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Category Archives: Human Genetic Engineering

Marking Environmental Progress Earth Day’s 50th Anniversary Part VI – Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Throughout 2020, much of our attention has been focused on the uncertainties brought on by the novel coronavirus and the prolonged election season. With so much of our time and effort taken up by lockdowns, personal distancing and campaigns, it has been a struggle to keep track of many of the other issues that typically affect our lives.

Despite the almost overwhelming litany of distractions, the Mackinac Centers Environmental Policy Initiative has spent the past several months putting together a list of 50 reasons people can be optimistic about our future. We chose to list 50 separate technological and environmental innovations that have helped human life to flourish on our planet, and not because that was all we could find. In fact, there are so many more examples to list that we could have kept this up for a great deal longer. We chose to narrow the project to a list of 50 to recognize the fact that 2020 is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

So far, weve seen 45 different ways that humanity has improved the environment for ourselves and the planet. Those reasons include:

With this post, we will finish off the final five ways human ingenuity is improving our environment and helping people to live healthier, longer, more fulfilled lives:

This completes our 50th Anniversary of Earth Day list of reasons people have to be optimistic about their future. Human ingenuity has developed amazing technologies and found numerous new ways to solve the environmental challenges we face. Whether these innovations help us find cheaper and cleaner energy sources, expand our ability to treat disease, decrease poverty, increase our access to food, stop species extinctions, or protect us from the impacts of natural disasters, their common element is the creative potential of the human mind.

Humanity is often wrongly maligned by green groups, elected officials, and the media as a necessarily destructive influence on our Earth. But our 50 examples demonstrate this is simply not the case. We have only published 50 reasons in this series, but the human mind has not yet begun to approach the limit of what it can achieve.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.Permission to reprint any comments below is granted only for those comments written by Mackinac Center policy staff.

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Should education be a part of human engineering? – Sunday Observer

With genetic engineering, well be able to increase the complexity of our DNA and improve the human race. But itll be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code. Stephen Hawking

Modern eugenics, better known in the present world as human genetic engineering has become one of the most important research areas, since genetic engineering can prevent and/or cure diseases or improve the human body in significant ways.

Even though potential health benefits of human gene therapy are enormous one should not overlook the equally staggering potential dangers it also brings.

Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which will give them the choice to decide whether they want to terminate the pregnancy.

Genetic testing

This can be extended to detect negative traits implicated by a particular gene and try to eliminate it or modify it. This becomes controversial since what exactly constitutes negative traits is open to interpretation. Many people think the laws of nature should not be tampered with, even if the intentions of doing so are backed by the purest of motives.

Advancements in genetic engineering and modern research in the area of eugenics these days do not get as much publicity as the new findings and applications in the area of ICT and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As in any other area of science and technology, genetic engineering also has its good and bad coming with it leaving the choice of using it for selfish reasons or for the betterment of the world in general, in the hands of human beings.

This is where the question: Should education be a part of human engineering? comes to the surface since it is obvious that the advancement of technology comes through science and technology education.

But, if the system of education in which science and technology education of the kind is facilitated does not emphasise the importance and provide opportunities to develop ones ethical and moral standards then the development of such technologies can, in the long run, do more harm than good.

The practice or the concept of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits is known as Eugenics. It supposedly aims to reduce human suffering by breeding out diseases, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. The word eugenics is supposed to have been coined by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800s to mean well-born or good creation using the Greek words eu meaning good and genos meaning birth.

Eugenics

Even though Galton gets the credit for introducing the concept and the word eugenics in modern history, Platos The Republic mentions about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging reproduction among the lower classes and/or cross breeding.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so called superior class to reproduce more and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm.

Even though eugenics got all its negative publicity due to Adolf Hitlers obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race during the years leading to World War II, he has mentioned in his books that he has followed American eugenics very closely in the 1930s.

In 1896, the state of Connecticut, in the USA, made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were feeble-minded to marry.

As the concept of eugenics was becoming popular, in the early 1900s, scientists and administrators in the USA established a eugenics record office to track families and their genetic traits.

There have been over 20,000 forced sterilisations in state mental institutions in the state of California under the guise of protecting the society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Thirty-three states eventually allowed involuntary sterilisation of anyone who deemed unworthy to procreate according to the definitions of the lawmakers at the time. Records show that close to 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilised between 1970 and 1976.

Some of the women have been sterilised during other surgical procedures without their knowledge. Such occurrences were taking place in the USA long after Hitlers trials of creating the Aryan race.

Genetic differences

Even if we do not use the word eugenics, as long as we do the same thing with the expectation of similar results, the consequences would be the same.

There may be genetically enhanced athletes performing in Olympics and in professional sports in the future. It may seem unfair just as the usage of steroids or other enhancement drugs is considered to be.

But, the supporters of human engineering might argue that it has always been the case where some humans are born with better performance abilities than others and the ability to manipulate the genes is also a part of the natural progress of human knowledge. In fairness, enhanced genetic differences would be no worse than natural ones, assuming that they were safe and made available to anyone interested in doing so.

In a world dominated by competition from kindergarten to universities and beyond, parents would be lined up to receive the services of genetic engineers to give their children every possible advantage.

The advancement of science and technology, though it can bring much good, it is dangerous since it is used by humans themselves who have not shown any development in their ethical and moral behaviour.

If the word spiritual can be used to denote any or all activities which can drive the human being forward towards a higher state of consciousness, then an essential part of an education system would be a support system for the participants to improve their spirituality.

This type of spirituality has nothing to do with religion but will be capable of guiding the thought process of the human being away from using his knowledge against the common good.

The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic for over twenty years in the USA and thirteen years in Sri Lanka and can be contacted at [emailprotected]

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Should education be a part of human engineering? - Sunday Observer

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Explained: What US FDA nod for genetically modified pigs means – The Indian Express

By: Explained Desk | New Delhi | Updated: December 19, 2020 12:45:50 pmThis undated photo provided by Revivicor, Inc., a unit of United Therapeutics, shows a genetically modified pig. (Revivicor, Inc. via AP)

This week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a first-of-its-kind intentional genomic alteration (IGA) in a line of domestic pigs referred to as GalSafe pigs. These pigs may be used for food and human therapeutics, the FDA has said. This will be the first time that the regulator has approved an animal biotechnology product for both food and biomedical purposes.

What is intentional genomic alteration?

Intentional genomic alteration in animals means making specific changes to the genome of the organism using modern molecular technologies that are popularly referred to as genome editing or genetic engineering. However, there are other technologies that can be used to make IGAs in animals.

Such changes in the DNA sequence of an animal may be carried out for research purposes, to produce healthier meat for human consumption and to study disease resistance in animals among other reasons. One example is of using IGAs to make an animal more susceptible to certain diseases such as cancer, which helps researchers get a better understanding of the disease and develop new therapies to treat it.

The FDA maintains that the only difference between an animal with an IGA and one that does not have an IGA is that the IGA gives them a new trait or characteristic, such as faster growth or resistance to certain diseases.

Essentially, an IGA is inserted into an animal to change or alter its structure and function and the FDA makes sure that the IGA contained in the animal is safe for the animal and safe for anyone who consumes a product or food derived from the animal. Follow Express Explained on Telegram

What does FDAs recent approval mean?

The FDA made the announcement this week and allowed IGA in GalSafe pigs to eliminate a type of sugar found in mammals called alpha-gal. This sugar is present on the surface of these pigs cells and when they are used for products such as medicines or food (the sugar is found in red meats such as beef, pork and lamb), the sugar makes some people with Alpha-gal Syndrome (AGS) more susceptible to developing mild to severe allergic reactions.

Since GalSafe pigs may potentially be used to produce human medical products, IGA will help eventually free these products from detectable alpha-gal sugar, thereby protecting their human consumers from potential allergies.

According to the FDA, GalSafe pigs may be used to make the blood-thinning drug heparin.

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A closer look at the genomes of microbial communities in the human mouth – Tech Explorist

Some bacteria are abundant in specific locations while absent from others. But, how did the bacteria get into the wrong place? How do we add the good bacteria into the right place when the biogeography has gotten out of whack?

Bacterias are so tiny and small that it is difficult to characterize which subgroups of bacteria live and what genes or metabolic abilities allow them to thrive in these wrong places.

Scientists from Harvard University studied the human oral microbiome and discovered impressive variability in bacterial subpopulations living in some mouth regions.

Co-author A. Murat Eren, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago, said, The mouth is the perfect place to study microbial communities. Not only is it the beginning of the GI tract, but its also a very unique and small environment thats microbially diverse enough that we can start to answer interesting questions about microbiomes and their evolution.

The mouth contains a surprising amount of site-specific microbes in different areas. For instance, the microbes found on the tongue are very different from the microbes found on the teeth plaque. Your tongue microbes are more similar to those living on someone elses tongue than they are to those living in your throat or on your gums!

Scientists scoured through public databases and downloaded 100 genomes that represented four bacteria species commonly found in the mouth, Haemophilus parainfluenzae, and the three oral species of the genus Rothia. Using these bacterias as references, scientists tend to discover their relatives sampled in hundreds of volunteers mouths from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP).

Lead author Daniel R. Utter said,We used these genomes as a starting point, but quickly moved beyond them to probe the total genetic variation among the trillions of bacterial cells living in our mouths. Because thats what were curious about, not the arbitrary few that have been sequenced.

Using the approach called metagenomics, scientists deeply examined the genomes of the microbes, which led to a shocking discovery. They found a tremendous amount of variability. What was more surprising was the patterning of that variability across the different parts of the mouth, specifically, between the tongue, cheek, and tooth surfaces.

For example, within a single microbe species, the researchers found distinct genetic forms strongly associated with a single, different site within the mouth. In many cases, the team was able to identify a handful of genes that might explain a particular bacterial groups specific habitat. Applying metagenomics, the scientists were also able to identify specific ways free-living bacteria in peoples mouths differed from their lab-grown relatives.

Colleen Cavanaugh from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, said,Having identified some strong bacterial candidates that could determine adaptation to a particular habitat, we would like to test these hypotheses experimentally. These findings could potentially be the key to unlocking targeted probiotics, where scientists could use whats been learned about each microbes habitats requirements to engineering beneficial microbes to land in a specified habitat.

Co-author Jessica Mark Welch, an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, said,The mouth is so easily accessible that people have been working on bacteria from the mouth for a long time.

Every environment we look at has these complicated, complex communities of bacteria, but why is that? Understanding why these communities are so complex and how the different bacteria interact will help us better understand how to fix a bacterial community thats damaging our health, telling us which microbes need to be removed or added back in.

Utter said,This study and others like it can provide new insights on the role of oral microbes in human health. The ability to identify specific genes behind habitat adaptation has been somewhat of a holy grail in microbial ecology. We are very excited about our contributions in this area!

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Genetically Modified People Are Walking Among Us – The New …

It felt as if humanity had crossed an important line: In China, a scientist named He Jiankui announced on Monday that twins had been born in November with a gene that he had edited when they were embryos.

But in some ways this news is not new at all. A few genetically modified people already walk among us.

In the mid-1990s, fertility doctors in New Jersey got an idea for how to help women have children. They suspected that some women struggled to become pregnant because of defective material in their eggs.

To rejuvenate them, the doctors drew off some of the jellylike filling in eggs donated by healthy women and injected it into the eggs of their patients before performing in vitro fertilization.

The researchers did not ask the Food and Drug Administration for permission to try out the procedure. Only after their patients started having healthy children did they share the news that it seemed to work. Once the word got around, would-be parents streamed into clinics to try the procedure themselves.

But other people reacted with shock rather than excitement. Our cells generate fuel in miniature factories called mitochondria. And each mitochondrion carries its own small set of genes. The New Jersey fertility doctors might have created children with the DNA of three people, not two.

It turned out that this was indeed the case. The doctors discovered that some of the children carried mitochondrial DNA from the donors in addition to their parents. In their 2001 report on this discovery, they called it the first case of human germ-line genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children. The germ line is a lineage of cells that gives rise to a new person.

The F.D.A. was not pleased. It sent the clinics letters demanding that they apply to test the method as if it was a new experimental drug. Those bureaucratic hurdles were so daunting that the clinics stopped injecting eggs.

By then, perhaps a dozen children had been born with a mixture of DNA. Maybe there are more no one knows for sure.

The New Jersey doctors later tracked down some of these children and didnt find anything unusual about their health as teenagers. Meanwhile, some biologists had realized that a variation on their procedure might be able to do something else: prevent diseases that are otherwise incurable.

Like the DNA in our chromosomes, the DNA in our mitochondria can mutate. Mutations can cause symptoms ranging from blindness to early death, and women pass them down to their children. An estimated one in 5,000 people suffer from a mitochondrial disease, and for a vast majority, there are no effective treatments. Scientists wondered if they could erase these diseases by swapping mitochondria.

The procedure they envisioned began with taking a patients chromosomes out of one of her eggs. Next, they got an egg from a healthy donor and removed her chromosomes as well. Finally, they inserted the patients chromosomes into the donor egg and fertilized it with sperm.

Tests of this so-called mitochondrial replacement therapy, carried out on mice and monkeys, offered encouraging results. But when scientists approached the United States government about trying it out on human eggs, they got shut down.

It wasnt just the possible medical risks that worried people. Many saw it as an affront to human dignity.

It is a macabre form of eugenic human cloning, declared a Nebraska congressman, Jeff Fortenberry, at a hearing in 2014.

Two years later a provision was mysteriously slipped into a congressional budget bill that barred the F.D.A. from even considering mitochondrial replacement therapy. So researchers went underground.

In 2016, an American fertility doctor named John Zhang announced that he had gone to Mexico to quietly carry out the procedure on a woman from Jordan with a neurological disease called Leigh syndrome. She gave birth to a boy who appeared healthy. But she and her husband had no interest in letting scientists track the health of their child. We know nothing more of his fate.

This history echoed loudly this week, when Dr. He, an assistant professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, told the world that he had made gene-edited babies by altering the DNA of human embryos with a new technology called Crispr.

He cut out a small portion of DNA from a gene called CCR5. People who are missing this chunk of genetic material appear to be resistant to infections with H.I.V. Dr. He reasoned that genetically modified babies would resist the virus, too.

On Sunday, MIT Technology Review broke the news, followed by a lengthy story by The Associated Press. Dr. He posted a series of triumphant videos online, and on Wednesday, he went to a major gene-editing conference in Hong Kong to show slides with some details of his work.

Like the New Jersey fertility doctors before him, Dr. He was roundly condemned for his secretive recklessness. The organizers of the Hong Kong meeting issued a statement Thursday calling the birth of the twins irresponsible. They said Dr. He had designed the study poorly, and they labeled his ethical considerations a failure. Some scientists who watched Dr. He's talk wondered if he might have actually removed the wrong chunk of the CCR5 gene. The Chinese government called the procedure illegal and opened an investigation.

I got in touch with Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies reproductive technologies, to ask him to guess what happens next. His forecast sounded like a repeat of the mitochondrial replacement story.

My sense of what will happen is that across the world there will be strong regulatory action, Professor Cohen told me. He predicted a blanket ban of the technology. People are scared, and when they are scared they make decisions that are not so subtle.

On Wednesday, the commissioner of the F.D.A., Scott Gottlieb, appeared to give some credence to Professor Cohens prediction. In an interview with BioCentury, he criticized the scientific community for failing to stop Dr. He and warned of potential regulations and laws that could be far more restrictive than they might otherwise be if there were more confidence that the community was able to self-impose appropriate standards.

That would be a shame. There may be times when editing human embryos would make medical sense. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine issued detailed guidelines about what sort of cases might qualify. While they didnt point to any particular disease, they argued that it should be considered only when no other treatment could allow parents to have a healthy child.

Fortunately, history offers us a different path. We need only look at what happened to mitochondrial replacement therapy in Britain.

When British scientists raised the idea of using the procedure on human eggs, the country conducted a serious, open conversation about the pros and cons. The health department conducted a long investigation. Parliament held a public debate. And in 2015 it passed a law approving the procedure.

The British government wasnt creating a medical Wild West, where doctors were free to use the procedure whenever they wanted. Clinics had to get a license from Britains Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which would monitor the procedures and track the children throughout their lives to check for unexpected side effects.

This February the authority announced that it was for the first time approving the use of mitochondrial replacement therapy on two women at a fertility clinic in Newcastle. On Thursday, a representative at the authority declined to say whether children had yet been born as a result.

Its only natural for the world to focus its attention on the two babies born in China. But these babies in Britain deserve our attention, too. We can choose which ones represent the future.

Carl Zimmer writes the Matter column for The New York Times and is the author of She Has Her Mothers Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.

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Spatial Genomics & Transcriptomics Market Demand is Expanding at a Stellar Pace in the Years to Follow – BioSpace

The demand within the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market is expanding at a stellar pace in the years to follow. Advancements in molecular biology have paved the way for revenue inflow into the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market. The need for studying genetic patterns in humans, animals, and plants has generated new opportunities for market expansion, Genetic engineering has emerged as a robust domain within nascent biological sciences, creating room for experimentation and analysis. The applications of genomics in molecular biology and genetic studies has given a thrust to market expansion.

In this custom review, TMR Research delves into the extrinsic and intrinsic trends that are shaping the growth graph of the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market. The domain of biological sciences has encapsulated new technologies for studying sizes, compositions, and archetypes of human genes. This is playing a vital role in driving sales across the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market. This review also assesses the impact of advancements in genetic engineering to decode market growth.

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Spatial Genomics & Transcriptomics Market: Notable Developments

Key Players

Spatial Genomics & Transcriptomics Market: Growth Drivers

The high incidence of genetic disorders has probed the medical industry to invest in new technologies for genetic engineering and gene transfer studies. Several medical centers and research units are investing in the study of dyslexia, downs syndrome, and other genetic inconsistencies. This has created fresh avenues for growth across the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market. In addition to this, the use of next-generation genetic studies for understanding genetic disorders has also given a thrust to market expansion.

The importance of microbiology in genetic studies has created a boatload of opportunities for growth and expansion across the global spatial genomics and transcriptomics market. The use of spatial genomics to understand the structure and composition of genes has enabled the inflow of fresh revenues into the global market. Besides, the use of genetic studies in the domain of veterinary care has also generated humongous opportunities for market expansion. The study of human and animal genes often goes hand-in-hand for the purpose of core research and analysis.

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Regional Segments

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TMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.

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Spatial Genomics & Transcriptomics Market Demand is Expanding at a Stellar Pace in the Years to Follow - BioSpace

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