Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: genetics – Page 435

The designer baby debate could start a war

Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

The genetics revolution that will transform our health care, the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make, and ultimately our evolutionary trajectory as a species has already begun. Just like parents in many places will need to make tough choices about whether, if at all, to genetically engineer their children, states will be forced to make monumental collective decisions on these issues with potentially fateful consequences.

Imagine you are the leader of a society that has chosen to opt out of the genetic arms race by banning embryo selection and the genetic alteration of human sperm, eggs, and embryos. Because your country is progressive enough to make a collective decision like this, parents desiring these services are free to go elsewhere to get what they want. But preventing the genetic alteration of your population by definition requires both restricting genetic enhancement at home and enhanced people or expectant mothers carrying genetically altered embryos from entering your country.

To protect the genetic integrity of your populations and keep genetically enhanced people out, you would need to perform genetic tests on all people entering the country. But there would likely be no way of knowing whether a person had been genetically enhanced without knowledge of their genetic baseline—their genome prior to any changes. For those few people for whom genetic information from the moment a few days after their conception is available, their former and current genetics could be compared. Everyone not able to provide baseline genetic information might be banned from entering the country or threatened with long jail terms for procreating with a citizen of it.

CRISPR was just used in a bid to restore sight to a blind person

The gene-editing tool CRISPR has been used for the first time inside the body of an adult, in an attempt to cure a form of blindness.

The treatment: According to the Associated Press, doctors dripped just a few drops of a gene-editing mixture beneath the retina of a patient in Oregon who suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, a rare inherited disease that leads to progressive vision loss.

Cells that take up the mixture can have their DNA permanently corrected, potentially restoring a degree of vision.

Whole Genome Sequencing Identifies a Missense Mutation in HES7 Associated with Short Tails in Asian Domestic Cats

Domestic cats exhibit abundant variations in tail morphology and serve as an excellent model to study the development and evolution of vertebrate tails. Cats with shortened and kinked tails were first recorded in the Malayan archipelago by Charles Darwin in 1868 and remain quite common today in Southeast and East Asia. To elucidate the genetic basis of short tails in Asian cats, we built a pedigree of 13 cats segregating at the trait with a founder from southern China and performed linkage mapping based on whole genome sequencing data from the pedigree. The short-tailed trait was mapped to a 5.6 Mb region of Chr E1, within which the substitution c. 5T C in the somite segmentation-related gene HES7 was identified as the causal mutation resulting in a missense change (p. V2A). Validation in 245 unrelated cats confirmed the correlation between HES7-c. 5T C and Chinese short-tailed feral cats as well as the Japanese Bobtail breed, indicating a common genetic basis of the two. In addition, some of our sampled kinked-tailed cats could not be explained by either HES7 or the Manx-related T-box, suggesting at least three independent events in the evolution of domestic cats giving rise to short-tailed traits.

The majority of vertebrate species, with the remarkable exceptions of humans and apes, possess a visible tail throughout their lifespans. The animal tail is an important appendage to the torso and plays adaptive roles in locomotion, balance, communication, thermoregulation and even energy storage1. In vertebrates, tails vary dramatically in color, size, shape and mobility and represent different evolutionary histories, including multiple independent events of shortening or loss of the tail in distinct lineages. Understanding the genetic causes of intraspecific tail length polymorphism would be one essential step toward elucidating the mechanisms underlying the development and evolution of tails. In laboratory mice, genetic studies of axial skeleton development have identified multiple genes and mutations involved in caudal vertebra development that have pleiotropic effects on fertility, somitogenesis, and meiotic recombination, thus shedding light on vertebrate evolution2,3,4,5.

Beyond broad strokes: sociocultural insights from the study of ancient genomes

In the field of human history, ancient DNA has provided answers to long-standing debates about major movements of people and has begun to inform on other important facets of the human experience. The field is now moving from mostly large-scale supraregional studies to a more local perspective, shedding light on socioeconomic processes, inheritance rules, marriage practices and technological diffusion. In this Review, we summarize recent studies showcasing these types of insights, focusing on methods used to infer sociocultural aspects of human behaviour. This approach often involves working across disciplines — such as anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics — that have until recently evolved in separation. Multidisciplinary dialogue is important for an integrated reconstruction of human history, which can yield extraordinary insights about past societies, reproductive behaviours and even lifestyle habits that would not be possible to obtain otherwise.

Is Sex for Reproduction About to Become Extinct?

As the coming genetic revolution plays out, we’ll still have sex for most of the same reasons we do today. But we’ll increasingly not do it to procreate.

Another rocket booster will be the application of gene editing technologies like CRISPR to edit the genomes of pre-implanted embryos or of the sperm and eggs used to create them. Just this week, Chinese researchers announced they had used CRISPR to edit the CCR5 gene in the pre-implanted embryos of a pair of Chinese twins to make them immune to HIV, the first ever case of gene editing humans and a harbinger of our genetically engineered future. The astounding complexity of the human genome will put limits on our ability to safely make too many simultaneous genetic changes to human embryos, but our ability and willingness to make these types of alterations to our future children will grow over time along with our knowledge and technological ability.

With so much at stake, prospective parents will increasingly have a stark choice when determining how to conceive their children. If they go the traditional route of sex, they will experience both the benign wisdom and unfathomable cruelty of nature. If they use IVF and increasingly informed embryo selection, they will eliminate most single gene mutation diseases and likely increase their children’s chances of living a longer and healthier life with more opportunity than their unenhanced peers. But the optimizing parents could also set up their children for misery if these children don’t particularly enjoy what they have been optimized to become or see themselves as some type of freakish consumer product with emotions.

But although there will be pros and cons on each side, the fight between conception through good old-fashioned sex and conception in the lab will ultimately not be fair. Differences and competition within and between societies will pressure parents and societies to adopt ever more aggressive forms of reproductive technology if they believe doing so will open possibilities and create opportunities for the next generations rather than close them.

Scientists now believe there are nine “causes” of our decline, the nine horsemen of an internal apocalypse

1️⃣ Genomic Instability 2️⃣ Telomere Attrition 3️⃣ Epigenetic Alterations 4️⃣ Loss of Proteostasis 5️⃣ Nutrient Sensing Goes Awry 6️⃣ Mitochondrial Dysfunction 7️⃣ Cellular Senescence 8️⃣ Stem Cell Exhaustion 9️⃣ Altered Intercellular Communication.

Explore these horsemen and the strategies being deployed to defeat this decline in Chapter 10 — The Future of #Longevity ➡️ futurefasterbook.com

‘Guardian angel gene’ key to avoiding premature births

Removal of an essential gene was a major contributor to preterm labor, according to recent research.

Researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center started with a pathway linked to the tumor suppressor gene known as transformation-related protein 53 (Trp53), which encodes another protein: p53. Mutations of Trp53 are found in a variety of cancers, but the gene’s function in female reproduction and other normal physiological processes is not well understood. The role of p53, sometimes referred to as the “guardian angel gene,” is to help preserve genetic stability and prevent mutation.

The researchers targeted certain signaling pathways that function both in pregnancy and during the formation of cancerous tumors. During pregnancy, the pathways are usually tightly regulated. In tumor development, however, they can become dysfunctional.

Building a Positive Genetic Future for All

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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