Rewriting the code of life

 One of my many, many, many drawbacks is this: I waste my time even on stuff that I don't understand.  Topics for which I am way underprepared.  Yet, I continue with this habit.

There is a reason for this madness.

Actually two.

First, I am genuinely interested in a bunch of things.  Of course, I know where my strengths and weaknesses are and I could simply focus on my strong areas alone.  But, that ain't me.  How could I not know about stuff about which I don't know anything?  No, do not jump to conclude that it is some kind of a FOMO.  Nope.  FOMO doesn't belong in this context.  FOMO is about fleeting, momentary excitement.  I am referring to something more than the now.

Second, even though I am a college professor, I don't consider myself a "teacher."  I am a life-long student who teaches.  If the university fires me from my job next year, I will continue to be a student even though I will no longer be a professor.  Being a student is absolutely a part of who I am.

So, I waste time reading about stuff that can often be way above my head.

CRISPR is one of those.

My earliest post--yes, there is more than one--on this was in March 2015.  In that post, I expressed my concerns about CRISPR.  I ended that post with this quote:

Rewriting human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us? 

Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power. There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution,” Doudna told me. One reason she feels the research should stop is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be. “Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”

See the name Doudna in that quote?

In October 2015, I blogged about CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier.  It was about how they were not awarded the Nobel, despite being considered the top bet.

They didn't get the October morning phone call until 2020!

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on Crispr-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women.

“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates.

Not merely understanding life, but rewriting the code of life.

As Jennifer Doudna said, most of the public does not appreciate what is coming.

For now, I am delighted that two women were the recipients of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But, I remain worried about the longer-term implications. 

If only I didn't waste time reading stuff that I don't truly understand!

Higher education is all about employment readiness

Over the years, I have written op-eds in plenty in my attempts to convince people about the importance of educating the youth in the humanities and the social sciences.  The logic is a no-brainer for me: The concerns and worries that we have are not always problems for science and technology to solve, nor can science and technology ever solve them.

Scientific and technological advancements will happen, and countries will grow and prosper, yes, but, we will face an increasing number of fuzzy issues for which decisions will have to be made by people, as individuals and as societies.  However, if people are not sufficiently educated on those, and if people do not have the skills to think through fuzzy and complex issues for which there are no cut-and-dried answers, then we are screwed.

But, hey, you know well that nobody listens to me.

Consider CRISPR.  Yes, I have blogged about CRISPR before, which you old-time readers know about.  I will refer the newbies to, maybe, this post.

I read the news, oh boy, and I immediately tweeted it.  (I don't care if anybody reads my tweet--I am fully prepared that nobody cares a shit about what I have to say.)

What was that news about?  Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University successfully targeted a gene associated with a human disease.

Mitalipov's team worked with human embryos produced by sperm from men with a genetic mutation, the report said, noting they were of "clinical quality." They then modified the mutation using a gene-editing technique, CRISPR.

So what, you ask?

The work offers the possibility that one day science will be able to modify genes in human embryos to prevent disease. Critics worry, however, that gene-editing in embryos opens the floodgates to the creation of "designer babies" in which parents specify traits they want their children to have.

Of course, we are long, long ways from "designer babies."  But, I don't think it is hyperbole to suggest that we are on the path towards it.  Which is why we need to start thinking about and discussing this fuzzy and complex issue.  "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.

And those are merely the beginnings, with a gazillion other questions, like:

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?

"Now is the time to figure out how we want to see this gene-editing path unfold."  Yep!

There is no way I want to leave these questions to some "wise men" (almost always men!) to decide on behalf of humanity.  But, if I want healthier deliberations amongst us all, then it gets back to the fundamental question of the purpose of education.  Should we invest in educating the youth so that they can think about such fuzzy and complex issues, and help a democratic society decide? Or should we let the prevailing forces channel higher education to be about workforce preparation, and just fuck the philosophy departments!

I know where I stand on this.  And, unlike the current president and his minions with their ackamarackus, mine is a principled and consistent stand.

From crisp jeans to ... CRISPR genes?

I suffer from many problems.  One of them is that I want to know about stuff even if I can't figure out any damn thing about it.  Well, that is not the problem as much as thinking that such a desire to know about stuff is some kind of an asset.  I am the perfect embodiment of a fool in his own paradise.  But, hey, it keeps me out of trouble!

The first time I read about CRISPR, I was, well, practically freaked out.  That was back in March.  To this day, if somebody asked me to explain the scientific process and technique of editing genes, well, I will draw a blank.  If I cannot explain it, then I should stay away from reading and talking about it, right?  But, I tell ya, I am a fool who has constructed his own paradise ;)

In that post in March, I had quoted, from the article that I read, one of the brains behind this gene-editing CRISPR technology--Jennifer Doudna,--who had this to say:

Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power. There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution,” Doudna told me. One reason she feels the research should stop is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be. “Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”

You and I and nearly seven billion others are the ones that she was referring to as the ones who do not appreciate what is coming.

And then a month ago, I blogged again about CRISPR.  And now a third one.  Why?  Because I read this in the Scientific American:

scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA

How was the DNA manipulated?  You know the answer by now.  Yes, CRISPR.  And you laughed at me when I freaked out in March--a mere eight months ago!

Guess what?  Those scientists are in China--"at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats."

Once the goat team began to deploy CRISPR, their progress was rapid. In September Qu and 25 other collaborating scientists in China published the details of their research in Nature’s Scientific Reports. In early-stage goat embryos they had successfully deleted two genes that suppressed both hair and muscle growth. The result was 10 goat kids exhibiting both larger muscles and longer fur—designer livestock—that, so far, show no other abnormalities. “We believed gene-modified livestock will be commercialized after we demonstrate [that it] is safe,” predicts Qu

While the left is still battling GMO crops, and the right is battling climate science, scientists are forging ahead genetically modifying goats and dogs and soon it will be "gene-modified livestock."  The joke is on every one of us, who do not appreciate what is coming!

So, anything else to spook us?

“The ethical concerns are now upon us because the technology is real,” [George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School] adds.
This applies to CRISPR experiments to “edit” the DNA of all plants and animals—as well as in the future, perhaps, humans, if scientists like Qu further hone the technique. ... And on the even more complicated topic of potential CRISPR experiments involving human DNA, he wonders, “Can we draw a clear line between what might be allowable for medical research or applications and what we must strictly prohibit?” Finding an answer that the whole world can agree on is geneticists’ and ethicists’ next big task.

Over at the New Yorker, which also had a lengthy essay on CRISPR, Doudna describes a dream that she recently had:

Her eyes narrowed, and she lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “I have never said this in public, but it will show you where my psyche is,” she said. “I had a dream recently, and in my dream”—she mentioned the name of a leading scientific researcher—“had come to see me and said, ‘I have somebody very powerful with me who I want you to meet, and I want you to explain to him how this technology functions.’ So I said, Sure, who is it? It was Adolf Hitler. I was really horrified, but I went into a room and there was Hitler. He had a pig face and I could only see him from behind and he was taking notes and he said, ‘I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology.’ I woke up in a cold sweat. And that dream has haunted me from that day. Because suppose somebody like Hitler had access to this—we can only imagine the kind of horrible uses he could put it to.”

I am now all the more convinced that I will be better off not reading such stuff.  I can only hope that Michael Specter is right:

CRISPR technology offers a new outlet for the inchoate fear of tinkering with the fundamentals of life. There are many valid reasons to worry. But it is essential to assess both the risks and the benefits of any new technology. Most people would consider it dangerous to fundamentally alter the human gene pool to treat a disease like AIDS if we could cure it with medicine or a vaccine. But risks always depend on the potential result. If CRISPR helps unravel the mysteries of autism, contributes to a cure for a form of cancer, or makes it easier for farmers to grow more nutritious food while reducing environmental damage, the fears, like the many others before them, will almost certainly disappear. 

Thinking about my favorite topic is so cheery in comparison! ;)

Are you a man or a mouse? Could be difficult to tell anymore?

During the weeks leading up the Nobel Prizes, there was plenty of speculation that the researchers behind "Crispr" would win the award, like in this report:

Scientists behind the discovery of a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that allows researchers to edit virtually any gene they target are among the top contenders for Nobel prizes next month, according to an annual analysis by Thomson Reuters.

Of course, that did not happen:

Two of those responsible for CRISPR existence, Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley) and Emmanuel (sic) Charpentier (now based in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute) have surprisingly not won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, despite Reuter’s prediction. Instead the prize has gone to Thomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for their DNA repair mechanism with connections at the Francis Crick Institute.

So, it might be next year then.

CRISPR freaked me out right from the first time I heard about it.  It is darn creepy to target a gene and edit it.  As I noted in this post,

Most of the public don't have a clue. And worse, don't spend even a minute wondering, contemplating, studying, about what it means to be human.

The only cool thing is this: the co-discoverers of the particular technology that has apparently made gene editing easy are women scientists.

Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Jennifer Doudna after their $3 million Breakthrough Prize
Source

I should use the favorite GOP politician line of "I am not a scientist" and then go on to commenting ;)

In this NY Times science piece on a recent National Academy of Sciences meeting, the author writes:

Among the scientists describing recent advances was one of Crispr’s pioneers, George Church of Harvard Medical School. In the midst of his presentation, packed with the fine details of biochemistry and genetics, Dr. Church dropped a bombshell.
In a typical experiment, scientists use Crispr to alter a single gene. But in recent work with pig cells, Dr. Church and his colleagues used Crispr to alter 62 genes at once. The researchers hope that this achievement may someday make it possible to use pig organs for transplantation into humans.
But the experiment also raises a deeper question: Could scientists someday alter complicated human traits by manipulating many genes at once?

Are you beginning to freak out now?  Well, hey, welcome to the club!

We are certainly free to imagine a world in which parents have hundreds of genes in their designer babies edited to alter everything from the color of their eyes to their scores on intelligence tests. This experiment on pigs is a far cry from that scenario.
But that doesn’t mean that scientists won’t learn how to alter many genes in one fell swoop.

You see why I have been harping on and on that the single greatest challenge for individuals and societies will be a tough question but one that does not need too many words: what does it mean to be human?  You make up your own mind on the following sentences from Martine Roblatt, who is "the Sirius satellite radio founder turned pharmaceutical magnate turned transhumanist":

“Weird does not mean unethical. There’s a 45-degree line on a graph—as long as the utility exceeds the yuckiness, social acceptance wins,” she said. “Taking organs from dead people and putting them in living people once seemed weird, it’s not weird anymore. It would be stupid to abjure nature’s greatest invention since chemistry.”

Oh, btw, Roblatt's big plan? To grow human organs in pigs at a "factory" like in this rendering:

It's a brave new world!

We can alter human heredity, therefore we should? NOT!

An atheist I am, yes, but a committed humanist.  In so many different ways, as many posts would have revealed, I am trying my best to understand what it means to be human, and what my place is in this universe whose vastness I cannot even begin to imagine.  If Earth itself is nothing but "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" and I am nothing but a mote of dust on Earth, then, it is wildly crazy how trivial I am in this universe. Which is all the more why it is important for me to understand what my existence means.

This humanist with deep values has never been a fan of many technological advancements, especially the ones that deal with fertilization, pregnancy, and childbirth.  Reducing human existence to its material components and then assembling them in labs is not one that gets to my interpretation of what it means to be human.  Yes, it might be strange that an atheist cares only about the old-fashioned ways of creating babies.  But, again, I am a committed humanist.  In the Carl Sagan tradition.  (What was Sagan's stand on IVF?  I don't know. I don't care either--because I make up my own mind on these matters and do not merely follow a leader!)

When I am not a fan of IVF (but this atheist knows not of a single convincing reason that he can provide to ban that either,) you can easily imagine that I am not at all in favor of genetic engineering, which is now getting more and more realistic.  And, thus, why I am so freaked out about what I read in MIT Technology Review: "Engineering the Perfect Baby."

Holy crap!

What does this mean, you ask?  Hold on tight:

“Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to correct disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.

Why freak out about this?  Because you can easily imagine what this could lead to. If you can't imagine, here it is:

The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?

You are now thinking, "meh! I have heard this before."  Indeed.  But, that "before"was all about the theoretical possibilities.  Now, we are getting closer and closer to making it happen.

human germ line engineering has become a burgeoning research concept. At least one other center in Boston is working on it, as are scientists in China, in the U.K., and at a biotechnology company called OvaScience, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that boasts some of the world’s leading fertility doctors on its advisory board.
The objective of these groups is to demonstrate that it’s possible to produce children free of specific genes that cause inherited disease. If it’s possible to correct the DNA in a woman’s egg, or a man’s sperm, those cells could be used in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic to produce an embryo and then a child. It might also be possible to directly edit the DNA of an early-stage IVF embryo using CRISPR. Several people interviewed by MIT Technology Review said that such experiments had already been carried out in China and that results describing edited embryos were pending publication. These people didn’t wish to comment publicly because the papers are under review.
All this means that germ line engineering is much farther along than anyone imagined. “What you are talking about is a major issue for all humanity,” says Merle Berger, one of the founders of Boston IVF, a network of fertility clinics that is among the largest in the world and helps more than a thousand women get pregnant each year. “It would be the biggest thing that ever happened in our field,” he says. Berger predicts that repairing genes for serious inherited disease will win wide public acceptance, but beyond that, the technology would cause a public uproar because “everyone would want the perfect child” and it could lead to picking and choosing eye color and eventually intelligence. “These are things we talk about all the time. But we have never had the opportunity to do it.”

Are you also freaking out now?  You should be.
(BTW, CRISPR is s "powerful technology for editing DNA." For precise modifications.)

CRISPR can do more than eliminate disease genes. It can lead to augmentation. At meetings of groups of people known as “transhumanists,” who are interested in next steps for human evolution, Church likes to show a slide on which he lists naturally occurring variants of around 10 genes that, when people are born with them, give them extraordinary qualities or resistance to disease. One makes your bones so hard they’ll break a surgical drill.

 How about now?  Are you freaking out thinking about an unbreakable boned X-Men?

Rewriting human heredity has always been a theoretical possibility. Suddenly it’s a real one. But wasn’t the point always to understand and control our own biology—to become masters over the processes that created us?
Doudna says she is also thinking about these issues. “It cuts to the core of who we are as people, and it makes you ask if humans should be exercising that kind of power. There are moral and ethical issues, but one of the profound questions is just the appreciation that if germ line editing is conducted in humans, that is changing human evolution,” Doudna told me. One reason she feels the research should stop is to give scientists a chance to spend more time explaining what their next steps could be. “Most of the public,” she says, “does not appreciate what is coming.”

Most of the public don't have a clue. And worse, don't spend even a minute wondering, contemplating, studying, about what it means to be human.

Yet again, I can't thank the countdown enough!