Contact: Cathia Falvey
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Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

New Rochelle, NY, February 7, 2012?People visit social networking sites such as Facebook for many reasons, including the positive emotional experience that people enjoy and want to repeat, according to an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/cyber

Measurements of physical and psychological responses such as breathing rate, brain activation, and pupil dilation, designed to assess a person's psychophysiological state, were collected in a group of individuals participating in either a relaxing or stressful task or being online on their own personal Facebook account. The results revealed a significantly different experience for stress or relaxation exposure compared to the response to Facebook.

Maurizio Mauri, PhD, Pietro Cipresso, PhD, Anna Balgera, MA, Marco Villamira, PhD, MD, and Giuseppe Riva, PhD, from IULM University, Auxologico Italian Institute, and Catholic University of Sacro Cuore, in Milan, Italy, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, report the design, findings, and conclusions of this study in the article entitled, “Why Is Facebook so Successful? Psychophysiological Measures Describe a Core Flow State while Using Facebook.” http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2010.0377

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Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking is an authoritative peer-reviewed journal published monthly in print and online that explores the psychological and social issues surrounding the Internet and interactive technologies. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed online at www.liebertpub.com/cyber

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Games for Health Journal, Telemedicine and e-Health, and Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 70 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available at www.liebertpub.com.

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 140 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, NY 10801-5215 www.liebertpub.com
Phone: (914) 740-2100 (800) M-LIEBERT Fax: (914) 740-2101

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New study shows Facebook use elevates mood

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Cutting-edge MRI techniques for studying communication within the brain

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Global Food Crisis to Spur Sturdy Growth of Genetically Engineered Crops, According to New Report by Global Industry …

Using technology to enhance our brains sounds terrifying, but using tools to make ourselves smarter may be part of humans' nature.

It could be that we are on the verge of a great deluge of cognitive enhancement. Or it's possible that new brain-enhancing drugs and technologies will be nothing compared to how we've transformed our minds in the past. If it seems that making ourselves “artificially” smarter is somehow inhuman, it may be that similar activities are actually what made us human.

Let's look at the nature of the new technology. Last week a team of ethicists from Oxford released a paper on the implications of using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) to improve cognition in human beings.  Recent years have seen some encouraging, if preliminary, lab results involving TDCS, a deep brain stimulation technique that uses electrodes placed outside the head to direct tiny painless currents across the brain. The currents are thought to increase neuroplasticity, making it easier for neurons to fire and form the connections that enable learning. There are signs that the technology could improve language acumen, math ability, and even memory. The Oxford paper argues that TDCS has now reached a critical stage where its risks must be carefully considered before the research goes further.

Of course, not everyone is convinced that the technology will pan out. Some remain skeptical of TDCS, calling it a fad, the latest in a long series of “neuro-myths” that bubble up when scientists distort or embellish their findings in the name of publicity. But even if brain stimulation fizzles, the questions raised by the Oxford paper are going to be with us for a long time. That's because TDCS is just one of many promising new technologies that neuroscientists hope will enhance cognition, including smart pills, genetic engineering, and brain-to-computer interfacing. As deep brain stimulation has become the flavor du jour in neuroscience, bioethicists have increasingly given it a starring role in the thought experiments they use to tease out the philosophical dilemmas posed by cognitive enhancement.

Allen Buchanan is one such bioethicist. As a Professor of Philosophy at Duke University and a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, Buchanan has written extensively about the ethical implications of human enhancement. In his most recent book Better Than Human he makes a sustained philosophical case for pursuing human enhancement, arguing that its critics often proceed from a deeply flawed understanding of human nature. Last week I spoke with Buchanan at length about the ethics of deep brain stimulation, the history of cognitive enhancement, and what a world of cognitively enhanced human beings might look like.

Some have argued that enhancement, cognitive or otherwise, is somehow antithetical to human nature. Part of your response to that argument, if I understand it correctly, has been to say that the drive toward enhancement is actually very much a part of human nature. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Buchanan: I think that any appeal to the notion of human nature, on either side of the enhancement debate, is tricky and problematic and has to be handled with care. Yes, in one sense we might say that it's part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we've done it with computers and the Internet. So, yes, if an alien were looking at humanity and asking “What is human nature?” one of the ingredients is going to be that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.

On the other hand, sometimes people say that we shouldn't engage with these technologies because we could somehow damage our nature or interfere with our nature, and in doing so they seem to have a kind of rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer—a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that's the product of eons of exacting evolution.

Now that's one account of human nature, but I want to contrast it with another one from Charles Darwin who wrote in a letter to Joseph Hooker: “What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature” and by the works of nature, he's talking about us. And so these are two quite different views about nature and about human nature, and if you begin with the first one, the sort of rosy and pre-Darwinian view, then you're almost bound to conclude that anything we try to do to improve ourselves is bound to be a disaster, that any form of intervention is going to end up looking like reckless, foolhardy behavior. On the other hand if you take the Darwinian view and think of human beings as being like any other organisms—sort of cobbled together beings, products of mutation and selection and the crude development of ways to cope with short term problems in the environment, then you'll be more open to the idea that we should at least consider the possibility of improving ourselves.

Humans have done enhancement in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we've done it with computers and the Internet.

The list of design flaws in human beings is pretty long, as it is in other organisms, and so to think that somehow we're at the summit of perfection and that we're stable is to have the wrong idea of human nature. The misleading assumption is that if we don't interfere, we're going to continue the way we are, and of course that goes completely contrary to everything we know about evolution. In fact it might turn out that the only way to prevent us from going extinct, or to prevent some great worsening of our condition, is to enhance some of our capacities.

When I was a child, which was quite some time ago, in textbooks in public schools you often saw this depiction of some sort of primordial being pulling itself out of primordial soup, sort of a half fish half mammal sort of thing, and then just to the right of that in this line of development, there would be an apelike creature walking on all fours, then you see a Neanderthal walking partly upright, and then you see a human being walking fully upright, and then that's the end. There's no indication that things could get better or worse after that. And that's the picture that we're the summit of the evolutionary process and of course that's really just importing the old pre-Darwinian view and giving it a superficial coating of Darwinian terms.

Human enhancement has been a frequent subject in popular culture, even if its treatment there has often been superficial. Have films like Gattaca or Limitless primed the public for thinking about the ethical implications of these technologies?

Buchanan: It's interesting you mentioned both Gattaca and Limitless because they're quite different. Gattaca is, in a way, representative of the majority of films that tackle these topics, which tend to be very dark. They tend to play on the anxieties people have about these technologies, and they tend to take a very negative view of their social consequences. Gattaca, for instance, paints a fairly grim picture, because it looks at the effects of genetic engineering on human beings simply in terms of its potential for creating a caste system, and I just think there's more to it than that. Limitless on the other hand, at least as I saw it, seemed to be much more positive and seemed to convey that people could have quite legitimate interests in cognitive enhancement technologies, and that the people who desire these technologies aren't just cranks or people who have inappropriate desires.

“One thing that Limitless missed is the interactive benefit of these enhancements.”

One of the most common objections to cognitive enhancement–one that Gattaca addresses in the context of genetic engineering–stems from the fear that cognitive enhancements might exacerbate social inequality by disproportionately advantaging elites. You have argued, persuasively I think, that some examples of previous cognitive enhancement technologies, like literacy and mobile phones, have diffused rapidly across classes after some initial period of monopolization by elites. Are there good reasons to think cognitive enhancement will follow suit?

Buchanan: I think that it depends on which kind of cognitive enhancements you're talking about, especially which modes of technology are being used. If you're thinking about something like surgical procedures for implanting genetically engineered tissue into someone's brain, or if you're talking about very high tech brain to computer interfacing technologies or the genetic engineering of human embryos, presumably those technologies are going to be very expensive and won't be available to a lot of people. So if that's the direction that we go, there might be very serious problems of inequality.

On the other hand cognitive enhancements like TDCS and cognition-enhancing drugs may become inexpensive fairly quickly, and in turn might diffuse much more rapidly than literacy did. This is especially clear in the context of prescription drugs. Right now if you go to Wal-Mart there are over one hundred and thirty drugs that used to be on patent and have now gone off patent and gone generic, and a month supply of each of these drugs is only four dollars. Now that's a lot cheaper than the cognitive enhancement drug that you get at Starbucks. So yes in the future there might be a period when these drugs are on patent, and are expensive, but when they go off patent they could become very inexpensive.

And also it's important to bear in mind that this may not be something where access to the market is an issue at all. If it turns out that some safe version of TDCS has dramatic cognitive benefits, then governments may view these as very important for national productivity and they may subsidize them in the way they now subsidize education for the very same reason.

Cell phones are another example. No one dreamed that cell phones would become available so rapidly to hundreds of millions of people around the world. But some technologies do diffuse slowly, and where they diffuse slowly there's a potential for problems of inequality.

Assuming then that some cognitive enhancements will spread rapidly across socioeconomic lines, is there a fear that they might make society more likely to produce certain outliers on the continuum of human personality–say, evil genius figures capable of horrific atrocities. If this technology increases the set of highly intelligent individuals within a certain population, won't it also increase the chances that those individuals will overlap with the small set of homicidal, or even genocidal maniacs within a population? I'm thinking of someone like Pol Pot with the intellectual capacities of a figure like Richard Feynman.

Buchanan: At present we don't know enough about the connections between intelligence and personality to know how serious a risk that is but I think it's a risk worth considering. I mean there's another way to look at this, and that is that there is a general problem here. We've developed technologies, which are so powerful and so readily accessible that a very small number of people can use them to create great harm, and that's just due to the success of science.

Even today, without a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge, people may be able to produce lethal viruses that we don't have much immunity to, or a small terrorist group can acquire some plutonium and put it in a municipal water supply and kill lots of people. So in one way this is a more general problem about how powerful our technologies are and the fact that they can be used for good or for ill by small numbers of people—people who are not subject to the discipline of large organizations like states, who aren't subject to the logic of deterrence that state actors are subject to.

Now the other side of this coin is that if there's a general ramping up of intelligence, then presumably there's also going to be a lot more people who are very intelligent and who have good motivations, and who will be committed to trying to constrain the bad apples and prevent them from doing damage.

You also have to consider the possibility that cognitive enhancements may go hand in hand with moral enhancements. There's a great debate as to what extent bad behavior results in part from flawed cognitive processes, but even if improving our intelligence is not by itself is not likely to make us behave better, it may turn out that some of the same knowledge we're using to make cognitive enhancements—knowledge about the relationship between our brains and behavior— may allow us to develop what some people have called “moral enhancements.” And if that happens, that may be something that will at least reduce the kind of risk that you're talking about, because you're right that people who have a super-developed intelligence along with a moral sensibility that's dwarfed in comparison could be a real problem.

An incomplete picture?

It strikes me that the development of “moral enhancements” would probably rip open five or six new subfields in bioethics.

Buchanan: Oh I agree and it already is, and it's very tricky. Cognitive enhancement is something that's relatively easy for people to understand, because it's easier for people to see what's controversial about it because it's easier to see what counts as a boost in cognitive performance. When it comes to moral performance, we have all sorts of problems that have to do with disputes about what a moral improvement is, what the moral virtues are, and that sort of thing.

We also have interesting precedents, interesting examples of existing morally enhancing technologies, like religion, social morality, institutionalized morality—there's no question that these have increased our capacity to interact with each other. Even legal systems have been moral enhancements in some respect because they've enabled us to control our aggressive impulses, to find ways of settling disputes that are more morally acceptable.

People who have a super-developed intelligence along with a moral sensibility that's dwarfed in comparison could be a real problem.

And it might turn out that there are some biochemical interactions that might stimulate our moral imagination, increase our empathy towards others, or, in the cognitive dimension, might improve our powers of moral judgment and reasoning. There's a lot of interesting literature now on what are called normal cognitive biases, cognitive flaws in cognitively normal people. Some of these cognitive flaws might have bad moral consequences in certain contexts, and so it's possible that by reducing some of those we might make ourselves better off also. 

Putting aside the outliers, the extreme personalities, some neuroethicists are worried about what they call ''hyper-agency,'' the notion that as human beings become more able to control their lives and themselves, they also become less constrained by traditional limits, and that human wisdom will ultimately be insufficient to manage that kind of freedom.

Buchanan: Look, I think this is a genuine problem. It's the old problem of hubris, and it's important to recognize that it doesn't just apply to cognitive enhancement or even biomedical enhancement more generally, it applies to all human interventions, technological or social or economic or political. One thing I would point out is that even though the worry about hubris is a serious one, it's hard to see how it could be a conclusive argument against biomedical enhancements across the board. Instead it's like all genuine concerns—it has to be given due weight and then balanced against the potential benefits of these technologies.

So while I think we should take the problem of hubris seriously, I also realize that it's not a local problem for biomedical enhancements, it's something we face everywhere and that consequently, it can't be a conversation-stopper. We have to take a more fine-grained approach, because there's no sort of general answer to the question “how should we go slow” or “how we should use due caution” for all of these different technologies. Different modes of enhancement in different contexts are going to have different risk benefit profiles.

A lot of people worry that the widespread use of cognitive enhancement will mean raised standards in the classroom and in the workplace. And while that may turn out to be a net positive for society, there is a fear that individuals who would rather not participate in cognitive enhancement will be forced to just to keep up with their enhanced coworkers, and that such pressures would constitute a kind of soft coercion.

Buchanan: That does worry me; I think it's a very reasonable concern. Now, again, it's not a conversation stopper, it's not something that would lead to the conclusion that we shouldn't develop these technologies. I think the situation you've described is quite widespread in sports. Some athletes, or even a majority of athletes, would prefer not to use enhancement drugs, but they do so in a defensive manner to prevent being put at a disadvantage when others use them. It's also a concern with the off-label use of drugs like Adderall, drugs that have not been developed specifically for the kind of cognitive enhancement they are often used for.

It would be better if we would bring these cognitive enhancement drugs out of the closet, and do regular clinical double-blind trails with them

The worst case scenario is where large amounts of people feel this pressure to use a drug even though they would prefer not to do it, and it's happening in a kind of unregulated context as it is now (with Adderall) and many people may be led to set aside reasonable worries about bad side effects because of this pressure, this soft coercion you're talking about. We have a huge unregulated experiment going on in this country, and in many other advanced countries I suspect, where a large population of university students are using these drugs, and that's unfortunate because it might be that five years from now or ten years from now it's going to be discovered that these drugs have some large scale adverse effect. It would be better if we would bring these cognitive enhancement drugs out of the closet, and do regular clinical double-blind trails with them, and genotype the people that take them and later if there's an adverse effect, see if it only affects people with a certain genotype, and be in a better position to prevent the wide diffusion of these drugs before they're safe.

Again, though, it's not confined to cognitive enhancement drugs or biomedical enhancements; I'm sure there are lots of people who used to be able to qualify for a job without an advanced degree, and now they have to have an advanced degree, and so they're “coerced” into getting that degree whether they think it gives them that much benefit or not. Similarly, if you're raising a child in a society where literacy is a necessary condition for any job worth having, you're going to be under pressure to make sure your child learns how to read and write. So these aren't necessarily bad things, they're only bad if they lead people to disregard reasonable worries about the risks of these technologies.

“Yeah, we're going to need you to put those electrodes on now.”

Some of the films about cognitive enhancement make it look pretty dull in practice. I remember seeing Limitless and thinking “so this guy ramps up to these breakout levels of raw intellect and creativity and the best he can do is a Wall Street job and a fancy car?” And that's an extreme example—there have been other, deeper explorations of enhancement, particularly in the superhero genre—but on the whole it seems like the subject has been treated pretty unimaginatively. What have you thought of that's really far out there, culturally or intellectually, that cognitive enhancement might bring about?

Buchanan: While I do think Limitless was more sympathetic toward these technologies than most pop culture representations of them, there's no question it was a little disappointing in terms of what was considered to be a fantastic improvement in the quality of this individual's life. I think one thing that Limitless missed is the interactive benefit of these enhancements. Cognitive enhancements in particular tend to have what economists call network effects, meaning that the value of you having the enhancement increases as more people have it.

Think about having a computer. If you have a computer, that's good you can do a lot of things with it, but part of what makes having your computer so valuable is that hundreds of millions of other people have computers. Similarly with literacy, if you were the only person who knew how to read certainly that would give you some advantages, but you wouldn't have nearly as rich a world as the one we live in where billions of people are literate.

So, I think perhaps one of the problems with Limitless was that it portrayed this guy by himself having much more developed cognitive capacities than other people, so it overlooked the fact that if lots of people have cognitive enhancements, there might be completely new forms of interaction, new kinds of social relationships, new forms of productivity and human flourishing, or new kinds of intrinsically enjoyable activities that we just don't have access to now.

I have an analogy for this, and the reason it's an analogy is that by the nature of the case it's hard for us to imagine what these new forms of interaction will be, and how rewarding they might be, but here's the analogy. Consider two card games: one is the child's game of “go fish” and the other is contract bridge. Now it might turn out that in the future if huge numbers of people are cognitively enhanced, they will look back at the kinds of activities that people in our world perform and say “that was like children playing go fish.”

Think about the kinds of interactions that we now have, and the kinds of enjoyments and productivity we can have because of the Internet. If you try and ramp that up, if you magnify it by many orders of magnitude, you might begin to get an idea of how human life could be if many hundreds of millions of people were cognitively enhanced.

Because TDCS is thought to pair especially well with active learning, it's been suggested that it might be grafted on to media devices of one sort or another. Some have even imagined that in the future iPads and Kindles may come with these electrodes attached, so that you could read in some heightened state of neuronal connectivity. If such a technology were to become safe and available, what would be the first thing you'd read while attached to it?

I've actually heard that the people using this stuff in labs are using it on themselves the way in the way that the rest of us use coffee breaks

Buchanan: It's funny; I've actually heard that the people using this stuff in labs are using it on themselves the way in the way that the rest of us use coffee breaks. But that's a good question, I might go back and try to read an organic chemistry text that I had a lot of trouble with as an undergraduate. Or maybe I'd try to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the original German and see if it's still as impenetrable to me as it was thirty years ago.

You're obviously someone at the outer edge, the innovating edge, of a particular field. I'm curious as to whether you'd want to use cognitive enhancement technologies in order to go deeper in that field, or would you try to expand your range of abilities, like you mentioned with the organic chemistry.

Buchanan: I think that's a question that many people are facing on a smaller scale, because as information becomes available more readily through the Internet, more forms of independent learning are available, and as people live longer, at least people in relatively affluent societies, they're facing this question. They may have specialized in something for most of their productive life, but now they realize they have another twenty years—I'm 63 years old right now, and I'm sort of thinking about what I want to be doing for the next fifteen or twenty years, however long it is that I'm going to be alive.

And that's a real question, the question of whether I should keep hammering away at the things that I do and try to do them better, or whether I should make some kind of radical change and go into some new area, or a diversity of areas, and I think that if the technologies we're talking about are developed it's going to add to the scope of that kind of choice, and I think that's probably a good thing. 

See more here:
Why Cognitive Enhancement Is in Your Future (and Your Past)

Your life depends on purposeful, targeted changes to cellular DNA. Although conventional thinking says directed DNA changes are impossible, the truth is that you could not survive without them. Your immune system needs to engineer certain DNA sequences in just the right way to function properly.

Today's blog is a tale of how cells engineer their DNA molecules for a specific purpose. It also illustrates how an evolutionary process works within the human body.

Your immune system has to anticipate and inactivate unknown invaders. Living organisms deal with unpredictable events by evolving. They change to adapt to new circumstances. Variation comes from their capacity for self-modification. Cells have many molecular mechanisms that read, write, and reorganize the information in their genomes, the DNA molecules used for data storage.

The adaptive immune system executes basic evolutionary principles in real time. It has to recognize and combat unknown (and utterly unpredictable) invaders. Immune system cells have to produce antibody molecules that can bind to any possible molecular structure.

How do cells with finite DNA, and finite coding capacity, produce a virtually infinite variety of antibodies? The answer is that certain immune cells (B cells) become rapid evolution factories. They generate antibodies with effectively limitless diversity while preserving molecular structures needed to interact with other parts of the immune system.

Immune cells achieve both diversity and regularity in antibody structures. They accomplish this by a targeted yet flexible process of natural genetic engineering: they cut and splice DNA.

Diversity is strictly limited to a special part of the antibody molecules: a “variable” region encoded by engineered DNA. DNA encoding the “constant” region does not change in the same way. The diversity-generating process is called “VDJ recombination” because it involves cutting and splicing together different “variable” (V), “diversity” (D) and “joining” (J) coding segments. Immune cells do this by cutting DNA at defined “recombination signal sequences.” There are hundreds of V segments, about a few dozen D segments, and ten J segments. The various combinations of different spliced segments makes for a tremendous amount of diversity.

Antibodies contain two paired protein chains: a longer heavy chain and a shorter light chain. The heavy chain variable coding region forms by splicing V, D, and J segments together. The light chain variable coding region forms by joining V and J segments together. There are at least 10,000 VDJ combinations and 1,000 VJ combinations. Altogether, over 10,000,000 different heavy + light chain antibodies are possible through “combinatorial diversity.”

Not bad… but not good enough.

VDJ recombination generates additional diversity. Although cutting the V, D, and J segments is precise, immune cells join each pair of cleaved DNA segments at about a dozen different positions. Connection between the same two segments can have about 30 to 35 possible different sequence outcomes. This “junctional diversity” adds over 1,000 possible antibody combinations.

In addition, heavy chain D segment joining has another virtually unlimited source of variability. Immune cells have an enzyme that attaches unique new DNA sequences to either end of the D segment. These are not encoded anywhere in the genome. Such so-called “N region” sequences can add over 1,000 new variations to each existing VDJ combination.

So the total possible genetically engineered antibody diversity is something above 10,000,000 X 1,000 X 1,000 = 10,000,000,000,000 combinations. This extraordinary number appears to be large enough to generate antibodies that can protect you from virtually any invader, whatever its molecular structure may be.

The immune system is itself a rapid evolutionary process, replacing one set of immune specificities with another. The right antibody-producing cells multiply when an invader enters the body. Antibodies sit on the surface of cells that made them. When a particular variable region binds an invader, that event sends a signal inside the cell to begin dividing.

Dividing immune cells are called “activated B cells,” which proliferate into distinct populations. Because the descendants of a single activated B cell share the same engineered variable region coding sequences, they produce even more invader-recognizing antibodies. By binding, these antibodies signal the rest of the immune system to begin eliminating the invaders. This is the front-line “primary” adaptive immune response.

In a future blog, I'll explain ongoing natural genetic engineering as activated immune cells mature in the “secondary” response. It is no less amazing. For now, let's draw three conclusions from the initial rapid evolution system. We see that:

Evolution has produced a system that engineers DNA with a specific purpose: encoding proteins that bind to unpredictable invaders and signal the immune system to make more antibodies and eliminate the invaders. Precise targeting of DNA cutting to variable region-coding segments allows the basic antibody structure to stay the same. At the same time, its recognition/binding capacity changes. Your B cells are able to combine several different kinds of DNA biochemistry into a functional engineering process: 1) cutting the V, D and J segments; 2) joining the cleaved segments; and 3) synthesizing and inserting the N region sequences.

In the immune system, “purposeful” and “having a predestined outcome” are far from the same thing. Your immune system follows a regular process, but the end result is not fixed in advance. This is an important lesson to keep in mind as we witness ongoing public debates over evolutionary DNA change.

In biology, the alternative to randomness is not necessarily strict determinism. If the cells of the immune system can use well-defined natural genetic engineering processes to make change when change is needed, there is a scientific basis for saying that germ-line cells might do the same in the course of evolution.

See the article here:
James A. Shapiro: Purposeful, Targeted Genetic Engineering in Immune System Evolution

Calcutta News.Net
Monday 6th February, 2012 (IANS)

The environment ministry's Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) ignored violation of law by the US-based company Monsanto which conducted trials of herbicide-tolerant, genetically modified (GM) maize across India without permission, an RTI reply revealed Monday.

The Right to Information (RTI) reply, to a query filed by an activist of Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), revealed that GEAC did not take any action even when a scientist pointed out that planting of herbicide-tolerant GM maize was done without permission. GEAC is the apex body constituted by the ministry for approving GM foods in India.

“Monsanto's GM maize trials have been going on for several seasons now in various locations around the country. It took a scientist in one monitoring team to point out the fact that planting of the herbicide-tolerant GM maize took place without permission from competent authorities,” said Kavitha Kuruganti, member of Coalition for a GM-Free India.

“What is more damning is that there is no evidence of any discussion or action by the regulators on this finding. This clearly demonstrates that the regulators are unconcerned about biosafety violations or contamination and are protecting and supporting offenders like Monsanto,” she said.

According to ASHA, the GEAC has authorised Monsanto to conduct trials of herbicide tolerant and insect-resistant GM maize but the company conducted trials for only herbicide-tolerant GM maize.

This is also the first GM product of Monsanto in India in its own name and not in the name of associate companies like Mahyco.

“This appears to be a repetition of an earlier episode of herbicide tolerant cotton planted by Mahyco without permission. The GEAC, in that instance, found the clarifications submitted by Mahyco highly unsatisfactory and warned that any non-compliance in future would attract punitive actions,” Kuruganti said.

The coalition demanded that the ministry fix accountability on Monsanto and take action against the regulators who repeatedly fail to check the violations of the corporations.

Read the original post:
Monsanto's violations in GM maize trials ignored: RTI reply

Washington, Feb 5 (ANI): Using a liquid laser, researchers have devised a better way to detect the slight genetic mutations that might make a person more vulnerable to a particular type of cancer or other diseases.

This work by University of Michigan researchers could advance understanding of the genetic basis of diseases.

It also has applications in personalized medicine, which aims to target drugs and other therapies to individual patients based on a thorough knowledge of their genetic information.

The researchers say their technique works much better than the current approach, which uses fluorescent dye and other biological molecules to find and bind to mutated DNA strands.

When a patrol molecule catches one of these rogues, it emits a fluorescent beacon. This might sound like a solid system, but it's not perfect. The patrol molecules tend to bind to healthy DNA as well, giving off a background glow that is only slightly dimmer than a positive signal.

“Sometimes, we can fail to see the difference,” said Xudong Fan, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and principal investigator on the project.

“If you cannot see the difference in signals, you could misdiagnose. The patient may have the mutated gene, but you wouldn't detect it.”

In the conventional fluorescence technique, the signal from mutated DNA might be only a few tenths of a percent higher than the background noise. With Fan's new approach it's hundreds of times brighter.

“We found a clever way to amplify the intrinsic difference in the signals,” Fan said.

He did it with a bit of backtracking.

Liquid lasers, discovered in the late '60s, amplify light by passing it through a dye, rather than a crystal, as solid-state lasers do. Fan, who works at the intersection of biomedical engineering and photonics, has been developing them for the past five years.

In his unique set-up, the signal is amplified in a glass capillary called a “ring resonator cavity.”

Last year, Fan and his research group found that they could employ DNA (the blueprints for life that reside in all cells) to modulate a liquid laser, or turn it on and off.

His group is one of just a few in the world to accomplish this, Fan said. At the time, they didn't have a practical application in mind. Then they had an epiphany.

“We thought, 'Let's look at the laser output. Can we see what's causing the different outputs and use it to detect differences in the DNA?'” Fan said.

“I had an intuition, and it turns out the output difference was huge,” Fan added.

The journal editors named this a “hot paper” that “advances knowledge in a rapidly evolving field of high current interest.”

The study has been published in German journal Angewandte Chemie. (ANI)

Read the rest here:
Liquid lasers to make detection of cancer genes easier

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Coughing and other respiratory symptoms improve within weeks of smoking cessation

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Jenks' Sam Sabin: Lineman headed to Air Force to study genetic engineering

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New RNA-based therapeutic strategies for controlling gene expression

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Assessing the value of BMI screening and surveillance in schools

Contact: Vicki Cohn
vcohn@liebertpub.com
914-740-2100
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News

New Rochelle, NY — A variety of innovative products and technologies that promote healing of difficult, painful, and potentially life-threatening acute and chronic wounds are described in the premier issue of Advances in Wound Care, a bimonthly online publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (http://www.liebertpub.com) and an Official Journal of the Wound Healing Society. The issue is available free online at http://www.liebertpub.com/wound

Several Technology Reports highlight products such as a negative pressure device that delivers a continuous subatmospheric pressure level to the wound bed to promote healing. Advanced dressings described in the reports can absorb fluid produced by the wound, cushion the surrounding area, and provide continuous cleansing to accelerate healing, reduce pain, and control swelling. Also featured are biological therapies that may include the delivery of growth factors, bioengineered cells, or components of the patient's own cells to stimulate the healing process.

“Thanks to the Wound Healing Society, Advances in Wound Care is a peer-reviewed forum where the essence of latest advances in science contributed by world-experts meets practical solutions in wound care,” says Editor-in-Chief Chandan K. Sen, PhD, Professor of Surgery and Director of the Comprehensive Wound Center at The Ohio State University Medical Center.

###

Advances in Wound Care is a bimonthly online journal that reports the latest scientific discoveries, translational research, and clinical developments in acute and chronic wound care. Each issue provides a digest of the latest research findings, innovative wound care strategies, industry product pipeline, and developments in biomaterials and skin and tissue regeneration to optimize patient outcomes. The broad scope of applications covered includes limb salvage, chronic ulcers, burns, trauma, blast injuries, surgical repair, skin bioengineering, dressings, anti-scar strategies, diabetic ulcers, ostomy, bedsores, biofilms, and military wound care. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed online (http://www.liebertpub.com/wound).

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Tissue Engineering, Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, and Surgical Infections. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 70 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available at our website (http://www.liebertpub.com).

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
140 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, NY 10801-5215
http://www.liebertpub.com
Phone: 914-740-2100
800-M-LIEBERT
Fax: 914-740-2101

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New high-tech wound care products speed healing of ulcers, burns, injuries and surgical wounds

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NPR's Bias Against Genetic Engineering

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Genes Linked to Cancer Could Be Easier to Detect with Liquid Lasers

Experts who made an unprecedented recommendation that bird-flu researchers hold back some details of their work justified the controversial decision on Tuesday, saying that the experiments were akin to the 1940s work on nuclear weapons or the first attempts at genetic engineering in the 1970s.

Members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity said that bioterrorists or rogue governments could use details of the experiments to make a global weapon of catastrophic potential.

“We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude,” they wrote in a statement published jointly in the rival journals Science and Nature.

The decision, they said, is too big for the scientific community to make on its own. “Physicists faced a similar situation in the 1940s with nuclear-weapons research, and it is inevitable that other scientific disciplines will also do so.”

Since it started spreading in 2003, H5N1 bird flu has killed 344 of the 583 people it is known to have infected–a mortality rate of 59 percent. This compares to a 2.5 percent fatality rate for the 1918 flu, which killed tens of millions of people, or 30 percent for smallpox before it was eliminated in 1979. Luckily, H5N1 doesn’t infect people easily, but it spreads rapidly through flocks of chickens, infects ducks with barely a symptom, and appears to be carried by migrating wild birds. All flu viruses mutate, and most flu experts fear it is only a matter of time before H5N1 either evolves or mixes up with another flu virus to make a form that can easily infect people.

“A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared,” the NSABB wrote.

Usually, when viruses acquire the ability to infect easily, they also become less lethal. So scientists are keen to find out what an H5N1 virus that could easily infect people might look like. If it transmits easily from one person to another, does it give up some of its killing power?

Two labs took a big step toward this goal last year, one in the Netherlands and one at the University of Wisconsin. They engineered forms of H5N1 that ferrets could easily pass to one another–ferrets being the closest thing in the animal world to humans when it comes to getting flu. The good news was that vaccines and drugs both worked against the new strain.

One team sent its findings to Science to be published, while the other submitted its results to Nature. The usual process would have been for the journals to ask other flu and genetics experts to critique the papers, and then they would publish them so other researchers could try to replicate the findings, adding to the world’s knowledge about H5N1, how to watch for dangerous changes, and how to make drugs and vaccines to protect people.

The flu community was atwitter about the pending news, and the potential consequences alarmed the NSABB, which was set up after the 2001 anthrax attacks and which includes heavyweight experts on bioterrorism such as Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University and Mike Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, as well as genetics experts like Claire Fraser-Liggett of the University of Maryland. They asked the two labs to hold off last year until the scientific community could agree on a way to make sure the information got into the right hands–and not into the wrong hands. The experts and the journals have agreed to wait for the time being, and the World Health Organization has set up a meeting in February in Geneva that includes experts from the two teams.

To say the decision frightened and irritated the scientific community would be an understatement. Almost everybody who is anybody in the world of viral research, bioterrorism, and scientific freedom has weighed in–most recently in eight letters to The New York Times.

Keim wrote a separate explanation for the online journal mBio, published by the American Society for Microbiology. “I carefully considered how restricting the information would compromise scientific research progress and even how it would hinder public health efforts to prevent such a horrific pandemic,” Keim wrote. “The short-term negative consequences of restricting experimental details seemed small in contrast to the large consequences of facilitating the replication of these experiments by someone with nefarious intent…. Publishing a detailed experimental protocol on how to produce a highly transmissible H5N1 virus in a highly regarded scientific journal is a very bad idea.”

Dr. Robert Webster of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., a pioneer in influenza research who doesn’t serve on the NSABB, agreed.  “It has been argued that suppression of information serves no purpose, as the information will inevitably be ‘leaked.’ Although this viewpoint is likely correct, I do not believe we should publish the detailed methods of preparing transmissible H5N1,” Webster wrote in a separate commentary in mBio. But he said that the research itself must continue. “While bioterrorism is of real concern, nature has the potential to do much greater damage,” Webster pointed out.

Vincent Racaniello, a microbiologist at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, disagreed. “Bioterrorists do not want to carry out an experiment; they want to instill terror,” he wrote in mBio. “Science has always worked best when information is freely accessible. Fear has clouded the NSABB’s vision. We cannot allow fear to limit our ability to address medical problems.”

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Flu Work Akin to Nuclear-Bomb Experiments, Board Says

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) recently announced a major breakthrough in engineering systems of RNA molecules through computer-assisted design.

This could lead to important improvements across a range of industries, including the development of cheaper advanced biofuels. 

Scientists will use these new “RNA machines,” to adjust genetic expression in the cells of microorganisms. 

This will enable scientists to develop new strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli) that are better able to digest switchgrass biomass and convert released sugars to form three types of transportation fuels — gasoline, diesel and jet fuels.

“This is a perfect example of how our investments in basic science innovations can pave the way for future industries and solutions to our nation’s most important challenges,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a news release.

“This breakthrough at the Joint BioEnergy Institute holds enormous potential for the sustainable production of advanced biofuels and countless other valuable goods.”

A breakthrough with E. coli could make it cheaper to produce fuel from switchgrass or other non-food biomass plants to create advanced biofuels with the potential to replace gasoline. 

While the work at the JBEI remains focused on the development of advanced biofuels, its researchers believe their concepts may help other researchers to develop many other desired products, including biodegradable plastics and therapeutic drugs. 

For example, some researchers have started a project to investigate how to use the “RNA machines” to increase the safety and efficacy of medicine therapies to treat diseases, including diabetes and Parkinson’s.

Biological systems are incredibly complex, which makes it difficult to engineer systems of microorganisms that will produce desired products in predictable amounts. 

JBEI’s work, featured in the Dec. 23 issue of “Science” magazine, is the first of its kind to set up and adjust a RNA system in a predictable way. 

Specifically, researchers focused their design-driven approach on RNA sequences that can fold into complicated three dimensional shapes, called ribozymes and aptazymes. 

By using JBEI-developed computer-assisted models and simulations, researchers then created complex RNA-based control systems that are able to program a large number of genes. 

In microorganisms, “commands” that are sent into the cell will be processed by the RNA-based control systems, enabling them to help develop desired products.

One of the major goals of synthetic biology is to produce valuable chemical products from simple, inexpensive and renewable starting materials in a sustainable manner. 

Computer-assisted models and simulations like the one JBEI developed are essential for doing so. 

Up to this point, such tools for biology have been limited, and JBEI’s breakthrough in applying computer assisted design marks an important technical and conceptual achievement for this field. 

To view additional details about this research, visit http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/22/cad-for-rna/.

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Genetic breakthroughs help develop cheaper biofuels: DOE

Bill Gates has a terse response to criticism that the high-tech solutions he advocates for world hunger are too expensive or bad for the environment:  Countries can embrace modern seed technology and genetic modification or their citizens will starve.

When he was in high school in the 1960s, people worried there wouldn’t be enough food to feed the world, Gates recalled in his fourth annual letter, which was published online on January 24 and reported on by the AP in the Huffington Post. But the “green revolution,” which transformed agriculture with high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, warded off famine.

Gates is among those who believe another, similar revolution is needed now. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent about $2 billion in the past five years to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia, and much of that money has gone toward improving agricultural productivity.

Gates doesn’t apologize for his endorsement of modern agriculture or sidestep criticism of genetic modification. He told the Associated Press that he finds it ironic that most people who oppose genetic engineering in plant breeding live in rich nations that he believes are responsible for global climate change that will lead to more starvation and malnutrition for the poor.

In his 24-page letter, the Microsoft Corp. chairman lamented that more money isn’t spent on agriculture research and noted that of the $3 billion spent each year on work on the seven most important crops, only 10 percent focuses on problems in poor countries.

“Given the central role that food plays in human welfare and national stability, it is shocking – not to mention short-sighted and potentially dangerous – how little money is spent on agricultural research,” he wrote in his letter, calling for wealthier nations to step up.

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Bill Gates: Embrace Genetic Modification or Starve

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Opportunities and challenges of palliative care in the ICU discussed in expert roundtable

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

It’s the 21st century. We’ve got robots. Genetic engineering.
Artificial intelligence. Hypersonic transportation.
Nanotechnology. Human cloning. Hydrogen-powered cars. We’re
even working on antigravity machines.

So where are the candidates of the Grand Old Party? They’re
busy trying to be a movie actor born more than 100 years ago,
in 1911. And a mediocre one, at that (he really didn’t make a
smooth transition from radio to those newfangled “talkies”).

Sure, that “Bedtime For Bonzo” guy turned out to be Ronald Reagan, and sure, THAT
Ronald Reagan (not the
Democrat he was in the 1950s) turned out to be a pretty darned
good president. But that, people, was 30-some years ago. Back
then, a Macintosh was an apple, not an Apple. Those on the
cutting edge of technology were using that dynamic new
communication device — the pager. And the Internet was the mesh
inside your swim trucks.

But, for some reason, the Republicans want to go back to the
idyllic 1980s — acid-washed jeans, the Cold War, Milli Vanilli,
“Dallas,” yuppies, the 10-year war in Afghanistan (that time it was the
Soviets), political correctness, the Commodore 64, Swatch.

President Reagan was not a
genius; he was a very smart man, but no genius. Still, he had
lived through heyday of the ‘20s, the depression of the ‘30s,
the Great War of the ‘40s, the Baby Boom of the ‘50s, the
social turmoil of the ‘60s, the excess and explosion of the
‘70s. It doesn’t take a genius to learn the lessons of a
half-century of just paying attention to the world. Reagan was smart enough to keep
his pores open and absorb all that knowledge through a life
filled with simple experience.

He was simply a man for his times, just as Margaret Thatcher was a woman
(and every bit a man) for her times. America had just gone
through the drama of a president resigning in shame, and along
came this man, this virile, striking man, who saw America —
still, despite its dramatic fall — as a shining city on a hill.

The image struck Americans in the heart; they saw it too,
always. But Reagan didn’t
say he was like anyone else, trying to be someone. Like few
others before him, he was simply himself.

Some say this year’s GOP nomination battle is just a rerun of
Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican, running against
arch-conservative Barry
Goldwater. Of course, Rockefeller — that era’s Mitt Romney — lost the nomination to
Goldwater — that era’s
Ronald Reagan. Goldwater went on to lose in one
the biggest landslides in history, but never mind that.
Ideologues will fight that fight, damn the consequences to the
party.

But the bigger issue is the soul of the Republican Party.
George Bush the First got
crushed in 1992 by a superliberal who proclaimed “I feel your
pain.” When it came time for the GOP to post up a candidate
against Bill Clinton, they came up with — Bob Dole? Beholden to
the Christian coalition, he got crushed. George Bush the Second won as a
“compassionate conservative,” but only because America was sick
of Mr. Clinton — and especially his veep, Al Gore.

Mr. Bush turned out to be
(surprise) a big-government Republican, spending every bit as
wildly as any Democrat. Then, in 2008, the GOP, as in 1996,
went with the next in line, posting up another liberal
Republican (albeit a self-described “maverick”). The
Establishment Republicans and the Socially Conservative
Republicans and the Fiscally Conservative Republicans beat each
other down until all that was left was the LCD Candidate (the
least common denominator). Again, crushed.

Mr. Romney is that LCD
Candidate, many argue. Despite the emergence of a powerful new
conservative faction (the tea party), Republicans are about to
embark on a trip they’ve taken several times in the past
half-century. The party is more splintered than ever, thanks in
part to Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth campaign.

Should Mr. Romney lose, all
segments of the Republican Party and conservative movement will
have to step back to reassess. They may simply decide then that
the party is broken beyond repair, say goodbye to Mr. Reagan’s “big tent” and
shatter into a hundred factions.

All over who really is the next Ronald Reagan. In 2012. You can’t
make this stuff up.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a
decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at
jcurl@washingtontimes.com.

© Copyright 2012 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint
permission.

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CURL: The end of the GOP as we knew it

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Body clock receptor linked to diabetes in new genetic study