CRISPR babies

One of my problems with resolving ethical questions is that I so often have a hard time deciding the difference between moral, ethical, reasonable, and justifiable, and figuring out where an issue lies on the spectrum thereof.

I've always had this problem.  There are things that in my view are always wrong -- harming or endangering a child comes to mind -- but the vast majority of issues lie in that immense field of gray areas.

Which is why I'm having a hard time deciding what to make of the bombshell announcement last week that a Chinese geneticist, He Jiankui, claims to have genetically altered a pair of human embryos -- and it resulted in the birth of twin girls who, if the gene editing was successful, will be resistant to HIV.

The technique involved was CRISPR-Cas9, a protein complex that allows for what amounts to cut-and-paste for your DNA.  What He did was to use CRISPR-Cas9 to selectively delete a gene for a  receptor called CCR5 that allows HIV to attach to cells.  Without that receptor -- He hopes -- the children will be genetically immune.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When He made his announcement, the scientific community had a collective meltdown.  "The underlying purpose of doing the experiment was obviously to show that they could do gene editing on an embryo, but the purpose for the party involved does not make any sense," said Anthony Fauci, an HIV/AIDS researcher and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.  "There are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV that the thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways in my mind is unethical."

Okay, I'm not defending He.  The real issue here, in my opinion, is risk.  "Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer," said Julian Savulescu, an ethicist at the Oxford University.  "This experiment exposes healthy normal children to risks of gene editing for no real necessary benefit."

But the problem is that at some point, scientists were going to have to take the leap and do something like this.  Ever since Jennifer Doudna of UC-Berkeley developed CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing protocol in 2012, it's only been a matter of time.  Once a technique like this becomes possible, it becomes inevitable.

So sooner or later, someone was going to have to accept the risk of trying it on human embryos.  Animal models only get you so far.  The potential for eradicating genetic diseases is nothing short of astonishing; think of a world without cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia.  All of that is well within the realm of possibility now.

But.  Once you've started down that road, what's to stop people from altering other traits?  Appearance, personality, behavior... for me, this gets out onto some very thin ice.  When this Pandora's box is opened, there's no telling what dubiously ethical practices will escape.

There's also the problem that if such a technique really becomes capable of (relatively) risk-free editing out of deleterious genes, it's almost certain that it would be available only to the rich, further widening the gap between the privileged and the non-privileged.  The brilliant (and prescient) 1997 film Gattaca dealt with this very issue -- how genetic engineering of children could result in a new lower class, people conceived the old-fashioned way who didn't have the same opportunities for jobs, education, health care, and health insurance as the smarter, stronger, healthier "Valids."

So I'm of two, or more, minds about all of this.  First, the potential of the therapy is mind-boggling.  And the idea that once developed, researchers were going to hold off trying it out on human embryos, is naively optimistic about human nature.

But it comes back once again to the quote from scientist Alan Grant in Jurassic Park -- "You were so busy trying to figure out if you could, you never gave any thought to whether you should."  The thorny ethical issues this technique brings up go way beyond the potential risk to two baby girls in China.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not on the scientific regulatory boards who are wrestling with how to respond to He's announcement.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Fuzzy thinking, alarmism, and GMOs

There's a fundamental problem when elected officials are charged with creating laws and policies surrounding issues that they simply do not understand.

This is where we currently stand with GMOs.  GMOs, or "genetically-modified organisms," get a great deal of negative press from the all-natural folks, who have nicknamed GMO crops "frankenfoods," claiming that they cause everything from allergies to autism.  Of course, that by itself is ridiculous; modifying genes isn't going to result in the same risks and benefits every time you do it, because (and it pains me to have to point this out) different genes do different things.  A papaya that has been genetically modified to be resistant to ringspot virus is not going to resemble in any way a strain of corn that produces the caterpillar-killing BT toxin.  The only commonality is that both of them were the result of humans tinkering with DNA.

Another problem, of course, is that we've been tinkering with DNA for a long, long time, which makes the USDA's definition of GMO sound a little ridiculous.  The USDA says that genetic modification is "The production of heritable improvements in plants or animals for specific uses, via either genetic engineering or other more traditional methods."  It's the "more traditional methods" that's a little funny; because by that definition, not only is virtually every food you eat a GMO (unless you're subsisting on wild nuts, berries, and roots), so is your pet dog.  Selective breeding -- which has been done for millennia -- is one of those "more traditional methods" the USDA is referring to, as evidenced by the fact that typical store-variety tomatoes, corn, apples, broccoli, oranges, and soybeans (sorry, tofu-eaters) occur nowhere in the wild.  Nor does this guy:

Trust me, this is not a product of natural selection.  [Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So we've got a problem right at the outset, which is that a scientifically-correct definition of GMO includes genetic modification by artificial selection, which means that pretty much everything in the grocery store should be so labeled; and if you include only recently-developed genetically engineered crops, you're throwing together all sorts of products whose only similarity is how they were created.

That's not even the extent of the problem, however.  At the end of last month, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that the USDA would not label as GMO anything created using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing protocol.  The press release gave a rather bizarre justification for this decision:

Under its biotechnology regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques as long as they are not plant pests or developed using plant pests.  This includes a set of new techniques that are increasingly being used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods.  The newest of these methods, such as genome editing, expand traditional plant breeding tools because they can introduce new plant traits more quickly and precisely, potentially saving years or even decades in bringing needed new varieties to farmers.

Did you catch that?  The USDA won't regulate crops that "could otherwise have been developed" by traditional techniques, and ones that are "indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods."  Which, actually, is pretty much every GMO ever created.  How do you figure out whether a particular strain "could otherwise have been developed" or not?  So we've gone from labeling every damn product in the store to labeling nothing at all.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I think CRISPR/Cas9 has phenomenal potential, not only for developing disease-resistant strains of crops that are currently seriously threatened (including, unfortunately, chocolate, oranges, and bananas), but in curing genetic diseases in humans.  And as I said before, it's scientifically inaccurate to regulate -- or even label -- all genetically modified food products the same way, as if the means by which they were produced is the only relevant issue.  My research into the topic has demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the vast majority of GMO foods are completely safe for human consumption, and a great deal of the fear-talk about them comes from people who don't have a very good understanding of what genetic modification is, or how it works.

As Tirzah Duren put it over at Real Clear Science:

Mandatory labeling of GMOs makes no sense both from the technical side and from the practical.  The definition of GMOs is misunderstood even by the organization who made them.  This lack of understanding translates into a sloppy policy that does little to inform consumers.  Examining the regulation of GMOs highlights a truth, which is the government cannot regulate what it does not understand...  [T]he major shortcoming on GMO regulation... is that the people making the rules do not understand what they are making rules about.

And neither, unfortunately, do many of the consumers.  I'm reminded of the situation a few years ago where freeze-resistant strawberries were developed by splicing in a gene for a natural antifreeze protein produced by certain species of fish, and people flipped out, because they believed of one or more of the following:

1. They thought the strawberries would taste like fish.
2. This meant that the strawberries were no longer vegan.
3. They thought the strawberries were produced by some bizarre half-plant, half-fish creature in a lab.  (No, I'm not joking.)

It also gave rise to foolishness like this:

Note that saying that all GMOs are safe is just as ridiculous to say that all of them are harmful.  Each one has to be evaluated and tested on its own merits and risks.  But this kind of alarmism, fear-talk, and elevation of the naturalistic fallacy into the law of the land is simply ignorant, not to mention encouraging us to think with our emotions rather than with our brains.

Anyhow.  I suppose it's no surprise that having a citizenry that is largely ignorant of science results in the election of leaders who are largely ignorant of science.  It's still a little disheartening, though -- especially when those ignorant leaders are charged with developing policy regarding issues that they clearly don't understand.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

A genetic cut-and-paste

If I had to pick one technology that I think will make the most different to human quality of life thirty years from now, I would pick CRISPR/Cas9.

CRISPR stands for "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats," a sequence of repetitive DNA in prokaryotes (bacteria) that interacts with a gene called Cas9 to chop up and inactivate foreign DNA.  At first, it seemed like it would interest only someone with a fascination for bacterial genetics.

Then it was discovered that you could guide CRISPR/Cas9 to specific sequences in DNA using a piece of RNA as a guide.  Think of it as a pair of scissors with a laser sight.  Molecular biologists saw the implications immediately; with that tool, you could cut out any piece of DNA you wanted, insert new genes, inactivate old ones -- you veritably have a cut-and-paste function for the genetic code.

The potential applications to treat human disease are nearly endless.  Disorders where the affected individuals have an inoperative gene, and therefore lack the specific protein it produces, might have the error repaired by splicing in a corrected copy.  (Possible candidates for this are cystic fibrosis and hemophilia.)  On the other hand, disorders where the defective gene makes a damaged end product -- such as sickle-cell anemia and Huntington's disease -- might have the faulty gene cut out and discarded.

All of this is still in the future, however.  At the moment, scientists are playing with CRISPR, seeing what it can do.  And just last week, a team at Cornell University used CRISPR/Cas9 on butterflies to inactivate specific genes...

... and completely changed the color patterns on their wings.

One of the species they worked on was the Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), a beautiful black, orange, and gold butterfly native to the southeastern United States.

[image courtesy of photographer Jonathan Zander and the Wikimedia Commons]

When a gene called optix was selectively inactivated by CRISPR/Cas9, the result was stunning.  All of the orange and gold regions turned velvety jet black.  White spots became a metallic silver.  Silencing a different gene, WntA, had a different result -- stripes blurred, eyespots disappeared, edges became indistinct.

Anyi Mazo-Vargas, one of the authors of the paper, calls genes like optix and WntA "paintbrush genes."  "Wherever you put them," Mazo-Vargas said, "you'll have a pattern."

They tested optix deletion on other species, and found similar results, even in species that have been evolutionarily separated for 80 million years.  Colorful butterflies come out looking monochrome. "They just turn grayscale,” said Robert Reed, who led the study.  "It makes these butterflies look like moths, which is pathetically embarrassing for them."

The fact that these genes can be inactivated, almost like flipping a switch, and have such body-wide results is nothing short of spectacular.  Of his earlier work in studying color genes in butterflies, Reed said, "It was convincing but we didn’t know exactly what these genes were doing. Without the ability to delete the genes, and see if their absence changed the butterfly wings, we didn’t have the final proof.  There’s been this frustrating wall that I’ve banged my head against...  CRISPR is a miracle.  The first time we tried it, it worked, and when I saw that butterfly come out ... the biggest challenge of my career had just turned into an undergraduate project."

Of their first success -- the jet-black-and-silver Gulf Fritillary -- Reed said, "It was amazing to see that thing crawl out of the pupa... it was the most heavy metal butterfly I've ever seen."

All of this is one more indication of why we should all be in support of pure research.  On one level, this might sound kind of silly to the layperson -- some scientists tinkering around and changing the color of butterfly wings.  But when you see where such research could lead, and the potential application to human health, it's absolutely stunning.

In my opinion, it won't be long before we're using the same genetic cut-and-paste not to fiddle with "paintbrush genes" in butterflies, but to repair genetic defects in humans.  And that would be the biggest leap in medical science since the invention of vaccines.

Designer genes

In the movie Gattaca, the future has become a divided society -- split between the "valids" (people who were conceived through in vitro fertilization and genetic selection/modification) and "invalids" (people conceived the old-fashioned way).  The invalids, who have (as all of us currently do) a random mix of good and bad traits from the parents, can't get jobs, can't get insurance, have no access to higher education.  Why should the society put money and effort into people who are of average intelligence and have a much higher susceptibility to hereditary disease, when there are plenty of people who have already been screened -- actually, selected -- to be genetically superior?

Gattaca centers around one man, Vincent (played by Ethan Hawke) who is an invalid -- but is determined to rise above his station.  It's a beautiful, inspiring, and deeply troubling movie.  Because the underlying premise of the movie -- that humans can modify their own genetics at will -- is very close to being realized.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a genetic modification protocol that allows scientists to (more or less) edit DNA one gene at a time.  The medical implications are immediately obvious; this opens up the possibility of not just treating, but curing, such devastating genetic disorders as cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The ethical implications are equally breathtaking.  Once gene-by-gene editing becomes possible -- and we're nearly there -- what will stop people from modifying other genes, such as those for appearance, behavior, and intelligence?  Will we enter a brave new world of "designer babies," such as the ones in Gattaca?

Lest you think that I'm engaging in wild speculation, allow me to point out that the first CRISPR-Cas9 experiment on humans is already being conducted.

In the United States, there is an ongoing moratorium on genetic experimentation on humans, but no such restrictions exist in China.  And three weeks ago, man with an aggressive form of lung cancer was brought into West China Hospital in Chengdu, and was given a course of CRISPR-Cas9 modified cells -- his own cells that had been edited to alter their ability to mount an immune response against cancerous tissue.  The cells were introduced into his bloodstream, where (it is to be hoped) they will attack and destroy the tumors.

While details are still forthcoming, research team spokesperson Liao Zhilin has said that "Everything is going as planned."

As with most discoveries, this is a mixed bag.  The idea of being able to use genetic modification to combat cancer is certainly wonderful.  So is the potential for eradicating genetic diseases.  The ethics becomes a little murkier when you start looking at issues like extending longevity -- current research supports the idea that genetic longevity (i.e. independent of other considerations like lifestyle and avoidable risk factors) is controlled by a relatively small number of genes.  It is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that those, too, could be modified by CRISPR-Cas9.

But is this a good idea?  It's one of those things that puts me in an ethical bind.  I'm 56, and frankly, I'm not looking forward to all of the age-related degradation that I have to look forward to in the next twenty years.  If I could do something that would give me another fifty or a hundred healthy years, I'd be all for it.  But the larger question is whether this sort of thing would be good for society if it became widespread.  It would require large-scale restructuring of how we approach such issues as career, insurance, and retirement, not to mention the fact that given that men remain fertile indefinitely if the plumbing still works, you could be looking at a world where guys could still be fathering children at double or triple the current age.

You think we have an overpopulation problem now?

Of course, this presupposes that such age-lengthening treatments would become widely available -- and this opens up another ethical issue, which is equity.  Especially at first, you'd have to expect such opportunities would only be available to the wealthy, further deepening the divide between the genetically-modified haves and the unmodified have-nots.

Gattaca is beginning to look kind of prescient, honestly.

The whole thing puts me in mind of a quote from Michael Crichton, which seems like a fitting place to end: "Science cannot help us to decide what to do with the world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  What should we do with our power?  It is the very question that science cannot answer."

GMOs and the package-deal fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the package-deal fallacy -- the tendency to lump together things that are similar (even superficially similar) and then paint them all with the same brush.  The fact that we here in the United States are in the middle of a particularly divisive presidential election makes it all too common.  How often do you see those stupid "internet memes" with captions saying things like "If you are a conservative, you believe ____" or "If you are a liberal, you think ____"?

The implication, of course, is that the universe is a simple and philosophically uniform place, a contention which you'd think that even a quick glance would prove wrong.  I know conservatives who are thoughtful, intelligent, well-spoken, and logical, and ones who are prone to fact-free, vitriolic rants.  I know liberals who fall into the same two designations.  I find it frightening that some people would like to have a word or two completely define a person -- and forthwith to cease thinking about the matter entirely.

Such thinking is hardly limited to politics, unfortunately.  Consider GMOs, which have been much maligned by the "pure foods movement" as being toxic, carcinogenic "frankenfoods" which are being foisted upon an unsuspecting public by evil corporations.  In this view of the world, Monsanto is being run by Satan himself, and any time you consume a genetically modified food item, you're running the risk of becoming ill from it.

[image courtesy of photographer Lindsay Eyink and the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is that like everything, genetic modification isn't simple, and claiming that all GMOs have the same (negative) effects isn't so much ignorant as it is flat-out wrong.  Not all genes do the same thing; why would we expect genetically modified organisms to have the same results, including their effects (if any) on human health?

Take, for example, the genetically modified eggplants now being grown in Bangladesh.  These eggplants have a gene that produces a protein making them resistant to being damaged by the fruit-and-shoot borer, a moth larva that causes widespread crop damage.  The protein has been tested to a fare-thee-well and shown to have no adverse health effects in humans.  Growing the GMO eggplants has drastically reduced the use of chemical pesticides -- which do have a lot of adverse effects, not only on humans but on wildlife.

Even the criticism that the GMO industry only exists to make millions of dollars at the expense of poor farmers doesn't apply here.  This GMO was developed using funding from the Bangladeshi government, and the seeds are being sold at low (controlled) prices, or given away for free.

Explain to me how this is a bad thing.

The difficulty is that in order to understand how GMOs differ from each other requires that you know some science.  To see that the situation with the eggplants, the one with RoundUp Ready crops (which have been used as excuses to increase the use of herbicides, and are implicated in herbicide resistance genes "jumping" to weed species), and the one with "Golden Rice" (a modified rice that is rich in vitamin A, but which is often tagged with a "kill switch gene" that makes the seeds unviable, thus preventing seed saving by poor farmers) are not the same thing means having to do some research and learn how genetics works.  And, in the case of Golden Rice, to consider a thorny ethical question about who has the right to profit from research.

Much easier, of course, just to say "GMO = evil" and be done with it.  The whole thing reminds me of a quote from John F. Kennedy: "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Zika freakout

Can we once, just once, face a problem in the world and find a solution based in logic?  And, fer cryin' in the sink, not ascribe it to a conspiracy?

I am referring, of course, to the Zika virus, which is currently exploding in the tropics, and is suspected of being connected to microcephaly and low brain development in infants born to infected women, and also cases of the neurological disease Guillain-Barré syndrome.  (Nota bene: these connections are still tentative, and are being studied.  The evidence thus far indicates possible links, but establishing causation and finding an underlying mechanism in either case have yet to be accomplished.)

Of course, a viral disease carried by mosquitoes, with uncertain and possibly devastating consequences for the victims through an unknown mechanism, opens the door for wild speculation.  And the conspiracy-minded amongst us have certainly been quick to rise to the occasion.

First, we have the claim that Zika was caused by the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by Oxitec Inc., a biotechnology firm -- in some versions of the story, caused deliberately for the purposes of population control.  And since no conspiracy is complete without a powerful rich guy controlling the whole thing, the originator of this evil master plan is...

... none other than Bill Gates.

So, the idea is that under Gates's funding and direction, Oxitec genetically engineered the virus, then genetically engineered mosquitoes to carry it, and released them in Brazil.  Since then, they (and the virus) have been spreading north rapidly.

My question is: why would Bill Gates do this, given that if the population of the Earth crashes, there will be far fewer people around to purchase updates to Windows every six weeks?  He doesn't really seem to have a lot to gain by spawning a pandemic.  And as for the conspiracy theorists, they're not really clear about this.  The upshot is, "Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, that's why."

Aedes aegypti [image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem, of course, is that the whole claim is based in a bunch of falsehoods.  As Christie Wilcox points out in her wonderful blog Science Sushi, Zika is nothing new; it was first isolated and described in 1947 from mosquitoes collected in the Zika Forest of Uganda.  Thus the name.  It spread across Africa by 1968, made a jump to Micronesia in 2007, to Polynesia in 2013, and was first spotted in the Americas -- in Chile, not Brazil -- in 2014.  The genetically modified mosquitoes were developed to combat mosquito outbreaks, not foster them; the GM mosquitoes contain a "kill switch," a set of genes that allows them to mate but results in non-viable offspring.  And because the species of mosquito that carries Zika -- Aedes aegypti -- also carries dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, and malaria, it's hard to imagine how this could be a bad thing, especially considering that the other option is the use of highly toxic pesticides.

But the conspiracy silliness doesn't end there.  Jon Rappoport, whose dubiously sane pronouncements have been featured in Skeptophilia before, has come up with something even goofier.  In his blog post "Zika Hoax: Five Things That Will Happen Next," we hear that there is no connection between Zika and microcephaly (which, of course, could turn out to be true; as I mentioned earlier, scientists are still investigating the point).  Then, however, he runs right off the cliff, predicting that researchers will develop a vaccine for Zika, but that the vaccine and the virus will turn out to be "weaponized biowar [agents]."

Because if you've launched a biological warfare virus, the first thing you'd do is to come up with a vaccine that's also for biological warfare.  And somehow, Zika is both a hoax and an evil biological weapon at the same time.

How evil can you get?  Cf. "Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

Of course, the major problem with all of this foolishness is that the basis of the conspiracy is that the release of the GM mosquitoes coincides, both in time and place, with the outbreak.  And this turns out to be false.  As Wilcox writes:

The epicenter of the outbreak and the release clearly don’t line up—the epicenter is on the coast rather than inland where the map points. Furthermore, the first confirmed cases weren’t reported in that area, but in the town of Camaçari, Bahia, which is—unsurprisingly—on the coast and several hundred kilometers from the release site indicated. 

But perhaps more importantly, the location on the map isn’t where the mosquitoes were released. That map points to Juazeiro de Norte, Ceará, which is a solid 300 km away from Juazeiro, Bahia—the actual site of the mosquito trial. That location is even more on the edge of the Zika-affected area.

On the other hand, think about it; it makes sense that they'd release the GM mosquitoes near where the outbreaks occurred.  Since the whole idea is to control Zika in Brazil, it wouldn't make much sense to release the mosquitoes in, say, Greenland.

But that sort of logic never seems to appeal as much as fact-free and panic-stricken shouting, for some reason.

In any case, bottom line: Zika isn't genetically engineered, isn't new, and isn't being spread by GM super-mosquitoes because of some obscure plot by Bill Gates.  I'd be much obliged if people would stop spreading this nonsense around, because it's got to be annoying to the scientists who are working on the real problem that Zika represents.  Thank you.

Food fight

There's a logical fallacy I've seen a lot lately.  It's called argumentum ad Monsantum (also known as argumentum ad Hitlerum).  The idea is that you can immediately cast doubt on the motives of a person or organization if you compare them to, or (worse) claim they got their ideas from, a stand-in for The Boogeyman.  Monsanto, Hitler, communists, Muslims, whatever one seems apt at the time.

Of course, this boils down to lazy thinking, which most of the fallacies do.

What's rather maddening about this is that the opposite can happen, too.  Give something an association with a name that's considered positive, and you automatically reap the benefits of a reflected glow of goodness, whether or not it's deserved.

You could call this the Compare-Yourelf-To-Mother-Teresa-And-Declare-Victory ploy.

The argumentum ad Monsantum strategy has been much used in the fight against GMOs, since Monsanto has been heavily involved in developing genetically modified crops for years.  How anyone who has even a smidgen of a background in science can fall for this is beyond me; comparing RoundUp-Ready Wheat with late blight-resistant potatoes makes no sense from any standpoint, from effects on human health to ecological impact.  (Consider that the former results in an increase in the use of chemical pesticides, and the latter decreases it.)

Saying that all GMOs are bad is, in fact, precisely equivalent to claiming that all genes do the same thing.

[image courtesy of photographer Elina Mark and the Wikimedia Commons]

What's wryly amusing about this is that the opposite side of the same coin -- the word organic -- is maybe not as squeaky-clean as it's been billed.  The reputation of organic produce for containing less in the way of Nasty Chemicals is apparently ill-deserved, considering a story by David Zaruk over at The Risk-Monger that revealed a startling fact -- that organic farmers in the United States are certified to use three thousand substances that are designated as toxic, and that are considered acceptable purely because they're "natural."

Copper sulfate, used as a fungicide, is highly toxic to fish, and is completely non-biodegradable.  Pyrethrin and azadirachtin (neem oil), insecticides that come from plants and therefore are somehow thought to be better than synthetics, are lethal to honeybees and carcinogenic in humans.  Rotenone, from the leafy parts of the jicama plant, kills damn near everything you put it on.

Also on the list is nicotine.  Made, presumably, from all-natural, organic, health-supporting tobacco plants.

Worse still, once produce is certified organic, it bypasses any kind of requirement for pesticide residue testing.  Because organic produce isn't supposed to have any pesticides on it, right?

Of course right.

Monsanto = bad.  GMO = bad.  Organic = good.  All a way to give yourself a nice warm feeling of being socially and environmentally responsible, not to mention healthy, and then to stop thinking.  Myself, I would rather the responsible use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which comes along with mountains of information on hazards and requirements for residue testing, than giving free rein to people who believe that Natural Must Mean Good For You.

Now, don't get me wrong; I think that a lot of the organic food movement is driven by the right motives.  Creating our food with as little negative environmental impact as possible, and producing food that is healthy and nutritious, are certainly goals to be lauded.  What is unclear is whether the rules governing organic food production as they now exist are meeting those goals.

But the beat goes on, which is why there was an apparently serious article over at The Organic Authority wherein we learn that artist and practitioner of magic Steven Leyba is mounting a one-man campaign against Monsanto, spurred by his own personal health experiences:

In 2010 I had been overweight and decided to get healthy.  I started eating large amounts of fruits and vegetables from my local grocery store.  I got sick and that was the time I found out about GMOs.  I was appalled.  I couldn’t understand why I would get so sick by eating what I thought was so healthy.  When I switched to organic food I got healthy again.

And since anecdote with a sample size of one is apparently data, Leyba decided to take matters into his own hands, and is launching a magic spell against Monsanto:

Death curses work like any manifestation of will like Gestalt psychology; you visualize and act in accordance and at some point what you can conceive and believe you can achieve.  Medicine men practice this and even medical doctors to some extent practice this.  They plant suggestions in people’s minds for healing and those people start to do things that promote their own healing.  For me I see a great need to identify the cancer (Monsanto and Nestlé) and attack with full force and mirror back this so-called Black Magic they are doing to all of us.

So he made a book full of disturbing imagery that includes demented portraits of executives who work for Monsanto, and also Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 1970s.  

"I encourage everyone to Death Curse Monsanto and Nestlé," Leyba says.  "Justifiable Death Curses are effective on many levels, fun, cathartic... and completely legal."

Article author Jill Ettinger, far from casting a wry eye at Leyba's Eye Of Newt approach to taking down Monsanto, seems to think it's a great idea.  And given the recent push in the United States for mandatory labeling of GMOs, "it may just be working," she says.

No harm, I suppose, if it amuses him.  But wouldn't it be better to learn some actual science, rather than giving in to fear talk and ignorance?  Not to mention (literal) magical thinking?

The world is complex, and when the motives of people and corporations get involved, it becomes even worse.  It'd be nice if categorical thinking really worked.  The difficult truth is, if you want to give yourself the best shot at making smart choices for yourself, both with respect to your personal health and the environmental impact, there's no substitute for bypassing the hype on both sides and understanding the reality beneath it all.

A glowing report from Georgia

It may sound biased of me, but I think one thing should be an ironclad requirement for holding public office: an adequate understanding of science.

Yes, I know that politics doesn't always connect directly to science.  But I would respectfully submit that science as a means of knowledge, as a way of sorting fact from fiction, is such a critical capacity that no leader should be deficient in it.  Science teaches you a protocol for understanding evidence-based inference, which then can be applied to any area you like.

Add that to the fact that there are realms of policymaking that require an explicit understanding of science -- environmental, medical, and educational policy come to mind -- and this gives us a powerful reason to expect that our elected officials understand not only how science is done, but to have a basic grasp of its fundamental rules.

Instead, we have people like Georgia State RepresentativeTom Kirby (R-Loganville).

Kirby just introduced a bill into the Georgia House of Representatives that is specifically to prevent anyone from creating a glow-in-the-dark human/jellyfish hybrid.  Because evidently that's a thing that they do, down there in Georgia.  And not only do they do it, they do it often enough that Representative Kirby wants a law passed to put an end to the practice.

"We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue," Kirby states on his website.  "Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo.  We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants.  The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia.  This bill is about protecting Human Life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life."

What could have precipitated this?

My guess is that someone told Representative Kirby that researchers had experimented with inserting a gene for a jellyfish fluorescence protein into the embryos of cats, creating kittens with phosphorescent skin.

Glow kitties [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, Kirby asked one of his aides, "But... could they do this with human embryos?"  And the aide said, "It's possible."  And Kirby said, "We've got to put a stop to this!"

What bugs me about this is that not only does Representative Kirby apparently have little understanding of how the process works (it has nothing to do with "mixing embryos with jellyfish cells"), he doesn't understand the point of making the glow cats in the first place.  It wasn't just to create demonic-looking cats (can you imagine waking up at night to see one of those staring at you?).  It also wasn't because scientists were thinking, "Ha ha!  Now we can create an army of Glowing Humans that will take over the world!"

The reason this research was done was primarily medical.  The problem with genetic modification is getting an inserted gene to express at the right time and place; so learning how to control the process, generating an animal that not only expressed the glowing protein, but expressed it in sufficient quantities and in one tissue only (the skin), showed that we can potentially do analogous procedures in humans.

Note that I say "analogous," not "identical."  This kind of targeted gene therapy could eliminate protein-deficiency genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), and hemophilia.  It works on the same principle; insert the gene into human cells, along with a robust tissue-specific promoter that allows the gene to turn on in the right tissue type.  If all goes well, we could see life-threatening genetic disorders not simply treated, but eliminated.

Of course, I doubt that Representative Kirby understands that.  Anyone who is at the "human-jellyfish hybrid" stage of science comprehension is light years away from getting even the basics of how genetic research works.  

And Kirby himself admitted he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  "I've had people tell me it is [possible], but I haven't verified that for sure," he told reporters.  "It's time we either get in front of it, or we're going to be chasing our tails."

Can I just ask you one question, Representative Kirby?  Why the fuck would you propose a bill regarding something you "haven't verified" and clearly don't have sufficient IQ to understand?

But members of Congress seldom let those sorts of considerations stand in their way.  So now we have a bill on the floor of congress in Georgia to prevent scientists from creating something that (1) they didn't intend to create anyhow, and (2) is impossible to do in the way the bill describes.  Good use of our policymakers' time and taxpayer dollars, isn't it?

I know it must be hard to be an elected official.  It's not only a job I would never want, but one for which I am clearly not qualified.  But I do have one thing going for me; when I don't know what I'm talking about, I generally shut the hell up.  

Not so, apparently, if you're in politics.  In politics, you're allowed to have an opinion about everything, whether or not you understand it.  And then you can use that opinion to craft legislation.  Once more convincing me of the necessity of demanding, as a nation, that our leaders have at least a basic comprehension of science before they start interfering with laws that govern how it's done.

Haremageddon

A couple of days ago there was a story out of North Dakota that's been making the rounds of the "Weird News" departments of various news agencies.  It's about a housing development in Fargo that has been "swarmed" by "dozens of dog-sized jackrabbits." 

Fargo resident Kayla Straabe told and ABC News reporter, "Every day, I feel like the crazy rabbit lady chasing them out of the yard where they're having a heyday.  There's at least 40 to 50 everyday, and they're in our yards and by a children's park."

The city pest control department claims not to be able to do anything about them, "because they're wild animals."  This strikes me as pretty peculiar.  Aren't all pests wild animals?  I mean, it's not like people are usually bothered by infestations of hamsters, or anything.

Be that as it may, the pest control department wouldn't do anything, but suggested that Straabe and others poison the jackrabbits, which she doesn't want to do.  So at the moment, the jackrabbits are still swarming in Fargo.

Which is an unremarkable enough story, until you look at the comments section.

Yes, yes, I know, sane people should never look at the comments section.  But I was curious as to what people thought about the cause, and what steps they thought should be taken, for this "flock of jackrabbits," a phrase which made me picture flying bunnies.  (I looked it up, and the correct collective noun for jackrabbits is a "husk," which to me sounds even weirder.  I suggest calling them a "lope of jackrabbits," which is much more euphonious.)

Some of the comments were reasonable enough.  A bunch of them suggested turning the jackrabbits into stew.  A couple recommended, given that it's Fargo we're talking about, running the jackrabbits through a wood-chipper.  But then things got weird, because people started weighing in on where the jackrabbits had come from in the first place, and it went downhill thereafter.

Here are a few samples.  Spelling and grammar have been left unaltered so you can get the full effect.

The government doesn't want you to see what's really happening with animals going on the rampage and flocks of birds dying and the news writes articles like it's completely normal?  Wake up.  This is only the first signs. 

Its a mutation.  Rabbits this huge, its not normal.  We spray pesticides all over the place and now we're reaping what we sow. 

Rabbits is one thing, what if this had been wolves? 

They can carry rabbies and they let them near a playground?  Bring them to Washington DC and let them go there.  You'll see how fast they disappear, and you won't hear the liberal lame stream media crying about the poor bunnies. 

Before the anti gun crazies got in charge, we would have known what to do about them before it became a problem. 

Giant rabbits, another sign of the unnatural things this government is doing.  Genetic engineering experiments gone wrong, and no one wants to blow the whistle, instead this will become more common until one day it becomes too late to do anything about it and people start dying.

Okay, will you people please just calm the fuck down?

These aren't vicious giant mutant bunnies, they're regular old jackrabbits.  According to the Wikipedia page on jackrabbits, this species normally gets to be two feet long and up to six pounds, which is (as the article said) the "size of a small dog."  No mutations, genetic engineering, or other "unnatural things" necessary.

And the bunnies haven't "gone on the rampage," they don't seem to be carrying "rabbies," and allowing people to run around shooting rabbits near a playground would create a whole different set of problems, you know?

So fer cryin' in the sink, let's take a deep breath, and relax.  This is not the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog we're talking about here.

Chances are, the jackrabbits have been driven into residential areas because it's winter and the foraging out in the wild is pretty slim, so they're going for decorative plantings in people's yards, which are more accessible through the snow.  The same thing happens in our area, but with white-tailed deer.  The deer, however, are kind of a nuisance year-round.  In some areas they make it impossible to have a garden unless you surround it by six-foot-high fence topped by razor-wire, and the number of car-deer collisions in upstate New York is astronomical.

On the other hand... maybe the deer are part of this whole evil scheme.  Mutated genetically engineered deer, released by Monsanto, so that we can't grow our own vegetables, and will be forced to purchase genetically-modified crops from grocery stores.  Probably the auto-repair industry is in on it, too, making sure the deer are bred to be attracted to car headlights.

And... and... it all started with Disney.  Remember Bambi?  Making us feel sorry for the poor little deer whose mother was killed by hunters.  And guess who Bambi's best friend was?

Thumper.  *cue scary music*

I guess that's enough evidence isn't it?  I believe we now have what the lawyers would call a "hare-tight case."

Inconvenient science

There is a frightening tendency for policymakers to request advice from scientists, and then ignore it if said advice doesn't agree with the party line.

Give us advice, in other words, unless it's inconvenient.

The perception of science as dangerous to political expediency has resulted in a number of troubling moves in the last few years.  Here in the United States, the general approach has been to put the wolves in charge of the sheep, explaining why the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is populated at least in part by creationist climate change deniers.  It's why the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is soon to be led by Senator James Inhofe, who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo, and the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space by notoriously anti-science Senator Ted Cruz.  It's also why Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has forbidden scientists to speak to the media without rigorous prior approval, and has cut the position of National Science Advisor.

Toe the line, in other words.  You can play around in your labs and wear your white lab jackets and so on.  But if you make a discovery, you damn well better make sure that you're discovering something that supports our political stance.

It's not just the right wing that does this, of course.  The left has its own bêtes noires, and one of the main ones is genetic modification.  GMOs are evil, goes the party line.  The big genetic research companies are trying to profit at the expense of human health, and all GMOs should be banned.  Further, they claim, the research facilities are suppressing any information that might get out showing the dangers of genetic modification, because that could hurt their bottom line.

It's this kind of categorical, zero-sum thinking that led to the axing this week of the position of Chief Scientific Advisor to the Juncker Commission, the executive body of the European Union.

Why?  Largely because of pressure from Greenpeace and other virulently anti-GMO groups.  Outgoing CSA Anne Glover was perceived as too pro-GMO, even though her position was supported by a vast consensus of scientific researchers and oversight organizations -- including the World Health Organization.

This is just as anti-science, and irrational, as the right's insistence that climate change isn't happening.  There are rigorous testing protocols for establishing the safety of GMOs, and when health problems are found, the crops are pulled from production.  Just this week, in fact, a genetically modified pea was scrapped after it was established that consuming it caused allergic lung damage in mice... after it had been in testing for ten years.

Not exactly the heartless behavior the anti-GMOers would have you believe, is it?  But even this gets spun the other way; I've already seen the above-linked article posted several times, with messages that amount to, "See?  We TOLD you that GMOs were dangerous and cause allergies!"

So even when the scientists publicly announce that they have cancelled an expensive program because of human health concerns, they're cast in the role of Dr. Frankenstein, trying to unleash their monster on the unwitting public.  You can't win.

Unless, of course, you just crowbar your political stance into place by ignoring the scientists altogether, or duct-taping their mouths.

Facts are facts, folks, and scientific consensus is what it is.  And when political or philosophical dogmatism blinds you to what the science actually says, you do so at your own risk.

Raising the dead

In the iconic movie (and book) Jurassic Park, scientists use genetic technology -- and samples of blood from the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber -- to recreate various dinosaur species.  With, of course, terrible results, being that in science fiction, nothing good ever comes out of scientists trying to "play god."  Various people were messily devoured, and the ones that escaped (barely) were left to ponder if it was possible for scientific research to go too far.

We seem to be at the point of finding out.

Not, of course, that it will be dinosaur-era animals, at least not at first.  Way too little DNA is left intact in fossilized remains from 65-plus-million years ago to pull a Jurassic Park-style trick and resurrect, say, the Pteranodon (always one of my favorites).  But we will, in, short order, see the first reborn extinct species created in a lab.

The best candidate for the winner in this Race to Raise the Dead is likely to be the Gastric-brooding Frog, a bizarre amphibian species from Australia that gets its name from the females' behavior of carrying their tadpoles around in their stomachs.  The frog was declared extinct in the wild in 1979, and the last captive individual died in 1983.

The technique is simple to describe, and immensely difficult in practice; obtain DNA samples from preserved specimens, insert that DNA into the fertilized egg cell of a related species that has had its own DNA removed, and hopefully this zygote will begin to divide and develop -- into an individual of the species that donated the DNA.

Of course, a million things can go wrong.  The role of genetic switches in development is still a new area of research; it's known that your DNA when you were an embryo was different than your DNA is now, especially with regards to which segments were being actively transcribed and which were not.  In order to get this technique to work, the nucleotides in DNA not only have to be in the correct sequence, the genes encoded therein have to turn on and turn off in a tightly-orchestrated fashion in order to produce a normal individual.

The hurdles, however, haven't discouraged scientists in this field.  The research team working on the Gastric-brooding Frog, led by Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales, has actually gotten the genetically altered embryonic cells to divide, apparently in a completely normal fashion, which has encouraged other groups working toward the same goal.  In the United States, a group called "Revive and Restore" is trying to bring back the Passenger Pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America, which was driven to extinction by overhunting in 1914.

And Ben Novak, of the Passenger Pigeon "de-extinction" project, believes that it is only a matter of time.  "This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense," he said, in an interview in Forbes.  "Someone could make a major breakthrough in next two years."

Me, I'm of two minds about this.  As a biologist, I have to say that the whole idea is just tremendously cool.  The idea that I could one day see a formerly extinct animal, alive and well, is just thrilling.  I'd give a lot to see a Thylacine, a Carolina Parakeet, a Moa, a Kaua'i O'o, or a Giant Ground Sloth.  And what about more remote animals, ones from further back?  How would you like to be eye-to-eye with a Brontops?

Of course, the more distant in the past you reach, the more difficult the procedure becomes.  Not only has any DNA from prehistoric animals had longer to degrade, often to the point of there being no useful fragments left, there's the problem of finding a related species in whose eggs you could do the insertion process.  Whether Gastric-brooding Frogs and Passenger Pigeons will return soon is a matter of conjecture, but it is nearly certain that seeing a Brontops stomping around in your garden is a far more remote possibility, one which may never be realized.

Then, of course, there are the inevitable ethical issues surrounding resurrecting extinct species.  The time of the Passenger Pigeon, for example, is long past -- when there were thousands of square miles of trackless forest in the eastern half of North America.  This bird only survived well in huge flocks (tens of thousands of individuals), which "darkened the skies when they flew over," according to accounts of people who saw them.  One, two, or even a couple of dozen of birds would be nothing more than a curiosity -- it would not be the same as truly reintroducing the species, a goal that is probably impossible due to the changes in the ecosystem.

But still, it's a fascinating idea.  For me, the coolness factor outweighs my ethical qualms, which probably isn't a good thing to admit.  Be that as it may, it is absolutely stunning how far science has come since the last Passenger Pigeon closed her eyes in death in 1914.  The ways in which the world has changed are far deeper, and more meaningful, than the visible alterations in the landscape.  And it looks like very soon, one of the laws we thought was an absolute -- extinction is forever -- may be overturned.

Sense and nonsense about GMOs

Please allow me to start today's post with a brief genetics lesson.

There is a feature of the genetic code called universality.  Put simply, universality means that all organisms on Earth read DNA the same way.  DNA is made up of strings of nucleotides, and there are four kinds, represented by the letters A, C, G, and T.  The order of those four nucleotides spells out the genetic message, and allows DNA to act as a set of instructions for building proteins and guiding development.  And the language -- how the order is translated -- is identical, for every living thing.

Besides being a fairly powerful argument for common ancestry -- why would we all speak the same genetic language if we weren't all related? -- this has opened the door for genetic engineering.  Take a gene (a set of instructions from one organism) and insert it into another organism's DNA, and the recipient will read that gene the same way the donor did, and produce the same gene product.  It's how we now have human insulin produced from genetically modified bacteria; it's how scientists have created "golden rice," that stores vitamin A in its seeds; it's how goats were generated that express spider silk proteins in their milk.  It's also how, by transferring a gene for a fluorescent protein from jellyfish into the embryo of a cat, scientists created Glow Kitties:

The application to agriculture was obvious.  Once the technique was perfected, within short order we had bt corn and tomatoes (the crops produce a substance in the leaves that is toxic to caterpillars, reducing the amount of pesticides that need to be used); "RoundUp-Ready" soybeans, wheat, and barley (the crop plants are resistant to the herbicide RoundUp, allowing the use of that chemical on fields, reducing the labor from weeding and increasing crop yields); disease-resistant papayas, plums, cucumbers, potatoes, and squash; tomatoes with a significantly increased shelf life; and freeze-resistant strawberries.

Then the alarmists began to chime in.  GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) were dangerous, they said; GMO crops generated food that was unsafe for human consumption.  A (hoax) story began to circulate that a "scientific experiment" had been done, feeding chickens exclusively GMO corn, and "26 out of 33 of them died, and the survivors were stunted and unhealthy."  Critics claimed that companies like Monsanto, that had spearheaded GMO research, were lying to consumers about product safety.  This led to a widespread banning of GMOs in the EU, most of Africa, and elsewhere, and a powerful grassroots movement is demanding that world governments outlaw GMOs and genetic transfer research entirely.

Now, despite the fact that there is no possible way that all GMOs could have the same (negative) health effect -- by what possible mechanism could rice that makes vitamin A and a virus-resistant cucumber generate similar side effects? -- people lumped together all GMOs in their minds.  The whole thing isn't "natural."  And since natural, of course, equals good, GMOs equal bad.

No one was more virulent in fostering this viewpoint than Mark Lynas, who was one of the first people to rail against GMOs as toxic and dangerous.  But now -- miracle of miracles -- Mark Lynas has issued a public retraction of his original stance at the Oxford Farming Conference.  Why?

Science, that's why.

Here's a brief excerpt from his 5,000-word statement (but you should definitely read the whole thing):

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

He then goes on to describe how putting all GMOs in the same category is illogical; as each transferred gene does something different, it's impossible for them all to have the same effects, and therefore the safety of each new crop has to be weighed independently, just as we do with everything else.  Furthermore, the vast majority of them, as evaluated by careful, peer-reviewed science, are safe and beneficial, but that hasn't stopped alarmists from swaying governmental policy:

Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural...

So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.

All in all, it's a remarkable turnaround.  Finally, we have someone talking what is just plain common sense -- not trumpeting childish scare-tactics like labeling GMOs "Frankenfoods."  And his position is backed up by mountains of evidence-based science, not just urban legends and the naturalistic fallacy.

Of course, Lynas is pretty likely to be labeled as a shill.  I'll bet that before the words were even out of his mouth, someone had shouted, "How much did Monsanto pay you to say all that?"  As we've seen over and over in Skeptophilia, you just can't convince some people, not with volumes of carefully-researched data and the most flawless argument.  But the fact that someone like Lynas changed his mind -- and was willing to issue a public apology and a statement to that effect -- gives me hope.  Because, as he says, if we don't get smart about how we do it, and use the technology and resources we have, feeding all seven billion humans is going to be an increasingly impossible task to accomplish.