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!