Genetic modification and the law of unintended consequences
I read two articles today that dovetailed with each other, although one concerns humans and the other mosquitoes. Then again, haven’t humans and mosquitoes long been intertwined?
The twins, called Lulu and Nana, reportedly had their genes modified before birth by a Chinese scientific team using the new editing tool CRISPR. The goal was to make the girls immune to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Now, new research shows that the same alteration introduced into the girls’ DNA, deletion of a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.
“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” says Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections.
The article is a bit cryptic about why this was done. But it highlights the fact that, particularly in countries with fewer rules about the ethics of scientific research and practice, these sorts of rogue experiments will increasingly be done. And it is nearly impossible to predict their ultimate results, except to say that science fiction scenarios easily come to mind.
Or literature. How much will these girls’ memories be enhanced, if the report is true? (It seems that one always needs to add “if the report is true” these days.) Since I often think in terms of literary references (is there a gene for that?), the story in the article make me think of a fictional story: “Funes the Memorious.” For Funes, enhanced memory was not necessarily a great thing, although he seemed to enjoy it. From the story by Borges:
Funes…reveals that, since his fall from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all. He remembers, for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment. Funes has an immediate intuition of the mane of a horse or the form of a constantly changing flame that is comparable to our (normal people’s) intuition of a simple geometric shape such as a triangle or square.
In order to pass the time, Funes has engaged in projects such as reconstructing a full day’s worth of past memories (an effort which, he finds, takes him another full day), and constructing a “system of enumeration” that gives each number a different, arbitrary name. Borges correctly points out to him that this is precisely the opposite of a system of enumeration, but Funes is incapable of such understanding.
I wrote that “Funes is an extreme example of memory run amok to the point of being dysfunctional.” What will happen to Lulu and Nana? I’m not saying they will turn into Funes, of course. But still, the effects are unpredictable and not necessarily as anticipated, and certainly not part of the original plan, which had to do with HIV resistance.
Which brings us to article number two. This one is about genetically modified mosquitoes:
Scientists have launched a major new phase in the testing of a controversial genetically modified organism: a mosquito designed to quickly spread a genetic mutation lethal to its own species, NPR has learned.
For the first time, researchers have begun large-scale releases of the engineered insects, into a high-security laboratory in Terni, Italy.
“This will really be a breakthrough experiment,” says Ruth Mueller, an entomologist who runs the lab. “It’s a historic moment.”
The goal is to see if the mosquitoes could eventually provide a powerful new weapon to help eradicate malaria in Africa, where most cases occur.
Malaria is still a big killer in Africa, although it could be fought with DDT. But DDT is no longer commonly used because of environmental concerns; I wrote about the problems here, as well as the fact that those concerns seem overblown.
Seems to me that this mosquito engineering has much larger potential adverse consequences than DDT. If I had to choose between the two methods of dealing with malaria, at the moment I’d say I prefer DDT:
The lab was specially built to evaluate the modified insects in as close to a natural environment as possible without the risk of releasing them into the wild, about which there are deep concerns regarding unforeseen effects on the environment.
“This is an experimental technology which could have devastating impacts,” says Dana Perls of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that’s part of an international coalition fighting this new generation of modified organisms.
To prevent any unforeseen effects on the environment, scientists have always tried to keep genetically engineered organisms from spreading their mutations.
But in this case, researchers want the modification to spread. So they engineered mosquitoes with a “gene drive.”…
But critics fear that gene-drive organisms could run amok and wreak havoc if they were ever released into the wild. The insects could inadvertently have a negative effect on crops, for example, by eliminating important pollinators, they fear. The insects’ population crash could also lead to other mosquitoes coming with other diseases, critics say…
“This is a technology where we don’t know where it’s going to end. We need to stop this right where it is,” says Nnimmo Bassey, director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation in Nigeria. “They’re trying to use Africa as a big laboratory to test risky technologies.”
The experiment is a key step in the Target Malaria project. The project’s major funder is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
That last bit doesn’t surprise me one iota. I wrote about Gates in that post of mine I linked earlier, and added that it was ironic that Gates wasn’t also championing the use of DDT now. It could save enormous numbers of lives. It’s ironic, but it doesn’t surprise me.
Pandora’s Box, caution don’t open Pandora’s Box because…. Just Because. Unknown and unforeseen consequences as a result of trying to making all our life stuff better.
the fact that those concerns seem overblown.
“Friends of the Earth” helped propagate the Rachel Carson hoax that kills millions.
The other side of the story,. Rachel Carson Was a writer, not a scientist.
Although many of Carson’s key claims about how DDT affects the health of birds have been disproven in the years since her book was published, there is now evidence, both from field studies and laboratory experiments, that DDT does have an effect on birds that Carson did not know about when she wrote Silent Spring: it can cause many bird species to produce eggshells that are thinner and therefore more fragile. This effect has been linked to reduced populations of certain bird species, especially “raptors, waterfowl, passerines, and nonpasserine ground birds.”[44]
Eggshell thinning is a potential problem, but it should not be overstated. The levels of DDT required for malaria control are much less than those required for crop dusting as practiced in the 1950s. Furthermore, the problem does not affect every bird species — indeed, for some species, there is reason to believe that DDT has an overall beneficial effect, by protecting them from the insect-borne diseases that are a primary cause of bird mortality. For example, some marsh bird populations grew so dramatically during the DDT years that they emerged from their marshes in millions to cause significant damage to crops in the American Midwest.[45] Ultimately, the effects of DDT on bird populations are not nearly as dire as Carson depicted — and offer no justification for the millions of human deaths caused by the unwarranted prohibition of DDT.
The eggshell theory has also been attacked.
Malaria is still a big killer in Africa, although it could be fought with DDT.
Fought, but not won.
Firstly, Africa has too many areas where the spraying simply can’t be done. So we can’t eradicate malaria that way.
Secondly, a long program of DDT spraying that doesn’t kill all the relevant mosquitos will merely ensure that the remaining ones become DDT resistant.
While Silent Spring was over the top, DDT isn’t actually a good thing to be spraying around. It will poison humans slowly. It might be that malaria is worse, but DDT isn’t a good thing to ingest and I would not be happy to have it sprayed around me.
Genetic modification does offer a chance of actually eradicating malaria. It is far and away the best chance.
Vaccines would be helpful in the meantime, but since the disease will continue to linger in other species it won’t be eradicated. Just as we haven’t wiped out the Plague, despite our best efforts, because it continues to exist in other species.
Chester: IIRC, one of the major delivery vectors of DDT was incorporation into the mud used to make huts, and impregnating mosquito nets for use at night. Both had significant effects in killing mosquitoes without the “open air” dispersal problems.
Africa has too many areas where the spraying simply can’t be done.
DDT use in Africa was indoors and involved spraying only the walls of dwellings.
Excessive use by farmers outdoors is analogous to overuse of antibiotics. It is not necessary in malaria prevention.
Old proverb: A Hell for humans is a Heaven for mosquitoes.
AesopFan:
Please see this.
How many examples have we seen of some new “revolutionary” “miracle” procedure, device, drug, or other cure that burst on the scene, only to find out that after a short time, or after five, or ten, or twenty year’s experience, it turns out that—on balance—the side effects of many of these supposedly curative things are far worse than the illnesses/conditions that these nostrums were supposed to cure?
Or, even worse, that this thing caused some additional, different, very bad disease or condition that no one even conceived of, that came out of nowhere, to manifest itself?
Given this experience, I would be very, very wary of going forward with research of any kind that has the potential to do great harm and that, in this case—if any of these mosquitos escaped the lab— could not be undone, “taken back,” eradicated.
P.S.—So how, exactly, are these scientists going to prevent these presumably tiny and very mobile mosquitos from escaping their lab?
Are we talking a level 4 biological hazard type lab, or are we talking about a lab with maybe a positive air pressure system and/or just an airlock system with two sets of doors with an open area between the inner and outer doors, and the pious hope that none of these mosquitos escapes?**
** I recently visited a “butterfly conservatory” that had such a lock system, because all of the butterflies in that conservatory were foreign to the U.S., and likely to become invasive to boot.
Well, on the way in they pretty casually waved us through, on the way out they opened the inner door, hustled us into the open area, and the elderly volunteer working there looked around to see if there were any butterflies in there with us and, then, had us rapidly exit.
Did this lock system really look like it would be even close to 100% effective in preventing any of those butterflies from escaping?
I sure didn’t think so.
Chester Draws:
As a human poison DDT is pretty weak tea:
“There are no documented unequivocal reports of a fatal human poisoning occurring exclusively from ingestion of pure DDT, but deaths have been reported following ingestion of commercial preparations containing also other substances.”
That includes applicators and formulators (heavy exposure workers).
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp.asp?id=81&tid=20
Bill Joy warned about pushing the frontiers of science back in 2000, in a superb piece for Wired Magazine. He’s hardly a household name but was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. In the article he identifies four areas of research – genetics, AI, robotics, and nanobotics, and points out that they each empower an individual to release a force that could eradicate the human race, for the first time in our history (nuclear weapons, in contrast, require teams of highly trained specialists working in unison).
That future, it seems, is rapidly approaching.
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
I can still very vividly remember that, as a young child–when we went on our usual annual week-long summer vacation to Long Beach Island, in New Jersey–and on one of those evenings during the week I would observe some township worker driving a truck or jeep down the street, past the same apartment we always rented, and whatever kind of the DDT machine they had on the back of the truck would be spewing out this thick white fog of DDT.
You could smell it everywhere, and it and the stuffy smelling apartment, and it’s similarly peculiar smelling bedding were the usual smells of those summer vacations.
Moreover, there was usually some young shirtless guy with a cigarette in his mouth sitting in the back, right next to the DDT machine.
It sure would be nice if we knew if those guys were harmed.
Later on, I saw WWII films of concentration and DP camp inmates having hoses spewing DDT thrust down the fronts of their uniforms and pants to kill all the fleas and lice.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to track them or the people doing the delousing down, to see if they were harmed by that DDT?
Snow on Pine; My childhood was in Florida in the sixties. I too remember the bug trucks, as we called them, rumbling by in the evening spewing out fog.
I remember kids playing in that fog. I did not make a study of it, but I don’t remember anything happening to them.
The left’s precautionary principle would argue against releasing modified mosquitos, ever. My estimation would be to do lots of analysis and testing before doing so. Malaria is so terrible partly because the number of victims is far higher than the fatalities. Many are reduced to lethargic shells of their former selves.
The Gates foundation: Bill supposedly is a voracious reader and astute analyst of the things his charity is involved in. I think he is (was?) trying to completely eradicate polio globally.
Then there are things like their education initiatives. A couple decades ago the foundation asked some teacher’s union how they should spend some money, and they did so. A few years later the foundation concluded it was a complete waste of money. Shocker. We’ll do better next time.
Just recently I read that they are very involved with spending on Common Core programs. Lesson not learned.
Three possibilities: Bill and Melinda disagree and argue often. Bill just isn’t that smart. And my favorite: The Foundation is another exercise in posturing (in part). Please don’t hate me for my wealth, look at my exercises in compassion.
How do you prove a negative? Can’t find the people poisoned by DDT? It must have been bad, I remember the taste. You want a bad actor that was widely used, and killed? Look up chlordane, or industrial workers exposed to vinyl chloride, or benzene. Sheesh.
Seems to me that [the following] mosquito engineering has much larger potential adverse consequences than DDT.
neo: There’s a Nebula Award-winning science-fiction story, “The Screwfly Solution,” by James Tiptree Jr. (an alias for Racoona Sheldon) about aliens who attempt to sterilize the earth of humans by using a gruesome version of the Sterile Insect Technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution
Snow & huxley: spraying for mosquitoes was a summer ritual in my small-town-Texas youth; the smell is indeed unforgettable. My mom made us come inside whenever the truck came down our street, but nobody ever died or got sick that I knew about.
The closest we came to disaster was the year the city also sprayed using crop-dusters. One of my cousins was climbing near the top of his quite tall willow tree when the plane passed overhead, spewing a thick plume of white.
He came down pretty durn quick.
Neo: “And don’t get me started on geese.”
They should be officially classified as vermin. In Denver metro, you can’t walk ayywhere in a park without taking home little reminders of your visit.
PS Nice poem, and interesting conversation on hunting.
This seemed still relevant, if not more so, in today’s frenzied political climate.
Seems odd to think that the attacks on Sarah Palin were once viewed as unusually vicious; now they are the norm.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2010/12/14/hunting-and-the-heaven-of-animals/#comment-208034
Back in the 1940s-early 1950s one of the trendy, new, miracle cures was Radium, and it had some medical applications.
For one thing, it was used to “fix” those members of the military who served in aircraft or submarines, and who had problems with equalizing atmospheric pressure.
From what I read, a total of somewhere around 70,000 servicemen were exposed to pretty hefty doses of radium to their heads, apparently used to burn out tissue—in their eustachian tubes?—that was blocking their ability to equalize atmospheric pressure, as their aircraft went higher and higher or their submarines descended lower into the ocean.
You never hear anything about this, but I wonder if the VA has any stats on what the long term effects of these concentrated doses of Radium to the head were?
The fears about unintended consequences of using genetic drive in one species of mosquitoes look wildly exaggerated to me. Genetic drives work only in the targeted species, all the others are completely safe. There are hundreds of mosquitoes species in nature, probably dozens in any given location, and ecologically they all are just the same in food chains. Open environment use of DDT is much more dangerous because DDT kills all kinds of insects, it is totally non-selective, and the environment damage can be really devastating. This is not just a conjecture, such thing happened in Novosibirsk when a small scientific center (Academgorodok) in the middle of taiga was spayed by DDT to get rid of mosquitoes that made life in this new research center in 1970-s unbearable. But the spraying of the forests around it killed all parasitic wasps that kept populations of Siberian silkworm (a caterpillar) under control. This resulted in population explosion of this dangerous pest and all the forest was dead in just a month. The damage was lasting, it took decades to recover.
I know that my comment below goes against the increasingly secular, Promethian, exaulted view of human knowledge and competence that seems to be gaining ground, especially among some researchers and scientists.
The idea that–given how much we have discovered and know these days–we can just step in, however we want, and meddle with the way things are currently arranged and work.
But, it seems to me that the lesson in a lot of these cases is that the environment/ the ecology/human physiology and functions/our DNA, etc. are a lot more complex and subtle, have a lot more layers, are interconnected and influence each other in ways that we may/do not currently perceive, or can even currently imagine, that the state of our current knowledge is nowhere near total and complete.
I know that people are champing at the bit, want to run ahead, but caution, I feel, is essential when you are “monkeying around” with something you may not fully comprehend.
We should be extremely careful to not arrogantly assume that we know all there is to know about these things, and then, based on our very likely faulty understanding of these things, go ahead and do things that will disrupt relationships, processes, and functions that we very likely do not fully comprehend.
Humility in the face of Nature is a good thing.
om on: the toxicology of DDT is probably the most well studied topic in biology. For warm-blooded animals (mammals and birds) it is no more toxic than a table salt, but absolutely deadly for insects and other arthropods (mites, round worms, spiders, etc. Actually, it is the least toxic for humans and cattle than any other insecticide, and by far.
Snow on Pine: In general, this is very true. But different research fields are very different in complexity and completeness of our knowledge. Genetics is now the most exact field in biology, comparable to Newtonian mechanics in predictability of outcomes of any genetic experiment (not about effects of genes, which can be very complex and unknown, but about how genes spread and combine). Effects of genes do not belong to genetics, it is development biology, a thousand times more complex and poorly understood field.
You never hear anything about this, but I wonder if the VA has any stats on what the long term effects of these concentrated doses of Radium to the head were?
Snow on Pine: I knew a woman born in the late 1940s who had been treated with X-rays for acne. She always looked mildly sunburned about the face. Apparently the treatment worked to a point, however:
Though it was an effective treatment for acne, the benefits did not outweigh the risks. Concern grew as incidence of thyroid cancer and epithelioma grew amongst the treatment groups.
https://www.entwellbeing.com.au/strange-history-x-ray-treatment-for-acne/
Snow on Pine: Nobody with warm blood was ever harmed by DDT, that is for sure. DDT is xenobiotic, that is, it does not change biochemically in any living organism and is excreted as it is. Even bacteria that can metabolize everything, even rubber and plastics, can not decompose it. Neither can ozone degrade it, so remarkably stable it is. That is the problem: completely alien to biosphere, it just accumulates in the ocean. And in the liver of any fish, dissolving in fat. The bigger fish is, the higher DDT concentration in its liver is, and the highest it is in the liver of penguins in Antarctic, and other sea birds eating fish. (It accumulates in food chains, and penguins are the apex predators.)
Sergey: Any word on indoxacarb? I live in essentially off-campus student housing and the Advion preparation of indoxacarb worked miracles on my apartment’s roach problem.
I keep a 3′ strip of packing tape dotted with Advion under the refrigerator door, where the warmth draws the roaches and that’s enough to do the trick.
There don’t seem to be human problems with it unless one eats large quantities for suicide.
People worried about the less used DDT here instead of chemicals sprayed in the air, high fructose corn syrup, and sodium flouride… no wonder the Deep State and leftist alliance has been winning in the USA.
Contact poisons that do not evaporate are generally safe for indoor use unless you accidentally ingest them. Insects are vulnerable to most contact poisons (DDT is one of them). In the form of non-drying gels they solved most of the problems with insect home invasion.
Enhanced memory is certainly possible, almost to the point of the Borges story. A Russian psychologist Luria wrote a case study, “A small book about a big memory”, where he described one of his patient, Shereshevsky, who could recall every day of his life since childhood, the weather, the details of events and so on. He was also synesthetic: his sensory input was intermixed. He felt color of the sound and sound of the color, the letters for him had pitch, texture, taste and smell. Probably, the sensory fields in his brain cortex were partially overlapped (visual and audio, for example). Synesthesia is often correlates with an exceptionally good memory: Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov is an example, composer Skryabin – another example. Reading Bunin, with his so vivid description of nature, I also suspect he was synesthetic too.
Borges story also confirms my suggestion that enhanced memory is connected to synesthesia. Ascribing individuality to numbers is very like Nabokov’s ascribing sensory qualities to letters, a hallmark of synesthetic personality. My hypothesis is based on the well known fact that at certain stage of embryonic development human brain has many times more neural cells than in newborn babies, but later most of them are removed by process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. There are several known genetic mutations that can suppress apoptosis. Such mutations can arise naturally, which produce individuals with enhanced memory and synesthesia.
Designer babies are on the horizon.
I offer, as an example, the concept of “Junk DNA.”
As I understand it, the quite substantial portions of our DNA that–given our current state of knowledge–do not have a lot of discernible functions attributed to them.
I can readily see some scientist/researcher in the near future deciding to “clean up” human DNA by eliminating this apparently useless “junk.”
Which I’m pretty sure is not as useless, as much Junk, as our current level of knowledge makes it out to be.
P.S.–As another example, according to a mention in the news, some reckless scientist and his team in China are preparing, in the near future, to try to carry out the first human head transplant.
An accomplishment and milestone that–if successfully attained–I am sure will greatly benefit and ennoble the human race, and not be the entrance to nightmare.
Right?
I happen to think it is wise to be very conscious of the tendency of some humans to suffer from too much Hubris, and our need to rein it in.