{"id":5711,"date":"2015-03-17T09:49:55","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T17:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5711"},"modified":"2015-03-17T09:49:55","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T17:49:55","slug":"the-gene-genies-part-2-the-genes-that-wouldnt-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5711","title":{"rendered":"The Gene Genies, Part 2: The Genes that Wouldn’t Die."},"content":{"rendered":"

Evolution with Foresight: an oxymoron, right? Evolution has no foresight. Natural selection only promotes what works in the moment. If a particular mutation doubles your reproductive rate, you will fill the world with thy numbers; the process doesn’t understand too much of a good thing<\/em>, doesn’t care if greater fecundity today means overpopulation, starvation, and extinction tomorrow. All it cares about is whether the latest edit gives you an edge right now<\/em>. Natural selection is the very incarnation of instant gratification (which, I’ve always thought, explains a great deal about human stupidity.)<\/p>\n

But what if we could<\/em> build foresight into the system? What if we could build a gene for\u2014 I dunno, say reduced fertility, give the biosphere a break\u2014 and let it loose in the human population? Obviously it would go extinct; people with that gene would breed less, the rest of us would breed more, and a few generations down the road you’d be right back where you started.<\/p>\n

\"Today,<\/a>

Today, Walden Puddle…<\/p><\/div>\n

But what if\u2014 what if\u2014 <\/em>you could force that gene onto the next generation, even if it reduced fitness in the classic sense? What if you could build code that would be beneficial over the long<\/em> term, and ensure its spread even if it costs you in the moment? What if we could gift evolution with foresight?<\/p>\n

Enter the Gene Drive<\/a>, CRISPR\/Cas9 for short. It’s a clever little machine built of enzymes and RNAs, and you can attach it to pretty much any gene you like. When a gamete from your transgenic organism hooks up with one from a baseline, CrisperCas detects the presence of the competing wild allele, cuts it out of the opposite strand, and splices your engineered code into the gap<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> It overwrites wild genes with engineered ones, turns heterozygous pairings homozygous. You can see how this would stack the odds.<\/p>\n

And introducing engineered, virtually-unkillable genes into wild ecosystems to do our bidding?<\/p>\n

What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

CrisperCas flew right under my radar when Esvelt et al<\/em> took it on tour last summer (I was too distracted birthing Echopraxia).<\/em> Fortunately this month’s piece<\/a> in h+ got me up to speed, providing links<\/a> to some<\/a> of those<\/a> earlier articles<\/a> (also here<\/a> and here<\/a>). To do them credit, CrisperCas’s advocates admit that their technology has the potential to “alter ecosystems … so we\u2019ll have to be very careful not to cause damage accidentally”. If that’s not enough assurance for you, Oye et al<\/em> have also put out a piece in Science<\/em><\/a> admitting that “Scientists have minimal experience engineering biological systems for evolutionary robustness”, and urging us all to get our ducks in a row before we start fiddling with their genes at the population level. They advocate extensive public consultation, careful risk management, and scrupulous regulation to make sure that nothing goes wrong. They introduce something called a “reverse drive”, which can be called upon when something inevitably does. (Reverse drives seem to be basically another iteration of the gene drive, configured to undo what the last one wrought. I’m thinking a better name might be “The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly Drive.”)<\/p>\n

\"...Tomorrow,<\/a>

…Tomorrow, the World.<\/p><\/div>\n

As Esvelt and his buddies point out, it would take centuries to engineer human populations this way; we large mammals are relatively slow breeders. They’re much more excited about inflicting the tech on other<\/em> pest species; disease-carrying mosquitoes, for example, or crop-eating beetles whose resistance to the usual pesticides might be undone by gene drives. But I’m looking even further down: down past the insects, the protists, even the bacteria. I’m remembering that line from Dawkins\u2014 life is information, shaped by natural selection<\/em>\u2014 and my recurrent musings (admittedly less cutting-edge now than they once were) that life can be built from ones and zeroes as easily as from carbon and nitrogen. Hell, if you buy into digital physics, that’s all any of us are anyway.<\/p>\n

Natural selection with foresight. It could change the world even up here, albeit slowly. Think of what it could accomplish in your smart watch.<\/p>\n

I wonder if this has anything to do with how the Maelstrom gets started…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evolution with Foresight: an oxymoron, right? Evolution has no foresight. Natural selection only promotes what works in the moment. If a particular mutation doubles your reproductive rate, you will fill the world with thy numbers; the process doesn’t understand too much of a good thing, doesn’t care if greater fecundity today means overpopulation, starvation, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,4,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech","category-evolution","category-intelligent-design-the-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5711"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5727,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711\/revisions\/5727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}