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      "body": "Congratulations @rcs! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@rcs/birthday3.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@rcs) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=rcs)_</sub>\n\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "body": "I am trying to contain my excitement because CRISPR is something I have been looking at a bit and I have thoughts to share!  So thank you for beginning this discussion.\n\nI am not a scientist, not even really a citizen scientist yet I wouldn't say, I am however rather in a self education process, so I'm working on it.\n\nI first heard of CRISPR in this video on the Council on Foreign Relations youtube video, I have watched it several times now as I have been discussing it on paper with myself.  \n\nEmerging Technology Series: Biotechnology--The Potential and Perils of Innovation\nJune 22, 2016\nYou can watch it, listen to it, or read the transcript here: http://www.cfr.org/biotechnology/biotechnology-potential-perils-innovation/p37981   \nor just youtube here:\nhttps://youtu.be/0wN5Kj8dcxE\nIt features:\n\nLaurie Garrett\nSenior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations\n\nJulie Gerberding\nExecutive Vice President, Strategic Communications, Global Public Policy, and Population Health, Merck & Co., Inc.\n\nand\nDrew Endy\nAssociate Professor of Bioengineering, Stanford University (via videoconference)\n\nI appreciate Laurie's explanation of what CRISPR actually is for one, as a non scientist:\n\n“So let me just say that what we’re looking at now with CRISPR—and that’s an acronym, and it doesn’t matter what it stands for—but it turns out it’s a very ancient mechanism, billions of years old, that microbes have used, particularly bacteria, to expel unwanted entry of genetic material brought in by phage or viruses that invaded the bacteria. So you can think of it as a roughly 3-billion-year old immune system. It’s only very recently that our species, homo sapiens, discovered this ancient thing that’s been out there forever and has been the way that bacteria maintain their genetic integrity against the constant onslaught of phage in their environments, and probably the way they plucked useful things from the phage when they needed them, such as the capacity to override antibiotics.”\n\nI also appreciate how she pretty clearly points out a big issue about it, a relevant issue too with all of the Zika action going on in the “news” and talk of saving the day with GM mosquitoes:\n\n“Now, the problem is we discovered this, it turns out to be so easy, wow, boom, cheap. And then discovered there’s another layer to it, which is gene drive, which allows you to essentially tell a genetic segment to just keep on running, and to run in the next generation and the next generation and the next generation, so that it becomes a permanent feature on the landscape. Now, just last week I was web in on a briefing at the NIH, where the heads of two institutes were briefing the head of the NIH about Zika. It was a terrifying meeting. But at one point Francis Collins asked Tony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, well, what about genetically modified mosquitos? Can’t we use CRISPR to take care of this problem? And then we won’t have mosquitos carrying dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Zika.\nAnd Tony, very wisely said, well, there’s two problems with that idea. Even though the stock market, by the way, really likes it and is spending a lot of money in this. One, these mosquitos only travel in their lifetime about 200 yards. So if you’re going to release a single generation CRISPR, it’s going to have to be released every 200 yards, which is a pretty tough way to control mosquitos. And then, if you’re going to say, well, no, we want it to go on forever and make a gene drive technology, you better know what you’re doing and you better have a really good idea how you’re effecting evolution out there if you deliberately and permanently alter Aedes aegypti mosquitos. And Tony’s advice was let’s not do it.”\n\nIf you keep reading from where these excepts lead to in the transcript you'll see Laurie has some issues with the way science is going these days.  If I could speak to Laurie I'd love to tell her that we do not know what we do not know.  The importance of these tiny bits of life all have a way they were intending to go, if only we'd stop tampering with them and killing them.  We kill/mutate tiny life all over the USA and then somehow can't understand why we are all so sick, I can't really speak for other countries, but knowing the reach of the tentacles of the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Monsanto, and all of the other companies thriving off the rape of the earth and the murder, and likely suffering, of so many small species that maybe aren't so cute or noticeable as to garner the support of animal rights groups.  \nLaurie, you speak of a new appreciation of this microbial world, please connect the dots of extremely available information and use your position in this world to halt these cruel and unusual punishments being thoughtlessly inflicted upon those who cannot speak for themselves.  Save the microbes, save the world.  We have to question everything we think we know and be willing to go and look around at other ideas while using the incredible tool called critical thinking.\n\nI'm sorry this is so long and if I should not have put this here, if I should have made my own thing, I apologize.  Tell me please and then I'll know.\n\nAlmost done.\n\nDrew is funny and his one point connects to something else I will mention later in a different tale, you might “follow” me if it sounds like something you just can't miss.  Haha  \nHis solution offered at the end, during Q&A , sounds like something that could work, kudos to him.\n\nAt last we come to Julie, oh, she is a hoot, I've seen here elsewhere too.  Quite the work history, I'm sure people who like to look around would love her job with Merck, as found on her Wikipedia\n\"In late 2009, Gerberding became president of Merck's vaccines division\" \n\nHer Merck position is especially funny to me here:\n\n“But it’s just taking that same concept and accelerating it, and allowing us to think about truly novel ways of attacking cancers, using our own natural immune system, which is certainly something that should be more preferable than chemotherapy or radiation.”\n\nAnd I'm sorry, but if it is listed as a WMD why are they doing clinical trials?  Above the law in the name of science?  Not that I'm surprised.\n\n “Which is, I’m sure, why this is on the list of WMDs that our national security advisor just created. But you know, it’s like the concern about any biological threat. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean it’s a weapon of choice, doesn’t mean it would be the most terrifying weapon of choice. Mother Nature is a very good terrorist herself. But I certainly think it deserves consideration in that paradigm.”\n\nThere is so much in this video, I hope anyone interested takes the time to check it out.\n\nI'm sorry for hijacking your post, I'd love to hear what others are thinking here because this is a huge topic that ought that be discussed.  Thanks.",
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      "title": "Scientists Argue the US Ban on Human Gene Editing Will Leave It Behind",
      "body": "https://transgenicnews.com/2016/08/10/usban/\n\nAs the biotech revolution accelerates globally, the US could be getting left behind on key technological advances: namely, human genetic modification.\n\nA Congressional ban on human germline modification has “drawn new lines in the sand” on gene editing legislation, argues a paper published today in Science by Harvard law and bioethics professor I. Glenn Cohen and leading biologist Eli Adashi of Brown University. They say that without a course correction, “the United States is ceding its leadership in this arena to other nations.”\n\nGermline gene modification is the act of making heritable changes to early stage human embryos or sex cells that can be passed down to the next generation, and it will be banned in the US. This is different from somatic gene editing, which is editing cells of humans that have already been born.\n\nThe ban, added by the House of Representatives as a rider to the fiscal year 2016 budget, could have far-reaching implications if it continues to be annually renewed, according to the authors.\n\nIt “undermines ongoing conversations on the possibility of human germline modification” and also affects “ongoing efforts by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to review the prevention of mitochondrial DNA diseases,” including some kinds of hearing and vision impairments, among other serious illnesses that tend to develop in young children.\n\n“This latest congressional intervention appears premature… in that the germline modification debate is barely getting underway,” write the authors.\n\n“The prospect of a telling a parent that they won’t have access to these therapies is morally untenable”\n\nAnd the debate may be paused indefinitely, should the rider continue to be renewed in the budget in coming years.\n\n“We are on the cusp of being able to do [gene editing] safely, and the prospect of a telling a parent that they won’t have access to these therapies is morally untenable,” said bioethicist James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. “A ban doesn’t make sense the way a moratorium does.”\n\nMitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), a controversial procedure known colloquially as “three-parent embryos,” is one kind of heritable genetic modification procedure that is included in the ban.\n\nIn the UK, which some in the field see as being more liberal than the US in gene editing legislation, MRT was approved by both houses of Parliament last year, following a robust period of investigation, public debate, and multiple rounds of parliamentary review.\n\nClinical trials of human embryos that have “three parents” are due to begin, pending a final round of approvals by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK’s regulatory agency for reproductive medicine.\n\nDespite an independent bioethics committee finding that the FDA should approve clinical trials for MRT, if only with male embryos (which would not be able to pass on a heritable mitochondrial illness, should something go wrong), the FDA chose to reject the idea.\n\n“The reality is in the United States, nobody was ready to start a human [clinical] trial for MRT,” said Alta Charo, one of the leading minds in American bioethics and medical law and co-chair of a committee studying gene editing at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. “The more difficult question to answer is how this affects long-term prospects if this position rolls into the next round of legislation.”\n\nA spokesperson for the FDA said that the agency can’t speculate on future provisions, and reiterated to Motherboard that human subject research utilizing genetic modification is off the table for now.\n\nCharo said any pushback against the Congressional ban wouldn’t necessarily come from the science community, but that legislators may hear displeasure from patient advocacy groups\n\nCongress began looking into gene editing last year with hearings led by House Science, Space and Technology committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), who believes that the US should proceed with severe caution when it comes to genetically altering embryos with heritable changes, even if it means putting off curing diseases. Rep. Smith was also in favor of the voluntary moratorium on use of the gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, undertaken by scientists in March 2015.\n\nThis year’s Congressional ban takes the cautious moratorium a step further by enacting a law, as opposed to calling on scientists to self-censor and stop short of the clinic, and supersedes the global conversation around the issue, led by the National Academies.\n\n“Most of the scientific community members have been clear: The science and ethics of this new technology must be resolved in order to prevent dangerous abuses and unintended consequences,” said Smith, who also insisted that the US should “provide scientific and moral leadership” when it comes to gene editing.\n\nIt should be noted that Smith, chair of a congressional science subcommittee, is a known climate change denier.\n\nCharo said any pushback against the Congressional ban wouldn’t necessarily come from the science community, but that legislators may hear displeasure from patient advocacy groups, despite the fairly small number of people who have a vested interest in using this kind of technology.\n\nUp to 4,000 children a year are diagnosed with some form of mitochondrial disorder, according to non-profit organization the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation.\n\nIt could be possible that the waiting game Congress is playing is a blessing in disguise for the research, however. The legal systems and contexts of science funding, access to healthcare, regulatory bureaucracy and comfort with human embryo experimentation is vastly different between the US and other countries that are moving more swiftly, such as the UK.\n\nOne only needs to look at a recent Pew study that found the majority of Americans are uneasy with gene editing, and that only 28 percent believe it is morally acceptable to edit genes to give otherwise healthy children a reduced risk of disease. Religion figured heavily in respondents’ reasoning, researchers found, which isn’t always a concern at the forefront of the scientific community.\n\n“For the people in bioethics, in science, we tend to be secular academics,” said Hughes. “It’s sometimes a challenge to factor in the spirituality of the general public.”\n\nUntil the anxiety eases and the public begins to become more educated on the issues around various forms of gene editing, perhaps not rushing to the clinic is the right thing for American science.",
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      "body": "https://transgenicnews.com/2016/08/04/nih/\n\nThe federal government announced plans Thursday to lift a moratorium on funding of certain controversial experiments that use human stem cells to create animal embryos that are partly human.\n\nThe National Institutes of Health is proposing a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions.\n\nThe NIH imposed a moratorium on funding these experiments in September because they could raise ethical concerns.\n\nOne issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures.\n\nBut scientists have argued that they could take steps to prevent those outcomes and that the embryos provide invaluable tools for medical research.\n\nFor example, scientists hope to use the embryos to create animal models of human diseases, which could lead to new ways to prevent and treat illnesses. Researchers also hope to produce sheep, pigs and cows with human hearts, kidneys, livers, pancreases and possibly other organs that could be used for transplants.\n\nTo address the ethical concerns, the NIH’s new policy imposes several restrictions.\n\nThe policy proposes prohibiting the introduction of certain types of human cells into embryos of nonhuman primates, such as monkeys and chimps, at even earlier stages of development than what was currently prohibited.\n\nThe extra protections are being added because these animals are so closely related to humans.\n\nBut the policy would lift the moratorium on funding experiments involving other species. Because of the ethical concerns, though, at least some of the experiments would go through an extra layer of review by a new, special committee of government officials.\n\nThat committee would, for example, consider experiments designed to create animals with human brain cells or human brain tissue. Scientists might want to create them to study neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. But the experiments would undergo intensive scrutiny if there’s any chance there might be a “substantial contribution” or “substantial functional modification” to an animal’s brain.\n\nIn addition, the NIH would even consider experiments that could create animals with human sperm and human eggs since they may be useful for studying human development and infertility. But in that case steps would have to be taken to prevent the animals from breeding.\n\n“I am confident that these proposed changes will enable the NIH research community to move this promising area of science forward in a responsible manner,” Carrie Wolinetz, the NIH’s associate director for science policy, wrote in a blog post.\n\n“At the end of the day, we want to make sure this research progresses because its very important to our understanding of disease. It’s important to our mission to improve human health,” she said in an interview with NPR. “But we also want to make sure there’s an extra set of eyes on these projects because they do have this ethical set of concerns associated with them.”\n\nSeveral scientists said they are thrilled by the new policy. “It’s very, very welcome news that NIH will consider funding this type of research,” says Pablo Ross, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Davis, trying to grow human organs in farm animals. “We need funding to be able to answer some very important questions.”\n\nBut critics denounced the decision. “Science fiction writers might have imagined worlds like this — like The Island of Dr. Moreau,Brave New World, Frankenstein,” says Stuart Newman, a biologist at New York Medical College. “There have been speculations. But now they’re becoming more real. And I think that we just can’t say that since it’s possible then let’s do it.”\n\nThe public has 30 days to comment on the proposed new policy. NIH could start funding projects as early as the start of 2017.",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a content-detection robot. This post is to help manual curators; I have NOT flagged you.\nHere is similar content:\nhttps://transgenicnews.com/2016/08/07/synbio/",
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      "title": "Synthetic Biology Is Not Just Good, It’s Good For You",
      "body": "https://transgenicnews.com/2016/08/07/synbio/\n\nSynthetic biology (synbio for short) is a term that circulates freely through the tech world, but what exactly does it mean? It inspires both excitement and concern, depending on application and context. To advance uses of synthetic biology we need to promote better understanding of what these technologies mean, and how they can be used to improve the world around us in new and exciting ways.\n\nSimply put, synthetic biology redesigns existing organisms for specific purposes. This approach is multidisciplinary, bringing together biologists, chemists, software engineers, software developers and bioinformatics specialists, among others.\n\nThe industry is relatively young, but revolutionary uses of synbio already impact our world via materials and processes that clean up the environment, improve human health, feed the world and create new industries and jobs. Synbio innovations are unquestionably high-tech, but they’re often quite simple — often using the same centuries-old process used to turn grains and yeast into beer.\n\nThe chemical industry adopted synbio early on. Carpet made with chemicals produced via bacteria rather than oil has been on the market for some time (DuPont Sorona®). Synbio production methods provide significant reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse emissions compared to traditional nylon carpet manufacturing. Many other industrial chemicals previously made from oil are now being made using synbio, including some used in tires, skateboards, Spandex, adhesives and detergents.\n\nModular Genetics has modified an industrial bacterium to produce a surfactant chemical used in personal-care products. The novelty of this approach is that the bacteria grow on discarded soybean hulls, rather than sugar. The end result is the recycling of carbon that might otherwise enter the atmosphere, without diverting the production of sugar to feed the bacteria. The vast savings in energy and greenhouse gas emissions promised by biologically produced chemicals are significant, and will have a tremendous impact in combatting global warming.\n\nSynbio also offers the potential to directly reduce greenhouse gases, with several projects in development today. Ginkgo Bioworks leads a Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (DOE ARPA-e) project to engineer microbes that can capture greenhouse gas compounds such as carbon dioxide and methane and convert them to higher-value chemicals and biofuels.\n\nThe wide-ranging applications for synbio offer promising advances in many fields and industries.\n\nBiofuels produced from plants or microorganisms can counter global warming by reducing our dependence on petroleum. The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 in fact mandates an enormous increase in production and usage of biofuels. Using synbio, we can start with discarded cellulose-rich materials like stems and leaves of existing crops.\n\nAgrivida has modified plants to reduce the amount of energy and chemical processing required to make this high cellulosic material suitable for conversion to biofuels by microbes. This could enable cost-effective, high-yield production of biofuels without the use of any additional agricultural land.\n\nSynbio offers great promise for improving human health, as well. For example, drug development can be made more cost-effective using synthetic biology methods. In 2014, Amyris introduced a version of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin made by yeast. Traditionally, the medicine has been produced by extracting it from the sweet wormwood plant — a significantly more expensive process. Amyris recently launched its µPharm™(microPharm) discovery and production platform to provide the pharmaceutical industry with therapeutic compounds that are scarce, unavailable, or cost-prohibitive to produce via chemical methods.\n\nOne of the most pressing health concerns is the rapid rise of bacterial pathogens such as MRSA that are widely resistant to known antibiotics. Eligo Biosciences is using a unique synbio approach to solve this problem by modifying a virus that infects bacteria to target and kill only those bacteria resistant to antibiotics.\n\n Treatment of some acute diseases requires organ transplantation. However, transplantation is often hampered by a severe shortage of donor organs and organ rejection due to incompatibility with the donor.\n\nSurprisingly, pigs offer a promising alternative as organ donors, due to their similar anatomy and genetics. Synthetic Genomics and Lung Biotechnology are working to endow pigs with lungs and other organs that are suitable for human transplantation. They are using the tools of synthetic biology to modify the genetic makeup (genome) of the pig, removing genes that may cause organ rejection in humans and providing the pigs with “humanized“ lungs that offer better chances of success after transplant.\n\nFood contamination can cause serious and widespread disease outbreaks. Real-time detection of contamination during food production can be challenging, however, due to the limits of technology. Sample6 has used synbio to create a very rapid and selective test for Listeria, one of the more common bacterial food contaminants. The test utilizes a modified bacterial virus that infects only Listeria, causing it to glow, resulting in more rapid detection. This novel approach reduces detection time from days to hours.\n\nMany crops critical to the food supply require repeated application of nitrogen-containing fertilizers. Fertilizer production consumes large amounts of fossil fuels, creating significant amounts of greenhouse gases as a byproduct. Also, the inability of subsistence farmers in the third world to obtain these fertilizers makes it difficult for them to produce enough food for their families due to sub-optimal soil conditions. Synbio methods can help reduce reliance on additional fertilizers.\n\nLegume crops such as peas and soybeans have the ability to obtain their own nitrogen from specialized soil bacteria, but these crops are not grown for food in many parts of the world. Scientists funded by the ENSA (Engineering Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa) project are attempting to insert genes into corn, wheat and rice that would give these crops the ability to “fix” nitrogen from these soil bacteria, eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizer. If successful, this effort could greatly expand the world’s ability to feed itself.\n\nSynbio innovations are unquestionably high-tech, but they’re often quite simple.\n\nFood flavorings can also be produced via synbio. For example, the vast majority of the more than 10,000 tons of vanilla flavoring produced each year is synthetic and produced primarily from oil. That’s a lot of oil being used to flavor ice cream. Evolva has modified yeast to produce vanillin that very closely mimics the flavor of the natural product, without consuming oil to make it.\n\nFragrances are high-value products, but they can be expensive to extract or chemically synthesize. They’re also subject to significant variation in availability, price and quality. Production of fragrances using synbio can eliminate these problems. Several synbio companies are planning to enter this marketplace, including Amyris (patchouli oil), Gingko Bioworks (rose oil) and Isobionics and Evolva (citric fragrances).\n\nThe wide-ranging applications for synbio offer promising advances in many fields and industries. The White House believes in the future of synbio, and has prepared a National Bioeconomy Blueprint that predicts broad benefits to the economy, including healthcare, agriculture and biomaterials that replace oil-based raw materials in industrial manufacturing.\n\nWith an emphasis on R&D investment, facilitated technology transfer, regulation development and reform, training programs and fostering of public-private partnerships, this blueprint charts a course for the successful implementation of the benefits of synbio, leading to a range of positive outcomes for the world as a whole.",
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