The Next Great GMO Debate

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Monday August 31, 2015 · 8:47 AM PDT

2015/08/31 · 08:47

This is the title of an article I stumbled across from MIT Technology Review.

I've written previouslyabout how the nature of GMO's are changing. Instead of taking a gene from bacteria and randomly splicing it into the genome of a plant (transgenic modification), scientists and breeders are becoming much more precise - adding a single DNA base pair to disrupt a gene with CRISPR/Cas9 technology (subgenic modification). Moving a gene from a wild potato to a commercial variety to provide resistance to pests (cisgenic modification) If someone makes a plant in this way, with the result being a genome that could easily have occurred randomly by chance, is it still a GMO? The answer appears to be no for US regulators, at least for subgenic modifications.

In the next twist in the GMO debate, we're skipping genetic modification altogether; we're just going to start crop-dusting plants with RNA.

raoul78

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Thursday July 16, 2015 · 3:35 AM PDT

2015/07/16 · 03:35

The title is a portion of the title of a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind.

In this paper, the authors relate the earth to a battery, that was slowly charged over billions of years as plants turned solar energy into chemical energy. Along we came and, over the last 12000 years, burned this chemical energy releasing the waste heat to space.

In this sobering paper, the authors calculate how much energy is left in the battery. As they indicate, the fact that we are using an unsustainable amount of energy is clear; what this new paper provides is:

Our synthesisdiffers from most of these treatments in two
respects: (i) it introduces the paradigm of the
earth‐space battery to provide a new perspective,
and (ii) it emphasizes the critical importance
of living biomass for global sustainability
of both the biosphere and human civilization.

They then create a sustainability metric, Omega. Omega is equal to the total amount of energy stored in living biomass, divided by the amount of energy needed to feed the human population for 1 year - in other words, how many years of food we have left. They calculated this number for the year 2000 to be 1029, and this number has been decreasing by roughly 200/decade since the 1970s.

raoul78

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Thursday April 23, 2015 · 8:25 AM PDT

2015/04/23 · 08:25

I wrote previously about the rumors that scientists were using a new biotech tool, the CRISPR/Cas9 nuclease system, to genetically engineer human embryos.

Nature News broke the story today that this work was just published in the journal Protein & Cell.

The scientists were using polyspermic embryos that made them not applicable for in vitro fertilization. They then tried to edit a gene responsible for causing the genetic disease Beta-thalassemia by cutting the gene repsonsible with the Cas9 nuclease, and editing it by providing a repair template that would generate verifiable changes in the genome. Their goal was to determine with what efficiency they could edit this gene. They injected 84 embryos, of which 71 survived for 48 hours. Of these 71, Cas9 had successfully cut the gene, but only 4 embryos had undergone repair using the repair template provided they provided - a success rate of less than 5%. Furthermore, Cas9 had cut DNA at what are called off-target sites, suggesting that even if targeted repair occurs, there is a significant risk of additional mutations. Their conclusion:

Taken together, our work highlights the pressing need to further improve the fidelity and specificity of the CRISPR/Cas9 platform, a prerequisite for any clinical applications of CRSIPR/Cas9-mediated editing.

My question to you is, should this work even have been done in the first place?

You say potato, I say po...GMO?

raoul78

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Wednesday April 22, 2015 · 2:55 AM PDT

2015/04/22 · 02:55

There were two related stories that popped up in my twitter feed today about GMO potatoes; the stories intrigued me primarily because they once again call into question what it means to be a genetically modified organism (GMO).

The first story I saw was about using (now-outdated) technology to delete a gene in potato that, when deleted, increases cold-storage longevity and reduces production of the toxin acrylamide when fried.

The second was the publication of a surprising result that sweet potatoes are naturally GMOs - sometime in early stages of cultivation, sweet potatoes were infected with a bacterium that inserted its DNA into the genome of the sweet potato. It appears that this event was then actually selected for during later cultivation in early human history. This means that sweet potatoes are an unregulated GMO.

Jump below for more!

raoul78

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Friday March 13, 2015 · 1:51 PM PDT

2015/03/13 · 13:51

Over the past few days, my twitter account has been filled with calls for a moratorium on the genetic editing of the human germ line, that is, any cell that will eventually give rise to either a sperm or egg.

Two and a half years ago, the breakthrough development of a new technology termed CRISPR/Cas9 genomic editing was reported in the high profile journal Science; it is widely assumed that development of this technology will be awarded a Nobel prize. It appears that in the two and a half intervening years, work on human embryos has already been undertaken.

From an aritcle published March 5th, italics mine

Several people interviewed by MIT Technology Review said that such experiments [human germ line editing] had already been carried out in China and that results describing edited embryos were pending publication.

Engineering the Perfect Baby, MIT Technology Review

If true, it means we have very quietly entered a new, ethically uncertain, era of human genetics. If you want to learn about the biotechnology, or discuss the ethics, read on.

raoul78

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Thursday January 30, 2014 · 1:57 AM PST

2014/01/30 · 01:57

Vitamin C is often touted as a wonder - an antioxidant found in high amounts in citrus fruits, it is generally accepted as a cure-all for everything from the common cold to helping to fight off cancer.

Vitamin C supplements dominate sales of supplements in the US, accounting for more than $200 million in sales annually.

But are high doses of antioxidants actually good for us? New research making the headlines suggest that these antioxidants may actually contribute to the spread of cancer.

raoul78

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Friday April 12, 2013 · 1:05 AM PDT

2013/04/12 · 01:05

This will be short and simple, and I'm sorry if its been posted already.
How many years of life have been cut short in the first few months of 2013 - an astounding 121,770.
guns.periscopic.com

Molecular evolution, autism, and a case for sperm banking

raoul78

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Friday November 23, 2012 · 3:29 AM PST

2012/11/23 · 03:29

A relatively recent article in Nature (Kong et al. Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk. Nature Volume: 488 Issue: 7412 Pages: 471-475 DOI: 10.1038/nature11396 Published: AUG 23 2012) analyzed what may be the largest amount of parent-child DNA sequence data so far generated to identify novel mutations. Surprisingly, they find that almost all of the variation in the number of mutations is explained by the age of the father.

My apologies if this article was diaried before, but if so, I didn't find it!

raoul78

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Thursday March 17, 2011 · 3:30 PM PDT

2011/03/17 · 15:30

With the recent events in Japan, there have been a lot of diaries and comments discussing what can happen, what sort of worst-case scenarios there are, but I have yet to see a diary discussing radiation and its relation to cancer risk. This diary is an attempt to discuss the possible health effects of what is happening, and to try and put some of the numbers we're seeing in the news into perspective.

raoul78

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Sunday August 17, 2008 · 1:37 PM PDT

2008/08/17 · 13:37

Let me start out by saying I'm not necessarily pro nuclear energy - I consider myself primarily anti-fossil fuels and I've come to believe over the last year or so that nuclear energy will be key if we want to get rid of coal and other fossil based fuels. Nuclear energy diaries may be the most contentious ones that are written on this site and since I started to comment in diaries on this topic, I've seen many of the same arguments come up over and over again, so I've decided to start a diary series to attempt to address some of these issues.

The first one tries to examine whether nuclear energy is really so much more expensive than wind or solar based solutions. If you're interested in seeing how much electricity produced from an overbudget nuclear plant in Finland, T Boone Pickens' wind farm, or a planned desert solar plant would cost, please read on.

raoul78

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Wednesday August 13, 2008 · 2:55 PM PDT

2008/08/13 · 14:55

What do radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and genetically modified organisms have to do with your food? A great deal actually, as I'm learning at the IAEA's current International Symposium on Induced Mutations in Plants. If you are interested in malnutrition in developing countries, Golden Rice, how plant breeders have produced a sizable fraction of the food you eat, and what this all has to do with the IAEA and radiation, please join me below the fold as I report on some of the astounding things I've learned from this meeting.

Poll

21 votes Show Results

I ...

21 votes Vote Now!

I ...

learned something

8 votes

stopped reading somewhere in the middle

5 votes

think Golden Rice is good

5 votes

think Golden Rice is bad

0 votes

am never eating Ruby Red grapefruit or california rice again

1 vote

or drinking irish whiskey (mutant barleyl)

1 vote

or cooking with sunflower oil

1 vote

A Government Freeze of New Solar Installations

raoul78

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Friday June 27, 2008 · 3:08 AM PDT

2008/06/27 · 03:08

Much of the desert Southwest that holds great promise for large scale solar installations is owned by the Federal Government, and managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM has received over 130 applications to lease government land for solar installations, and has now decided that any future applications will first have to wait for the results of an environmental impact statement of large scale solar plants on the environment.

Hat tip to gristmill.

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The Next Great GMO Debate

Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind

Genetically engineered human embryos are here

You say potato, I say po...GMO?

GATTACA: Are genetically engineered human embryos already here?

Can Antioxidants be Bad for You?

Gun deaths - a powerful infographic

Molecular evolution, autism, and a case for sperm banking

Radiation, Cancer, and the Linear No-Threshold Model

Myths and Misconceptions of Nuclear Energy Part I - Cost

Radiation, the IAEA, GMOs and your food

A Government Freeze of New Solar Installations