Daily Archives: January 5, 2020

A Chinese court sentenced biomedical scientist He Jiankui and two accomplices to prison on Monday for illegal medical practice for genetically engineering three babies.

In November 2018, He announced the birth of the first two children, twin girls named Lulu and Nana, as well as the pregnancy of a second woman carrying a genetically engineered fetus. The news created a scientific firestorm, with human genetic engineering experiments widely viewed as dangerous and unethical by scientific organizations worldwide. The third baby has now been born, according to reporting from Chinas state news agency.

The genetic engineering team fabricated an ethics review of their experiment, according to the Nanshan District People's Court of Shenzhen City ruling. They used the faked permissions to recruit couples living with HIV in hopes of helping them to conceive children genetically engineered to receive a mutation giving them immunity to some forms of the disease.

He, formerly a biomedical scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzen, received a prison sentence of three years and a fine equivalent to $480,000. His associates, Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou, received jail terms of two years and 18 months with a two-year reprieve, according to the ruling, for practicing medicine without a license and violating Chinese regulations governing assisted reproduction.

The prison sentence and stiff financial penalty sends a message to other Chinese scientists that unsanctioned efforts at human germline editing will not be tolerated, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine researcher Kiran Musunuru told BuzzFeed News, by email. I expect that it will have a deterrent effect, certainly in China and possibly elsewhere.

At an October conference, Musunuru had reported that a draft study submitted to a scientific journal about the twins by Hes team suggested that the genetic engineering attempt had badly misfired, targeting the wrong location for the mutation and potentially seeding other mutations throughout the DNA of the children.

Science academies worldwide formed an oversight commission in March, following widespread condemnation of the experiments.

The court ruling found the three sentenced scientists acted "in the pursuit of personal fame and gain" and have seriously "disrupted medical order, according to Chinese state media.

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The Chinese Scientist Who Made The First Genetically Engineered Babies Is Going To Prison - BuzzFeed News

Vance Crowe is a communications consultant who thrives on chaos. Heis a keynote speaker at the Land Expo 2020 in Des Moines on January 14. Successful Farming magazine caught up with him ahead of time to get a preview.

VC: My talk is called The Edge of Chaos, where and how society changes. What is accepted, what is desirable, and what is not allowed in a society? There is a difference between perceptions in the countryside and the city. What ramifications does this have for how things will be done in the future with agricultural lands, whether thats growing crops or raising animals? Which perceptions and demands of people living in the city are fads, and which ones actually have a chance of radically changing the way land is being managed?

VC: Ive only been involved in agriculture for the last five years. Before that, my jobs varied widely. I ran a camp for inner city kids, was a deckhand on a ship that traveled around the Western Hemisphere, lived in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, worked in public radio in northern California, worked at the World Bank, and then worked at Monsanto.

It has been an interesting journey. I have seen how ideas started and then flowed out into society. That became very real for me when I was working at Monsanto. A group of people who disagree with modern agriculture can alter the publics perception of the way the world ought to change. I saw what happened when society and culture turn against certain components of agriculture.

VC: Things you think are certain can change. The Overton window can shift on you. Changes in society that you couldnt imagine can happen. Even if you know something is far better for society, it may reject it.

On the other hand, you can change perception with enough coordinated effort. Five years ago, there was a lot of concern about whether or not you should eat GMOs, and that fight has basically dissipated. There are people who still think that, but the issue is nowhere near at the velocity and temperature that it was before. Agriculture figured out that it was a technology people didnt understand, so we have to explain it to them. Otherwise they will become so impassioned that they wont let us use this technology.

VC: Catastrophic. It is the manifestation of how our legal system can be profited by individuals. If you can sue glyphosate, you can do that to any chemical, because glyphosate is one of the most innocuous. That has very serious implications for the future.

It is a challenge to be in the number one spot. People focus on you. The companies in the number two, three, and four spots dont jump up to help you out. They kind of scoot back and let you take the slings and arrows, even though they all have a shared interest in genetic engineering or crop protection. They say, Monsanto is the one being sued for glyphosate, its not really our problem, were going to stay out of this. But if you can knock glyphosate out, any chemical in their portfolio could get knocked out.

VC: Societies wont live in chaos. Its not acceptable. They will accept suboptimal conditions before they will accept not knowing. So people will choose a certain future that is less good, rather than an uncertain feature with lots of potential.

There are good things that can come from chaos. If you stay too much on the ordered side of life, you dont make the changes you need to make to evolve and thrive and get better. If youre too ordered, you become tyrannical.

VC: The people who thrive the most in these situations are the ones who are the most curious about the chaos the ones most interested in learning what is on the edge. Its good to have opinions, but loosely hold them so that other people can give you a good argument that makes sense. Be willing to change and adapt and not be so rigid that you break.

The only way you make change is if you get up there on the edge of chaos. You figure out what changes society is asking us to make that we should make, and which ones are unreasonable demands that we should find a way to convince them otherwise.

VC: Kenya, a place I used to live in while in the Peace Corps, is close to approving BT. Once farmers see the benefits of genetic engineering traits, you may watch the adoption of genetic engineering technology in a place that gets more sunlight than anywhere else on earth the continent of Africa. They are adding technology in a very big way. That will change global agriculture. It will change where countries like China look to do trade deals.

VC: Synthetic biology, whether it pertains to synthetic meat or other types of products that were naturally grown, is coming on in a big way. Where do farmers fit into that? Dont focus on the micro issues, because this is starting to blossom all over the world.

VC: Farmers either get mad or they get very dismissive of it. The biggest impact of synthetic meat is not going to be the burgers and steaks that the beef industry is so worried about. Its going to be pet food. Its like what the rebar market in steel did to the steel manufacturers. In Mexico, they built these tiny foundries that made cheap steel, and they stole 3% from the steel market, which was enough to grind that to a halt in the United States. Synthetic meat is going to enter through the pet food market, or some ancillary market that isnt going to compete on taste and texture.

VC: Absolutely, with 100% certainty. The things that are possible to do with precision gene editing over the long term are so mind bending as to be difficult to believe. It will have profound implications not only on the way we grow things, but also what we grow.

VC: Sensors will become inexpensive to put in peoples fields. Sensors can start figuring out exact applications of nitrogen for your field, meter by meter. Farmers will be able to conduct those tests themselves; they won't have to wait for an agronomist or a seed company to come by and tell them what to do. Thats coming very soon.

VC: I happen to know quite a bit about banking and the marijuana system. Banking is one of the biggest impediments, but once that flips and you can now start loaning on capital for hemp or for marijuana production, that is when the whole game takes off. Marijuana has been held off because you havent been able to do proper banking. We are within six months of that flipping, and then youre going to see a whole bunch of bankers looking for farmers to be taking those loans.

VC: There has not been a new active ingredients for crop protection approved by the USDA in the last 20 years. The rise of biologicals is because theyre regulated in a completely different way. Youre bringing it in through a side door. There is way more innovation going on there. A lot of it is snake oil, but some of it is solid gold. Biologicals are going to come on in a big way in feed. Its a way to lower methane emissions.

VC: I love Bitcoin. Thats one of my favorites. Its held its value. Its far and away the best investment Ive ever made by orders of magnitude. I was in pretty early.

VC: There is a concept called the intransigent minority. It was developed by a brilliant guy named Nassim Taleb, whos a mathematician that hates genetic engineering. He really hated Monsanto. The intransigent minority is the number of people you need in a given society to be absolutely entrenched on an idea that society relents to them and gives them whatever they want. For example, how many vegans would you need before you require all food to be vegan. Or organic?

More:
How To Thrive On the Edge of Chaos: A Guide for Farmers - Successful Farming

Changing landscapes, habitat loss, fragmentation, and global climate change have been listed as the main reasons for biodiversity decline worldwide. Now, a new study from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, has added to the growing knowledge that anthropogenic activities can impact genetic connectivity or the movement among habitat patches usually resulting in mating and genetic exchange.

In several mammalian carnivores, juveniles disperse away from their mother's territory to establish their own territory. Males are known to travel longer distances than females. Isolation of habitat patches (due to habitat destruction and fragmentation) can restrict animal movement among habitat patches and thus reduce genetic exchange and increase the probability of extinction. Hence maintaining connectivity is critical to ensure long term persistence of a species, Prachi Thatte explains. Dr. Thatte is the first author of the paper published in Diversity and Distributions and now works with WWF-India on connectivity conservation

Four wide-ranging mammals Jungle cats, leopards, sloth bears, tigers were investigated for the genetic differentiation in central India, which is a critical landscape for several species. The DNA extracted from faecal samples were used for understanding genetic connectivity. The samples were collected from nine protected areas during the period 2012-2017.

The team looked at how land-use, human population density, nearby roads and traffic affected the genetic structure. The paper notes that tigers were impacted the most by high human footprint. Although known to travel long distances and move through agricultural fields to some extent, tigers in central India do not have equally high genetic exchange throughout the landscape. Some protected areas like Bandhavgarh tiger reserve seem to be getting relatively isolated (the 2014 tiger census report also shows the same), explains Dr. Thatte.

Jungle cats were found to be the least impacted. That is likely because in central India, they occupy a variety of habitats including forests, scrublands, grasslands and even irrigated agricultural fields close to the forests, she explains.

Despite being the least impacted by human activity, the team encountered several jungle cat road-kills while carrying out fieldwork. She explains that with increasing infrastructure and traffic, systematically studying the impact of roads on smaller species like jungle cat and jackals and ensuring the presence of mitigation structures like underpasses and overpasses would be crucial to ensure that we don't fragment the currently well-connected populations.

IIndia has also started paying attention to wildlife corridors and encouraging engineering reforms to promote wildlife movements. Last year, the Ministry of Environment along with the Wildlife Institute of India released a document that lays out the regulatory requirements for developing roads, railways, powerlines while recognising the impacts on wildlife and people. NHAI and all PWDs have been instructed to follow the guidelines.

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How humans affect genetic connectivity of four mammals - The Hindu

Hemophilia. Cystic fibrosis. Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Huntingtons disease. These are just a few of the thousands of disorders caused by mutations in the bodys DNA. Treating the root causes of these debilitating diseases has become possible only recently, thanks to the development of genome editing tools such as CRISPR, which can change DNA sequences in cells and tissues to correct fundamental errors at the sourcebut significant hurdles must be overcome before genome-editing treatments are ready for use in humans.

Enter the National Institutes of Health Common Funds Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program, established in 2018 to help researchers develop and assess accurate, safe and effective genome editing therapies for use in the cells and tissues of the body (aka somatic cells) that are affected by each of these diseases.

Todaywith three ongoing grants totaling more than $6 million in research fundingDuke University is tied with Yale University, UC Berkeley and UC Davis for the most projects supported by the NIH SCGE Program.

In the 2019 SCGE awards cycle, Charles Gersbach, the Rooney Family Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and collaborators across Duke and North Carolina State University received two grants: the first will allow them to study how CRISPR genome editing affects engineered human muscle tissues, while the second project will develop new CRISPR tools to turn genes on and off rather than permanently alter the targeted DNA sequence. This work builds on a 2018 SCGE grant, led by Aravind Asokan, professor and director of gene therapy in the Department of Surgery, which focuses on using adeno-associated viruses to deliver gene editing tools to neuromuscular tissue.

There is an amazing team of engineers, scientists and clinicians at Duke and the broader Research Triangle coalescing around the challenges of studying and manipulating the human genome to treat diseasefrom delivery to modeling to building new tools, said Gersbach, who with his colleagues recently launched the Duke Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies (CAGT), a collaboration of the Pratt School of Engineering, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and School of Medicine. Were very excited to be at the center of those efforts and greatly appreciate the support of the NIH SCGE Program to realize this vision.

For their first grant, Gersbach will collaborate with fellow Duke biomedical engineering faculty Nenad Bursac and George Truskey to monitor how genome editing affects engineered human muscle tissue. Through their new project, the team will use human pluripotent stem cells to make human muscle tissues in the lab, specifically skeletal and cardiac muscle, which are often affected by genetic diseases. These systems will then serve as a more accurate model for monitoring the health of human tissues, on-target and off-target genome modifications, tissue regeneration, and possible immune responses during CRISPR-mediated genome editing.

Currently, most genetic testing occurs using animal models, but those dont always accurately replicate the human response to therapy, says Truskey, the Goodson Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

Bursac adds, We have a long history of engineering human cardiac and skeletal muscle tissues with the right cell types and physiology to model the response to gene editing systems like CRISPR. With these platforms, we hope to help predict how muscle will respond in a human trial.

Gersbach will work with Tim Reddy, a Duke associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics, and Rodolphe Barrangou, the Todd R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Professor in Probiotics Research at North Carolina State University, on the second grant. According to Gersbach, this has the potential to extend the impact of genome editing technologies to a greater diversity of diseases, as many common diseases, such as neurodegenerative and autoimmune conditions, result from too much or too little of certain genes rather than a single genetic mutation. This work builds on previous collaborations between Gersbach, Barrangou and Reddy developing both new CRISPR systems for gene regulation and to regulate the epigenome rather than permanently delete DNA sequences.

Aravind Asokan leads Dukes initial SCGE grant, which explores the the evolution of next generation of adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), which have emerged as a safe and effective system to deliver gene therapies to targeted cells, especially those involved in neuromuscular diseases like spinal muscular atrophy, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other myopathies. However, delivery of genome editing tools to the stem cells of neuromuscular tissue is particularly challenging. This collaboration between Asokan and Gersbach builds on their previous work in using AAV and CRISPR to treat animal models of DMD.

We aim to correct mutations not just in the mature muscle cells, but also in the muscle stem cells that regenerate skeletal muscle tissue, explainsAsokan. This approach is critical to ensuring long-term stability of genome editing in muscle and ultimately we hope to establish a paradigm where our cross-cutting viral evolution approach can enable efficient editing in multiple organ systems.

Click through to learn more about the Duke Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies.

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Duke Researchers Garner Over $6 Million in NIH Funding to Fight Genetic Diseases - Duke Today

Venezuelan philosopher, Antonio Pasquali, who wrote extensively about how media and society affected each other, passed away on Oct. 5, 2019, in Spain.

In 1984, Pasquali was appointed Deputy Director General of the Communications Sector of UNESCO and Regional Coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean of UNESCO from 1986-1989. He played an important role in UNESCOs New World Information and Communication discussions.

Pasqualis contributions to media studies are well-known in Latin America, but his research is less known in the English-speaking world. His research on media and communication inspired many Latin American scholars and media practitioners including myself who place ethics at the centre of the discussion.

Pasquali was a fierce critic of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhans view that the medium is the message that the medium in which things are disseminated determines their meaning. Always returning to human communication as the basis of relationships betwwen people, Pasquali warned us about the necessary conceptual and practical difference between communication and media.

For Pasquali, the ability to communicate is inherent to the formation of society. And so, any modification or control of communications becomes to a modification or control of society itself. He argued that technological changes, with their benefits and disruptions, have yet to transform the essence of human communication.

Pasqualis work is important to consider because he warned us about some troubling challenges that we can see around us.

Pasquali wrote about the ethics of communication, or what he called the moral dimension of communication. In his book 18 essays about communications, he identified six hard trends that would mark humanitys future:

1) A process of human-made environmental degradation that approaches the point of no return, as in the impending ecological crisis brought about by climate change and its consequences;

Read more: Dealing with the absurdity of human existence in the face of converging catastrophes

2) Human interference in natural evolutionary processes. He warned that advances in genetic engineering that bring hope for the treatment of diseases and also open the door to sophisticated mechanisms of social engineering and control;

3) Challenging the very idea of what being human is by: a) machines combined with living beings (cyborgs), and b) by the shift of human decision-making to artificial intelligence that could make humans irrelevant and even disposable. This will require new ways of understanding the relations between digital machines and human;

4) The persistence of nuclear, bacteriological, chemical and terrorist dangers, in a context of political polarization coupled with the emergence of extremist ideologies that could lead to internal and external violent confrontations;

5) The consolidation of the disparity between rich and poor that is already generating social unrest in different regions, as we have seen recently in Latin America and the Middle East;

6) The transformation of democracy into a plutocratic dictatorship (the government by the wealthy) based on the technological manipulation of social consensus, as illustrated in the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal.

Pasquali was persistent in his struggle to establish a public broadcasting service in Latin American countries. His passion in defence of the need for a public media service never declined, and seems to be more relevant than ever in the midst of the Internet explosion.

Pasquali observed that the internet is now largely controlled by monopolies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, and manipulated by big emerging powers like China. He vehemently denounced the communication hegemony of the authoritarian government of Hugo Chvez and his successor Nicols Maduro. Pasquali documented the setbacks that the regime has inflicted on Venezuelan society from the point of view of telecommunications, the media and transportation infrastructure.

At the end of his essay Will we communicate or inform ourselves?, Pasquali wondered if we are ready to give up a fundamental condition for our existence the ability and experience of communication. For him, communication was a mixture of intellect, passions and will that was intrinsic to how people and made meaning, personally and socially. He asked: Are we going to give up without a fight the possibility of communicating to another human being that we love him/her?

The great body of work that Pasquali produced will help us to answer these fundamental questions about the future of communication. Pasqualis intellectual legacy will live on through his writings and teachings.

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Society can be controlled through its means of communication - The Conversation CA