Is This a Good Idea? Transgenic Human Babies?

June 08, 2009

In case you haven’t seen them, here are photos those almost unbearably cute marmosets and their glowing green feet, created by Japanese scientists who implanted a jellyfish fluorescence gene into monkey embryos. The experiment, detailed in a paper just published in the scientific journal Nature, is momentous because it marks the first time that a gene-encoding protein has been fully integrated into the DNA of a primate, enabling the fluorescent-footed monkeys to pass the artificial trait on to their offspring. It’s a development that has a lot of medical researchers excited, because of the potential for breeding primates with genetic tendencies for human diseases, who then could be studied in research to find cures. Conversely, animal rights activists, who are already against the use of apes for medical experimentation (see my previous blog on that subject), are likely to become even more outraged by the breeding of transgenic primates for laboratories.

Keep reading! There's more...

A Separate Olympics for Gene Dopers?

July 03, 2008

We’ve already talked about whether China should alter the weather at this year’s Olympic games in Beijing, but here’s another Olympic-related question for you. How far should athletes be allowed to go in altering themselves in the quest for gold medals?

World-class competitors already push their bodies to almost unfathomable extremes. A recent New York Times Magazine profile of four-time Olympic swimmer and 2008 hopeful Dara Torres described her brutal training regimen, which includes two hours of swimming every morning, another hour and a half of strength training in the afternoon, and every other day, a third grueling two-hour session of resistance stretching, in which a pair of trainers force her body into various contortions to increase her range of motion when she’s propelling herself through the water. Years of such intense workouts have produced a physique like this.

How Far Should Scientists Try to Extend the Human Life Span?

June 17, 2008

British biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey might look like a ZZ Top wannabee, but don’t let the beard deter you from contemplating his novel concept of strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Basically, what he wants to do is re-engineer the human body at the cellular level to prevent — or reverse — the aging process, and extend the human life span by centuries or longer. Here’s a video of de Grey explaining SENS, in his wonderful Masterpiece Theatre-esque accent:

Before you dismiss de Grey as some sort of snake-oil salesman, consider that he’s sufficiently brilliant to have been awarded a doctorate by prestigious Cambridge University without having to take any classes, strictly on the merits of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, a 1999 book in which he made the case that preventing damage to mitochondrial DNA might stem the usual effects of aging and significantly extend the human life span. Indeed, he’s not only published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but also edits one, the bimonthly Rejuvenation Research. A lot of big-brained Silicon Valley folks take his ideas very seriously; Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former chief executive officer of PayPal, has donated $3.5 million to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation, which funds research on anti-aging biomedicine.

Should Scientists Create Artificial Life Forms?

February 15, 2008

Mycoplasma genitalium is a bacterium that resides on epithelial cells inside the genital tracts of humans suffering from non-gonococcal urethritis. Up to this point, M. genitalium’s main claim to fame was that it is one of the least complex organisms known to man. But now, the humble microbe is the subject of worldwide headlines; researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have just accomplished a scientific first by assembling a near-perfect replica of the bacterium’s 582,970 base-pair genome from its chemical components.  If Venter’s team is able to insert the synthetic genome into a living bacterium, which they hope to do sometime in 2008, in theory, at least, it should take over control of the organism’s functions, in the same way that installing and booting up a copy of a new operating system would run a computer.

The Venter Institute’s feat moves us one step closer to the day when scientists can create totally synthetic life forms that don’t exist in nature. As the New York Times explains:

"Synthetic biologists envision being able to design an organism on a computer, press the 'print' button to have the necessary DNA made and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

'What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,' said J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist."

The ability to create synthetic organisms could be tremendously useful, and profitable too. Scientists might be able to design a fuel-producing microbe that efficiently converts biomass into ethanol, or create custom-made cellular factories to produce ingredients for medicines. (Already, University of California scientist Jay Keasling has used synthetic biology techniques to program yeast cells to produce artemisinin, a substance used in treating malaria, more cheaply than it can be extracted from tree bark.) They even might devise tiny biological robots that could adapt to their environments with greater agility than any machine, or manmade bacteria programmed to attack and kill cancers. It’s not too hard to imagine the creation of synthetic life forms eventually turning into a trillion-dollar global industry.

On the other hand, it might be just as easy to cause incredible harm with such technology. An organism custom designed for a benign purpose might escape into the environment and mutate into a crop-ravaging pest. Worse yet, malevolent governments or terrorist organizations might eventually be able to create new types of lethal pathogens for biological warfare. Here’s an article from The New Atlantis that lays out some of the potential perils.

So what do you think? Should scientists be allowed to create synthetic life forms, or are the potential risks too scary? Express your opinion below.

Should Humans Be Cloned?

February 01, 2008

If you’re uneasy about the FDA’s recent decision that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe for human consumption, this story is really going to rock your world. Stemagen, a La Jolla, Calif.-based private-sector stem cell research company, has announced that its scientists have for the first time created a human embryo by cloning adult cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same process used to create cloned animals.

You may be thinking that you’ve heard this before, because you have. Back in 2004, South Korean scientists announced that they not only had created a human embryo via cloning but had successfully extracted stem cells from it. After their work could not be replicated, lead scientist Hwang Woo-Suk was forced to admit that the results had been fabricated.

As a result, Stemagen seems to have taken extra care to document its findings, an article accepted by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cells. The researchers had an independent lab do DNA fingerprinting to prove that the embryos were true clones of the cells from which they originated.

Stemagen chief executive Dr. Samuel H. Wood, who doubled as a donor of the cells from which some of the embryos were cloned, describes the project as “a critical milestone in the development of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for human therapeutic use, potentially including developing treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.”

But not everybody is going to hail this as a breakthrough. The idea of creating an embryonic clone of a person in order to harvest stem cells — and then discarding the clone — is abhorrent to opponents of most conventional embryonic stem cell research, who consider the destruction of an embryo to be murder. Even those who aren’t outright opposed raise some potentially troubling questions. For example, bioethicist and blogger Arthur Caplan writes:

In the paper announcing the breakthrough, the authors note that they got three out of 25 attempts at clones to turn into human clone embryos. That is a success rate of about 10 percent. Even if that success rate improves in the future, it still means that six or more eggs are going to be required for a researcher to make a stem cell from a clone made from the DNA of one of your own cells.

Where will hundreds of thousands of eggs come from when hundreds of thousands seek cures? Will we pay poor women to create them? Egg-farming, using powerful drugs with serious risks, may not be the most humane way to ask a poor woman to earn a living.

And although this obviously isn’t the Stemagen scientists’ intention, some undoubtedly worry that the process will be used to produce human infants who are perfect genetic duplicates of a cell donor. (It may already have happened, if you buy the 2004 claim of a mysterious outfit named Clonaid that it actually had produced 13 cloned human children; skeptical New York Times journalists pointed out that the company was founded by the leader of a sect that preaches space travelers originally populated Earth through cloning.) If such cloning proved feasible and the process was widely available, would people resort to cloning in an attempt to make themselves (or at least their genetic blueprint) immortal? Or would companies obtain cell samples from the most productive workers and use them to create a generation of super employees who would bump those of us with conventional origins into the unemployment line? Would human clones have the same civil rights as their progenitors? What if terrorists used cloning to create an endless supply of suicide bombers? That all may sound crazy,  but crazy things sometimes happen.

What’s your opinion on human cloning? Say your piece here.

Should Humans Use Cloned Animals for Food?

January 11, 2008

You vegans out there probably don’t give a hill of beans about the Washington Post’s recent revelation that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is about to say that it’s OK for humans to eat meat and use dairy products from cloned animals. But the omnivorous masses, the ones who pick one fast-food joint over another because the patties are supposedly fresh rather than frozen, may get a little uneasy at the prospect of chomping into a double burger with cheese produced by somatic cell transfer, rather than the old fashioned way.

Scientists started cloning animals back in 1996, when Dolly the sheep was produced in Scotland. But for years, U.S. regulators were cautious about allowing clones to become part of the U.S. food supply. However, based a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report and additional findings from researchers in the U.S. and Japan in 2005, the FDA issued a draft risk assessment in 2006 that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. But consumer and health activists remain unconvinced. In December 2007, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the 2007 farm bill by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., that would require more government study of clones’ safety, but it’s unclear whether that restriction will make it into the final bill. If it doesn’t, the FDA’s approval would mean that meat and milk from the offspring of clones — and eventually, as the cost of the technology drops, from clones themselves — could start appearing in supermarkets and on restaurant menus sometime in the near future.

Proponents of animal cloning see the brouhaha as an unnecessary one. "Thousands of data points, hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and two reviews by the National Academies have all said the same thing," Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, an Austin, Texas-based animal cloning company, told the Post. "There is nothing left to review." David Faber, president of TransOva, an Iowa-based cloning outfit, insisted to the Des Moines Register that “there is no food safety issue with clones.” The Los Angeles Times actually went so far as to sponsor a taste test at an upscale L.A. eatery, in which six diners were asked to tell the difference between cloned and conventional beef. (They couldn’t.)

The rationale behind cloning cattle is that animals with the best genetic makeup to produce tasty meat or milk could be duplicated again and again. In theory, that ultimately would make the finest quality sirloin burgers or porterhouse steaks available cheaply to everyone.

Scientific American points out that the cattle industry has long employed a process called budding, in which the undifferentiated cells in a fertilized cow egg are separated, so that they grow into hundreds of artificially induced siblings (“natural clones,” as the magazine calls them).

None of this seems to have persuaded the public; a recent Pew poll found that six out of 10 Americans regarded the notion of eating cloned beef as, well, kind of icky. Consumers Union points out that many clones suffer from severe deformities, and those that survive often have weak immune systems and require large doses of antibiotics to survive. “At the very least, raising clones will necessitate greater use of antibiotics on food animals, worsening the existing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect and sicken humans,” CU testified on behalf of proposed California legislation that would require special labeling identifying food that came from clones.

The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in its public comments on the FDA’s draft risk assessment:

Animal cloning remains a technology in its early stages that still produces primarily debilitated and physiologically impaired animals. Regarding the relatively few animals that survive to adulthood and appear to be normal, there are sufficient differences between clones and non-clones to conclude that they are not normal, or at least not normal enough to conclude that subtle changes do not pose health risks. Although the possibility of such effects is not great, because milk and meat are so widely consumed in the United States, these deserve to be addressed experimentally in well-defined consumption and safety studies done in all species and breeds headed for the market on animals at the ages they are likely to be consumed.

So are you ready for a T-bone clone, or does the idea of “Frankenfood” gross you out? Express your opinion below.

Biological Warfare Against Opium Fields

October 30, 2007

According to the New York Times, the Bush administration is pressuring the Afghan government to allow aerial spraying of synthetic herbicides in rural areas. The United States wants to eradicate Afghan farmers’ harvest of opium poppies, which supply the raw material for 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and help fund the Taliban insurgency. But Afghan officials are resisting the idea, in part because of fears that the chemicals will contaminate the Afghan water supply. (The chemical that the U.S. wants to use is glyphosate, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns can cause lung congestion, kidney damage and reproductive problems with sufficient exposure.)

But the U.S. government ultimately may deploy a more technologically advanced — and potentially even riskier — solution to destroy the poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been working on using both natural and genetically engineered organisms to kill drug crops such as opium poppies and coca, the source of cocaine, according to The Sunshine Project, an international organization opposed to the use of genetic engineering in warfare. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration tried to persuade Colombia to allow use of a U.S.-developed strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum against coca fields, but field tests of the organism were halted after international protests. In 2000, U.S. scientists published a study on two fungi with opium-killing properties. Asia Times reported in 2002 that the United Nations Drug Control Program, with research support and funding from the United States, had conducted tests of the effect of the fungus Pleospora papaveracea on opium poppies at the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (a former site of Soviet biological-weapons research). In 2005, Indiana GOP Congress members Dan Burton and Mark Souder, the then-chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, advocated a biological war on drugs, which potentially would include both naturally occurring and genetically manipulated organisms. "We spend millions of dollars every year on counter-narcotic efforts, including drug-crop eradication and interdiction, especially in our joint efforts in Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, yet the flow of illegal and lethal narcotics continues to be a major problem in our country," stated congressman Burton. "The advent of mycoherbicides and other counter-narcotic alternatives offers us the possibility to cut off the source of these drugs literally at their roots."

The Sunshine Project’s scientists, however, warn that such tactics are "a recipe for environmental disaster." They point to the risk that drug-destroying organisms will harm other plants and insects as well, and estimate that the anti-opium fungus’s spores would persist in the soil for as long as 40 years, making the spread of the fungus difficult to control. In addition, they say that a biowar against drugs could lead to a rise in life-threatening fungal infections among humans with compromised immune systems — such as patients in Afghan hospitals. Worse yet, a scientific paper written by two Sunshine Project scientists warns that "these biological agents are lowering the political threshold for the use of biological weapons and are likely to have tremendous environmental and health impacts. The pursuit of crop-killing fungi as weapons would be a further slide down a slippery slope that, by following the same logic, could easily lead to the use of other plant pathogens, animal pathogens or even non-lethal biological weapons against humans."

There’s also the possibility that drug traffickers could strike back with biowarfare of their own. Wired News reported in 2004 that Colombian cocaine traffickers may have obtained genetically engineered herbicide-resistant coca plants to thwart the U.S. anti-drug effort.

So, should the U.S. wage a biowar against drugs in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? Express your opinion here.

Human-Animal Hybrids

October 19, 2007

Back in 2006, you probably were as startled as we were when President George W. Bush, during his State of the Union address, implored Congress to bar scientists from “creating human-animal hybrids.” Not accustomed to having our commander in chief veer off on a tangent that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of a plot line from The X-Files, Americans reacted with a mix of puzzlement and derision. Within a day, Technorati.com listed “human-animal hybrid” as the second-most popular search on the Internet, and a Web-based vendor was offering T-shirts emblazoned with a man-monkey so that wearers could  “help President Bush raise awareness about these terrible half man / half beasts.”

As it turns out, Bush wasn’t actually envisioning a nightmarish race of what sci-fi writers refer to as parahumans. Instead, he was up in arms about the possibility of scientists combining human genetic material with animal eggs to produce hybrid embryos, which then could be harvested for stem cells — a possible way of getting around political and religious conservatives’ opposition to the harvesting of stem cells from leftover human embryos from fertility clinics. (Back in 2001, Bush essentially barred the federal government from funding such research, unless scientists relied upon a limited number of existing stem cell lines.)

The controversy has been revived by the recent decision of the U.K.’s Embryology Authority to propose that British scientists be permitted to create hybrid embryos as a source of stem cells, which may possibly provide eventual treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other conditions. Opponents of such research, in a peculiar twist, are winding their way back to what we thought our president was talking about. As the Times of London reported in June, they’re arguing that if scientists are allowed to create human-animal hybrid embryos, in the interests of preserving life, the embryos should then be implanted in women and carried to term, rather than being destroyed. The conceivable result: a generation of infants that are mostly human but also part animal.

So what do you think? Should scientists be permitted to create human-animal embryos, but only for research purposes? Or should they be allowed to go even further, and create manimals? Post your comments below.