Can we make babies to order, what is synthetic evolution and what will human 2.0 look like?

All of these questions were tried to be answered by the participants of the "Not the Way of Evolution" evening held by FeyLab graduates from Israel and Greece at Hamada, and the answers (inside) are interesting

Babies on order

The first lecturer was Michal Dekal. Dekel graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in biotechnology and a master's degree in genetics and is currently working on her doctoral thesis on genomic stability in human embryos - in the first stages of development and in the stem cell lineages. This research was conducted in collaboration with the Genetic Institute at Tel Hashomer and the Center for Stem Cell Research at the Technion.
150 years have passed since Darwin realized that evolution occurs because of random changes that give an advantage to those subjects. Today we know that these changes are mutations that occur in the genome, in DNA. Mutations are also the cause of some of the various diseases we see around us today. Whereas today, 150 years after the publication of "The Origin of Species", and after the genetic code was deciphered and many genes were discovered (and many more will be discovered in the future) we have the technological tools to get rid of those diseases. Therefore today the question I want to raise is do we have the power to influence the path of evolution, do we have the power to intervene and perhaps bypass natural selection?

Let's take sickle cell anemia as an example of such a disease. Sickle cell anemia is a hereditary blood disease manifested by a defect in the structure of hemoglobin. The hemoglobin protein is the oxygen carrier in the body. Inside each blood corpuscle there are about 200 to 300 million hemoglobin molecules and they are the ones that transport the oxygen to the cells. When the protein is damaged, it forms a different (longer) structure which causes the red blood cells to deform into a sickle-like shape. Such blood cells do not survive for a long time, which leads to anemia, and in addition, the oxygen supply to the cells is impaired, which can cause pain, paralysis, many infections and, without treatment, even death. Today there is no cure for the disease and the proposed treatment mainly focuses on alleviating the symptoms - antibiotics, frequent blood transfusions and the like.

If our goal in the current era is to eliminate this disease, we need to know a little about its cause - the defect in the hemoglobin structure occurs due to a mutation in the hemoglobin gene. The gene for hemoglobin is located on chromosome 11, and since each of us has two chromosomes 11, we have two copies of the gene. Sickle cell anemia is a recessive disease, that is, it is enough to have one normal copy so that the disease does not appear. Although there will be production of abnormal hemoglobin because there is one defective copy, but the normal copy covers it and therefore there will be enough red blood cells with a normal structure and the symptoms of the disease will not appear. Such people are carriers of the disease and may pass the defective gene on to the next generation - in the pairing of two carriers there is a 25% chance of a sick child - a child who will have two abnormal copies and will be sick with all the symptoms I mentioned. Today there are tools that can easily identify who are the healthy, who are the carriers and who are the sick in the population.

Since with the patients, the problem is that there is no normal copy of the gene, it is possible that in the future, with methods of gene therapy, it will be possible to cure the patients. This was recently tried in mice, and it is a groundbreaking study - they took mice that have sickle cell anemia, isolated skin cells from them, with the help of an innovative process, managed to turn these cells into embryonic stem cells - those cells that can differentiate into all the cells in the body, and then injected these cells with the shape The normality of the hemoglobin gene. These cells were sorted in the direction of the hematopoietic system and implanted in the bone marrow of the mice, and they began to produce normal hemoglobin and were cured of the disease.

The process is still not safe enough for us to perform it in humans as well, it is necessary to make sure that it was inserted in the right place and does not interfere with the function of other genes. But even if in the future the process will be possible, it still does not prevent the transition to the next generation. In this process, the gametes are not changed and therefore the defective copy of the gene will be passed on. If we want to completely get rid of the defective form of the gene, another technology can be used - preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique in which the embryos can be scanned to know their genomic content. The technique requires in vitro fertilization - eggs are extracted from the woman and fertilized in the laboratory with sperm taken from the man. The embryo is allowed to grow in the laboratory for several days - by cell division - when all the cells are genetically identical, they all have the same DNA because they all developed from the same primary cell, and when the embryo is 3 days old and contains 8 cells, one cell is taken from it and tested. If we want to get rid of the defective copy, we will return to the womb only those embryos that are found to be completely healthy - neither diseased nor carriers. In this way, within one generation it is possible to get rid of the defective form of the gene - if we return only healthy offspring and not sick or carriers, it will not be able to pass on.

But if we already did in vitro fertilization, and took one cell from the embryo to test its genomic content - why test only one disease? The location and role of thousands of genes related to various diseases and traits in the human body is known today - why don't we test them too? Imagine a world where we could choose the traits of our offspring. And the truth is, this world is just around the corner. In the not too distant future we will be able to mold our children according to our will. By screening embryos we can select only those with green eyes or blond hair, or alternatively we can engineer the embryos as we wish - changing existing genes in other genes, even those that were not in our database at all.

Is the question whether to do all these things only moral or is it possible that we don't see the full picture at all. Maybe there are wider consequences for our actions that we may not be aware of?

To illustrate this point, let's go back to sickle cell disease. After all, we said that Darwin understood that only traits that confer an advantage survive - and sickle cell anemia is not really an advantage - why then does this gene survive and not disappear on its own? The disease is widespread mainly in countries such as Africa and South America. What is also common in these areas is the disease malaria - it turns out that the carriers of the gene for sickle cell anemia are immune to malaria and do not develop the disease. The protein through which the malaria parasite enters the blood cells changes due to that mutation and therefore the parasite does not infect at the same rate - it does manage to infect the healthy cells, but at a slower rate that allows the immune system to overcome it. Malaria is a disease that kills more than a million people a year, most of them children, and it turns out that the defective gene gives the subjects the same evolutionary advantage in the environment in which they live.
In other words, our ability to get rid of a particular shield today can have a far-reaching effect. And therefore, before making such a decision, it is important to be aware and see the big picture.
By the way, another way to get rid of this disease, the good old way, is one where we get rid of malaria, then the carriers of the defective gene will no longer have an evolutionary advantage and slowly the gene will find its way out of the general gene pool.
In conclusion, several points for discussion -
Is it appropriate to allow genetic intervention in embryos? Are we aware of the consequences? Is there a difference between curing a disease and improving a trait? Where is the border? Who should draw it? What should be the composition of the body that will draw the border?
Is it possible that by actually destroying a certain allele, we are changing the path of evolution? And maybe we are even delaying evolution by preserving the existing?

Will synthetic biology lead to synthetic evolution?

This is what Theo Anagnostopoulos asks, one of the winners of the FeyLab competition in Greece, who this week participated in the "Not the Way of Evolution" event together with two graduates of FeyLab Israel, in Hamada

What is synthetic biology - a new type of biology that includes chemistry, computer science, engineering and molecular biology. This is how Theo Anagnostopoulos defines it, a molecular biologist and geneticist whose areas of research focus on human populations, hereditary diseases and reproduction. He has been active in the field of scientific communication since 2007. He founded the non-governmental organization SciCo www.scico.gr whose goal is to simplify scientific topics to be presented to the public in creative and fun ways. He was also one of the founders of the Green Project organization whose goal is to promote and encourage the use of renewable energy sources.
Anagnostopoulos was one of the participants in the meeting entitled "Not the way of evolution" that took place on Monday of this week in Hamada, together with two graduates of FaymLab-Israel - Michal Dekal andRoey Tsezana.
Synthetic biology works in two ways, Anagnostopoulos says. "One way is the way of genetic engineering, they combine a DNA segment from different creatures so that they create a new bacterium, but they use existing DNA. The second way, which is relatively new, is to build a synthetic DNA segment and create a new creature with it.
We heard about malaria - a disease that affects 500 million people every year and a million of them die. The treatment is with the drug quinine. The problem is that the doctor found a way to quinine resistance. Scientists have developed a new drug called artemisinin that actually grows inside a plant. Farmers have tried to grow the plant commercially and this is something that cannot be monitored as a result of the known variability in agriculture - in droughts, other natural disasters and as a result the price of the medicine changes and it does not drop below 10 dollars per dose, a price too expensive for poor countries - those countries where malaria is common.
"A group of scientists from Berkeley cut and pasted DNA from several different organisms and developed a new metabolic pathway - the way the cell works and consumes energy to function. In 2003 they published in Nature Biotechnology that in this way they succeeded in developing an E. coli bacterium that produces Artemisias.
In 2008, the same team announced that it had succeeded in increasing production by one million percent. As a result, the production cost dropped from ten generations per treatment to one dollar per treatment. The pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis has registered a patent for the drug and will soon begin selling the drug in bulk at the cost of production - a dollar per dose. Other uses for the method is the development of bacteria that turn sugar into environmentally friendly fuel, others are trying to develop bacteria that will turn cellulose into biofuel.
The energy we need on Earth is 15-18 terawatts. According to the predictions, synthetic biology can bring any amount between 5-90 terawatts, which means that there is a chance that synthetic biology alone could provide us with all the energy consumption.
Another use is to create a new organism that will absorb the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And a crazy thing done with this method: at the University of Pennsylvania they managed to extract DNA from an extinct mammoth and they plan to inject it into an elephant's egg.

The future vision is to create a synthetic organism directly from chemical components and a DNA master plan. Craig Venter, one of the leaders of the human genome project, is talking today about the minimal genome project - taking bacteria and removing one gene from them one after the other, and trying to find what is the minimum necessary to maintain life. They try to reassemble the bacteria using only chemicals and of course add new genes that can, for example, produce a medicine.
Points to think about - what happens to the thousands of farmers who cultivated the artemisinin plants? Who said Mammoth wants to come back? The mammoth died for certain reasons - it became extinct without the intervention of humans. Who controls the technology - we can interfere with our children, we are lost and will have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on our health, why don't we make children who do not carry genetic diseases? How expensive will it be - will everyone have access to it or only the rich?

Person 2.0
The last participant wasRoey Tsezana, also a Paymalab graduate, who talked about possible improvements to the human body. How can we give people the ability to improve their vision? Today this can be done through laser surgery. Athletes like Tiger Woods have had surgery that gives them 20/15 vision - meaning they see objects 20 feet (about 6 meters) away as if they were 15 feet (about 4.5 meters) away, and some are able to see 20/15 (6/3 meters). Fortunately for them, this has not yet been banned for athletes, and it is important for them to see the golf balls better.
The future holds the possibility of genetic engineering using viruses. This method is designed to fight one of the enemies of the human body, the free radicals. The problem is that they are formed as part of the natural breathing process. If a muscle cell knows there are too many free radicals it stops working to give the free radicals a chance to be broken down by the catalase enzyme. The problem is that this enzyme works at a limited rate.
In 2005, transgenic mice were created that express an excess of catalase in their cells. These mice can gain better protection from free radicals compared to 'normal' mice. They lived between 10% and 15% longer than normal mice and also had less heart disease, and less cataracts in the eyes. Is it possible to do a similar thing in humans? Humans cannot be genetically engineered as mice are, because human generations are much longer. Therefore for humans there is another solution, genetic engineering using viruses. The idea of ​​injecting billions of viruses into veins, in an experiment on mice these viruses entered the cells and infected them with the gene that expresses the catalase. Even these mice, like those born with this expression ability, recorded a significant improvement in physical fitness.
There are several obstacles in the way of using the enzyme in humans. First, it is not certain that what works in mice will work in humans. Secondly, it is desirable to improve the safety of the use of viruses because they may cause damage and not only perform their duties.
The third example of human improvement is also taken from the living world - eternal restoration. There are animals such as the salamander that can regrow limbs. The snails beat them all because they can even grow their heads. But there is an animal that beats them all the hydra. Like the mythological hydra, every head that was cut off would grow two, there is an animal that is very close to it, the hydra. This animal includes one leg, a head containing a mouth and an undetermined number of hunting arms, although unlike the mythological hydra it is only 3 millimeters long, but it has much better rehabilitation abilities than the snail. the hunting arm. But even the severed hunting arm will regenerate the entire hydra.
If we take the hydra and break it down into the thousands of cells it is made of, the cells will reconnect into clusters of 10 cells and each cluster will build its own new hydra. The reason for this is that the hydra's body is full of embryonic stem cells and they are the ones that are able to rebuild the hydra. In fact the hydra can be said to be an eternal fetus.
A person does not have such cells in adulthood. But the positive side is that 3 years ago there was a breakthrough in stem cell research. Three different laboratories have shown that it is possible to transform normal human skin cells through genetic engineering into a kind of stem cells. These are called induced stem cells. Is it possible to engineer a person or inject into his body stem cells that will restore worn out organs or create a new organ or at least the nerve cell that dies of old age in the brain.
However, it is worth noting that embryonic stem cells are dangerous without control. If we inject them just like that into the body, we will get cancerous tumors. We will therefore have to instruct them how to restore the body and create a new life. If we succeed - a life without death, without accidents and without diseases.
Finally Cezana asks some questions: are we allowed to play with human material (my answer is yes); How will society change as a result of human improvement (for the better) Is the Earth capable of dealing with immortality? Yes.

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Why science fiction is necessary for our survival in the future
• Greetings from the future camp
• On eugenics and genetics - how genetic engineering will change the vision of the superior race