Biotech Acceleration: Editing Genomes
Dean
You know, I would suppose that most people would not be as geeked as I am about stories like this, but... Quoted:
By stripping the E. coli genome of vast tracts of its genetic material - hundreds of apparently inconsequential genes - a team of Wisconsin researchers has created a leaner and meaner version of the bacterium that is a workhorse of modern biology and industry.More details right here.The feat, reported this week (April 28, 2006) in the journal Science, demonstrates that scientists can make precise, large-scale genetic alterations to organisms without compromising their basic functions. It represents some of the first hard results in a new field of science known as synthetic biology, where researchers are able to mold the entire genomes of bacteria and viruses in unprecedented ways.
They removed--as in, simply edited out--over fifteen percent of this bacterium's genetic code, stuff they basically decided was junk spread throughout the genome. And they got as a result an organism that looks and act just like normal, natural E. Coli.
So this is the state of the art today:
1) They can literally rewrite a genome for an organism.
2) They can produce viable species out of such edits.
3) They understand genetics well enough that they can decide with fair accuracy what's really needed and what's superfluous.
All three of those facts by themselves are impressive. This is way, way beyond what I'll bet most people thought to be possible with today's technology.
Biotechnology appears to be approaching the "knee" of the exponential growth curve, where people suddenly start to notice how fast things are moving.
Designer babies anyone? It may be way closer than you think. Yeah yeah, I know: "But Dean, it's just bacterium! It only reproduces asexually!" Yeah. Anyone else remember when 56kbps was a screaming fast connection?
The pace of change isn't just mind-boggling, it's actually accelerating.
But i really don't understand why you're so geeked about this. it should scare the bejeezus out of you. A couple of years ago, I wrote something about the abortion debate and the "gene" for homosexuality. I brought up the point that if there were a "homosexual gene" and they identified it so that people could find that gene in a pre-natal screen, what would prevent people from aborting those babies?
Now fast forward to this news. What would prevent people from "editing out" that homosexual gene? That's just one example. I'm sure proponents will focus on the great things we can do for certain diseases, but there are two sides to that coin.
These are profound questions, and they're racing up on us very quickly.
As for tweaking folks' genes for sexuality, isn't it just possible that some of these people just want to be homosexuals? For the same reason that I like being heterosexual? If so, why not just live and let live?
Other than that, long live science. In all its glories, wonders, and sometimes, weird outcomes and unintended consequences.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I don't mean to throw cold water on everyone's warm-fuzzies about it, but whether they realize it or not, scientists are playing with fire. I hope they are taking some serious laboratory security precautions because monkeying around with the genomes of bacteria such as e-coli or viri such as ebola could have some very serious consequences if the modified organisms were to escape into the wild.
I can see the potential for a lot of good to come out of this, but I can also see the potential for a real live "Captain Tripps" as well.
"neat"
In this case super-neat.
How long before I can engineer bacteria to eat dirt and produce a pleasant fragrance so I can spread them around my apartment?
Yoghurt.. beer.. blue cheese.. is there anything bacteria can't do? :)
Gay couples might want to edit it in.
If that seems farfetched, it really isn't. There are well-deocumented cases of deaf couples making every effort to have deaf children -- and being gay isn't a crippling disability.
Welcome to the 21st century and the rapidly-approaching Singularity, also known as the point of radical departure where we literally cannot see the future because events are developing so fast we can't see past them.
It is increasingly possible with equipment that is at the fingertips of grad students to monkey with viruses and bacteria in ways that were almost inconceivable ten years ago. And that equipment gets cheaper and easier to use all the time. Want to download the instructions for smallpox and build it in your lab genetic sequencer? Don't laugh, it's already plausible RIGHT NOW, and not in some far-flung future. Find a way to modify it to make it 100% fatal? You might even stumble on that by accident--as some researchers came close to doing a couple of years ago when they were fiddling with the mousepox virus, a chickenpox relative that infects mice, and accidentally made a 100% lethal variety. (Hint: in the real world, there is no virus that's 100% lethal. This was. They did it on accident.)
You can't stop this progress. You can't. The technology is loose in the world and even if you stopped it with a sledgehammer in one country it'll be available in a hundred others anyway. We should be strategizing ways to fight this before the threat becomes real. So far, it looks like relatively few people are taking it seriously.
Step back about 400 meters. Your expectations are so far from biological realities that you could be writing PR for a genomics company.
The analogy between a genome of E. coli and a higher organism and increasing the speed of a modem is not even a close one, and the idea of "editing in or out specific germline genes is in Jurassic Park land.
Pathogenic theory of homosexuality.
Talldave, how about engineering some biomemes?
Harvey, I think the average layperson in America doesn't even remotely have a clue about what we are figuing out how to do.
What is wrong with designer babies any ways?
When you wrote me, Miklos and Duesberg early this am asking whether "this work was actually astonishing or whether you were just naive", we each wrote you essentially the same thing. You are naive.
Fred Blattner (the senior investigator) is an old E. coli hand who is one of the best, but this work is quite straightforward, albeit elegant, and while it does show how much we do know about this most important of all bacteria that 'comes in the feces and has been the subject of innumerable doctoral theses' (as we used to sing back in the bad old days at Bezerkely)and will be extremely valuable as a better host for many metabolic engineering studies, it is hardly a landmark work.
I would have thought you realized how little single genes mean in complex organisms with numerous chromosomes from all your study of aneuploidy theory. Networks and parameters are the terms to use in thinking about genomes. The metabolic connections in a cell compose a network and the genes are parameters. There is an awful lot of excellent modelling of E. coli and other simple cells too based on this thinking, but it is mathematically tough going and doesn't lend itself to idiotic neologistical descriptions like "synthetic biology" (who uses that term anyway? maybe people who do "functional genomics" instead of "biology", and journalists of course.
The paper you found last week or so, also from Science, about using MS phage to make a better battery is much, much, much more exciting and interesting and clever etc than Fred's nice piece of snipping.
Are we "flat" as they used to say?
matoko-chan: I am tempted to write "What you mean "we" whiteman?" (as in the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto being surrounded by by pissed Indians and Kimosabe remarking on how much trouble "they" were in) but from your moniker it does not seem appropriate. So I will assume you are a right thinking molecular biologist and agree with you, the average person has absolutely nooooo idea about what serious biologists are up to.
As to designer babies -- it actually misses the essential point...babies already choose their parents (not as we stupidly imagine the other way around). Chew on that one if you be a Buddhist, and even if you're not.
Nevertheless, as Miklos told me this morning, there seems to be no good, solid layman's overview of the current state of genetics. So if you don't have your head deeply embedded in the peer reviewed literature--i.e. unless you're a grad student or better in the field--you really wind up grasping in the dark on these things.
From my perspective, I simply did not know that we were now routinely rewriting genomes on simple organisms. I knew we could do that with strands of DNA and RNA, like a virus, or occasionally changing one or two genes through direct manipulation in an organism. I didn't know that we were so confident in what we were doing that we could simply produce a viable organism after chopping out 15% or more of its entire genetic sequence. I daresay more than 95% of the lay population didn't know that either.
You're right, as I noted in my article, that we're still far away from "designer babies." A thing to keep in mind with me is that when I speak of the "near future" I'm usually thinking in terms of 10 to 20 years. Which to me ain't that long at all (but I tend to take the long view on most things).
Harvey likes to think of it as network theory, I guess, but you can also think of it as a giant chunk of code, with conditional loops.
The difference between mice and men is not in the genome, but in which genes are turned on. ;)
Please learn something about metabolic control analysis before you presume to put words in my mouth.
You might also try reading my book.