Its time to question bioengineering Paul Root Wolpe

today i want to talk about design

but not design as we usually think about

it i want to talk about what is

happening now

in our scientific biotechnological

culture where for really the first time

in history

we have the power to design bodies to

design

animal bodies to design human bodies

in the history of um our

planet there have been three great waves

of evolution

the first wave of evolution is what we

think of as darwinian evolution

so as you all know species lived in

particular ecological niches in

particular environments

and the pressures of those environments

selected

which changes through random mutations

in species were going to be preserved

then human beings stepped out of the

darwinian

flow of evolutionary history and created

the second great wave

of evolution which was we changed

the environment in which we evolved we

altered our ecological niche by creating

civilization

and that has been the second great

couple hundred thousand years

hundred and fifty 000 year flow of our

evolution

by changing our environment we put new

pressures on our

bodies to evolve whether it was through

settling down in agricultural

communities

all the way through modern medicine we

have changed our own evolution

now we’re entering a third great wave of

evolutionary history which has been

called many things intentional evolution

evolution by design very different than

intelligent design

whereby we are actually now

intentionally

designing and altering the physiological

forms that inhabit our planet

so i want to take you through a kind of

whirlwind tour of that

and then at the end talk a little bit

about what some of the implications are

for us and for our species as well as

our cultures

because of this change now we actually

have been doing it for a long time

we started selectively breeding animals

many many

thousands of years ago and if you think

of dogs for example

dogs are now intentionally designed

creatures

there isn’t a dog on this earth that’s a

natural creature

dogs are the result of selectively

breeding traits

that we like but we had to do it the

hard way

in the old days by choosing offspring

that looked a particular way

and then breeding them we don’t have to

do it that way anymore

this is a beefalo a beefalo

is a buffalo cattle hybrid

and they are now making them in some day

perhaps pretty

soon you will have beefalo patties in

your local supermarket

this is a geep a goat

sheep hybrid the scientists that made

this

cute little creature ended up

slaughtering it and eating it afterwards

i think they said it tastes like chicken

this is a comma a comma is a camel

llama hybrid created to try to get the

heartiness of a camel

with some of the personality traits of a

llama

and they are now using these in certain

cultures

then there’s the liger this is the

largest cat in the world

the lion tiger hybrid it’s bigger than a

tiger

and in the case of the liger there

actually have been one or two that have

been seen in the wild

but these were created by scientists

using

both selective breeding and genetic

technology and then finally everybody’s

favorite

the source none of this is photoshopped

these are real creatures and so one of

the things we have been doing

is using genetic enhancement or genetic

manipulation

of sort of normal selective breeding

pushed a little bit through genetics

and if that were all this was about then

it would be an interesting

thing but something much much more

powerful is happening now

these are normal mammalian cells

genetically engineered with a

bioluminescent gene

taken out of deep sea jellyfish we all

know that some

deep sea creatures glow well they’ve now

taken that gene

that bioluminescent gene and put it into

mammal cells

these are normal cells and what you see

here is these cells

glowing in the dark under certain

wavelengths of light

once they could do that with cells they

could do it with organisms

so they did it with mouse pups

kittens and by the way the reason

the kittens here are orange and these

are green is because that’s a

bioluminescent gene

from coral well this is from jellyfish

they did it with pigs

they did it with puppies and in fact

they did it with monkeys and if you can

do it with monkeys though the great leap

in trying to genetically manipulate is

actually between monkeys and apes

if they can do it in monkeys they can

probably figure out how to do it in apes

which means they can do it in human

beings

in other words it is theoretically

possible that before too long

we will be biotechnologically capable of

creating

human beings that glow in the dark

be easier to find us at night and in

fact right now

in many states you can go out and you

can buy bioluminescent pets

these are zebrafish they’re normally

black and silver these are sieberfist

that have been genetically engineered to

be yellow green

red and they are actually available now

in certain

states other states have banned them

nobody knows what to do with these kinds

of creatures

there is no area of the government not

the epa or the fda that controls

genetically engineered pets and so

some states have decided to allow them

some states have decided to

ban them some of you may have read

about the fda’s consideration right now

of genetically engineered

salmon the salmon on top is a

genetically engineered

chinook salmon using a gene from the

salmon and from one other fish that we

eat to make it grow much faster

using a lot less feed and right now the

fda is trying to make a final decision

on whether pretty soon you could be

eating this fish

it’ll be sold in the stores and before

you get too worried about it

here in the united states the majority

of food you buy in the supermarket

already has genetically modified

components to it

so even as we worry about it we have

allowed it to go on in this country much

different in europe

without any regulation and even without

any identification on the package

these are all the first cloned

animals of their type so in the lower

right here you have dolly the first

clone sheep

now happily stuffed in a museum in

edinburgh

ralph the rat the first cloned rat cece

the cat

for cloned cat snuppy the first clone

dog snuppy for

seoul national university puppy created

in

south korea by the very same man that

some of you may remember

had to end up resigning in disgrace

because he claimed he had cloned a human

embryo which he had not

he actually was the first person to

clone a dog which is a very difficult

thing to do because

dog genomes are very plastic this is

pro-media

the first cloned horse it’s a halflinger

horse cloned in italy

a real gold ring of cloning because

there are many horses that win important

races who are geldings

in other words the equipment to put them

out to stud has been removed

but if you can clone that horse you can

have both the advantage of having a

gelding run in the race

and is identical genetic duplicate

can then be put out to stud these were

the first cloned calves

the first cloned gray wolves and then

finally

the first clone piglets alexa

chrissy carol janey and dotcom

in addition we’ve started to use cloning

technology to try to

save endangered species this is the use

of animals now to

create drugs and other things in their

bodies that we want to create

so with antithrombin in that goat that

goat has been genetically modified

so that the molecules of its milk

actually

include the molecule of antithrombin

that gtc

genetics wants to create and then in

addition

transgenic pigs knockout pigs from the

national institute

of animal science in south korea are

pigs that they are going to use in fact

to try to

create all kinds of of drugs and other

industrial types of chemicals

that they want the blood and the milk of

these animals

to produce for them instead of producing

them in an

industrial way these are

two creatures that were

created in order to save endangered

species the guar

is an endangered southeast asian

ungulate

it was a somatic cell a body cell was

taken from its body

gestated in the ovum of a cow and then

uh that cow gave birth to aguar same

thing happened with the muflin

where it’s an endangered uh species of

sheep

it’s uh it was gestated in a regular

sheep

body which actually raises an

interesting biological problem we have

two kinds of

dna in our bodies we have our nucleic

dna that everybody thinks of

as our dna but we also have dna in our

mitochondria which are the energy

packets of the cell

that dna is passed down through our

mothers

so really what you end up having here is

not a guar

and not a mufflin but a guar

with cow mitochondria and therefore cow

mitochondrial dna

and a mufflin with another species of

sheep’s mitochondrial dna

these are really hybrids not pure

animals

and it raises the question of how we’re

going to define animal species

in the age of biotechnology a question

that we’re not really sure

yet how to solve this lovely creature

is an asian cockroach and

what they’ve done here is they’ve put

electrodes in its ganglia in its brain

and then a transmitter on top and it’s

on a big computer tracking ball

and now using a joystick they can send

this creature

around the lab and control whether it

goes left or right

forward or backwards they’ve created a

kind of insect bot or bug bot

it gets worse than that or perhaps

better than that this

actually is one of darpa’s very

important darpa is the defense research

agency one of their projects

these goliath beetles are wired

in their wings they have a computer chip

strapped to their backs

and they can fly these creatures around

the lab

they can make them go left right they

can make them take off they can’t

actually make them land they put them

about one inch above the ground and then

they shut everything off and they go

but it’s as close as they can get to a

landing

and in fact this technology has gotten

so developed

that this creature this is a moth

this is the moth in in its pupa stage

and that’s when they put the wires in

and they put the uh

computer technology so that when the

moth is actually emerges as a moth

it is already pre-wired the wires are

already

in its body and they can just hook it up

to their technology

and now they’ve got these bug bots that

they can send out for surveillance they

can put little cameras on them

and perhaps someday delivering other

kinds of uh

of ordinance to war zones

it’s not just insects this is the rat

pot or the robo wrap by sanjiv tawar at

suny downstate

again it’s got technology it’s got

electrodes going into its left and right

hemispheres it’s got a camera on top of

its head the scientists can make this

creature go left right they have it

running through mazes controlling where

it’s going they’ve

now created an organic robot

the graduate students in sanji’s talwars

uh

lab said is this ethical we’ve taken

away the autonomy of this animal

we’ll get back to that in a minute

there’s also been work done with monkeys

these is uh miguel nicoles of

duke he took owl monkeys wired them up

so that a computer watched their brains

while they moved especially looking

at the movement of their right arm the

computer learned what the monkey brain

did to move its arm in various ways

they then hooked it up to a prosthetic

arm which you see here in the picture

put the arm in another room pretty soon

the computer learned by reading the

monkey’s brain waves

to make that arm in the other room do

whatever the

monkey’s arm did then he put a video

monitor in the monkey’s cage that showed

the monkey this

prosthetic arm and the monkey got

fascinated the monkey recognized that

whatever she did with her

arm this prosthetic arm would do and

eventually

she was moving it and moving it and

eventually stopped moving her right arm

and staring at the screen could move the

prosthetic arm

in the other room only with her brain

waves which means that monkey became the

first

primate in history of the world to have

three

independent functional arms

and it’s not just technology that we’re

putting into animals

this is thomas demars the university of

florida he took

twenty thousand and then sixty thousand

disaggregated rat neurons

so these are just individual neurons

from rats put them

on a chip they self-aggregated into a

network

became a integrated chip

and he used that as the

i.t piece of a mechanism which ran a

flight simulator

so now we have organic computer chips

made out of living self-aggregating

neurons

finally musa avaldi of northwestern

took a completely intact independent

lamprey eel brain this is a brain from a

lamprey eel

it is living fully intact brain

in a nutrient medium with these

electrodes going off

to the sides attached photosensitive

sensors to the brain

put it into a cart here’s the cart the

brain is sitting there in the middle

and using this brain as the sole

processor for this cart

when you turn on a light and shine it at

the cart the cart moves towards the

light when you turn it off

it moves away it’s photophilic so now we

have a complete

living lamprey eel brain is it thinking

lamprey eel thoughts

sitting there in its nutrient medium i

don’t know

but in fact it is a fully living

brain that we have managed to keep alive

to do our bidding so

we are now at the stage where we are

creating creatures

for our own purposes this is a mouse

created by charles vicanti

of university of massachusetts

he altered this

mouse so that it was genetically

engineered to have skin that was less

immunoreactive to human skin

put a polymer scaffolding of an ear

under it and created an ear that could

then be

taken off the mouse and transplanted

onto a human being

genetic engineering coupled with polymer

physiotechnology

coupled with xenotransplantation this is

where we

are in this process finally

not that long ago craig ventner created

the first artificial cell

where he took a cell took a dna

synthesizer which is a machine

created an artificial genome put it in

the cell

and that of a different cell the genome

was not of the cell he put it in

and that cell then reproduced as the

other cell

in other words that was the first

creature in the history of the world

that had a computer as its parent it did

not have an organic

parent and so asked the economist

the first artificial organism and its

consequences

so you may have thought that the

creation of life was going to happen in

something that looked like that

but in fact that’s not what

frankenstein’s lab looks like

this is what frankenstein’s lab looks

like this is a dna synthesizer

and here at the bottom are just bottles

of a t

c and g the four chemicals that make up

our dna

chain and so we need to ask ourselves

some questions

for the first time in the history of

this planet we are able to directly

design

organisms we can manipulate the plasms

of life

with unprecedented power and it confers

on us a responsibility

is everything okay is it okay to

manipulate and create whatever creatures

we want

do we have free reign to design

animals do we get to go someday to pets

our us

and say look i want a dog i’d like it to

have the head of a

dachshund the body of a retriever

maybe some pink fur and let’s make it

glow in the dark

does industry get to create creatures

who in their milk and their blood and

their saliva and other bodily fluids

create the drugs and industrial

molecules we want

and then warehouse them as organic

manufacturing machines

do we get to create organic robots where

we remove the autonomy from these

animals

and turn them just into our play things

and then

the final step of this once we perfect

these technologies and animals

and we start using them in human beings

what are the ethical guidelines

that we will use then it’s already

happening it’s not science fiction

we are not only already using these

things in animals

some of them were already beginning to

use on our own bodies

we are now taking control of our own

evolution

we are directly designing the future of

the species of this planet

it confers upon us an enormous

responsibility

that is not just the responsibility of

the scientists and the ethicists

who are thinking about it and writing

about it now it is a responsibility of

everybody because it will determine what

kind of planet

and what kind of bodies we will have in

the future thanks

you