John Ward July 18, 2014 At the End of the Day

At the End of the Day

A Hungarian friend of The Slog has just sent me this link.

The detailed complexity of most of it makes my head hurt, but the overall thrust is very clear: A new technology announced yesterday has the potential to wipe out diseases, turn back evolutionary clocks, and reengineer entire ecosystems, for better or worse.

With ‘gene drives’ – negative genes that drive through a population until everyone is adversely affected – one can now produce a species that is 100% benign….or malign. The first target for such action, it seems, is the malaria-spreading species Anopheles gambiae. A new gene will sweep through its population, without exception, and make it incapable of spreading the disease.

We were supposed to have grown up quite a bit since the days of indiscriminately introduced mixamatosis; but if the information offered at this link has any veracity, then clearly we haven’t.

The idea at the core of this research is to eliminate all those diseases that represent a threat to Homo sapiens….just one species among millions on Planet Earth. The assumption underlying that idea is that Homo sapiens is the best thing that ever happened to Earth. I’m not sure I could go along with that.

More to the point perhaps, this is a prime example of the socerer’s pet chimp being given the keys to the Universe.

While the human braindeath at the EC is gaily approving this sort of stuff, other elements within the all-powerful Brussels Soviet have ruled as follows in a more immediate vein:

‘…on Wednesday, agricultural subsidies of 387.4 million euros granted to
Greek farmers in 2008 and 2009 have been judged as incompatible with
the rules of the EU’s internal market and therefore must be recovered
by the Greek state…..The ruling of the European Court is final. The case was opened in
January 2009, when the European Commission was informed about the
compensations which were to be paid by the Greek Agricultural Insurance
Organization (ELGA) after protests by large number of Greek agricultural
producers who have suffered damages in 2008 due to bad weather.’

I sense that this might be a case of the urgent humiliation triumphing over the important demolition.

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1

rtj1211 on July 19, 2014 at 7:19 pm

The technology behind this genetics is well known in the bioscience community – people have been looking at ‘site specific recombination’ for a few decades now. What that means is you say: ‘I want to stick this DNA XXX into that slot YYY’. The question was how you could do it.

Nature has numerous systems that do it for good reason: your immune system is as good as it is because your antibody pool is made up of a small set of ‘parts’ (analagous to car parts) which can be combined in millions of different combinations by having tens to thousands of variants of each ‘part’. By having the potential to have millions of different ‘antibodies’ which recognise one specific foreign molecule, you can set up your production line on demand to eliminate whatever disease comes your way. We’re really very good at that by and large……..

Various viruses which infect bacteria also have such systems, since their mode of reproduction is to insert their genetic make up into the bacterial chromosome, then reproduce lots of them before splitting the cell releasing masses of virus. Plenty of those systems were being studied in the 1990s.

HIV and similar viruses also have specific ‘integrase’ proteins, which allow the HIV DNA (made from viral RNA first) to be inserted into T-cell chromosomes.

The technology will basically be in two forms:
i. A biological ‘assembly line’ where you say: ‘this is the set of DNA I want to insert into some organism: make it please’. You will do it by optimising the mechanisms of welding the DNA together as quickly and cheaply as possible.
ii. Once you’ve done that, either you manufacture lots of that first in bacteria or, if you have enough already, you transfer your ‘gene drive’ into your desired organism .That will require a delivery mechanism and an integration mechanism. You can see those two things as a bit like an Eddie Stobart lorry on the M6 and a fork lift truck taking the cargo and putting it where you want it in the destination warehouse.

Like all science discoveries, you have to distinguish between what you CAN do and what you OUGHT TO DO, OUGHT NOT TO DO and ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT DO. In the early 1970s, when the cloning revolution started, the leading scientists of the day got together and drew up a set of rules for what should or should not be done. Those of us who worked in the 1980s and 1990s in the field were bound by their rules, in the UK through the COSHH regulatory framework. Broadly, we made DNA in bacteria which wouldn’t survive in the wild because they needed certain sugars to feed on (as their ability to make those sugars had been engineered out, making them ‘stunted’). We had to carry out the work under certain ‘containment levels’ depending on how dangerous any accident/spill could be (anything I did was singularly undangerous at the lowest containment level (which was pretty much swabbing all areas used before and after with neat alcohol, using specific areas designated for the work and disposing of all sterile gowns/gloves within that contained space for incineration.

I suspect that you are going to need another global accord on this technology, but the reality now is that the madmen and madwomen in the military will doubtless already be using it.

I really don’t think it will be used in the way you describe, simply because you can’t predict what the unintended ecological consequences will be. I do think it will be used to transform biomanufacturing, the automation of many aspects of biological research and the creation of high-throughput biological libraries for pharmaceutical testing (which to date has been rather limited in scope).

The more fanciful things are more likely to be biological weapons, which once again one hopes madmen don’t get their hands on. Trust me, I can draw you a template for weapons that could wipe people out using this technology, but I’m not going to do it. If I can do it, so can hundreds of others. It will have happened already in the USA, probably in the UK and likely in Russia, China and quite possibly Israel.

It is, of course, one way to ensure that ‘food security’ can never be 100%. For the psychotic warmongers who need that threat to feel potent, it is a wet dream.

For those of us who think that food security is the highest goal of mankind, it does beg the question what you should do with nutcases who want to endanger it through calculated warfare……

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2

KJH on July 19, 2014 at 11:18 am

We may soon need something to combat the alarming rise of the antibiotic resistant bacteria being produced by the sewage treatment plants which act as huge mixing tanks where microbes mutate.
Scary stuff.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/drugresistant-bacteria-sewagetreatment-plants-described-as-giant-mixing-vessels-after-scientists-discover-mutated-microbes-in-british-river-9615850.html

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the real gemz on July 19, 2014 at 9:34 am

This looks like another angle on the Arian Superstate by the NAZI aka EU .
Needs a: here a boom, there a boom, everywhere a boom boom…. nothing else will ever wash.
Boomzoom washing powder.

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4

Mark Deacon on July 19, 2014 at 8:31 am

No insult to Greeks, there is no way you can repay 374 million euros except by yet more hardship.

To suggest any solution other than the one the elites intend (to preserve themselves of coourse) is a pointless waste of energy as they are hell bent on going down the same path (preserving themselves). If you do not want to travel that path the ONLY thing you can do is pull the wheels off the vehicle as any diplomatic solution will only end up with you going down the same path anyway (that’s the con job).

More cuts it is then seeing as being part of the eurozone denies you the QE mechanism.

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5

PeterinPortugal on July 19, 2014 at 8:17 am

Excellent link in the intro. Thank you John for providing your Hungarian friend’s reference, and thanks to the person who drew your attention to this. Readers should note that at the end of this presumably well-intentioned research Paper the authors provide possible links for replies. From what I read it is already too late as the genie is out of the bottle, but sensible responses would presumably be welcomed by the authors.

As a non-specialist it’s a bit like a TED Talk, interesting, but you move on to the next one.
As a citizen of the World (LOL) I am scared shitless.

PS: yet again today the temperature here in Central Portugal is lower than in the UK. This has happened frequently this year. I just can’t get out of my head (I can, actually, thanks) the “New” Labour poster of William Hague with Maggie’s wig on, captioned, “Be afraid, be very afraid.” that TB & AC stole from The Fly.

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6

the real gemz on July 18, 2014 at 11:18 pm

Someone like guy fuwkes
boom boom!

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7

the ghost on July 18, 2014 at 10:16 pm

am just not shocked that supremacist think that way

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8

Ed P on July 18, 2014 at 9:08 pm

With Greece, the EU is now copying Mugabe’s attitude to Zimbabwean white farmers. All those faceless Brussels bureaucrats will be given a Greek farm each – it’s their right, init? – while the Greeks starve. Farking chumps the (EU) lot of them – when will the sheeple rise up and resist the new fascism?

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9

Sir Henry Rawlinson on July 18, 2014 at 9:07 pm

Thanks for the link JW. Time to reread every dystopian Sci – Fi novel in the bookcase. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner would be a good start.

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10

alexei on July 18, 2014 at 8:57 pm

“The assumption underlying that idea is that Homo sapiens is the best thing that ever happened to Earth. ”
One look at what Man has done to the physical world and all its species should call for his rechristening as Homo Improvidus, or Homo Myops.

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11

Per Kurowski on July 18, 2014 at 8:31 pm

Any idea for how to go about to recover that which must be money spent long time gone? Will there be some hold-outs?

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