Learning About Genetic Engineering On The Net

Norm asks: "How does one use the WWW to learn about the current and future state of the human genome project, corporate research into potential genetic manipulation of humans, and human Genetic Engineering in general? This is a subject, that while touched upon in the news and exploited in popular culture (e.g., the film 'Gattaca'), does not receive the fact-based, in-depth coverage it deserves. Right now, we are facing a serious social, political and philosophical dilemma: what happens when those of us in our 20s-30s are in our 70s-80s, and the new generation of people are genetically enhanced super-humans? Ideas? Pointers?"

Human genetics may be a military/police thing...

While solving medical problems and giving people bigger breasts may remain in the public domain, you can bet your ass that if muscle/brain/reflex etc enhancement happens, it will either begin as or end up as property of the military/police. The people in power want neither dissidents nor foreign armies to have advantages in combat; therefore they will use whatever means possible to remain the sole proprietors to any genetic enhancements beyond cosmetic and medical ones.

Culture differences

What will happen if you have two largely polarized groups of people.. and then you bring them together suddenly? Any history book past page 20 will tell you a bad-ass "war to end all wars" style conflict will break out, there will be large casualties, and lots of pain and suffering because both sides think they're "right". There is no right in these situations.. only wrong. We have not evolved yet enough to dispense with physical violence as a tool to promote change...

I'd just as soon we keep genetic engineering to the non-sentient lifeforms until we know more about it. I mean, the last thing we need is to engineer a "super" human which is not backwards-compatible with the current generation. Flip over to Star Trek TNG's story about how generically engineering an immune system to be "perfect" had the unfortunate side-effect of killing it's predecessors (namely, us) because of an unforseen variable: a normally harmless genetic virus for an example. I can think of more - science fiction is replete with these examples. I would say to anyone thinking seriously about this issue to spend some time at the library.. and some time in a movie theatre.

And don't think for a minute that viruses won't take advantage of the host's "improved immume systems" - even if the new super-humans aren't hostile towards the existing generation we're still stuck with the problem of viruses which will more rapidly attack and infect people with less of an immune system (path of least resistance - plant a tree in a sunny spot, plant another in a dark spot, which one uses more of the soil's resources?)...

We are messing with things far above and beyond our comprehension. I hate to say it, but I very nearly side with the conservative elements in our society on this - this is a matter best left to God. For now, anyway. The other sciences have not caught up enough to have enough of a base of knowledge to anticipate what will happen if we start changing genes. Trial and error is NOT an option for human experimentation.

~ Signal 11

Re:Human genetics may be a military/police thing..

As for muscle and reflexes, I think that a certain level of tampering will remain legal. We'd see a generation of kids growing up with no genetic diseases, and everybody would have similar levels of physical strength, endurance and reflex, looks, etc.

Tampering with intelligence, on the other hand, is almost certain to be banned outright (obviously "rogue" nations won't care, and the US gov't will enhance their own soldiers secretly).

One thing that triggers fear in the masses is intelligence. Physical strength they can understand, but intelligence eludes them. So, they'd blindly legislate away their ability to mess with it, fearing a generation of wunderkind that would relegate them to the dustbins of history. (Intelligence is probably also the hardest thing to successfully modify, since the brain's so complex.)

What this means is that we'll see a stratification of our society into castes:

• The kids of those who were naturally smart, who now benefit from genetic augmentation of their body.
• The vast numbers of "average" people (when "average" starts to take on a completely new meaning!) who have genetic modifications and just dumbly go about their daily lives like nothing happened.
• The unmodified. Those whose parents objected to their prenatal modification for one reason or another would grow up being teased, harrassed, and bullied for being "weak" or "different" (similar to Gattaca). However, they'd be so sick of it that within a generation or two, they'd all have ensured that their kids don't have to grow up in the same hell that they did. Also, it's hard to remain "unmodified" if anyone you could possibly mate with already has modified genes.

  Finally, there's the people who are too poor to be able to afford these modifications. And that'd include a lot of people worldwide. They'd be placed at the bottom rung of the social ladder, and they'd be forced to compete with the "modified" on the merit of their own natural traits.

  If (as in Gattaca) the "modified" automatically and prejudicially disdain all the unmodified people, then there would be very little interbreeding between the two groups. And if there were some genetic tag imprinted in anyone who was modified, this would be even more certain, since no matter how good your genes are, if you're natural, you're out of luck.

  Ironically, if the "unmodified" have harsh competition with the modified people, and practically no interbreeding between the two groups, then the unmodified would be forced to evolve at a much faster rate than the "modified", and within several generations, many of them would be naturally stronger, faster, smarter, etc. than the regulations allow the "modified" to become.

  Moral of the story: if you mess with nature, make sure it doesn't return to bite you in the ass.

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Re:Some web sites...open source as well...

It always amuses me how clueless slashdot generally as group is about these things.... Despite best efforts otherwise.

I don't know about the best efforts otherwise thing. The weird thing about biology is that humans (because they're "living," I guess) have so many false notions about biology that they hold to so strongly. Biologists who don't know how to take derivatives never argue to engineers that fourier transforms are a lie (or whatever), but the opposite holds true at least 90% of the time. I used to try to explain things to people on /., but I gave up after being told again and again that I was wrong by people who don't know the difference between DNA and RNA.

As far as genetic engineering goes, genes themselves aren't nearly as important as people seem to think. Humans and chimps are supposedly 99% genetically identical, so why are the two so different? If we switched my hemoglobin with chimp hemoglobin, or slowly replaced my brain one neuron at a time with chimp neurons, I wouldn't become a chimpanzee. This is because the critical issue is not at the level of the gene products, but the REGULATION OF EXPRESSION OF THOSE GENES, especially during development. The uninformed love to spout about the wonders of genetic engineering that will unfold as soon as we have the genome sequenced, but the truth of it is that the human genome project won't solve any puzzles, it will just allow us to finally work with all the pieces.

As far as engineering genes goes, there is no intelligence gene. There is no tall gene. There is no smart gene. There are combinations of thousands of different polymorphic loci that will yield these phenotypic traits, but finding these associations is a much larger task than sequencing the genome. This is something molecular neuroscientists can't get right even today, when they make their mice that have some gene knocked out or overexpress some GluR subunit wherever, then try to draw conclusions about intelligence or aggression based on time to swim water mazes or ear bite statistics.

The real reason why human genetic engineering will not occur in our lifetimes, however, ("enhancing" humans, I mean, not fixing genetic disorders) is because humans have too many hangups about the sanctity of life. If you want to genetically engineer anything, you will inevitably have to go through hundreds and hundreds of failed attempts. Three-headed pigeon-boys with webbed legs and strange appendages. People aren't likely to volunteer their zygotes for this. Right now it's against the law to use NIH funding to obtain fetal tissue (pounds of which are THROWN AWAY at abortion clinics daily) to study AIDS, a 100% fatal disease that infects more than 11 people every minute. What are the chances that hundreds and hundreds of human lives are going to be thrown away to develop faster reflexes and 2 extra inches of penis length?

"Genetically Enhanced Superhuman"

... is a problematic thing. What, exactly, is an ehancement? We can start be removing genetic diseases. That's something pretty straightforward and few would object. But "won't get sick" isn't quite "superhuman".

Beyond this, it ain't so easy. The thing is, the human body is not a bundle of individual, unconnected traits that can be manipulated at will. It is a bunch of interdependent traits that have been optimized by evolution for a certain environment. Given that it is optimized, improving it may be difficult. Try to improve strength, and you may find that strength is a tradeoff with some other feature. Increase intelligence and you may get a higher incidence of insanity. Decrease insanity and you may lose creativity.

Not that it can't, or won't, be done, but it is no where as easy as many people think. Personally, I think our grandkids will likely not worry about most genetic diseases, but it will be a couple generations after that before we get anyone that would be recognizably "superior" in general.

Remember, there are two big problems in human genetic engineering. You have to be sure before you do anything. Mistakes are not an option. And you have to deal with a very long generation time. This isn't like fruit flies, where you can try things out and have the results in a few weeks.

back to the basics

I suggest starting here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, then, using the National Library of Medicine's PubMed search engine (which catalogues primary biomedical literature), search for reviews written about specific "hot" areas in genetic technology. PubMed is now a "killer app" because after finding an article that you're interested in, the abstract page has a "Books" link that re-formats the abstract with keywords hyperlinked to the seminal textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell. Now, even though a lot of these articles are written with a Biomedical audience in mind and filled with a lot of complex biology and jargon, definitions of anything needed for the "lay-"reader's understanding are immediately accessible. CHECK IT OUT.

Often lost in the shuffle of these big debates on genetic technology are the people involved in the actual WORK, and the ACTUAL capabilities conferred on humanity by that work; the pundits come out of the woodwork (including here on Slashdot: News for COMPUTER Nerds, often not BIOLOGY Nerds) whenever someone mentions DNA. The words "genetic engineering" sell newspapers and books. I recommend looking a little deeper.

Our site has lots of links

The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org] has a Biotechnology page which has links to lots of relevant stories and articles and other sites.

You can reach it here:
http://www.tecsoc.org/biotech/biotech.htm [tecsoc.org]

Also, we have a brief "What is Biotechnology? [tecsoc.org]" essay which explores some of the most important issues in that area.

A. Keiper

Some web sites...open source as well...

It always amuses me how clueless slashdot generally as group is about these things....
Despite best efforts otherwise. It comes up as
an "Ask Slashdot" related question regularly;
slashdot posts pseudo-science stories or op-ed
about cloning etc, and yet... slashdot hasn't
attempted to *contact the actual scientists*
involved to get their opinion.

Yes - I have suggested this as an interview topic
a number of times. Slashdot editorials are more
interested in "wow-science" stories than real
science. It annoys me. (but I still read slashdot).

Here are some pointers:

The largest public sequencing center in the world

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/

The US biological information portal

http://www.ncbi.nln.nih.gov/

The European biological information portal

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/

Some open source projects in this area:

(The bio* group.)

http://bio.perl.org/

http://www.biojava.org/

http://www.biopython.org/

http://www.bioxml.org/

Open source genome annotation project

http://www.ensembl.org/

Some Good Info

Human Genome Project Information:
http://www.ornl.gov/TechRe sources/Human_Genome/home.html [ornl.gov]

Human Genome Program, Genome Research:
http://www.er.doe.gov/production /ober/hug_top.html [doe.gov]

National Human Genome Research Institute:
http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/ [nih.gov]

On a more philosophical note, when those who are in their adolescence find themselves looking at a generation which has had their genes tampered, there will be prejudice. Lots of it. It can't be avoided.

But what about those who got vaccines at birth? Those who never had to worry about smallpox, polio, etc.? Every generation we go through is healthier than the last, constantly improving. Genetic research will be an issue, obviously, but it's not that unbelivable or radical. Just another step in the same direction.
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Try NCBI

One resource I'd strongly recommend is the National Center for Biotechnology Information [nih.gov]. I'm a professional working in the field of Proteomics (the protein equivalent of Genomics) and NCBI is an outstanding clearinghouse of information. It also has good links to other sites. If you really want to see some of the science that's going on using genomic information (and are willing to put up with a somewhat dry, utilitarian attitude), it's a good place to look.