Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Go Shrink Yourself

Here's an idea for saving our planet: make people smaller.

Sounds crazy, right? Nobody wants to be small. Everybody wants to be big. How would you make people smaller, anyway? Genetic modification? Wouldn't it be horribly risky? Even if it worked, wouldn't it be embarrassing and dangerous to be smaller than other people? I can already hear you snickering, "You first."

You're right. It's dangerous and crazy. But it might be less dangerous and crazy than the alternatives.

Our planet is in trouble. We're overheating its atmosphere. We're exhausting its resources. Just about every analysis suggests that we have no hope of averting disaster using known technologies. Solar power, wind, carbon caps—we should do all of that. But it won't come close to being enough. And even if we invent some brilliant solution to climate change, the next environmental crisis is just around the corner. There are simply too many people using too many resources. We're overtaxing our planet.

Could we get more resources from other planets? Theoretically, sure. But right now, we can't even afford to go back to the moon.

This is where contrarian thinking comes in handy. Maybe we don't have to find more resources. Maybe we can reduce the number of people.

That's the agenda of the Optimum Population Trust, which has just released an analysis of the environmental costs of bringing new children into the world. "Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change," says the trust's press release. Likewise, other environmental challenges—soil erosion, water shortage, deforestation, fish depletion, starvation—"would be easier to solve with fewer people."

The argument is totally, screamingly, urgently correct. Yet, as David Fahrenthold reported in yesterday's Washington Post, the Obama administration won't touch it, and a U.N. official calls it "an insult to developing countries." Why the resistance? Because everyone fears coercive population control. The only thing more hard-wired than our desire to procreate is our desire to fornicate.

So: If we're devouring our planet, and we can't find more resources, and we refuse to have fewer children, where does that leave us?

Hence my proposal: Shrinking our numbers isn't the only way to reduce our environmental impact. Another way is to shrink our size. Don't tell me it's impossible. Look what we've done to dogs.

If you come up with a less crazy solution, let me know.

Dog Medicine and Dog Breeding

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tentatively approved a flu vaccine for dogs. The agency said the vaccine's purpose was "the control of disease associated with canine influenza virus infection, type A, subtype H3N8," which "has now been detected in dogs in 30 states." The vaccine was approved only after "the acceptance of data supporting product purity, safety and a reasonable expectation of efficacy."

At the time, I thought this was a nice expression of man's love for his best friend. We don't just develop medicines for ourselves; we also make them for animals under our care. And we don't just treat your dog like, well, a lab animal; we test the vaccine first to be sure it's safe.

Then I saw this follow-up from Donald McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:

Some veterinarians have found that the dogs that tend to die from [this flu] are the "brachycephalics"—dogs with short snub noses. Just as obesity has proved dangerous to human flu victims because of the weight on their chests, being bred to have a short, bent respiratory tract is dangerous for dogs. "It really puts a strain on their ability to breathe," Dr. Crawford said. "They can't move air in and out of their lungs."

This is the kind of thing that sickens me about dog breeding. This health defect we're so generously treating? We caused it. As I've noted before, dogs are a 15,000-year reckless genetic experiment. We've bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, and retrievers for obedience. We've given some dogs legs so short they couldn't run, and we've given others, such as the unlucky pooches now dying of H3N8 flu, noses so flat they couldn't breathe.

So congratulations to us. We're now trying to fix a problem we created. Will this teach us to stop breeding such defects into animals? Don't count on it. Some creatures are just slow to learn.

Minicows

A few weeks ago, I noticed an article in the Los Angeles Times about "minicows." "In the last few years, ranchers across the country have been snapping up mini Hereford and Angus calves that fit in a person's lap," wrote reporter P.J. Huffstutter. "Today, there are more than 300 miniature-Hereford breeders in the U.S., up from fewer than two dozen in 2000. And there are about 20,000 minicows, compared with fewer than 5,000 a decade ago ..."

Huffstutter explains the animals' virtues. Mini-Herefords "consume about half [the feed] of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers," he notes. "Farmers who raise mini Jerseys brag how each animal provides 2 to 3 gallons of milk a day." Grass-fed minicows also "reached their mature weight faster, so they could be sold for meat sooner."

I was all set to write about minicows as the latest human manipulation of animal genetics. Then I realized that I had it backward. According to Huffstutter:

Minicows are not genetically engineered to be tiny, and they're not dwarfs. They are drawn from original breeds brought to the U.S. from Europe in the 1800s that were smaller than today's bovine giants, said Ron Lemenager, professor of animal science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. ... Big cows emerged as a product of the 1950s and '60s, when farmers were focused on getting more meat and didn't fret as much about the efficient use of animal feed or grasslands. "Feed prices were relatively cheap, and grazing lands were accessible," Lemenager said. "The plan was to get more meat per animal. But it went way too far. The animals got too big and eat so much."

In a way, this makes minicows even more fascinating. We did manipulate cows' genes for our purposes. We adapted them to our environment: plentiful land and feed. But then our environment changed. It became better suited to natural cows—or, more accurately, cows that were the product of human manipulation up to a century ago—than to the artificial cows of the last 50 years. So artifice unraveled itself. We went back to the original gene pool. Except that now, having becoming used to oversized 20th-century cows, we call the modern offspring of their ordinary-sized predecessors "minicows."

Cows aren't the only animals we can shrink. Two years ago, when parents of a disabled girl "attenuated" her growth through surgery and hormones, I argued that

economic and ecological forces are going [that] way. Smaller people consume fewer resources, live longer, and are cheaper to transport. They can fit in a Hyundai. Forty-five years ago, if you were 6 feet tall, you couldn't fly in a NASA space capsule. Now, you can barely fly coach. Blessed are the short, for they shall inherit the earth.

That's certainly the argument for minicows. They fit the latest "trend in farm efficiency—the move to ranchettes, smaller operations run by families or small groups of workers," Huffstutter writes. Today's ecology and economics demand smaller livestock.

The same is true of people. We're getting too fat for our planet. Many of us no longer fit old-fashioned toilets, ambulances, or coffins. Yet we've become so accustomed to our new size that only 15 percent of obese people now recognize themselves as obese. Fearing the economic consequences, governments around the world are groping for measures to restore us to our previous size. If they succeed, I wonder what we'll call the thin people of tomorrow. Minihumans, anyone?

Real Resurrection

Now I'm less incredulous. Agence France Presse reports:

Japanese scientists said [Nov. 18] they had created a cloned embryo from the dead body of an endangered species of rabbit and are hoping for a birth. ... Professor Yoshihiko Hosoi of Kinki University ... said his team had extracted a cell from a dead Amami rabbit's ear and put it into the egg of an ordinary rabbit. "After we confirmed that the egg developed into a cloned embryo, we put it back into the fallopian tube of the host mother," Hosoi said. "In about 30 days the host mother may give birth to a baby rabbit which has the gene information of Amami rabbit."

Kinki, indeed. So the due date for this clone of a dead member of a dying species is somewhere in mid-December. And this comes just six months after scientists reported in PLOS One:

We isolated a transcriptional enhancer element from the genome of an extinct marsupial, the Tasmanian tiger ... obtained from 100 year-old ethanol-fixed tissues from museum collections. ... Using a transgenic approach, it was possible to resurrect DNA function in transgenic mice. ... Our method using transgenesis can be used to explore the function of regulatory and protein-coding sequences obtained from any extinct species in an in vivo model system, providing important insights into gene evolution and diversity.

There you have it: a rationale for, and pilot demonstration of, the resurrection of DNA from extinct species. Tissue taken from a museum and brought to life in a mouse.

You can save a species by cloning new members from its corpses. Or you can reactivate part of the DNA of an extinct species by integrating it into an existing species. Or you can reassemble a whole member of an extinct species (the mammoth) by incrementally reengineering its known DNA from a closely related existing species (the Indian elephant). Scientists seem to be making progress on the first two ideas. It's hard to believe they won't try the third.

Little Green Men

The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!

I didn't believe it when I heard the report was in the Sunday Times of London. This, after all, is the paper that butchered the gay sheep story and can't find any evidence to back up its disputed paraphrases of James Watson. But the original report, which the Sunday Times neglects to mention, turns out to have been published in a scientific journal, Fertility and Sterility. It's titled, "Genetic modification of preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESC) by recombinant lentiviral vectors: efficient and stable method for creating transgenic embryos and ESC."

For those of you who don't have access to the pricey journal, the New York Times boils down the experiment: Scientists "put a gene for a fluorescent protein into the single-celled human embryo," and "after the embryo divided for three days, all the cells in the embryo glowed."

What's new in this experiment isn't genetic modification of humans. We've already done that in limited doses, through the same viral technique. What's new is that because this was a single-celled embryo, every cell it went on to produce, including egg and sperm cells, would (except for the diploid-haploid transition, which gets complicated) carry the same genetic tweak. If the embryo were implanted and grew into an adult, its fluorescent gene would be passed down like any other. This is called germline modification. If you wanted to transform our species or give your offspring an advantage that persists through generations, this is how you'd do it.

Naturally, genetic watchdog groups are freaked out. Human Genetics Alert calls it a prelude to "eugenics" and "designer babies" and demands an "international moratorium on such experiments." The Center for Genetics and Society says it "could push us toward a GATTACA-like world" dominated by "the genetically enhanced."

The scientists, based at Cornell University, offer several responses. First, they used no U.S. federal funds, so no legal restrictions were violated. Second, the gene conveyed no enhancements; it was just a green "marker" to help them see whether it was replicated in subsequent cell divisions. Third, the experiment "was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," due to pre-existing chromosomal defects. Fourth, they destroyed the embryo after five days, as required by a Cornell review committee.

The watchdog groups are alarmed because Britain's parliament is presently debating legislation to lift restrictions on human embryonic genetic modification. (See yesterday's post about the bill's pregnant-man loophole.) But proponents of the legislation point out that the law would still ban growing such embryos beyond 14 days or transferring them to a womb.

When you line up the points made by scientists and liberalizers, it's easier to understand what's really going on here. It's not that we're plowing unimpeded toward genetic engineering of children. To the contrary, we've drawn lines to prevent that: the 14-day limit and the no-implantation rule. What's going on is that by drawing these lines, we've created a zone where virtually no legal or moral rules apply. Look at the American and British treatment of cloning, and you'll see the same pattern. You can clone embryos, mix species, and engineer all you want, as long as you don't implant the embryos or grow them beyond 14 days.

Maybe this system will allow us to make important scientific discoveries and conquer diseases without crossing the lines we've drawn. On the other hand, maybe it'll turn embryos into a testing ground for techniques that we'll use for people-engineering when we're ready to go there. Or maybe we'll relax the rules a bit at a time, extending our techniques to more advanced embryos as we test and refine them. We'll tell ourselves that we're curing genetic diseases in the womb so that babies and their babies will be born healthy.

The argument for the latter scenario is that, far from being diabolical, the idea of loosening the 14-day rule makes a lot of sense. The Cornell scientists point out that genetically modified embryos "could be used to study how diseases develop" and that "in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests." The longer you grow the embryo, the more you learn.

How long could we grow genetically modified embryos if we lift the 14-day rule? According to the New York Times, "A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said the Cornell work would not be classified as gene therapy in need of federal review, because a test-tube embryo is not considered a person under the regulations." Roughly speaking, U.S. law confers personhood at viability. That's five months or so. Plenty of time for good work to be done.

I don't mean to make this scenario sound imminent. But as we ease ourselves into the world of genetic engineering, let's notice what we're doing. We're chalking off a zone where the ethics of human manipulation don't apply, on the grounds that the human entities we're manipulating aren't human beings. Seven years ago, scientists and supportive ethicists set up a similar ethics-free zone based on origin: Human embryos produced by fertilization were protected, while those produced by cloning were fair game. Now we've shifted to lines based on age and location.

Will these lines hold? You can't dismiss the fear that they won't as slippery-slope nonsense from the anti-abortion crowd. Embryo research is fundamentally different from abortion. If you're a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, you have no incentive to prolong it. But if you're a scientist with an embryo modified for research, you have lots of good reasons to keep growing it and studying it. The only things holding you back are your conscience, your review board, and the law.

Here's my prediction: We won't end up extending species-mixing beyond the 14-day line. Nor will we end up deliberately growing embryos past that point for harvestable tissue, as I previously speculated. But we will extend germline genetic engineering all the way through pregnancy and beyond, and our grandchildren will wonder why it was ever controversial.

A Womb Without a Woman

Today I've been reading up on the trans-Atlantic news about a genetically modified human embryo. I'll have some thoughts on that shortly. In the meantime, while reading Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill as part of my research, I noticed what might be a loophole. I'll point it out here, since the bill is being debated by the British parliament right now.

The bill proposes to lift previous restrictions on tinkering with human embryos. To reassure critics and the public, it promises to prevent altered embryos from growing into people. Here's the relevant legislative language:

No person shall place in a woman—

(a) an embryo other than a permitted embryo (as defined by section 3ZA), or

(b) any gametes other than permitted eggs or permitted sperm (as so defined). ...

No person shall place in a woman—

(a) a human admixed embryo,

(b) any other embryo that is not a human embryo, or

(c) any gametes other than human gametes.

Now, here's my question: Is Thomas Beatie a woman? Here's his first-person account, published seven weeks ago in the Advocate:

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. ... Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. ... I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. ... [So] I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. ... My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn't have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.

How did he get pregnant? By using donated sperm, as millions of women have done. He reports:

On successfully getting pregnant a second time, we are proud to announce that this pregnancy is free of complications and our baby girl has a clean bill of health. ... Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant.

Beatie says his initial attempt at pregnancy produced ectopic triplets, which cost him a fallopian tube and could have killed him. So he has good reasons to do IVF and screen his embryos. Suppose doctors find a genetic flaw in his next embryo and can fix it. That's human germline modification. The British bill says the altered embryo can't be placed in a woman. But under the law, Beatie isn't a woman. He's a man.

I'll let you lawyers sort it out. But it sure looks like a loophole to me.

The DNA Age

My colleague Jack Shafer says the Pulitzers are a fraud. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers," he wrote in a piece published four years ago and reprinted last week, after this year's winners were announced. In particular, he noted, "I doubt that one newspaper reader in 10,000 could tell you a day after the Pulitzers are awarded who got the prize for explanatory reporting."

Well, never argue with Shafer. Except this once. The winner of this year's prize for explanatory reporting deserved every bit of it, not just for her terrific writing, but because, for the past two years, she's been pioneering the journalism of the next century.

The prize announcement salutes Amy Harmon of the New York Times for her "examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing." Harmon's series, "The DNA Age," has actually covered far more than that. It began two years ago and has weaved its way through a thicket of emerging controversies. Her opening topic was people who used DNA tests to establish unexpected ancestry—such as whites claiming to be black, or Christians claiming to be Jewish—in order to gain the ensuing advantages in areas such as minority admissions, Israeli citizenship, or Native American entitlements. Then she turned to the psychological and social effects of studies that tell us much of our behavior is genetically influenced.

Harmon wrote about the moral deliberations of couples who used preimplantation genetic diagnosis to weed out embryos that might carry or pass on diseases. She talked to parents of Down syndrome kids, who worried that the eradication of Down fetuses by prenatal tests would turn their children, in the public's mind, from disabled people into freakish burdens that should never have been brought to term. She detailed our increasingly methodical genetic engineering of dogs as a potential preview of genetic engineering of human beings. She introduced us to women who had healthy breasts surgically removed based on genetic predictions of cancer. She explored fears that analyses of average genetic and trait differences among populations might foment a "new era of racism." She chronicled the emerging ability to Google your own DNA. She wrote about families who use the Internet to find and bond with other families over shared genetic disorders.

Last month, Harmon looked at "genomic elitism," the practice among rich people of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a full DNA analysis normal people couldn't afford. And a week ago, she scrutinized "surreptitious sampling," the law-enforcement technique of obtaining incriminating DNA samples by testing cells and fluids you inadvertently leave in public places every day.

Half of what's amazing about this body of work is that nobody else has done anything quite like it. In retrospect, the trends Harmon has covered will be recognized as the story of our age. We're living in an era of science and technology. Discoveries about ourselves and the world, coupled with our increasing power to transform both, are changing how we live, what we think, and who we are. This is happening at a pace unheard of in previous generations. In Sunday's Washington Post, another of my favorite science writers, Joel Achenbach, points out:

The most important things happening in the world today won't make tomorrow's front page. They won't get mentioned by presidential candidates or Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly or any of the other folks yammering and snorting on cable television. They'll be happening in laboratories—out of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change life as we know it. Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent.

The fact that such developments are now being recognized by the Pulitzer board and are blanketing the Post's Sunday opinion section is, in itself, good news.

But that's only half the reason to applaud Harmon's award. The other half is the way she has covered—or, in her case, invented—the beat. Lots of writers, including me, have opined about the abstract virtues or evils of biotechnology. We think we're being visionary or "morally serious." But real moral seriousness isn't about abstractions. It's about flesh and blood: the real people in whom, and in whose lives, the abstractions take shape. You can't really understand or explain abortion, war, or economic globalization until you've talked to people who have been through it. The same is true of biotechnology. If you go in with moral assumptions, the experiences you see or hear about may change your mind, or at least complicate it. That's part of the point of reporting, not to mention reading.

I can't do justice to "The DNA Age" in a blog post. Read it for yourself. It's as provocative as any sci-fi collection and as nuanced as any novel. Except it's real.