Study Finds Climate Change as Threat to 1 in 6 Species

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The New York Times, April 30, 2015

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Climate change could drive to extinction as many as one in six animal and plant species, according to a new analysis.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, also found that as the planet warms in the future, species will disappear at an accelerating rate.

“We have the choice,” he said in an interview. “The world can decide where on that curve they want the future Earth to be.”

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Talking About Editing Human Embryos on the Radio

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This morning I went on the NPR show “On Point” to talk about using CRISPR to edit embryos. I’ve embedded it below, and you can also listen to it at this link.

 

It was fascinating to listen to my fellow guests. Nobel-prize winner Craig Mello basically said that if we can make it safe, then let’s go for it.  Marcy Danovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society argued that the world needed to put rules in place to ban human germline engineering.

Towards the end of the show, I went on a bit of an anti-GATTACA rant. GATTACA, in case you haven’t seen it, is a movie that puts a biotech twist on Brave New World. Danovsky and other critics frequently warn that embryo editing could lead to a world like the movie–in other words, rich people would create a genetically altered population of super-smart, super-healthy people, leaving the have-nots in the dust.

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Ancient Viruses, Once Foes, May Now Serve as Friends

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The New York Times, April 23, 2015

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Our genomes are riddled with the detritus of ancient viruses. They infected our hominid ancestors tens of millions of years ago, inserting their genes into the DNA of their hosts.

Today, we carry about 100,000 genetic remnants of this invasion. So-called endogenous retroviruses make up 8 percent of the human genome.

Mostly, these genetic fragments are generally nothing more than molecular fossils. Over thousands of generations, they have mutated so much that they cannot replicate in our cells. And our cells keep the viral DNA muzzled to minimize the harm it might cause.

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Editing Human Embryos: So This Happened

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Earlier this week, Chinese researchers reported that they edited the genes of human embryos using a new technique called CRISPR. While these embryos will not be growing up into genetically modified people, I suspect this week will go down as a pivotal moment in the history of medicine. David Cyranoski and Sara Reardon broke the news today at Nature News. Here I’ve put together a quick guide to the history behind this research, what the Chinese scientists did, and what it may signify.

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When Darwin Met Another Ape

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On March 28, 1838, Charles Darwin paid a visit to the London Zoo. At age 29, he was far from the scientific celebrity he would eventually become. It had only been two years since his return from his round-the-world voyage on the Beagle, and he was still methodically working his way through the heap of fossils and living specimens he had accumulated along the way. It would take more than two decades before he would present the world with his theory of evolution. In 1838, the theory was still in a primordial form in his mind. Darwin was struggling to find an explanation for how living things–humans included–got to be the way they are. And so, on that chilly spring day, Darwin went to the zoo and stepped into a cage with an orangutan.

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