Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: bioengineering – Page 121

Nearly every day, new discoveries are pushing the genetics revolution ever-forward. It’s hard to imagine it’s been only a century and a half since Gregor Mendl experimented with his peas, six decades since Watson and Crick identified the double helix, fourteen years since the completion of the human genome project, and five years since scientists began using CRISPR-cas9 for precision gene editing. Today, these tools are being used in ways that will transform agriculture, animal breeding, healthcare, and ultimately human evolution.

Common practices like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation embryo selection make human genetic enhancement possible today. But as we learn more and more about what the genome does, we will be able to make increasingly more informed decisions about which embryos to implant in IVF in the near term and how to manipulate pre-implanted embryos in the longer-term. In our world of exponential scientific advancement, the genetic future will arrive far faster than most people currently understand or are prepared for.

Human genetic science is one of the most important and potentially beneficial advancements of our time, but the monumental health and well-being benefits of these technologies could be overwhelmed by fear, hysteria, and international conflict if a foundation for informed and inclusive public and governmental dialogue is not laid as soon as possible.

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Great news.

The successful delivery of CRISPR/Cas9 modified immune cells to cancer patients represents the first U.S. clinical trial to test the gene editing approach in humans.

Researchers from the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania have published data suggesting that immune cells modified using the gene editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 are able to survive and function for months following delivery to cancer patients [1].

The research team demonstrated that T cells taken from patients and modified ex vivo (outside the body) can be safely returned to the patient and continue to survive and fight cancer. The cells were successfully edited in three ways: by deleting the TRAC, TRBC, and PDCD1 genes. In addition to these edits, a cancer-specific T cell receptor was inserted to target the NY-ESO-1 antigen to help improve the T cells’ ability to detect tumors.

Continue reading “CRISPR Edited Immune Cells Successful in First U.S. Clinical Trial” | >

The very nature of the human race is about to change. This change will be radical and rapid beyond anything in our species’ history. A chapter of our story just ended and the next chapter has begun.

This revolution in what it means to be human will be enabled by a new genetic technology that goes by the innocuous sounding name CRISPR, pronounced “crisper”. Many readers will already have seen this term in the news, and can expect much more of it in the mainstream media soon. CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and is to genomics what vi (Unix’s visual text editor) is to software. It is an editing technology which gives unprecedented power to genetic engineers: it turns them into genetic hackers. Before CRISPR, genetic engineering was slow, expensive, and inaccurate. With CRISPR, genome editing is cheap, accurate, and repeatable.

This essay is a very non-technical version of the CRISPR story concluding with a discussion of Gene Drive[1], a biological technique which, when used with CRISPR, gives even greater power to genetic engineers. The technical details go very deep and for those who are interested in diving in, I’ve included a number of useful pointers. At the end, I will very briefly discuss the implications of these two new technologies.

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Ogba Educational Clinic

A nightmarish scene was burnt into my memory nearly two decades ago: Changainjie, Beijing’s normally chaotic “fifth avenue,” desolate without a sign of life. Schools shut, subways empty, people terrified to leave their homes. Every night the state TV channels reported new cases and new deaths. All the while, we had to face a chilling truth: the coronavirus, SARS, was so novel that no one understood how it spread or how to effectively treat it. No vaccines were in sight. In the end, it killed nearly 1,000 people.

It’s impossible not to draw parallels between SARS and the new coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19, that’s been ravaging China and spreading globally. Yet the response to the two epidemics also starkly highlights how far biotech and global collaborations have evolved in the past two decades. Advances in genetic sequencing technologies, synthetic biology, and open science are reshaping how we deal with potential global pandemics. In a way, the two epidemics hold up a mirror to science itself, reflecting both technological progress and a shift in ethos towards collaboration.

Let me be clear: any response to a new infectious disease is a murky mix of science, politics, racism, misinformation, and national egos. It’s naïve to point to better viral control and say it’s because of technology alone. Nevertheless, a comparison of the two outbreaks dramatically highlights how the scientific world has changed, for the better, in the last two decades.

Continue reading “How to Battle an Epidemic? Digitize Its DNA and Share It With the World” | >

The standard gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, frequently produces a type of DNA mutation that ordinary genetic analysis misses, claims new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In describing these findings the researchers called such oversights “serious pitfalls” of gene editing (Skryabin et al., 2020). In all, the new results suggest that gene-editing is more error-prone than thought and, further, that identifying and discarding defective and unwanted outcomes is not as easy as generally supposed.

Gene-editing is more error-prone than thought, new findings suggest

CRISPR Enzyme on DNA (Photo: MIT News)

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A bionic revolution is brewing, as recent advancements in bioengineering have brought about scientific breakthroughs in rehabilitation for people with disabilities. The most cutting edge research is happening inside the human brain, where implanted technology allows people to communicate directly with computers, using their thoughts.

VICE’s Wilbert L. Cooper travels to Zurich to see the first-ever bionic Olympics and discovers a host of technologies that are expanding what it means to be human.

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Four years ago, Todd Rider was on top of the world. The MIT-trained bioengineer had developed a radical idea for killing viruses. Initial test results showed that his therapy, called DRACO, could kill every virus he threw it at: 15 viruses were killed in human cells, and two in mice.

It seemed like there was a chance it could be the biggest discovery in medicine since the invention of antibiotics. Enthusiastic headlines praised the potentially world-changing panacea. “Todd Rider Has a Kill Switch for Viruses,” wrote Bloomberg Businessweek. The Verge: “Killing sickness: is DRACO a doomsday device for viruses?” Time magazine declared it one of the top 50 inventions of the year.

Yet over the next few years, things started going wrong. Rider moved from lab to lab and says he couldn’t raise the money to continue testing DRACO, despite, he claims, the continued promise of the concept.

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It is in this second phase when Darwinian evolutionary rivers will merge with the rivers of intelligent designers, represented by scientists, programmers and engineers, who will fuse organic natural biology, synthetic biology, and digital technology into a unified whole that future generations will deem their anatomy. The merger will serve to afford greater intelligence and, longer, healthier lives. In exchange, we will relinquish actual autonomy for apparent autonomy, where what was once considered “free will” will be supplanted by the deterministic logic of machinery somewhere in the mainstream of our unconscious.

Although in-the-body technology will have an explosive effect on commerce, entertainment, and employment, in the near term the concentration will be on medical devices, such as the innocuous pacemaker (essentially a working silicon-based computer, with sensors, memories, and a stimulation device with telecommunications to the outer world). In a second epoch, these devices will be gradually down-sized by advances in synthetic DNA, molecular- and nano-sized processors, each deployed alongside and within cells and organs as permanent non-organic, internal adjuncts to our anatomy for use as: nano-prosthetics, nano-stimulators/suppressors, artificial organ processors, metabolic and cognitive enhancers, and permanent diagnostic tools to ensure our physical and psychological well-being as we head toward a practically interminable lifetime.[6]

Will a wide-spread practice of installing technology into the body fundamentally change human essence? Our sense of self-sufficiency, authenticity, or individual identity? Will it change that numerical identity, the one “I” as some static aspect of ourselves (as self-consciousness as idealized by Locke)? Or will it change our narrative identity, our unseen internal human form, to eventually redefine what it means to be human?[7].

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