Regenesis Read online

  Subsequently we started the sequencing ourselves, on a shoestring budget, and cadging spare sequencing capacity from friends. The first data for the naked mole rat genome and RNA started flowing in the spring of 2011. By summer Magalhaes and his team at Liverpool had made the first draft sequence and put it online. As of this writing we are still in the midst of interpreting the sequence (the hard part), as well as planning follow-up experiments.

  The list of genes that scientists have discovered grows by the day: there are genes for cystic fibrosis, skin cancer, lung cancer, and on and on. Other genes control height, weight, and a host of other traits. Comparative genomics has been a huge help in finding those structures, and genome engineering will make it possible to incorporate them, gradually or swiftly, into the human genome.

  Undoubtedly, some people will object to modifying the human genome in this way on a variety of grounds: moral, philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic—and let’s not forget just plain emotional grounds (or even no grounds whatsoever). Objections to new technologies (see the technology prohibition plot in the Epilogue) typically peak as the technology is poised to spread among early adopters but doesn’t yet work well. Then, once the technical bugs are ironed out, the moral high ground can invert. For example, in vitro fertilization was considered unnatural and risky at first, but eventually withholding access to the procedure from infertile couples became unacceptable. Vaccines have had numerous periods of bad press since Pasteur’s rabies tests, and even Edward Jenner’s first trials of smallpox vaccination were ridiculed by some British cartoonists. But whenever an outbreak occurs, especially after a public campaign that reduces local vaccinations, the popularity of vaccines mysteriously increases. Sometimes people invoke the precautionary principle of “do no harm,” but in some cases doing nothing is harmful in and of itself.

  So, with respect to human longevity, how many of us really want the status quo prolonged? Or how about the longevity of our pets? Dog owners and cat lovers typically outlive several successive pets, experiencing wrenching partings with their animals every time one of them dies a natural death or is euthanized. Wouldn’t it be better if your pet could be made to live as long as you (or at least double its normal life span), all the while remaining in good health?

  And then there’s this question: Is anyone actually in favor of aging? Some worry that a widespread increase in human life span could cause overpopulation. But “overpopulation” is a relative concept, and by some people’s reckoning the world is already overpopulated and indeed it was overpopulated decades ago (see Chapter 9). As our human population is dramatically shifting to cities, the average family size is falling to below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Further, it is a well-established trend that as people become wealthier, they have fewer children. Finally, as we have seen, there is also the option of getting some of the population off the planet.

  Lysenko and Eugenics: The Future of Cultural Evolution

  The ideas surrounding eugenics and Lysenkoism are nearly synonymous with bad science—worse than merely mediocre science because of their huge and adverse political and economic consequences. Here we will reexamine these ideas from a radical new perspective to see if, against all expectation, some value can come from these most unlikely quarters.

  Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who accepted the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which opposed the Mendelian theory’s view that inherited characteristics are inborn and not affected by the environment. In 1940 Lysenko became the director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics, and, with Stalin’s backing, applied his version of Lamarck’s 1822 theory to agriculture. Lysenko’s one big idea was vernalization—pretreating seeds with cold and moisture so that they would sprout and grow earlier in the spring than untreated seeds. He further held that vernalized seeds would give rise to plants whose seeds were also vernalized because they had acquired that characteristic through inheritance. (Which they did not in fact do.)

  Although this practice did not bode well for Soviet agricultural production, Lysenko’s ideas, collectively termed Lysenkoism, nonetheless became the official agricultural dogma of the USSR. Those who opposed it were persecuted, imprisoned, and sometimes even killed.

  In the 1960s, Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet physicists finally precipitated the fall of Lysenkoism, blaming it for the “shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular . . . and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.”

  At the opposite (yet equally discredited) end of the genetic theory spectrum was the Galtonian eugenic movement, which from 1883 onward grew in popularity in many countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany). In its extreme form, eugenics propounded the forced sterilization of various “undesirables,” and this was perpetuated despite the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed that “men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.” In fact, forced sterilization persisted into the 1970s in Sweden and Canada.

  The conventional wisdom regarding these two pseudoscientific movements is that Lysenkoism overestimated the impact of environmental influences while eugenics overestimated the role of genetics. But an interesting and radical alternative interpretation is that both theories underestimated and in fact hobbled both of these powerful forces: they tried to apply genetics on a grand economic and human scale without being able to directly recode the genome.

  One form of scientific blindness occurs, as above, when a theory displays exceptional political, faith-based, or intuitive appeal. But another source of blindness arises when we rebound from catastrophic failures of pseudoscience (or science). For example, Lysenko’s spectacular failure in his attempts to apply a Lamarckian view of evolution can blind us to the ways in which we do in fact inherit acquired characteristics, for example, through epigenetics. The grandchildren of those who survived the 1944 Dutch hunger winter had smaller than average birth weights.

  Our children already inherit our computers and cars as surely as they inherit our brains and brawn. Indeed, we have inherited acquisitions ever since we developed tools and domesticated animals. But now this form of inheritance has become increasingly dominant (over genetic inheritance) and rapidly exponential. Even genetic inheritance could become genuinely Lamarckian if we became as confident and adept in applying our synthetic biotechnologies as we have been in the application of our inorganic technologies. We have always applied genetics in a weak sense, and in general unwittingly, at the individual family level, by marrying whomever we want, and for the genetically based characteristics we see embodied in those we choose.

  Many have speculated that human evolution has stopped. But we are well into an unprecedented new phase of evolution in which we must generalize beyond our DNA-centric worldview. Evolution can accelerate from geologic speed to Internet speed—still employing the processes of random mutation and selection, but also by the use of nonrandom, intelligently designed genomes, and by use of lab selections, which makes the process even faster. We are losing species—not just by extinction but by merger. The species barriers separating humans, bacteria, and plants were breached occasionally over vast evolutionary time frames through horizontal gene transfer. But today those high barriers have vanished. Genes for bacterial insecticides and for herbicide resistance are permanently integrated into current crop genomes. Even the barrier between humans and machines is porous—think of pacemakers, artificial hearts, hearing aids, and cochlear implants. Between humans and other animals we have xenotransplantation, the use of pig heart valves in human hearts, and so on.

  One objective of eugenics was to improve the intelligence of the general population. But this is happening already, without the use of Galtonian-style eugenics measures. Consider the “Flynn effect,” the observation that standardized test scores for general intelligence aptitude have been increasing since 1932
, when the first of these tests was introduced. Various explanations have been offered for this, including better nutrition, greater public exposure to testing, an overall increase of stimulation and information by means of television and the Web, the increased use of “shorthand abstractions” (scientific terms that have been exported to general usage, such as “placebo effect” and “random sample”), lowered infectious load, and the crossbreeding of formerly inbred populations (heterosis), among other things.

  Although barely noted and not contributing to the Flynn effect (as yet), the first permitted use of calculators in SAT tests probably marked a major milestone in the man-machine merger. How many of us have participated in conversations that are semidiscreetly augmented by Google or text messaging? Even without invoking artificial intelligence, such commonplace enhancements of our decision making amount to nongenetic ways of augmenting intelligence. In parallel, incremental improvements in current blood stem cell transplantation will make us more confident in the safety and efficacy of adult stem cell genome engineering. Such clinical genetic interventions will not be usefully lumped together with eugenics, especially if they are confined to somatic cells and not germ line cells, if they are done voluntarily by individuals and families and not at the behest of governments, and if they are diverse and not monochrome.

  The concepts of maximizing evolution by means of population size, speed of mutation, replication, selection, and recombination apply here too, although their effects are harder to estimate, especially as we consider the way in which our cultural and technological artifacts increasingly become part of our evolutionary life. With “generation” times (i.e., the time between applying selection to cultural variations “generated” on the Internet) possibly in the nanosecond range (rather than the seven minute world-record minimum for replicating a living cell), and with 1018 bytes “selected” per day, this form of evolution starts to get interesting. Every day the composition of which 1018 bytes are sent over the Internet is selected by economic, intellectual, and entertainment (Darwinian) selective forces. Our computer-aided evolution can enable us to inherit acquired traits, after Lamarck, while gene pools of accelerated evolution will be subject to Galtonian market pressures. In Chapter 9, for example, we will see how Nic Volker and Timothy Ray Brown have become living testimonials to the power of stem cell transplants to change body genetics (to eliminate intestinal problems, leukemia, and AIDS), and how their newly “acquired” state will likely spread to many other patients by viral word of mouth.

  What limits the number of computer replication and selection operations? Energy. Right now computers accomplish 109 operations per Joule while DNA replication is far more efficient at about 2x1019 operations per Joule. So, biologically inspired improvements in computer efficiency might lie in the near future. For example, the encoding digital information in DNA (text and images, using the scheme A:00, C:01, G:10, T:11, as described more fully in Chapter 8), in addition to being potentially a billion times more compact, less expensive, and longer-lived than paper or CD/Blu-ray disks, could be more efficient to manufacture and search.

  The second part of the energy equation is the cost of acquiring the energy from a renewable source. Read on.

  CHAPTER 4

  -360 MYR, CARBONIFEROUS

  “The Best Substitute for Petroleum Is Petroleum”

  On Sunday, February 24, 2008, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 flew from London to Amsterdam with a blend of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent standard Jet-A in one of its fuel tanks. It was a short trip, only 221 miles, and lasted only 70 minutes; moreover, as a demonstration flight the plane carried no paying passengers. Nevertheless, this was the first flight by a commercial airliner that was powered in part by biofuel (in this case a mix of coconut and babassu nut oils). Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airlines as well as Virgin Fuels, called the flight “historic.”

  It was the first of a series of proof-of-concept test flights. Later that year, in December, an Air New Zealand Boeing 747 made a two-hour demonstration flight from Auckland International Airport. With one of its four Rolls Royce engines powered by a fifty-fifty blend of jatropha oil and standard jet fuel, the plane climbed to its normal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The pilot shut down the bio-fueled engine, restarted it, and then performed a number of other exercises before making a routine landing. “We undertook a range of tests on the ground and in flight with the jatropha biofuel performing well through both the fuel system and engine,” said the carrier’s chief pilot, David Morgan.

  About two weeks later, on January 7, 2009, a Continental Airlines Boeing 737 departed from Bush International Airport in Houston, Texas, with one of its fuel tanks containing the most exotic brew yet: a mixture of 50 percent conventional jet fuel, 47.5 percent jatropha oil, and, something new, 2.5 percent algae-derived biofuel. For two hours, the plane flew a series of maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico, including a midair engine shutdown and successful restart, after which it landed without incident. “This is really a kind of landmark,” pilot Rich Jankowski said afterward.

  These three flights were a window onto the coming era of biofuels, for by the summer of 2011 at least six airlines, including KLM, Lufthansa, and Finnair, had used biofuels on commercial flights carrying paying passengers. With the global fuel market operating at a trillion dollar level, diminishing oil reserves in the ground, much of it controlled by unstable or unfriendly political regimes, and a global warming crisis caused in large part by carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (not to mention the human, economic, and environmental costs of disasters such as British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010), the idea of renewable energy sources exerted a powerful appeal.

  In fact, the whole idea of biofuels, especially the vision of having microbes such as cyanobacteria “grow” petroleum for you, seemed to be surrounded by a halo effect, a magical radiance. After all, it was like getting something for nothing, or almost. The idea was that we’re going to leave the fossil fuels in the ground and put microorganisms to work for us, producing whatever alternative fuels we need. As a side benefit, those same microbes would clean up the atmosphere and help save the world in the process.

  Who could resist such a dream? Not many. As the twenty-first century began, airlines, automakers, national governments (especially the military components thereof), and even the oil companies themselves were all jumping on the biofuels bandwagon, and looking to replace, or at least supplement, fossil fuels with fuels that are grown, like maple syrup, tomato juice, and coconut milk (or for that matter, cow’s milk).

  By 2010 there were more than two hundred companies in the United States, including one located on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, plus dozens more abroad, competing for the potential fortunes to be made from microbes that produce fuels. But there was more to biopetroleum than biofuels. In 2011 retail giant Walmart began selling a bio-based motor oil, G-Oil, which was being advertised in car magazines as “green bio-based full synthetic motor oil.” The ads ran under a banner headline, “Change your oil, change the world,” while a text at the bottom announced that the oil was “Grown and made in the USA.” What the ads failed to mention was that the oil was not made by special-purpose and efficient microbes, but was based on some of the least efficient biosources of all—rendered beef, pork, and chicken fat. (How an oil made from animal fat could be “fully synthetic” was not explained.) Nevertheless, the fact that such a product was now being marketed by a major retailer (and used as a lubricant in Mazdaspeed Formula One racing cars) showed that the idea of bio-based petroleum had suddenly come of age. All at once, it was glamorous.

  Of course there were a few minor problems with this otherwise rosy scenario. One of the earliest start-ups to enter the algae-to-biofuels game was GreenFuel Technologies Corporation. Founded in 2001 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it planned to produce vast quantities of algae using CO2 smokestack emissions from power plants, and then use the
resulting masses of algae to make biodiesel, among other things. The company christened this process as its proprietary Emissions to Biofuels technology, and raised $70 million in private funding. By 2005 the company had established a working bioreactor pilot plant in Arizona. But two years later the pilot plant was producing more algae than it could convert into fuel. Growing the algae, the company discovered, was the easy part. The hard part was getting the algae to make petroleum, especially in a cost-effective way. Further compounding its difficulties, the company did not perform any genetic engineering on the microbe it was using. In 2009, having been blindsided by the fine print of microbiology, GreenFuel filed for bankruptcy.

  California-based Solazyme provided another cautionary tale. Unlike GreenFuel Technologies, Solazyme did not go out of business. To the contrary, the company was wildly successful, announcing in 2010 that “we delivered over 80,000 liters (21,000 gallons) of algal-derived marine diesel and jet fuel to the U.S. Navy, constituting the world’s largest delivery of 100% microbial-derived, non-ethanol biofuel.” What the company did not reveal, although the Marine Corps Times did, was the price per gallon of this otherwise auspicious and forward-looking new substance: $424.

  No consumer in a calm and sober frame of mind would pay anything like that kind of money for a gallon of gas. But the military, which was famous for its thousand dollar toilet seats and wrenches, had a totally different mind-set when it came to spending. But if the military was your major customer for algal-derived biofuels, then you had to wonder about the real-world viability of the product. Was it really anything more than a pipe dream?