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