Ancient mammoth DNA didn't persevere in casual ambient conditions. They were only able to retrieve genetic material because the animal's corpse had been preserved by permafrost. DNA storage of actual data would require cooling solutions an order of magnitude more intense than what is currently used to keep a data center running. Most people don't realize how much nucleic acid digesting enzymes are in our normal environment. A great deal of the sticky slimy residue generated copiously by our bodies are the chewed up DNA remnants of microbial organisms that our immune system keeps in check. This is to say nothing of the difficulty involved with reading/writing of said data. You DON'T want to go down that rabbit hole.
You are free to disagree, but I will assert that a modern society is marked by secularism. In most of the developed world, the birth rate is either stable or in decline. What growth there is is often due to significant immigration from less developed parts of the world. Those who cling to religion and are susceptible to obsolete ideologies tend to be less educated and are economically disadvantaged. I think if we can keep a lid on social inequality, we wond need to worry about what you're talking about (too much).
One way or another some kind of balance has to be struck. Dwindling resources are likely to make the cost of living expensive. If things get bad enough, population control of the Chinese variety isn't too far fetched. But something tells me you won't need to tell people to stop reproducing. Given the situation in Japan and other places that are experiencing negative population growth, It is more likely than not that the problem a modern society will face is going to be the complete opposite.
Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
Cancer cells are observed to maintain viability this way - even though they are diseased and abnormal cells, they maintain just enough chromosomal health by activating the necessary telomere maintenance process to continue dividing without incurring even greater genomic damage.
Not offhand in any good laymen's literature I know of. But the process is described in a bunch of molecular biology textbooks I don't have access to at the moment. When chromosomes are not protected with telomere caps on the ends, the cellular machinery is likely to mistakenly treat them as DNA double strand breaks. What happens in such situations is that proteins involved in DNA repair will try to join the "naked" end to the nearest other piece of DNA, even if it belongs to another healthy chromosome. Fused chromosomes are always bad news for cellular health. The problem is amplified in what is called a breakage-fusion-bridge (b/f/b) cycle as cells try to continue dividing with abnormal chromosomes that now doesn't separate as they should.
The presence of healthy telomeres suppresses this process. Even if your chromosomes get messed up through the infrequent snags that still happens occasionally, a damaged chromosome that is able to restore the presence of telomeres at the end by one means or another (there are several) will stop undergoing b/f/b cycles. Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
More likely the opposite. One of the hallmarks of cancer is genomic instability caused by abnormal chromosomes. Restorative extension of telomeres would in fact stabilize chromosomes and protect them from developing anomalies.
All jokes aside, maturation of this technique has huge ramifications for the treatment of diseases that are fundamentally due to misfolded proteins. Prion diseases, frightening as they are, might finally have a cure. I would dare say related disorders that involve plaque deposits such as Alzheimer's might also benefit from possible therapeutics.
I don't necessarily disagree with you completely. But I think your point is badly argued and perhaps unnecessarily harsh.
>As far as i know.
THAT is pretty much what it boils down to... WHAT do you know? HOW do you know it? Is it really fair of you to dismiss a position where one only seeks to know more than what you currently know?
>The very idea that some things outcompete others is one of our basic immunological defenses.
I don't know where you pulled this out of or where you're going with it. Perhaps a point can be made about host immunological tactics and responses to pathogens in the context of ecological adaptation and niches. But to draw some kind of connection via competition for resources is a pretty awkward and bizarre way of making that point. And what is purpose of bringing this up in the current context? Are you suggesting if our immune system doesn't need to handle something that can't compete in our ecological backyard, we shouldn't bother? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but that is not a very scientific perspective.
>That we haven't seen something already.
>I doubt you'll find much outside of novel viruses because bacteria infest every corner of our world. around you, on you, inside you, above you and below you.
Are you sure you would know even if you were looking at it? Moreover, what are you looking with? If as it was postulated, a non-DNA based genetic code was used, our existing assays may not pick up anything at all. I'm not going to dive into a discussion about laboratory science just yet. But let's pull back for a minute and consider something even more conventional. There is a enigma in microbial ecology sometimes called "The Great Plate Count Anomaly" that simply stated is the fact many more microbial organisms exist than we can culture in the lab. Recent advances in metagenomic techniques has allowed us to sequence the DNA of these previously un-grow-able bugs and given microbiologists their first look at stuff they've never seen before. And this is only within the last couple of years.
New discoveries and advances are occurring much more recently than you believe. A few months ago, I came across a bit of relatively new research where modern techniques identified some symbiotic bacteria in the gut of an insect called the glassy winged sharpshooter which finally explained how it was able to feed on relatively un-nutritious xylem that lacked essential nutrients required for survival. It turned out there was a previously unknown microbial community in this hard to observe environment with different bacteria synthesizing different nutrients crucial for this insect's survival. Discoveries like this are possible because obstacles exist but researchers never stop asking how we can overcome the limits of existing methods and techniques. There are countless examples of such "things we haven't already seen" to paraphrase you. And I am confident that if we should dare to extend our search as was urged in the paper, we'll open up new door we can't even dream of at the moment.
I guess I can't really fault you for your perspective as it appears biology isn't your field of expertise. But for those of us bio-hackers here on slashdot, compelling questions of what we should be looking for and where/how to look for it, is most definitely "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". For the good of the community, I would ask that you and others not try to knock something simply because you don't understand it. Please try not to ask questions on the premise of unfounded assumptions.
That's a pretty narcissistic and arrogant world view which does little to advance the current state of knowledge. When we stop daring to think ambitiously and asking improbable questions about the world around us, we settle into a valley of complacency from which we loose the momentum of curiosity that has driven science and technological innovation. Imagine Einstein never bothered to write that letter which lead to the Manhattan project. Or if DARPA thought the packet switching ARPANET was a waste of time and money. Or if the DOE thought sequencing the human genome was someone elses responsibility.
Believe me, as a lab rat who's been doing bench work in molecular and cell biology for the last 3 years I am more qualified than anyone to sing the praises of our current power to probe the depth, diversity, and extent of life. It is easy for me to sympathize with those who are jaded by these routine "miracles" where we can send out a DNA sample and have it sequenced overnight. If we wanna know something, the answer is literally a bunch of mouse clicks and a few pipette pumps away. Not much to get excited about at all.
But any self respecting biologist who works with modern molecular tools and technique has seen the frightening pace of progress that has allowed us to do the previously unimaginable. For example, the 2007 Nobel prize was awarded for the development of the "knock-out" mouse. This has lead to all sorts of experiments that has elucidated protein (mal)functions that have lead to a revolutionary understanding of countless diseases and illnesses. In more recent years, we are poised for another such quantum leap with bacteria-derived "genomic editing" techniques such as TALEN and CRISPR that allows us to make precise changes in the DNA of model organisms.
If biologists have the mindset you espouse, that everything worth discovering has been found, none of these type of breakthroughs would be possible. I've talked to colleagues who often muse wishfully, "If only we can do ****** more easily, our experiment would be so much better." There isn't one among us who don't hope some newly discovered microbe from the deep ocean or where ever will lead to some new technique or method that will allow us to do different kinds of experiments to generate data we didn't think was possible to collect.
And that is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It has been pointed out before that more people have walked on the moon than been to the deepest part of Earth's oceans. Of the little bit we have seen down there, entire ecosystems run on biochemistry that might as well be from another planet. You think it is *easy* to go down there and do science on those critters? There is a reason why astronauts outnumber aquanauts and ease/simplicity isn't one of them. You can't just bring them to you either because, those organisms don't live in the kind of environment we operate most lab equipment.
And it isn't necessarily about who can out-compete who on this planet. Everyone gets to shine in the spot light because everyone potentially has a role to play on the stage of life. How unimpressed will you be if it is discovered that some newly identified ocean trench bottom dweller can help us clean up the "Deep Horizon" oil spill in the gulf of Mexico? Or what if some rare sparsely growing thing-in-a-rock synthesizes a potent life-saving anti-cancer compound? We are not out to make discoveries for something that can necessarily colonize and take over the planet. The motivation for such quests are as varied as life itself, but for me personally, it is about finding something that can be of use to humanity. New biology may mean our current tools/techniques don't work. But therein also lies opportunities for new technologies and new discoveries. And you can bet there will be spin-offs to spare!
Sure, it may be not much more than viruses we find out there. There may NOT be some exotic thing out there that confounds established biology of life. But who are YOU to say? Plenty of reputable scie
Mod parent up. The article as written is dumbed down and misleading in many ways. Against my usual temperament I'm going to make a sociological/anthropological argument that someone reading the article will draw very wrong conclusions about the nature of prehistoric Neanderthal-modern human interaction. Genetic inheritance or progeny happens to be the only evidence we have right now about early Neanderthal-modern human interaction. But it does not say anything useful about when we "first had sex with" them as the article claims. Consider the following: Archaeological evidence suggests that large scale violence we would consider warfare was a part of human life as far as 7,500 or possibly 14,000 years ago. Does that mean ancient society was all about peace and love before that time? No. There is too little information to make such sweeping conclusions. To return to the subject at hand, not all sexual encounters with Neanderthals are going to leave evidence for us to conveniently find. What we *DO* know at this point is that at least one such encounter resulted in a pregnancy that was carried to term and the resulting offspring lived long enough to have children of his/her own who continued to survive. That's ALL we know. Put another way, imagine the young men and women of ancient communities playing a game of "fuck, marry, or kill" that included their funny looking neighbors. The visual may not be pleasant, but any earlier incidents of war-rape and deliberate infanticide due to parental rejection will leave little to no evidence behind for us. And barring extreme luck, there is almost NO WAY we can know if/when such incidents occurred. Who really knows when Neanderthals and us *FIRST* had sex?
Why is this comment modded off topic? Anyone who has bothered to read the linked webpages would know they are not talking about photovoltaics. What perhaps *IS* off topic is that examiner.com is usually a really poor source of good science. The feed they provide to YAHOO is almost always filled with sensationalist nonsense.
I don't have very deep background in this area, but a bit of trivia from a neuroscience class two years ago is relevant here. Decades ago, before research ethics developed to its current state, there was an experiment using a de-brained but still living cat that showed the neural circuitry in the spinal cord was sophisticated enough to coordinate walking/running with no input/output to the brain. The following youtube clip shows film footage of the cat suspended over a treadmill where the motion of the tread stimulated anatomically correct gaits of normal healthy animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In other words, the artificial stimulation doesn't really control *how* they walk or perform other tasks that are "instinctual". Most of that is an innate ability of the central nervous system. Voluntary control of muscles and movement, especially fine control, like dodging obstacles, for example, are still a bit tricky to hack at the current state of understanding.
After they optimize this for human physiology and gain commercial approval, this technology will obviously be a boon for accident victims. However, the engineer in me can't help but think of how far they can take the cyborg theme. ALS is a disease where motor neurons selectively waste away. Do we dare hope that we can eventually bypass the whole path of neuro connections to directly stimulate individual muscle groups?
Mod parent up.
I've read only the abstract of the article, but even still, the proposed system as described is a terribly expensive way to do PCR for another reason. Typical PCR reaction runs usually thermocycle around 20-30 times. That is 20 to 30 times you will need to change the temperature of your heat sink from a high denaturing temp to a low annealing temp to facilitate DNA replication. One of the first things I was taught in heat transfer as an electrical engineer is that the overwhelming factor involved in electronics failure is material fatigue due to thermo expansion/contraction. If you try to turn the CPU of a commodity PC into a thermocycling heat sink, you are going kill that machine really fast. Better to put in the investment for a proper thermocycler and related equipment designed to do the job correctly and reliably. Molecular biology is cheap enough these days that you don't need to do these crazy ostentatious hacks.
Laboratory samples are not necessarily the only sources of still viable small pox virus. With climate change now a global reality, thawing of the arctic permafrost means that the remains of victims who died of smallpox before eradication, even if buried (but especially if not), can potentially still release the disease into the current population. There was some news a while ago when the the Spanish Flu of 1918 was recovered in this way, albeit intentionally in the interest of science. But who knows if/when nature should take it's course this way with small pox, without our help?
It is hard to predict the progress of technology, so - NO: I won't tell you "how long before...." But I'll try to explain why CRISPR is special enough to be exciting in my experience and what technological/engineering hurdles need to be overcome in order to reach your objective.
At the moment, variations of the CRISPR-CAS system can only edit the genome of individual cells in vitro with varying efficiency. This is assuming you can culture the cells to begin with. For example, I work with human embryonic stem cells, which are particularly finicky. They won't tolerate much roughness and will even up and die on you if the growth conditions are just a bit off. This is very hard to achieve reliably as some culturing reagents (coating matrix, for example) are "undefined" products with variations in composition from batch to batch.
To go to a chop shop and treat your issue at the genetic level requires an in vivo way to introduce a CRISPR-enabled vector into your cells. This is not easy to do with today's technology, but it may not necessarily be a deal breaker. In the example you gave, a food allergy can probably be addressed by treating only the GI tract and the immune system that comes into contact with the offending allergen. As such, there is no need to target every living cell in your body in this case. However, if you are treating an illness involving a more fundamental life process, that is not the case. For example, a mitochondrial disease where basic cellular metabolism is defective would probably be best tackled when an individual is still a developing embryo or at least very, very young. Otherwise, tissues and organs that are not convenient to access will still retain the genetic defect and present problems for the host organism.
Another question is where in the genome you want to edit. So far, one of our experiments involving the targeted insertion (non-CRISPR method) of a construct into our hESCs have been a bust. Our best guess is that the intended site of transfection (sub-telemeric regions of chromosomes) is critical for cell survival and too much fiddling in the area is fatal. CRISPR-CAS was a compelling solution for us because of how ideally targeted it is supposed to be. We are not aware of anyone else who've used CRISPR with hESCs in the way that we are doing, but what has been reported so far with other experiments using notoriously difficult subjects has been encouraging. So far, the experiment shows clear evidence of true integration into the genome as opposed to a transient transfection. In about a week, a Southern blot verification will tell us if the integration was random or indeed targeted.
As rosy as I can paint a picture about what is possible, however, strong caution follows the introduction of any new technology. Anonymous Coward may be an asshole, but (s)he isn't wrong for being a cynic about the commercial deployment of this as a consumer product. Considering how complex human biology is, the chance of an unintended edit with unanticipated consequences is more than likely. Many genes are linked in very convoluted ways. Even with the human genome project having ostensibly mapped everything, we are still looking at just the tip of the iceberg. Having a complete manuscript, is very different from understanding all the nuances of the story. To get back to the spirit of your question, I would imagine that the scenario probably is more similar to dental service, where you go back periodically to check on the integrity of any major service, with tweaks along the way as necessary.
However the issue with embryonic stem cells are that they come from aborted human fetuses.
This is right-wing propaganda at its worst. embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM ABORTED HUMAN FETUSES. They come from left over embryos that those seeking fertility treatment no longer need. They were never aborted because they were never implanted in the first place. Because they were never implanted, they never had the chance to develop into anything near resemblance to a fetus. Please get your facts straight, no matter which side of the debate you are on.
Please mod parent up, as it ought to be considered an honest question deserving of an honest answer.
I work with human embryonic stem cells (hESC). I'm going to hazard a guess that you've bought into certain propaganda efforts attempting to mislead the public into believing ESC research "destroys" embryos. That is not at all the case. First a primer in cell biology: At a certain stage in their life cycle, most normal "somatic" cells enter a stage called "senescence" where they may continue to live but no longer divide and will eventually die. Stem cells, on the other hand, have the unique ability to continue dividing indefinitely without becoming "old". This "self-renewal" property makes a stem cell culture very much like the "mother dough" a baker would use to perpetuate starter cultures for years or decades.
Our lab uses uses cells that originated from fertility treatment at my institution's OB/GYN clinic. Individuals who have achieved a successful pregnancy would consent to allow fertilized but unimplanted embryos to be used for research purposes. (If we didn't ask for them, they would have been destroyed as medical waste.) During the early stages of growth, all the cells in the embryo have stem cell qualities and are all "self-renewing". Under artificial growth conditions, these cells are coaxed into remaining stem cells without developing further into a fetus with all different types of tissues and organs. As such, they remain masses of stem cells that could be split/divided and given to research groups as necessary.
So you see, a single embryo can establish a "cell line" that (depending on culture methods and/or skill/technique of cell-culturist) can be maintained indefinitely by researchers. At the moment, the "economics" of this has more to do with the resources needed to grow them rather than obtain them. Cell culture growth media is incredibly expensive right now because it is hard to keep these delicate, finicky guys happy in lab conditions. (Stem cells like growing in an organic environment - not in a dish.) So far, embryonic stem cells are only being used for research as a way to study some fundamental things that are still poorly understood. (Like for example how to grow cells intended for tissue/organ transplant in artificial conditions cheaply and reliably. Expect cost to come down as we make progress on this front.) My lab, for example, only grows enough of them to support a few experiments at a time on DNA damage/repair. Now, the anticipated therapeutic use of stem cells are different. But you would not necessarily need millions of them as one would as in the case of drug manufacturing to produce useful proteins. Because stem cells are "self-renewing", conceivably you only need enough of them to keep itself going in, say, replacing a failed organ or tissue.
At the moment, it is too early to concretely say what the future might look like where stem cells are commercially used for therapies. A couple of possible guesses for how they can be obtained: 1) a person donates his/her own by having parents who made the smart decision to bank "cord blood" saved from the umbilical cord when the baby was born. 2) the small minute number of stem cells that circulate in the blood or exist elsewhere in the body can be extracted. 3) Cells from other parts of your body that have already specialized into certain cell types can be treated to return them to a "stem-cell-like-state". This last thing is what people are talking about when they mention "induced pluri-potent stem cells" (iPSC). In any case, I find it hard to come up with a scenario where stem cells take on the qualities of a commodity to be produced for mass consumption. I suppose anything is possible, but other problems need to be solved along the way, like how to prevent organ rejection when your immune system recognize that your implant doesn't belong to you.
For the intended purpose of perpetuating humanity, such a simplistic scheme is laughably inadequate. Human beings are not some lab organism that you can sustain by throwing them some measured resource. "What is left" is the means to pass on tradition and culture - the living soul of a society. One example: We have enough problems already in segments of our society caused by the absence of men in single parent families disproportionately supported by women. What kind of civilization are you going to have with no male role-models to eventually show sons what it means to be decent husbands and fathers? Will a female only "custodial" community be sustainable or even desirable? Do you expect them to all be lesbians without the need for anyone of the male gender to be around? Even if such a preposterous idea could be floated, how would such a society deal with the eventual presence of male children and adults? You might say that technology provides a way to store the customs and norms of a society such that we can easily store the essence of manhood digitally. But let me ask you: Given the historic records afforded by the invention of writing, how feasibly is it to resurrect past human civilizations to which we no longer have an unbroken link? If your living population is too small, the chances are greater for social order to drift in a way that would eventually lead to instability and destruction. Or at best, communal norms may reach a point where there is no compelling motivation for the "custodial" population to restore humanity in any form that we currently recognize or desire. You are playing with the dangerous idea of putting too much power in the hands of too few. "Genetic" diversity should not be the only thing that is important here.
I think you guys are misunderstanding what is being accomplished here. Using nitrogen fixing bacteria instead of artificial fertilizer means you *DON'T* have excess nitrates leaching out into the environment. The bacteria acts locally - usually right at the roots of the plant where it has colonized in return for being fed with sugars by the host. It is a truly balanced symbiotic relationship that is self-regulating.
Thanks for clarifying your point. I think it was the ".....only teaches us about evolution." bit that threw some of us off as to why comparative genomics should ever be useful to anyone. Not a bad perspective, but maybe a bit awkwardly worded.
..... comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens. We're not benefiting human medicine by sequencing, say, red pandas or sea turtles, although these things are certainly important for other reasons. There are occasionally exceptional genomes, like the naked mole rat (immune to cancer), but these are rare.
Comparative genomics are of enormous importance to the field of cisgenesis/intragenesis. Somewhat inbetween traditional plant breeding and inter-species genetic engineering, intragenics seeks to modify a target organism by transferring genes from related organisms. When applied to agriculture, there are practical savings in resources expended when trying to create new cultivars of existing crops. For more see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17692557
Oh well. I'm trying to talk to the wrong crowed here. Let me find another soap box somewhere else.
Instead of getting on another soap box and saying anything at all, would you consider stopping to listen to what others are saying? There are many insights being expressed here that are worth thinking about and learning from. If you do have to say something, consider asking an engaging question.
Slashdot Mirror
Ancient mammoth DNA didn't persevere in casual ambient conditions. They were only able to retrieve genetic material because the animal's corpse had been preserved by permafrost. DNA storage of actual data would require cooling solutions an order of magnitude more intense than what is currently used to keep a data center running. Most people don't realize how much nucleic acid digesting enzymes are in our normal environment. A great deal of the sticky slimy residue generated copiously by our bodies are the chewed up DNA remnants of microbial organisms that our immune system keeps in check. This is to say nothing of the difficulty involved with reading/writing of said data. You DON'T want to go down that rabbit hole.
You are free to disagree, but I will assert that a modern society is marked by secularism. In most of the developed world, the birth rate is either stable or in decline. What growth there is is often due to significant immigration from less developed parts of the world. Those who cling to religion and are susceptible to obsolete ideologies tend to be less educated and are economically disadvantaged. I think if we can keep a lid on social inequality, we wond need to worry about what you're talking about (too much).
One way or another some kind of balance has to be struck. Dwindling resources are likely to make the cost of living expensive. If things get bad enough, population control of the Chinese variety isn't too far fetched. But something tells me you won't need to tell people to stop reproducing. Given the situation in Japan and other places that are experiencing negative population growth, It is more likely than not that the problem a modern society will face is going to be the complete opposite.
Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
Cancer cells are observed to maintain viability this way - even though they are diseased and abnormal cells, they maintain just enough chromosomal health by activating the necessary telomere maintenance process to continue dividing without incurring even greater genomic damage.
Not offhand in any good laymen's literature I know of. But the process is described in a bunch of molecular biology textbooks I don't have access to at the moment. When chromosomes are not protected with telomere caps on the ends, the cellular machinery is likely to mistakenly treat them as DNA double strand breaks. What happens in such situations is that proteins involved in DNA repair will try to join the "naked" end to the nearest other piece of DNA, even if it belongs to another healthy chromosome. Fused chromosomes are always bad news for cellular health. The problem is amplified in what is called a breakage-fusion-bridge (b/f/b) cycle as cells try to continue dividing with abnormal chromosomes that now doesn't separate as they should.
The presence of healthy telomeres suppresses this process. Even if your chromosomes get messed up through the infrequent snags that still happens occasionally, a damaged chromosome that is able to restore the presence of telomeres at the end by one means or another (there are several) will stop undergoing b/f/b cycles. Mind you, the chromosome is still damaged to some degree, but it doesn't get worse.
More likely the opposite. One of the hallmarks of cancer is genomic instability caused by abnormal chromosomes. Restorative extension of telomeres would in fact stabilize chromosomes and protect them from developing anomalies.
The first author of the paper did an impromptu AMA over at reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/scienc...
All jokes aside, maturation of this technique has huge ramifications for the treatment of diseases that are fundamentally due to misfolded proteins. Prion diseases, frightening as they are, might finally have a cure. I would dare say related disorders that involve plaque deposits such as Alzheimer's might also benefit from possible therapeutics.
I don't necessarily disagree with you completely. But I think your point is badly argued and perhaps unnecessarily harsh.
>As far as i know.
THAT is pretty much what it boils down to... WHAT do you know? HOW do you know it? Is it really fair of you to dismiss a position where one only seeks to know more than what you currently know?
>The very idea that some things outcompete others is one of our basic immunological defenses.
I don't know where you pulled this out of or where you're going with it. Perhaps a point can be made about host immunological tactics and responses to pathogens in the context of ecological adaptation and niches. But to draw some kind of connection via competition for resources is a pretty awkward and bizarre way of making that point. And what is purpose of bringing this up in the current context? Are you suggesting if our immune system doesn't need to handle something that can't compete in our ecological backyard, we shouldn't bother? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but that is not a very scientific perspective.
>That we haven't seen something already.
>I doubt you'll find much outside of novel viruses because bacteria infest every corner of our world. around you, on you, inside you, above you and below you.
Are you sure you would know even if you were looking at it? Moreover, what are you looking with? If as it was postulated, a non-DNA based genetic code was used, our existing assays may not pick up anything at all. I'm not going to dive into a discussion about laboratory science just yet. But let's pull back for a minute and consider something even more conventional. There is a enigma in microbial ecology sometimes called "The Great Plate Count Anomaly" that simply stated is the fact many more microbial organisms exist than we can culture in the lab. Recent advances in metagenomic techniques has allowed us to sequence the DNA of these previously un-grow-able bugs and given microbiologists their first look at stuff they've never seen before. And this is only within the last couple of years.
New discoveries and advances are occurring much more recently than you believe. A few months ago, I came across a bit of relatively new research where modern techniques identified some symbiotic bacteria in the gut of an insect called the glassy winged sharpshooter which finally explained how it was able to feed on relatively un-nutritious xylem that lacked essential nutrients required for survival. It turned out there was a previously unknown microbial community in this hard to observe environment with different bacteria synthesizing different nutrients crucial for this insect's survival. Discoveries like this are possible because obstacles exist but researchers never stop asking how we can overcome the limits of existing methods and techniques. There are countless examples of such "things we haven't already seen" to paraphrase you. And I am confident that if we should dare to extend our search as was urged in the paper, we'll open up new door we can't even dream of at the moment.
I guess I can't really fault you for your perspective as it appears biology isn't your field of expertise. But for those of us bio-hackers here on slashdot, compelling questions of what we should be looking for and where/how to look for it, is most definitely "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". For the good of the community, I would ask that you and others not try to knock something simply because you don't understand it. Please try not to ask questions on the premise of unfounded assumptions.
That's a pretty narcissistic and arrogant world view which does little to advance the current state of knowledge. When we stop daring to think ambitiously and asking improbable questions about the world around us, we settle into a valley of complacency from which we loose the momentum of curiosity that has driven science and technological innovation. Imagine Einstein never bothered to write that letter which lead to the Manhattan project. Or if DARPA thought the packet switching ARPANET was a waste of time and money. Or if the DOE thought sequencing the human genome was someone elses responsibility.
Believe me, as a lab rat who's been doing bench work in molecular and cell biology for the last 3 years I am more qualified than anyone to sing the praises of our current power to probe the depth, diversity, and extent of life. It is easy for me to sympathize with those who are jaded by these routine "miracles" where we can send out a DNA sample and have it sequenced overnight. If we wanna know something, the answer is literally a bunch of mouse clicks and a few pipette pumps away. Not much to get excited about at all.
But any self respecting biologist who works with modern molecular tools and technique has seen the frightening pace of progress that has allowed us to do the previously unimaginable. For example, the 2007 Nobel prize was awarded for the development of the "knock-out" mouse. This has lead to all sorts of experiments that has elucidated protein (mal)functions that have lead to a revolutionary understanding of countless diseases and illnesses. In more recent years, we are poised for another such quantum leap with bacteria-derived "genomic editing" techniques such as TALEN and CRISPR that allows us to make precise changes in the DNA of model organisms.
If biologists have the mindset you espouse, that everything worth discovering has been found, none of these type of breakthroughs would be possible. I've talked to colleagues who often muse wishfully, "If only we can do ****** more easily, our experiment would be so much better." There isn't one among us who don't hope some newly discovered microbe from the deep ocean or where ever will lead to some new technique or method that will allow us to do different kinds of experiments to generate data we didn't think was possible to collect.
And that is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It has been pointed out before that more people have walked on the moon than been to the deepest part of Earth's oceans. Of the little bit we have seen down there, entire ecosystems run on biochemistry that might as well be from another planet. You think it is *easy* to go down there and do science on those critters? There is a reason why astronauts outnumber aquanauts and ease/simplicity isn't one of them. You can't just bring them to you either because, those organisms don't live in the kind of environment we operate most lab equipment.
And it isn't necessarily about who can out-compete who on this planet. Everyone gets to shine in the spot light because everyone potentially has a role to play on the stage of life. How unimpressed will you be if it is discovered that some newly identified ocean trench bottom dweller can help us clean up the "Deep Horizon" oil spill in the gulf of Mexico? Or what if some rare sparsely growing thing-in-a-rock synthesizes a potent life-saving anti-cancer compound? We are not out to make discoveries for something that can necessarily colonize and take over the planet. The motivation for such quests are as varied as life itself, but for me personally, it is about finding something that can be of use to humanity. New biology may mean our current tools/techniques don't work. But therein also lies opportunities for new technologies and new discoveries. And you can bet there will be spin-offs to spare!
Sure, it may be not much more than viruses we find out there. There may NOT be some exotic thing out there that confounds established biology of life. But who are YOU to say? Plenty of reputable scie
Mod parent up. The article as written is dumbed down and misleading in many ways. Against my usual temperament I'm going to make a sociological/anthropological argument that someone reading the article will draw very wrong conclusions about the nature of prehistoric Neanderthal-modern human interaction. Genetic inheritance or progeny happens to be the only evidence we have right now about early Neanderthal-modern human interaction. But it does not say anything useful about when we "first had sex with" them as the article claims. Consider the following: Archaeological evidence suggests that large scale violence we would consider warfare was a part of human life as far as 7,500 or possibly 14,000 years ago. Does that mean ancient society was all about peace and love before that time? No. There is too little information to make such sweeping conclusions. To return to the subject at hand, not all sexual encounters with Neanderthals are going to leave evidence for us to conveniently find. What we *DO* know at this point is that at least one such encounter resulted in a pregnancy that was carried to term and the resulting offspring lived long enough to have children of his/her own who continued to survive. That's ALL we know. Put another way, imagine the young men and women of ancient communities playing a game of "fuck, marry, or kill" that included their funny looking neighbors. The visual may not be pleasant, but any earlier incidents of war-rape and deliberate infanticide due to parental rejection will leave little to no evidence behind for us. And barring extreme luck, there is almost NO WAY we can know if/when such incidents occurred. Who really knows when Neanderthals and us *FIRST* had sex?
Why is this comment modded off topic? Anyone who has bothered to read the linked webpages would know they are not talking about photovoltaics. What perhaps *IS* off topic is that examiner.com is usually a really poor source of good science. The feed they provide to YAHOO is almost always filled with sensationalist nonsense.
I don't have very deep background in this area, but a bit of trivia from a neuroscience class two years ago is relevant here. Decades ago, before research ethics developed to its current state, there was an experiment using a de-brained but still living cat that showed the neural circuitry in the spinal cord was sophisticated enough to coordinate walking/running with no input/output to the brain. The following youtube clip shows film footage of the cat suspended over a treadmill where the motion of the tread stimulated anatomically correct gaits of normal healthy animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... In other words, the artificial stimulation doesn't really control *how* they walk or perform other tasks that are "instinctual". Most of that is an innate ability of the central nervous system. Voluntary control of muscles and movement, especially fine control, like dodging obstacles, for example, are still a bit tricky to hack at the current state of understanding.
After they optimize this for human physiology and gain commercial approval, this technology will obviously be a boon for accident victims. However, the engineer in me can't help but think of how far they can take the cyborg theme. ALS is a disease where motor neurons selectively waste away. Do we dare hope that we can eventually bypass the whole path of neuro connections to directly stimulate individual muscle groups?
Mod parent up. I've read only the abstract of the article, but even still, the proposed system as described is a terribly expensive way to do PCR for another reason. Typical PCR reaction runs usually thermocycle around 20-30 times. That is 20 to 30 times you will need to change the temperature of your heat sink from a high denaturing temp to a low annealing temp to facilitate DNA replication. One of the first things I was taught in heat transfer as an electrical engineer is that the overwhelming factor involved in electronics failure is material fatigue due to thermo expansion/contraction. If you try to turn the CPU of a commodity PC into a thermocycling heat sink, you are going kill that machine really fast. Better to put in the investment for a proper thermocycler and related equipment designed to do the job correctly and reliably. Molecular biology is cheap enough these days that you don't need to do these crazy ostentatious hacks.
Laboratory samples are not necessarily the only sources of still viable small pox virus. With climate change now a global reality, thawing of the arctic permafrost means that the remains of victims who died of smallpox before eradication, even if buried (but especially if not), can potentially still release the disease into the current population. There was some news a while ago when the the Spanish Flu of 1918 was recovered in this way, albeit intentionally in the interest of science. But who knows if/when nature should take it's course this way with small pox, without our help?
It is hard to predict the progress of technology, so - NO: I won't tell you "how long before...." But I'll try to explain why CRISPR is special enough to be exciting in my experience and what technological/engineering hurdles need to be overcome in order to reach your objective.
At the moment, variations of the CRISPR-CAS system can only edit the genome of individual cells in vitro with varying efficiency. This is assuming you can culture the cells to begin with. For example, I work with human embryonic stem cells, which are particularly finicky. They won't tolerate much roughness and will even up and die on you if the growth conditions are just a bit off. This is very hard to achieve reliably as some culturing reagents (coating matrix, for example) are "undefined" products with variations in composition from batch to batch.
To go to a chop shop and treat your issue at the genetic level requires an in vivo way to introduce a CRISPR-enabled vector into your cells. This is not easy to do with today's technology, but it may not necessarily be a deal breaker. In the example you gave, a food allergy can probably be addressed by treating only the GI tract and the immune system that comes into contact with the offending allergen. As such, there is no need to target every living cell in your body in this case. However, if you are treating an illness involving a more fundamental life process, that is not the case. For example, a mitochondrial disease where basic cellular metabolism is defective would probably be best tackled when an individual is still a developing embryo or at least very, very young. Otherwise, tissues and organs that are not convenient to access will still retain the genetic defect and present problems for the host organism.
Another question is where in the genome you want to edit. So far, one of our experiments involving the targeted insertion (non-CRISPR method) of a construct into our hESCs have been a bust. Our best guess is that the intended site of transfection (sub-telemeric regions of chromosomes) is critical for cell survival and too much fiddling in the area is fatal. CRISPR-CAS was a compelling solution for us because of how ideally targeted it is supposed to be. We are not aware of anyone else who've used CRISPR with hESCs in the way that we are doing, but what has been reported so far with other experiments using notoriously difficult subjects has been encouraging. So far, the experiment shows clear evidence of true integration into the genome as opposed to a transient transfection. In about a week, a Southern blot verification will tell us if the integration was random or indeed targeted.
As rosy as I can paint a picture about what is possible, however, strong caution follows the introduction of any new technology. Anonymous Coward may be an asshole, but (s)he isn't wrong for being a cynic about the commercial deployment of this as a consumer product. Considering how complex human biology is, the chance of an unintended edit with unanticipated consequences is more than likely. Many genes are linked in very convoluted ways. Even with the human genome project having ostensibly mapped everything, we are still looking at just the tip of the iceberg. Having a complete manuscript, is very different from understanding all the nuances of the story. To get back to the spirit of your question, I would imagine that the scenario probably is more similar to dental service, where you go back periodically to check on the integrity of any major service, with tweaks along the way as necessary.
However the issue with embryonic stem cells are that they come from aborted human fetuses.
This is right-wing propaganda at its worst. embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM ABORTED HUMAN FETUSES. They come from left over embryos that those seeking fertility treatment no longer need. They were never aborted because they were never implanted in the first place. Because they were never implanted, they never had the chance to develop into anything near resemblance to a fetus. Please get your facts straight, no matter which side of the debate you are on.
I work with human embryonic stem cells (hESC). I'm going to hazard a guess that you've bought into certain propaganda efforts attempting to mislead the public into believing ESC research "destroys" embryos. That is not at all the case. First a primer in cell biology: At a certain stage in their life cycle, most normal "somatic" cells enter a stage called "senescence" where they may continue to live but no longer divide and will eventually die. Stem cells, on the other hand, have the unique ability to continue dividing indefinitely without becoming "old". This "self-renewal" property makes a stem cell culture very much like the "mother dough" a baker would use to perpetuate starter cultures for years or decades.
Our lab uses uses cells that originated from fertility treatment at my institution's OB/GYN clinic. Individuals who have achieved a successful pregnancy would consent to allow fertilized but unimplanted embryos to be used for research purposes. (If we didn't ask for them, they would have been destroyed as medical waste.) During the early stages of growth, all the cells in the embryo have stem cell qualities and are all "self-renewing". Under artificial growth conditions, these cells are coaxed into remaining stem cells without developing further into a fetus with all different types of tissues and organs. As such, they remain masses of stem cells that could be split/divided and given to research groups as necessary.
So you see, a single embryo can establish a "cell line" that (depending on culture methods and/or skill/technique of cell-culturist) can be maintained indefinitely by researchers. At the moment, the "economics" of this has more to do with the resources needed to grow them rather than obtain them. Cell culture growth media is incredibly expensive right now because it is hard to keep these delicate, finicky guys happy in lab conditions. (Stem cells like growing in an organic environment - not in a dish.) So far, embryonic stem cells are only being used for research as a way to study some fundamental things that are still poorly understood. (Like for example how to grow cells intended for tissue/organ transplant in artificial conditions cheaply and reliably. Expect cost to come down as we make progress on this front.) My lab, for example, only grows enough of them to support a few experiments at a time on DNA damage/repair. Now, the anticipated therapeutic use of stem cells are different. But you would not necessarily need millions of them as one would as in the case of drug manufacturing to produce useful proteins. Because stem cells are "self-renewing", conceivably you only need enough of them to keep itself going in, say, replacing a failed organ or tissue.
At the moment, it is too early to concretely say what the future might look like where stem cells are commercially used for therapies. A couple of possible guesses for how they can be obtained: 1) a person donates his/her own by having parents who made the smart decision to bank "cord blood" saved from the umbilical cord when the baby was born. 2) the small minute number of stem cells that circulate in the blood or exist elsewhere in the body can be extracted. 3) Cells from other parts of your body that have already specialized into certain cell types can be treated to return them to a "stem-cell-like-state". This last thing is what people are talking about when they mention "induced pluri-potent stem cells" (iPSC). In any case, I find it hard to come up with a scenario where stem cells take on the qualities of a commodity to be produced for mass consumption. I suppose anything is possible, but other problems need to be solved along the way, like how to prevent organ rejection when your immune system recognize that your implant doesn't belong to you.
For the intended purpose of perpetuating humanity, such a simplistic scheme is laughably inadequate. Human beings are not some lab organism that you can sustain by throwing them some measured resource. "What is left" is the means to pass on tradition and culture - the living soul of a society. One example: We have enough problems already in segments of our society caused by the absence of men in single parent families disproportionately supported by women. What kind of civilization are you going to have with no male role-models to eventually show sons what it means to be decent husbands and fathers? Will a female only "custodial" community be sustainable or even desirable? Do you expect them to all be lesbians without the need for anyone of the male gender to be around? Even if such a preposterous idea could be floated, how would such a society deal with the eventual presence of male children and adults? You might say that technology provides a way to store the customs and norms of a society such that we can easily store the essence of manhood digitally. But let me ask you: Given the historic records afforded by the invention of writing, how feasibly is it to resurrect past human civilizations to which we no longer have an unbroken link? If your living population is too small, the chances are greater for social order to drift in a way that would eventually lead to instability and destruction. Or at best, communal norms may reach a point where there is no compelling motivation for the "custodial" population to restore humanity in any form that we currently recognize or desire. You are playing with the dangerous idea of putting too much power in the hands of too few. "Genetic" diversity should not be the only thing that is important here.
New technologies always bring new jobs. Maybe self-driving cars will be the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ÃX-Driver
I think you guys are misunderstanding what is being accomplished here. Using nitrogen fixing bacteria instead of artificial fertilizer means you *DON'T* have excess nitrates leaching out into the environment. The bacteria acts locally - usually right at the roots of the plant where it has colonized in return for being fed with sugars by the host. It is a truly balanced symbiotic relationship that is self-regulating.
Thanks for clarifying your point. I think it was the ".....only teaches us about evolution." bit that threw some of us off as to why comparative genomics should ever be useful to anyone. Not a bad perspective, but maybe a bit awkwardly worded.
..... comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens. We're not benefiting human medicine by sequencing, say, red pandas or sea turtles, although these things are certainly important for other reasons. There are occasionally exceptional genomes, like the naked mole rat (immune to cancer), but these are rare.
Comparative genomics are of enormous importance to the field of cisgenesis/intragenesis. Somewhat inbetween traditional plant breeding and inter-species genetic engineering, intragenics seeks to modify a target organism by transferring genes from related organisms. When applied to agriculture, there are practical savings in resources expended when trying to create new cultivars of existing crops. For more see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17692557
Oh well. I'm trying to talk to the wrong crowed here. Let me find another soap box somewhere else.
Instead of getting on another soap box and saying anything at all, would you consider stopping to listen to what others are saying? There are many insights being expressed here that are worth thinking about and learning from. If you do have to say something, consider asking an engaging question.