Sunspots 914

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

The Arts: NPR has posted on the wildlife comedy photo awards. Worth seeing!

Christianity: A Christianity Today article examines the effect of  reading the Bible on a device, rather than from a book.

Reader's Digest tells us why red and green colors are symbolic of Christmas. (They mention some other colors, too.)

Computing: Gizmodo reports that Elon Musk now wants employees to sleep at the office.

Politics: NPR reports that nearly a million people became US citizens in the past year.

Science: NPR reports on a 190-year-old tortoise.

2.4 million year-old DNA has been used to determine what organisms lived in the locale where it was deposited, according to an article in The Scientist.

NPR reports on a new type of treatment for cancer, using gene editing.

When I was in college, over 5 decades ago, there was discussion of using atomic fusion (the sun, and Hydrogen bombs, use this) for power generation, but a drawback was that it took more energy than it released. That has been licked, apparently, according to NPR, but we are still a long way from using fusion as a power source.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 761

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: (or something) NPR reports on how a couple who moved into a neighborhood recently had a deaf child, and the neighbors, who had all lived there a long time, have decided to learn sign language.

N. T. Wright on how most Christians have the wrong idea about heaven.

Christianity Today, and other outlets, report that a Chinese pastor has been sentenced to 9 years in prison.

Computing: Gizmodo reports on what people wanted most to know in the Wikipedia.

Gizmodo also reports that anti-robocalling legislation has been approved by Congress, and signed by President Trump. Gizmodo also guesses that it will help some, but maybe not enough.


Education: CBS News reports that Princeton University has honored lunchroom, and other non-professorial workers, by hanging their portraits.


Environment: A Relevant article on why Christians should care for the environment.

Health: A woman with sickle-cell anemia has been treated with her own cells, modified with CRISPR. The results are promising.
 
Politics: Relevant reports that white evangelicals are further from the mainstream in their attitudes concerning immigration than they are on abortion.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

A call for a moratorium on creating gene-edited babies

National Public Radio and other news sources have reported on a call to put a "moratorium on heritable genome editing" in place.

The call for a moratorium was published on October 13, 2019, in Nature, the same journal that originally published the Watson-Crick paper, which explained how the structure of DNA was responsible for its use as a heredity-carrying molecule. Here is that call. It was made by 18 scientists and ethicists from 7 countries, namely Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. Paul Berg, who was prominent in calling for a similar moratorium on developing recombinant DNA, in the 70s, was one of the authors. Jennifer Doudna, perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the development of current genetic engineering methods, using the CRISPR-cas9 system, was not among the authors. She believes that the CRISPR system should be used to change genes in early embryos.

The earlier moratorium was most likely the reason that scientists working on genetic engineering, in the 70s and after, became quite cautious about the possible dangers of such work. I am not aware that any disaster, caused by recombinant DNA, has ever occurred. Without the moratorium, and the publicity that resulted, some disaster might have occurred.

The current proposed moratorium, by Eric Lander and the others, will probably not be made into law, or perhaps even into research regulations, by the US and other countries. But, again, it most likely will cause scientists to be very careful in what research is carried out, and how it is carried out.

This is probably the most important statement in the call for a moratium: "clinical germline editing should not proceed for any application without broad societal consensus on the appropriateness of altering a fundamental aspect of humanity for a particular purpose. Unless a wide range of voices are equitably engaged from the outset, efforts will lack legitimacy and might backfire." 

Some Christians (and others) are concerned about any manipulation of human embryos. (See here for discussion of abortion.) Many people are wary of the possibility of somehow enhancing humans, for example by manipulating genes so that people with better vision, or stronger muscles, result. And, also, many are concerned that genetic manipulation techniques would be available only to the wealthy. There are also safety concerns. Have we demonstrated, in animals, that the use of the CRISPR system won't result in unintended changes in genes, whether the gene under consideration, or some other gene? There are possible negatives, perhaps so serious that the technique should not be used on human embryos, ever, buty, on the other hand, manipulating genes might make it possible for some embryos, which would otherwise never have had a chance to survive, to live normal lives.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 638

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Christianity Today article argues that Christians usually have no business watching rape, as depicted in visual media. Duh!


Computing: Wired considers the question of how to interact with intelligent robots -- not those of the future, but those of the present, for example in our homes, and which are nearly ready.

Ethics: You have probably heard that scientists have recently changed genes in human embryos. There are analyses in Wired, and two, here and here, in Scientific American.

Health: A Wired writer tells us how many time we need to click a mouse, so as to burn one calorie. A lot.

Scientific American reports that remaining friends with someone, after he/she develops dementia, is helpful to both.

History: Listverse has an interesting post about 10 important events in history, which are looked on differently by different countries. (Sample: how the UK and the US see the Revolutionary War.)
Scientific American on strawberries and politics. (The article says little or nothing about 21st Century politics.)

Humor: (or something) The US Government is auctioning off lighthouses, and they won't be very expensive.

A writer for FiveThirtyEight analyzed the contents of over 1000 "Chinese" fortune cookies, and found some interesting things.

Listverse describes 10 unusual places where people have lived, or still live. (Sample: a two-room burrow in a city park.)


Politics: Wired reports that a recently proposed immigration bill wouldn't help US productivity very much, if it were passed, and that Canada is getting a considerably higher portion of its skilled workers from immigration that the US is. (I have since heard other commentators on this bill, on radio, including one from Fox News, who agree that the main thing this proposal does is cut down seriously on the number of immigrants, and that it won't really add much, if any, to the number of skilled workers who immigrate.)

Wired reports that employees of the US Department of Agriculture have been ordered not to use "climate change" and related terms in their reports.


Science: Scientific American reports on a study of dog facial expressions.

Government scientists have produced a report on climate change, not yet released. It's not good. See here and here.



Image source (public domain)

Creating DNA sequences has gotten easier, and some people think we need to be careful.

National Public Radio reports on a new technique for making sequences of DNA to order, apparently relatively quickly and easily, if you have the right equipment and know what you are doing. The report, and the company itself, use the term DNA printing. It isn't printing, in the usual sense. The only item on the company's web site seems to be a video, nearly 6 minutes long, about a CNN reporter, who had his DNA "hacked" by the company, as a demonstration of what they think they can do.

The CEO/chief scientist of the company, Cambrian Genetics, said a number of interesting things in the CNN report. I will mention two:

The ability to safely insert a DNA sequence into an adult, or any other cell, has not appeared yet.

Austen Heinz implied strongly that, when we can safely do this, we will have an ethical obligation to fix their DNA. That's worth an argument, I think.

The NPR report says: "But Heinz envisions a day when mass-produced DNA can genetically engineer people — or let anyone use DNA like computer code to design their own organisms." Again, that last part seems to be worth an argument.

I know -- we have been selecting organisms for different characteristics for centuries -- think dogs, for one example. So what's the big deal? Well maybe there isn't one. But consider: a terrorist might be able to produce an organism designed to destroy wiring, or pass on disease, or attack people. A lone geek might produce an organism which does something obnoxious, like digging holes in people's lawns, and is also resistant to poisons and disease, or is difficult to kill with traps or guns. Designing one's own organisms might lead to a lot of animal suffering by the products, if they were poorly designed, and, organisms being quite complex, poor design should occur all too often.

When dogs, or cows, were selected for some particular characteristics, it took a long time, maybe more than one human generation. There was time to assess the result. It also took a lot of effort. Usually, more than one person, or tribe, or family, was involved. There was at least a little consideration and discussion. If this technology becomes widely available, there are serious potential dangers.

See here for a report on different techniques, but which raises similar issues.

And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of early generations over later ones. - C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. HarperOne, 2015 paperback edition, p. 57. (Originally published in 1943)

Editing genes in human embryos -- we may be almost there, for better or for worse

And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of early generations over later ones. - C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. HarperOne, 2015 paperback edition, p. 57. (Originally published in 1943)


Wired has recently reported on what they are calling gene editing. (Another term is human genetic engineering.) The title of the article is "America Needs to Figure out the Ethics of Gene Editing Now." Yes.

What is gene editing? Gene editing is changing the DNA of an embryo. In the Wired report, it mentions that Chinese scientists attempted this, with the goal of curing an inherited disease before the embryo was born. According to the article, the experiment didn't work, and was terminated. My guess is that, even if there were no reasons not to do this, and government and industry invested heavily in it, we still wouldn't see any successful medical interventions of this type for several years.

The article includes several statements from scientists and others, all concerned that there is a possibility that this sort of treatment is likely to result in unforeseen bad consequences, most likely in deformed embryos or infants. (That seemed to happen in the Chinese experiments.) In other words, even if the techniques become well understood, and scientists and medical personnel become proficient in such techniques, the procedures won't always work.

Another reason for concern, not really raised in the statements, is the likelihood that human embryos will have to be used, and sacrificed, in the development of the techniques, for practice, as it were.

Yes, we need to have a conversation about this, and now. As the quotation at the beginning of this post indicates, C. S. Lewis, for one, was concerned about this sort of thing, although his statement was published about ten years before the discovery of the DNA double helix. Others, including ethicists, politicians, theologians, lawyers and scientists, have been concerned since that time. The reasons for their concerns are almost coming to fruition. (Not everyone is concerned. Some people want to forge ahead, and let the consequences fall where they may.)

The research discussed above is motivated by a desire to help children who have inherited diseases. But future gene editing might be for less beneficent purposes. For example, it might be possible to edit the genes of an embryo so that that embryo would be more likely to develop into someone with athletic prowess; or with a certain kind of hair, eye, or skin color; with the likelihood of getting better grades at school; or even with genes from other organisms -- firefly or jellyfish fluorescence comes to mind, as a cosmetic "enhancement." Such gene editing would most likely exaggerate the gap between the haves and the have-nots, even if there were no other bad consequences. It also might be an important step on the road towards re-defining what a human being is, and is not.

Thanks for reading.

Kathryn Applegate, at BioLogos, has commented on this research, and the questions surrounding it.