAR. This protein allows the T cells to recognize and attack cells that have a protein called CD19 hanging off themwhich leukemia cells do.

In the Kymriah procedure, researchers first harvest T cells from a patient and then send them to a manufacturing center. There, researchers insert the CAR gene into the immune cells using a virus. The process takes 22 days, Nature reported.

In an earlier trial, 52 of 63 participants (82.5 percent) achieved overall remission after undergoing the therapy. The trial is unpublished and lacked controls, so its not possible to determine Kymriahs influence. But trials of other CAR-T therapies have shown similarly high rates of remission. And the early results were enough to sway an external panel of FDA scientific advisors in July. In a unanimous vote on July 12, the panel recommended that the FDA approve Kymriah.

This is a major advance and is ushering in a new era, panel member Malcolm Smith, a pediatric oncologist at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, told Nature at the time.

But, the story isnt all rosy. CAR-T therapies are known to cause life-threatening immune responses called cytokine storms or cytokine release syndrome (CRS). This can lead to systemic full body inflammation, with organ failure, seizures, delirium, and brain swelling. Several trials of therapies similar to Kymriah have reported deaths.

In the Kymriah trial, 47 percent of patients experienced some level of CRS, but none died. Novartis reported that it was able to manage all the cases of CRS.

The FDA noted the risk in todays announcement and also revealed that it had expanded the approved use of a drug called Actemra, which treats CRS, so it can be used in patients who receive CAR-T therapy. The FDA also approved Kymriah with a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy or (REMS). This involves additional safeguards such as extra training and protocols for healthcare providers.

For now, though, Kymriah is only approved for use in patients aged 25 or younger who have failed conventional therapies or relapsed since undergoing those therapies. Of the roughly 3,100 patients aged 20 or younger who are diagnosed each year with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, about 15 to 20 percent will fail treatment. For these patients, Kymriah may be a literal life-saver, as there are few alternatives.

But along with the frightening side effects, gene therapy may also come with a hefty price tag. UK experts have appraised one round of therapy at $649,000. Its still unclear what the actual cost will be and what patients will end up having to pay.

In a press release, Novartis announced that its working with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to come up with outcomes-based pricing. Also in the release, Bruno Strigini, CEO of Novartis Oncology, added:

We are so proud to be part of this historic moment in cancer treatment and are deeply grateful to our researchers, collaborators, and the patients and families who participated in the Kymriah clinical program. As a breakthrough immunocellular therapy for children and young adults who desperately need new options, Kymriah truly embodies our mission to discover new ways to improve patient outcomes and the way cancer is treated.

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First genetic engineering therapy approved by the FDA for leukemia - Ars Technica

Genetic engineering in science fiction – Wikipedia

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In literature and especially in science fiction, genetic engineering has been used as a theme or a plot device in many stories.[1][2]

In his 1924 essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future, J. B. S. Haldane predicted a day when biologists would invent new algae to feed the world and ectogenetic children would be created and modified using eugenic selection. Aldous Huxley developed these ideas in a satirical direction for his 1932 novel Brave New World, in which ectogenetic embryos were developed in selected environments to create children of an 'Alpha', 'Beta', or 'Gamma' type.[3]

The advent of large-scale genetic engineering has increased its presence in fiction.[4][5] Genetics research consortia, such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, have felt the need to distinguish genetic engineering fact from fiction in explaining their work to the public,[1] and have explored the role that genetic engineering has played in the public perception of programs, such as the Human Genome Project.[6]

Beyond the usual library catalog classifications,[7] the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute[1] and the NHGRI[6] have compiled catalogs of literature in various media with genetics and genetic engineering as a theme or plot device. Such compilations are also available at fan sites.[8]

In the 2000 television series Andromeda, the Nietzscheans (Homo sapiens invictus in Latin) are a race of genetically engineered humans who religiously follow the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, social Darwinism and Dawkinite genetic competitiveness. They claim to be physically perfect and are distinguished by bone blades protruding outwards from the wrist area.

In the book 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, genetic engineering of humans, plants and animals and how that affects a society spread over the solar system is explored.

In the Animorphs book series, race of aliens known as the Hork-Bajir were engineered by a race known as the Arns. Another race, the Iskhoots, are another example of genetic engineering. The outer body, the Isk, was created by the Yoort, who also modify themselves to be symbotic to the Isk. Also, a being known as the Ellimist has made species such as the Pemalites by this method.

In the 1983 film Anna to the Infinite Power, the main character was one of seven genetically cloned humans created by Anna Zimmerman as a way to groom a perfect person in her image. After her death, her work was carried on by her successor Dr. Henry Jelliff, who had other plans for the project. But in the end we learn that her original genetic creation, Michaela Dupont, has already acquired her creator's abilities, including how to build a genetic replicator from scratch.

The 1996 video game series Resident Evil involves the creation of genetically engineered viruses which turn humans and animals into organisms such as zombies, the Tyrants or Hunters by a worldwide pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation.

In the video game series BioShock, most of the enemies in both BioShock and BioShock 2, referred to as "splicers", as well as the player, gain superpowers and enhance their physical and mental capabilities by means of genetically engineered plasmids, created by use of ADAM stem cells secreted by a species of sea slug.[9]

The novel Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and its sequels are widely recognized by science fiction critics as among the most sophisticated fictional treatments of genetic engineering. They portray genetically-engineered characters whose abilities are far greater than those of ordinary humans (e.g. they are effectively immortal and they function without needing to sleep). At issue is what responsibility they have to use their abilities to help "normal" human beings. Kress explores libertarian and more collectivist philosophies, attempting to define the extent of people's mutual responsibility for each other's welfare.

In the Battletech science fiction series, the Clans have developed a genetic engineering program for their warriors, consisting of eugenics and the use of artificial wombs.

In The Champion Maker, a novel by Kevin Joseph, a track coach and a teenage phenom stumble upon a dark conspiracy involving genetic engineering while pursuing Olympic gold.

In the CoDominium series, the planet Sauron develops a supersoldier program. The result were the Sauron Cyborgs, and soldiers. The Cyborgs, who made up only a very small part of the population of Sauron, were part highly genetically engineered human, and part machine. Cyborgs held very high status in Sauron society.

Sauron soldiers, who made up the balance of the population, were the result of generations of genetic engineering. The Sauron soldiers had a variety of physical characteristics and abilities that made the soldiers the best in combat and survival in many hostile environments. For instance, their bones were stronger than unmodified humans. Their lungs extract oxygen more efficiently than normal unmodified humans, allowing them to exert themselves without getting short of breath, or function at high altitudes. Sauron soldiers also have the ability to change the focal length of their eyes, so that they can "zoom" in on a distant object, much like an eagle.

The alien Moties also have used genetic engineering.

In the science fiction series Crest of the Stars, the Abh are a race of genetically engineered humans, who continue to practice the technology. All Abh have been adapted to live in zero-gravity environments, with the same features such as beauty, long life, lifelong youthful appearance, blue hair, and a "space sensory organ".

In the 2000 TV series Dark Angel, the main character Max is one of a group of genetically engineered supersoldiers spliced with feline DNA.

In military science fiction 1993 television series Exosquad, the plot revolves around the conflict between Terrans (baseline humans) and Neosapiens, a race of genetically engineered sentient (and sterile) humanoids, who were originally bred for slave labour but revolted under the leadership of Phaeton and captured the Homeworlds (Earth, Venus and Mars). During the war, various sub-broods of Neosapiens were invented, such as, Neo Megas (intellectually superior to almost any being in the Solar System), Neo Warriors (cross-breeds with various animals) and Neo Lords (the ultimate supersoldiers).

Genetic modification is also found in the 2002 anime series Gundam SEED. It features enhanced humans called Coordinators who were created from ordinary humans through genetic modification.

In Marvel Comics, the 31st century adventurers called the Guardians of the Galaxy are genetically engineered residents of Mercury, Jupiter, and Pluto.

The 1997 film Gattaca deals with the idea of genetic engineering and eugenics as it projects what class relations would look like in a future society after a few generations of the possibility of genetic engineering.

In Marvel Comics, the Inhumans are the result of genetic engineering of early humans by the Kree alien race.

Rather than deliberate engineering, this 2017 novel by British author Steve Turnbull features a plague that carries genetic material across species, causing a wide variety of mutations. Human attempts to control this plague have resulted in a fascist dystopia.

In the Leviathan universe, a group known as the Darwinists use genetically engineered animals as weapons.

The 2000AD strip, Lobster Random features a former soldier-turned-torturer, who has been modified to not feel pain or need to sleep and has a pair of lobster claws grafted to his hips. This state has left him somewhat grouchy.

In Metal Gear Solid, the Genome Army were given gene therapy enhancements.

Also in the series, the Les Enfants Terribles project involved genetic engineering.

The Moreau series by S. Andrew Swann has as the central premise the proliferation of humanoid genetically-engineered animals. The name of the series (and of the creatures themselves) comes from the H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. In the W
ells novel, humanoid animals were created surgically, though this detail has been changed to be genetic manipulation in most film adaptations.

The Neanderthal Parallax novel by Robert J. Sawyer depicts a eugenic society that has benefitted immensely from the sterilization of dangerous criminals as well as preventing the 5% least intelligent from procreating for ten generations.

In the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series, the character Rei Ayanami is implied to be a lab-created being combining human and angelic DNA. (compare to the Biblical Nephilim)

Genetic engineering (or something very like it) features prominently in Last and First Men, a 1930 novel by Olaf Stapledon.

Genetic engineering is depicted as widespread in the civilized world of Oryx and Crake. Prior to the apocalypse, though, its use among humans is not mentioned. Author Margaret Atwood describes many transgenic creatures such as Pigoons (though originally designed to be harvested for organs, post-apocalyptic-plague, they become more intelligent and vicious, traveling in packs), Snats (snake-rat hybrids who may or may not be extinct), wolvogs (wolf-dog hybrids), and the relatively harmless "rakunks" (skunk-raccoon hybrids, originally designed as pets with no scent glands).

In Plague, a 1978 film, a bacterium in an agricultural experiment accidentally escapes from a research laboratory in Canada, reaching the American Northeast and Great Britain.

Using a method similar to the DNA Resequencer from Stargate SG-1, and even called DNA Resequencing, the Operation Overdrive Power Rangers were given powers of superhuman strength, enhanced hearing, enhanced eyesight, super bouncing, super speed, and invisibility.

Quake II and Quake 4, released in 1997 and 2005, contain genetically-engineered Stroggs.

In the long-running 2006 series Rogue Trooper, the eponymous hero is a Genetic Infantryman, one of an elite group of supersoldiers genetically modified to resist the poisons left in the Nu-Earth atmosphere by decades of war. The original concept from the pages of 80s cult sci-fi comic 2000 AD (of Judge Dredd fame).

James Blish's The Seedling Stars (1956) is the classic story of controlled mutation for adaptability. In this novel (originally a series of short stories) the Adapted Men are reshaped human beings, designed for life on a variety of other planets. This is one of science fiction's most unreservedly optimistic accounts to date of technological efforts to reshape human beings.

In "The Man Who Grew Too Much" episode (2014), Sideshow Bob steals DNA from a GMO company, thus making himself the very first genetically engineered human, and attempts to combine his DNA with that of the smartest people ever to exist on Earth.

In Sleeper, a 1973 parody of many science fiction tropes, genetically modified crops are shown to grow gigantic.

The short-lived 1990s television series Space: Above and Beyond includes a race of genetically engineered and artificially gestated humans who are born at the physical age of 18, and are collectively known as InVitros or sometimes, derogatorily, "tanks" or "nipple-necks". At the time of the series storyline, this artificial human race was integrated with the parent species, but significant discrimination still occurred.

The Ultimate Life Form project that produced Shadow the Hedgehog and Biolizard in the Sonic the Hedgehog series was a genetic engineering project.

In the Star Trek universe, genetic engineering has featured in a couple of films, and a number of television episodes.

The Breen, the Dominion, Species 8472, the Xindi, and the Federation use technology with organic components.

Khan Noonien Singh, who appeared in Space Seed and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, was a product of genetic engineering. His physical structure was modified to make him stronger and to give him greater stamina than a regular human. His mind was also enhanced. However, the creation of Khan would have serious consequences because the superior abilities given to him created superior ambition. Along with other enhanced individuals, they tried to take over the planet. When they were reawakened by the Enterprise, Khan set himself to taking over the universe. Later, he became consumed by grief and rage, and set himself on the goal of destroying Kirk.

Others of these genetically enhanced augments wreaked havoc in the 22nd century, and eventually some of their enhanced DNA was blended with Klingon DNA, creating the human-looking Klingons of the early 23rd century (See Star Trek: Enterprise episodes "Affliction" and "Divergence").

Because of the experiences with genetic engineering, the Federation had banned it except to correct genetic birth defects, but a number of parents still illegally subjected their children to genetic engineering for a variety of reasons. This often created brilliant but unstable individuals. Such children are not allowed to serve in Starfleet or practice medicine, though Julian Bashir is a notable exception to this. Despite the ban, the Federation allowed the Darwin station to conduct human genetic engineering, which resulted in a telepathic, telekentic humans with a very effective immune system.

In Attack of the Clones, the Kamino cloners who created the clone army for the Galactic Republic had used engineering to enhance their clones. They modified the genetic structure of all but one to accelerate their growth rate, make them less independent, and make them better suited to combat operations.

Later, the Yuuzhan Vong are a race who exclusively use organic technology and regard mechanical technology as heresy. Everything from starships to communications devices to weapons are bred and grown to suit their needs.

In the show Stargate SG-1, the DNA Resequencer was a device built by the Ancients, designed to make extreme upgrades to humans by realigning their DNA and upgrading their brain activity. The machine gave them superhuman abilities, such as telekensis, telepathy, precognition, superhuman senses, strength, and intellect, the power to heal at an incredible rate, and the power to heal others by touch.

In the futuristic tabletop and video game series, Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man uses genetic engineering to enhance the abilities of various militant factions such as the Space Marines, the Grey Knights, and the Adeptus Custodes. A sample or a synthesized version of the gene seed, a "part" of the original Primarch's or leaders DNA is used in the transformation of these superhuman warriors.

At the same time, the Tau Empire uses a form of eugenic breeding to improve the physical and mental condition of its various castes.

In the e-book, Methuselah's Virus, an ageing pharmaceutical billionaire accidentally creates a contagious virus capable of infecting people with extreme longevity when his genetic engineering experiment goes wrong. The novel then examines the problem of what happens if Methuselah's Virus is at risk of spreading to everyone on the entire planet.

In World Hunger, author Brian Kenneth Swain paints the harrowing picture of a life sciences company that field tests a new strain of genetically modified crop, the unexpected side effect of which is the creation of several new species of large and very aggressive insects.

Genetic engineering is an essential theme of the illustrated book Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon, where it is used to colonize other star systems and save the humans of Earth from extinction.

The Survival Gene e-book contains the author Artsun Akopyan's idea that people can't preserve nature as it is forever, so they'll have to change their own genetics in the future or die. In the novel, wave genetics is used to save humankind and all life on Earth.

A series of books by David Brin in which humans have encountered the Five Galazies, a multitude of sentient species which all practice Uplift raising species to sapience through genetic engineering. Humans, believing they have risen to sapience through evolution alone, are seen as
heretics. But they have some status because at the time of contact humans had already Uplifted two species chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins.

Eugenics is a recurrent theme in science fiction, often with both dystopian and utopian elements. The two giant contributions in this field are the novel Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, which describes a society where control of human biology by the state results in permanent social stratification.

There tends to be a eugenic undercurrent in the science fiction concept of the supersoldier. Several depictions of these supersoldiers usually have them bred for combat or genetically selected for attributes that are beneficial to modern or future combat.

The Brave New World theme also plays a role in the 1997 film Gattaca, whose plot turns around reprogenetics, genetic testing, and the social consequences of eugenics. Boris Vian (under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan) takes a more light-hearted approach in his novel Et on tuera tous les affreux ("And we'll kill all the ugly ones").

Other novels touching upon the subject include The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper and That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis. The Eugenics Wars are a significant part of the background story of the Star Trek universe (episodes "Space Seed", "Borderland", "Cold Station 12", "The Augments" and the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). Eugenics also plays a significant role in the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy where eugenics-practicing Neanderthals from a near-utopian parallel world create a gateway to earth. Cowl by Neal Asher describes the collapse of western civilization due to dysgenics. Also Eugenics is the name for the medical company in La Foire aux immortels book by Enki Bilal and on the Immortel (Ad Vitam) movie by the same author.

In Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels, selective breeding programs form a significant theme. Early in the series, the Bene Gesserit religious order manipulates breeding patterns over many generations in order to create the Kwisatz Haderach. In God Emperor of Dune, the emperor Leto II again manipulates human breeding in order to achieve his own ends. The Bene Tleilaxu also employed genetic engineering to create human beings with specific genetic attributes. The Dune series ended with causal determinism playing a large role in the development of behavior, but the eugenics theme remained a crucial part of the story.

In Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, Ender is only allowed to be conceived because of a special government exception due to his parent's high intelligence and the extraordinary performance of his siblings. In Ender's Shadow, Bean is a test-tube baby and the result of a failed eugenics experiment aimed at creating child geniuses.

In the novels Methuselah's Children and Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein, a large trust fund is created to give financial encouragement to marriage among people (the Howard Families) whose parents and grandparents were long lived. The result is a subset of Earth's population who has significantly above-average life spans. Members of this group appear in many of the works by the same author.

In the 1982 Robert Heinlein novel Friday, the main character has been genetically engineered from multiple sets of donors, including, as she finds out later her boss. These enhancements give her superior strength, speed, eyesight in addition to healing and other advanced attributes. Creations like her are considered to be AP's (Artificial Person).

In Eoin Colfer's book The Supernaturalist, Ditto is a Bartoli Baby, which is the name for a failed experiment of the famed Dr. Bartoli. Bartoli tried to create a superior race of humans, but they ended in arrested development, with mutations including extrasensory perception and healing hands.

In Larry Niven's Ringworld series, the character Teela Brown is a result of several generations of winners of the "Birthright Lottery", a system which attempts to encourage lucky people to breed, treating good luck as a genetic trait.

In season 2 of Dark Angel, the main 'bad guy' Ames White is a member of a cult known as the Conclave which has infiltrated various levels of society to breed super-humans. They are trying to exterminate all the Transgenics, including the main character Max Guevara, whom they view as being genetically unclean for having some animal DNA spliced with human.

In the movie Immortel (Ad Vitam), Director/Writer Enki Bilal titled the name of the evil corrupt organization specializing in genetic manipulation, and some very disturbing genetic "enhancement" eugenics. Eugenics has come to be a powerful organization and uses people and mutants of "lesser" genetic stock as guinea pigs. The movie is based on the Nikopol trilogy in Heavy Metal comic books.

In the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a fictional character called Pastor Richards, a caricature of an extreme and insane televangelist, is featured as a guest on a discussion radio show about morality. On this show, he describes shooting people who do not agree with him and who are not "morally correct", which the show's host describes as "amateur eugenics".

In the 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy, a fictional character, pvt. Joe Bauers, aka Not Sure (played by Luke Wilson), awakens from a cryogenic stasis in the year 2505 into a world devastated by dysgenic degeneration. Bauers, who was chosen for his averageness, is discovered to be the smartest human alive and eventually becomes president of the United States.

The manga series Battle Angel Alita and its sequel Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (Gunnm and Gunnm: Last Order as it is known in Japan) by Yukito Kishiro, contains multiple references to the theme of eugenics. The most obvious is the sky city Tiphares (Salem in Japanese edition). Dr. Desty Nova, in the first series in Volume 9, reveals the eugenical nature of the city to Alita (Gally or Yoko) and it is further explored in the sequel series. A James Cameron movie based on the series is due for release on 2018.[10]

In the French 2000 police drama Crimson Rivers, inspectors Pierre Niemans (played by Jean Reno) and his colleague Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) attempt to solve series of murders triggered by eugenics experiment that was going on for years in university town of Guernon.

In the Cosmic Era universe of the Gundam anime series (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED), war is fought between the normal human beings without genetic enhancements, also known as the Naturals, and the Coordinators, who are genetically enhanced. It explores the pros and cons as well as possible repercussions from Eugenics

The Khommites of planet Khomm practice this through the method of self-cloning, believing they are perfect.

The book Uglies, part of a four-book series by Scott Westerfeld, revolves around a girl named Tally who lives in a world where everyone at the age of sixteen receives extensive cosmetic surgery to turn into "Pretties" and join society. Although it deals with extreme cosmetic surgery, the utopian (or dystopian, depending on one's interpretation) ideals in the book are similar to those present in the books mentioned above.

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Genetic engineering in science fiction - Wikipedia

Writing the human genome – The Biological SCENE

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In brief

Synthetic biologists have been creating the genomes of organisms such as viruses and bacteria for the past 15 years. They aim to use these designer genetic codes to make cells capable of producing novel therapeutics and fuels. Now, some of these scientists have set their sights on synthesizing the human genomea vastly more complex genetic blueprint. Read on to learn about this initiative, called Genome Project-write, and the challenges researchers will faceboth technical and ethicalto achieve success.

Nineteenth-century novels are typically fodder for literature conferences, not scientific gatherings. Still, at a high-profile meeting of about 200 synthetic biologists in May, one presenter highlighted Mary Shelleys gothic masterpiece Frankenstein, which turns 200 next year.

Frankensteins monster, after all, is what many people think of when the possibility of human genetic engineering is raised, said University of Pennsylvania ethicist and historian Jonathan Moreno. The initiative being discussed at the New York City meetingGenome Project-write (GP-write)has been dogged by worries over creating unnatural beings. True, part of GP-write aims to synthesize from scratch all 23 chromosomes of the human genome and insert them into cells in the lab. But proponents of the project say theyre focused on decreasing the cost of synthesizing and assembling large amounts of DNA rather than on creating designer babies.

The overall project is still under development, and the projects members have not yet agreed on a specific road map for moving forward. Its also unclear where funding will come from.

What the members of GP-write do agree on is that creating a human genome from scratch is a tremendous scientific and engineering challenge that will hinge on developing new methods for synthesizing and delivering DNA. They will also need to get better at designing large groups of genes that work together in a predictable way, not to mention making sure that even larger assembliesgenomescan function.

GP-write consortium members argue that these challenges are the very thing that should move scientists to pick up the DNA pen and turn from sequence readers to writers. They believe writing the entire human genome is the only way to truly understand how it works. Many researchers quoted Richard Feynman during the meeting in May. The statement What I cannot create, I do not understand was found on the famed physicists California Institute of Technology blackboard after his death. I want to know the rules that make a genome tick, said Jef Boeke, one of GP-writes four coleaders, at the meeting.

To that end, Boeke and other GP-write supporters say the initiative will spur the development of new technologies for designing genomes with software and for synthesizing DNA. In turn, being better at designing and assembling genomes will yield synthetic cells capable of producing valuable fuels and drugs more efficiently. And turning to human genome synthesis will enable new cell therapies and other medical advances.

In 2010, researchers at the Venter Institute, including Gibson, demonstrated that a bacterial cell controlled by a synthetic genome was able to reproduce. Colonies formed by it and its sibling resembled a pair of blue eyes.

Credit: Science

Genome writers have already synthesized a few complete genomes, all of them much less complex than the human genome. For instance, in 2002, researchers chemically synthesized a DNA-based equivalent of the poliovirus RNA genome, which is only about 7,500 bases long. They then showed that this DNA copy could be transcribed by RNA polymerase to recapitulate the viral genome, which replicated itselfa demonstration of synthesizing what the authors called a chemical [C332,652H492,388N98,245O131,196P7,501S2,340] with a life cycle (Science 2002, DOI: 10.1126/science.1072266).

After tinkering with a handful of other viral genomes, in 2010, researchers advanced to bacteria, painstakingly assembling a Mycoplasma genome just over about a million bases in length and then transplanting it into a host cell.

Last year, researchers upped the ante further, publishing the design for an aggressively edited Escherichia coli genome measuring 3.97 million bases long (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf3639). GP-write coleader George Church and coworkers at Harvard used DNA-editing softwarea kind of Google Docs for writing genomesto make radical systematic changes. The so-called rE.coli-57 sequence, which the team is currently synthesizing, lacks seven codons (the three-base DNA words that code for particular amino acids) compared with the normal E. coli genome. The researchers replaced all 62,214 instances of those codons with DNA base synonyms to eliminate redundancy in the code.

Status report International teams of researchers have already synthesized six of yeast's 16 chromosomes, redesigning the organism's genome as part of the Sc2.0 project.

Bacterial genomes are no-frills compared with those of creatures in our domain, the eukaryotes. Bacterial genomes typically take the form of a single circular piece of DNA that floats freely around the cell. Eukaryotic cells, from yeast to plants to insects to people, confine their larger genomes within a cells nucleus and organize them in multiple bundles called chromosomes. An ongoing collaboration is now bringing genome synthesis to the eukaryote realm: Researchers are building a fully synthetic yeast genome, containing 17 chromosomes that range from about 1,800 to about 1.5 million bases long. Overall, the genome will contain more than 11 million bases.

The synthetic genomes and chromosomes already constructed by scientists are by no means simple, but to synthesize the human genome, scientists will have to address a whole other level of complexity. Our genome is made up of more than 3 billion bases across 23 paired chromosomes. The smallest human chromosome is number 21, at 46.7 million baseslarger than the smallest yeast chromosome. The largest, number 1, has nearly 249 million. Making a human genome will mean making much more DNA and solving a larger puzzle in terms of assembly and transfer into cells.

Today, genome-writing technology is in what Boeke, also the director for the Institute of Systems Genetics at New York University School of Medicine, calls the Gutenberg phase. (Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in Europe in the 1400s.) Its still early days.

DNA synthesis companies routinely create fragments that are 100 bases long and then use enzymes to stitch them together to make sequences up to a few thousand bases long, about the size of a gene. Customers can put in orders for small bits of DNA, longer strands called oligos, and whole geneswhatever they needand companies will fabricate and mail the genetic material.

Although the technology that makes this mail-order system possible is impressive, its not prolific enough to make a human genome in a reasonable amount of time. Estimates vary on how long it would take to stitch together a more than 3 billion-base human genome and how much it would cost with todays methods. But the ballpark answer is about a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Synthesis companies could help bring those figures down by moving past their current 100-base limit and creating longer DNA fragments. Some researchers and companies are moving in that direction. For example, synthesis firm Molecular Assemblies is developing an enzymatic process to write long stretches of DNA with fewer errors.

Synthesis speeds and prices have been improving rapidly, and researchers expect they will continue to do so. From my point of view, building DNA is no longer the bottleneck, says Daniel G. Gibson, vice president of DNA technology at Synthetic Genomics and an associate professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Some way or another, if we need to build larger pieces of DNA, w
ell do that.

Gibson isnt involved with GP-write. But his research showcases what is possible with todays toolseven if they are equivalent to Gutenbergs movable type. He has been responsible for a few of synthetic biologys milestones, including the development of one of the most commonly used genome-assembly techniques.

The Gibson method uses chemical means to join DNA fragments, yielding pieces thousands of bases long. For two fragments to connect, one must end with a 20- to 40-base sequence thats identical to the start of the next fragment. These overlapping DNA fragments can be mixed with a solution of three enzymesan exonuclease, a DNA polymerase, and a DNA ligasethat trim the 5 end of each fragment, overlap the pieces, and seal them together.

To make the first synthetic bacterial genome in 2008, that of Mycoplasma genitalium, Gibson and his colleagues at JCVI, where he was a postdoc at the time, started with his eponymous in vitro method. They synthesized more than 100 fragments of synthetic DNA, each about 5,000 bases long, and then harnessed the prodigious DNA-processing properties of yeast, introducing these large DNA pieces to yeast three or four at a time. The yeast used its own cellular machinery to bring the pieces together into larger sequences, eventually producing the entire Mycoplasma genome.

Next, the team had to figure out how to transplant this synthetic genome into a bacterial cell to create what the researchers called the first synthetic cell. The process is involved and requires getting the bacterial genome out of the yeast, then storing the huge, fragile piece of circular DNA in a protective agarose gel before melting it and mixing it with another species of Mycoplasma. As the bacterial cells fuse, some of them take in the synthetic genomes floating in solution. Then they divide to create three daughter cells, two containing the native genomes, and one containing the synthetic genome: the synthetic cell.

When Gibsons group at JCVI started building the synthetic cell in 2004, we didnt know what the limitations were, he says. So the scientists were cautious about overwhelming the yeast with too many DNA fragments, or pieces that were too long. Today, Gibson says he can bring together about 25 overlapping DNA fragments that are about 25,000 bases long, rather than three or four 5,000-base segments at a time.

Gibson expects that existing DNA synthesis and assembly methods havent yet been pushed to their limits. Yeast might be able to assemble millions of bases, not just hundreds of thousands, he says. Still, Gibson believes it would be a stretch to make a human genome with this technique.

One of the most ambitious projects in genome writing so far centers on that master DNA assembler, yeast. As part of the project, called Sc2.0 (a riff on the funguss scientific name, Saccharomyces cerevisiae), an international group of scientists is redesigning and building yeast one synthetic chromosome at a time. The yeast genome is far simpler than ours. But like us, yeasts are eukaryotes and have multiple chromosomes within their nuclei.

Synthetic biologists arent interested in rebuilding existing genomes by rote; they want to make changes so they can probe how genomes work and make them easier to build and reengineer for practical use. The main lesson learned from Sc2.0 so far, project scientists say, is how much the yeast chromosomes can be altered in the writing, with no apparent ill effects. Indeed, the Sc2.0 sequence is not a direct copy of the original. The synthetic genome has been reduced by about 8%. Overall, the research group will make 1.1 million bases worth of insertions, deletions, and changes to the yeast genome (Science 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4557).

So far, says Boeke, whos also coleader of Sc2.0, teams have finished or almost finished the first draft of the organisms 16 chromosomes. Theyre also working on a neochromosome, one not found in normal yeast. In this chromosome, the designers have relocated all DNA coding for transfer RNA, which plays a critical role in protein assembly. The Sc2.0 group isolated these sequences because scientists predicted they would cause structural instability in the synthetic chromosomes, says Joel Bader, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University who leads the projects software and design efforts.

The team is making yeast cells with a new chromosome one at a time. The ultimate goal is to create a yeast cell that contains no native chromosomes and all 17 synthetic ones. To get there, the scientists are taking a relatively old-fashioned approach: breeding. So far, theyve made a yeast cell with three synthetic chromosomes and are continuing to breed it with strains containing the remaining ones. Once a new chromosome is in place, it requires some patching up because of recombination with the native chromosomes. Its a process, but it doesnt look like there are any significant barriers, Bader says. He estimates it will take another two to three years to produce cells with the entire Sc2.0 genome.

So far, even with these significant changes to the chromosomes, the yeast lives at no apparent disadvantage compared with yeast that has its original chromosomes. Its surprising how much you can torture the genome with no effect, Boeke says.

Boeke and Bader have founded a start-up company called Neochromosome that will eventually use Sc2.0 strains to produce large protein drugs, chemical precursors, and other biomolecules that are currently impossible to make in yeast or E. coli because the genetic pathways used to create them are too complex. With synthetic chromosomes well be able to make these large supportive pathways in yeast, Bader predicts.

Whether existing genome-engineering methods like those used in Sc2.0 will translate to humans is an open question.

Bader believes that yeast, so willing to take up and assemble large amounts of DNA, might serve as future human-chromosome producers, assembling genetic material that could then be transferred to other organisms, perhaps human cells. Transplanting large human chromosomes would be tricky, Synthetic Genomics Gibson says. First, the recipient cell must be prepped by somehow removing its native chromosome. Gibson expects physically moving the synthetic chromosome would also be difficult: Stretches of DNA larger than about 50,000 bases are fragile. You have to be very gentle so the chromosome doesnt breakonce its broken, its not going to be useful, he says. Some researchers are working on more direct methods for cell-to-cell DNA transfer, such as getting cells to fuse with one another.

Once the scientists solve the delivery challenge, the next question is whether the transplanted chromosome will function. Our genomes are patterned with methyl groups that silence regions of the genome and are wrapped around histone proteins that pack the long strands into a three-dimensional order in cells nuclei. If the synthetic chromosome doesnt have the appropriate methylation patterns, the right structure, it might not be recognized by the cell, Gibson says.

Biologists might sidestep these epigenetic and other issues by doing large-scale DNA assembly in human cells from the get-go. Ron Weiss, a synthetic biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is pushing the upper limits on this sort of approach. He has designed methods for inserting large amounts of DNA directly into human cells. Weiss endows human cells with large circuits, which are packages of engineered DNA containing groups of genes and regulatory machinery that will change a cells behavior.

In 2014, Weiss developed a landing pad method to insert about 64,000-base stretches of DNA into human and other mammalian cells. First, researchers use gene editing to create the landing pad, which is a set of markers at a designated spot on a particular chromosome where an enzyme called a recombinase will insert the synthetic genetic material. Then they string together the genes for a given pathway, along with their regulatory elements, add a matching
recombinase site, and fashion this strand into a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid. The target cells are then incubated with the plasmid, take it up, and incorporate it at the landing site (Nucleic Acids Res. 2014, DOI: 10.1093/nar/gku1082).

This works, but its tedious. It takes about two weeks to generate these cell lines if youre doing well, and the payload only goes into a few of the cells, Weiss explains. Since his initial publication, he says, his team has been able to generate cells with three landing pads; that means they could incorporate a genetic circuit thats about 200,000 bases long.

Weiss doesnt see simple scale-up of the landing pad method as the way forward, though, even setting aside the tedium. He doesnt think the supersized circuits would even function in a human cell because he doesnt yet know how to design them.

The limiting factor in the size of the circuit is not the construction of DNA, but the design, Weiss says. Instead of working completely by trial and error, bioengineers use computer models to predict how synthetic circuits or genetic edits will work in living cells of any species. But the larger the synthetic element, the harder it is to know whether it will work in a real cell. And the more radical the deletion, the harder it is to foresee whether it will have unintended consequences and kill the cell. Researchers also have a hard time predicting the degree to which cells will express the genes in a complex synthetic circuita lot, a little, or not at all. Gene regulation in humans is not fully understood, and rewriting on the scale done in the yeast chromosome would have far less predictable outcomes.

Besides being willing to take up and incorporate DNA, yeast is relatively simple. Upstream from a yeast gene, biologists can easily find the promoter sequence that turns it on. In contrast, human genes are often regulated by elements found in distant regions of the genome. That means working out how to control large pathways is more difficult, and theres a greater risk that changing the genetic sequencesuch as deleting what looks like repetitive nonsensewill have unintended, currently unpredictable, consequences.

Gibson notes that even in the minimal cell, the organism with the simplest known genome on the planet, biologists dont know what one-third of the genes do. Moving from the simplest organism to humans is a leap into the unknown. One design flaw can change how the cell behaves or even whether the cells are viable, Gibson says. We dont have the design knowledge.

Many scientists believe this uncertainty about design is all the more reason to try writing human and other large genomes. People are entranced with the perfect, Harvards Church says. But engineering and medicine are about the pretty good. I learn much more by trying to make something than by observing it.

Others arent sure that the move from writing the yeast genome to writing the human genome is necessary, or ethical. When the project to write the human genome was made public in May 2016, the founders called it Human Genome Project-write. They held the first organizational meeting behind closed doors, with no journalists present. A backlash ensued.

In the magazine Cosmos, Stanford University bioengineer Drew Endy and Northwestern University ethicist Laurie Zoloth in May 2016 warned of unintended consequences of large-scale changes to the genome and of alienating the public, potentially putting at risk funding for the synthetic biology field at large. They wrote that the synthesis of less controversial and more immediately useful genomes along with greatly improved sub-genomic synthesis capacities should be pursued instead.

GP-write members seem to have taken such criticisms to heart, or come to a similar conclusion on their own. By this Mays conference, human was dropped from the projects name. Leaders emphasized that the human genome would be a subproject proceeding on a conservative timescale and that ethicists would be involved at every step along the way. We want to separate the overarching goal of technology development from the hot-button issue of human genome writing, Boeke explains.

Bringing the public on board with this kind of project can be difficult, says Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is not involved with GP-write. Charo cochaired a National Academy of Sciences study on the ethics and governance of human gene editing, which was published in February.

She says the likelihood of positive outcomes, such as new therapies or advances in basic science, must be weighed against potential unintended consequences or unforeseen uses of genome writing. People see their basic values at stake in human genetic engineering. If scientists achieve their goalsmaking larger scale genetic engineering routine and more useful, and bringing it to the human genomemajor changes are possible to what Charo calls the fabric of our culture and society. People will have to decide whether they feel optimistic about that or not. (Charo does.)

Given humans cautiousness, Charo imagines in early times we might have decided against creating fire, saying, Lets live without that; we dont need to create this thing that might destroy us. People often see genetic engineering in extreme terms, as a fire that might illuminate human biology and light the way to new technologies, or one that will destroy us.

Charo says the GP-write plan to keep ethicists involved going forward is the right approach and that its difficult to make an ethical or legal call on the project until its leaders put forward a road map.

The group will announce a specific road map sometime this year, but it doesnt want to be restrictive ahead of time. You know when youre done reading something, Boeke said at the meeting in May. But writing has an artistic side to it, he added. You never know when youre done.

Katherine Bourzac is a freelance science writer based in San Francisco.

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Writing the human genome - The Biological SCENE

American scientists use CRISPR to modify human embryos – MIMS General News (Hong Kong) (registration) (blog)

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For the first time, scientists from the Oregon Health and Science University in the United States have successfully created genetically modified human embryos. Led by embryologist, Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov a researcher at the university the team used the gene-editing technique CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to introduce gene-editing chemicals to single-cell embryos.

The aim of the experiment was to target a gene associated with a significant human disease and see if the gene was modified.

This is the kind of research that is essential if we are to know if its possible to safely and precisely make corrections in embryos DNA to repair disease-causing genes, shares Alta Charo, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin.

Thus far, such experiments have only been conducted in China as scientists, religious organisations, civil society groups and even many biotechnology companies in America have been vehemently opposed to them.

However, the team was able to move forward with their experiment because of a report by the US National Academy of Sciences in February this year. The report agreed to laboratory research on germline modification as it argued, may one day be a way for parents with severe genetic disorders to have healthy, biological children.

But we anticipated that there would need to be a lot of research to see if you could make these changes without any unintentional effects, remarks Charo, who co-chaired the Academies committee.

The team chose to inject the CRISPR into eggs at the same time as they were fertilised by sperm. It was conducted in this way in order to avoid the pitfalls faced by the Chinese researchers. One pitfall was mosaicism, in which the desired DNA changes are taken up by only some of the cells in the embryo, not all; and the second are off-target effects, in which genes that were not meant to be edited, are.

It is proof of principle that it can work. They have significantly reduced mosaicism. I dont think its the start of clinical trials yet, but it does take it further than anyone has before, comments a scientist familiar with the project.

This is important as much of the criticism against germline engineering has been the concern that errors such as mosaicism and off-target editing make CRISPR an unsafe way to create human beings.

Although none of the embryos were permitted to develop for more than a few days and the team had no intention of implanting the embryos into a womb news of the experiment has brought to the forefront again, conversation around designer babies. An example situation would be in China, where more and more parents are opting for genetic testing in order to uncover their childs talents.

Genome editing to enhance traits or abilities beyond ordinary health, raises concerns about whether the benefits can outweigh the risks, and about fairness if available only to some people, explains Charo.

Additionally, because changes that are made to the embryos cells will also be found in the eggs or sperm that will be produced if the embryo is allowed to develop into an adult human, any children the person has will also inherit the changes.

This ability to change human evolution has triggered fears. However, Stanford University law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely responds that the key point is that the team did not implant any edited embryos. He argues that research embryos that are not to be transferred for possible implantation are not a big deal.

In America, parliamentary government has prohibited using edited IVF embryos to make people and the Department of Health and Human Services has forbidden the technology to do so from reaching clinical trials.

While there will be time for the public to decide if they want to get rid of regulatory obstacles to these studies, I do not find them inherently unethical, expresses Charo.

Indeed, for now, small, correctly-performed experiments such as Mitalipovs does beg the question: whether Charlies Gards situation would have been different had his parents had access to CRISPR technology. MIMS

Read more:What does the artificial womb mean for the future of fertility and neonatal care?Worlds first human-pig hybrid: Medical breakthrough or ethical dilemma?Male infertility boosts financial equity of the reproductive health industry in ChinaSources:https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608350/first-human-embryos-edited-in-us/https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/26/human-embryos-edited/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/first-us-team-gene-edit-human-embryos-revealed

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American scientists use CRISPR to modify human embryos - MIMS General News (Hong Kong) (registration) (blog)

Will Healthcare Inequality Cause Genetic Diseases to Disproportionately Impact the Poor? – Gizmodo

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Artwork via Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo

Today in America, if you are poor, you are also more likely to suffer from poor health. Low socioeconomic statusand the lack of access to healthcare that often accompanies ithas been tied to mental illness, obesity, heart disease and diabetes, to name just a few.

Imagine now, that in the future, being poor also meant you were more likely than others to suffer from major genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, TaySachs disease, and muscular dystrophy. That is a future, some experts fear, that may not be all that far off.

Most genetic diseases are non-discriminating, blind to either race or class. But for some parents, prenatal genetic testing has turned what was once fate into choice. There are tests that can screen for hundreds of disorders, including rare ones like Huntingtons disease and 1p36 deletion syndrome. Should a prenatal diagnosis bring news of a genetic disease, parents can either arm themselves with information on how best to prepare, or make the difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy. That is, if they can pay for it. Without insurance, the costs of a single prenatal test can range from a few hundred dollars up to $2,000.

And genome editing, should laws ever be changed to allow for legally editing a human embryo in the United States, could also be a far-out future factor. Its difficult to imagine how much genetically engineering an embryo might cost, but its a safe bet that it wont be cheap.

Reproductive technology is technology that belongs to certain classes, Laura Hercher, a genetic counselor and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, told Gizmodo. Restricting access to prenatal testing threatens to turn existing inequalities in our society into something biological and permanent.

Hercher raised this point earlier this month in pages of Genome magazine, in a piece provocatively titled, The Ghettoization of Genetic Disease. Within the genetics community, it caused quite a stir. It wasnt that no one had ever considered the idea. But for a community of geneticists and genetic counsellors focused on how to help curb the impact of devastating diseases, it was a difficult thing to see articulated in writing.

Prenatal testing is a miraculous technology that has drastically altered the course of a womans pregnancy since it was first developed in the 1960s. The more recent advent of noninvasive prenatal tests made the procedure even less risky and more widely available. Today, most women are offered screenings for diseases like Down syndrome that result from an abnormal presence of chromosomes, and targeted testing of the parents can hunt for inherited disease traits like Huntingtons at risk of being passed on to a child, as well.

But there is a dark side to this miracle of modern medicine, which is that choice is exclusive to those who can afford and access it.

This is one of those aspects of prenatal testing that we dont want to talk about, Megan Allyse, who studies reproductive ethics at the Mayo Clinic, told Gizmodo. Theres a wide variety of reasons people might not get access to reproductive technologies. But what is unavoidable is that you are more likely to have access if you are socio-economically well-off.

The scenario Hercher imagines is this: Say you dont have insurance, or have insurance that does not cover the roster of prenatal tests that OB/GYNs commonly recommend. You also cannot afford the tests out-of-pocket, and your baby is born with a genetic disease. This scenario plays out over and over again among people who cannot afford testing, while at the same time many of those who can afford the test for that disease and test positive choose to terminate a pregnancy. Over time, Hercher predicts, that disease would become more prevalent in those communities that could not afford the tests.

Whether this hypothetical scenario will play out in the real world isnt totally clear, in part because there are many variables besides socioeconomic status at work. Maybe you live in a state where abortions are more difficult to access or against local norms, influencing your decision to undergo prenatal testing. Perhaps you oppose abortion for cultural or religious reasons. And there isnt data for on individuals who refuse prenatal testing altogether, even if they could afford it. Somewhere around 70 percent of women opt-in to some form of prenatal testing, but those numbers vary wildly by region, jumping up to about 90 percent on the coasts and dropping significantly in the midwest.

At this point, all researchers can really do is speculate about future disparities in genetic disease. For example, a 2012 meta-analysis published in Prenatal Diagnosis found that across the country, the mean termination rate for Down syndrome was 67 percent, meaning that a significant number of people who undergo prenatal testing and wind up testing positive for Down syndrome choose to end the pregnancy. Of course, not every parent who learns their future child will have Down syndrome wants to terminate the pregnancy. Its is a complex, personal choice. But access to prenatal testing also allows a parent to better plan for their childs future needs.

Some geneticists already see evidence of an accessibility gap in their own clinical practices.

Certainly we know that access to care varies, Massachusetts General medical geneticist Brian Skotko told Gizmodo. His own work has studied the demographic breakdown of Down syndrome, and has found a clear racial pattern in both Down syndrome births and pregnancy terminations.

In Massachusetts, were seeing more Hispanic and black mothers with Down syndrome babies, he said, and what weve learned from their stories is either they dont have access to testing or that if they did get tested, they had strong religious beliefs.

As access to prenatal testing increases, Skotko said, it is likely we will see a drastic reduction in genetic diseases. In the next five years, as tests get better and better, the global market for them is expected to balloon by 25 percent to over $10 billion. We can look to historical evidence, Skotko said. As more people get access to prenatal tests, there will be an increase in number of selective terminations.

Access to prenatal testing isnt the only thing that could lead to Herchers fear becoming a reality, either. Abortion access has become increasingly difficult in some parts of the country, with states like Texas stripping funding for clinics and placing more restrictions on the conditions under which they can take place. In vitro fertilization could one day also contribute, allowing those who can afford the tens of thousands of dollars to undergo IVF to select the most genetically-desirable eggs for implantation.

In her new book, Whittier Law School professor Judith Daar makes a terrifying prediction: that unequal access to IVF may wind up bringing about a new eugenics.

The growth and success of reproductive technologies, accounting for three out of every one hundred babies born in the United States today, have prompted lawmakers to introduce and occasionally pass legislation that expressly or indirectly limits access to [assisted reproductive technologies] by certain individuals, she writes. These formal legal barriers, combined with individual and practice-wide physician conduct, coalesce to suppress access to assisted conception for those who have historically experienced a devaluation of their reproductive worth.

Daar points out that while in the 1942 case Skinner v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court affirmed that procreation is a right, striking down the states compulsory sterilization of certain criminals, the ruling only weighs in on procreating naturally. The court has yet to rule on anything that might also equalize access to technologies that could help with conception, or to ensure that a child conceived is healthy.

Whats missing in the conversation is how we adopt all of these technologies to a society that considers well-being for all, Eleonore Pauwels, a bioethicist at the Wils
on Center, told Gizmodo. There is already an access problem. But what about when were editing out diseases? Who will pay for CRISPR? We are looking at much more disruption in the future.

The only real way to prevent genetic diseases from becoming diseases of poverty, said Josephine Johnston, a bioethicist at The Hastings Institute, is to make sure everyone has access to the same services. While the costs of todays tests may one day be affordable for more people, there will inevitably also be newer, more expensive technologies that create the same issues in the future. Thus is the cycle of healthcares disparity of accessthere are always people for whom treatment is not equal to the rest.

People have to have access to healthcare services, and [genetic testing] needs to be part of what those services include, she told Gizmodo. If you dont have access to testing and termination servicesor support if you continue the pregnancyyou dont really have a choice about what to do. Its not a choice if youre backed into a corner.

The inequality threat that prenatal testing, IVF and germline editing present, is of course a version of the same inequality that has always existed. If you are poor, there is a good chance your access to healthcare is not as good as someone who has more money.

But as these technologies grow in power and expense, the gulf of that inequality widens. Genetic disease has always been our shared vulnerability, Hercher wrote in Genome. When one part of society can opt out of risk, will they continue to feel the same obligation to provide support and resources to those who remain vulnerable, especially if at least some of them have deliberately chosen to accept the risk?

Hercher presents what is really a common vision of dystopia: a future of genetic haves and have-nots in which inequality becomes encoded in our basic biology. But arriving at that future does not require genetic engineering or some other as-yet-unknown technology. All it requires is that we keep doing what we are already doing, living in a world in which access to necessary healthcare is often a luxury off-limits to the poor.

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Will Healthcare Inequality Cause Genetic Diseases to Disproportionately Impact the Poor? - Gizmodo