The Ed's Up #114
I've been at a conference on human gene-editing this week, so there are several stories in this newsletter about that. If you want to read only one, I'd recommend the second one. But first, some disembodied chicken heads:
That Time Europe Air-Dropped Vaccine-Loaded Chicken Heads to Bait Rabid Foxes
"In 17 October, 1978, Steck deployed the baits in a real field trial—the first of its kind. At the time, the rabies epidemic was spreading along the east shore of Lake Geneva, so Steck’s team created a grisly firebreak of 4,050 chicken heads. The team dispersed the heads mostly by flinging them onto roadsides and paths. For more remote areas, they used helicopters. From 1979 to 1984, chicken heads would rain down on the countryside. The program was a success. Over four years, the team dispersed some 52,000 baits, and wherever the heads landed, rabies disappeared." (Image: me)
The Quest to Make CRISPR Even More Precise
"Although scientists have been able to edit genomes for many decades, their tools were often cumbersome to work with, expensive to hire, or sloppy in their efforts. And some were frustratingly artisanal. By contrast, CRISPR, the youngest technique on the block, is cheaper, more versatile, and more precise than its predecessors. And scientists are racing to improve it even further, developing new versions that are even more efficient, that can subtly change the emphasis of genetic words rather than deleting them outright, and that make fewer mistakes." (Image: allispossible.org.uk)
What Can You Actually Do With Your Fancy Gene-Editing Technology?
"But gene-editing might be totally impractical for fixing common diseases, because they are typically influenced by legions of genes. If you took people with the highest risk of, say, schizophrenia, you’d probably need to CRISPR thousands of genes to bring their odds back down to average levels. That’s a terrible idea. The same is true for attributes like intelligence, height, sporting ability, or personality traits, which involve small contributions from thousands of genes, and a massive dollop of environmental influence on the side. So no matter how precisely we can edit genes, there are some things we won’t be able to edit our way out of—and certainly not safely." (Image: Andrew Brookes)
Gene-Editing Humans Edit Statement on Human Gene-Editing
"When scientists who work on gene-editing try to write a position statement on gene-editing, you just know they’re going to be editing it right to the last minute.That’s certainly what happened at the end of the historic International Summit on Human Gene Editing that I’ve been covering this week in Washington, D.C."
Rival Scientists Kill Recent Discovery About Invincible Animals
"Last Monday, a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published the first ever genome of a tardigrade—a group of endearing microscopic animals with a reputation for being nigh-invincible. Astonishingly, as we reported last week, they found that around 6,600 of the animal’s genes—a full sixth of its genome—had jumped in from bacteria and other foreign sources. And perhaps, they speculated, this massive horizontal gene transfer (HGT) explained the tardigrade’s famed ability to withstand extreme conditions. Just one week later, those claims are starting to unravel." (Image: Science Picture Co/Corbis)More good reads
- A beautiful read about the death of a whale, by Rebecca Giggs.
- Wonderful piece on the glory of "Bitten by orca", “Rough housing and horseplay", and other ICD codes. By Alastair Gee
- Carl Zimmer profiles a Russian refugee who figured out how to find important new antibiotics by making bacteria happy
- Who makes the rules for outer space? Maggie Koerth-Baker on space law, space mining, and space pirates
- Meet The Woman Who Made The Military Care About Climate. By Dan Vergano.
- Language Log on Uhs, Ums, and other verbal quirks, featuring a table with a column called "UM per kiloword".
- The troubled quest to make an artificial heart. By Joaquin Palomino
- The smartest thing I've read on driverless cars, by Adrienne LaFrance
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed