Crispr-Cas9

Remember Mr. DNA, the cartoon character in the movie Jurassic Park, who explains how the park's scientists extract and edit DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber millions of years ago to bring extinct dinosaurs back to life? Remember chaos theory?



Well, gene editing is now quite real where not a day goes by when something new is reported about the advances - - and moral and ethical issues - - of gene editing.

I first learned about the gene editing tool Crispr, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, last May when Wired published a video with biologist Neville Sanjana. Sanjana explained the tool, first to a seven-year-old, followed by a fourteen-year-old, a college student, a grad student, and finally a Crispr expert. It's fascinating technology with far-ranging implications and consequences for the human race.


Gene editing holds great promise for preventing the heritability of many diseases caused by DNA mutations, such as autism, diabetes, and cancer.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on the latest breakthroughs in gene editing in viable human embryos, as well as the race to patent and profit from the market opportunities ahead.

"The technology has sparked a rush of investment into companies poised to take advantage of Crispr. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in for-profit startups founded by scientists whose academic institutions are now warring with each other over the patent."

The moral and ethical issues center on "germ-line" editing of the genes in sperm, eggs and embryos. Such editing not only alters the DNA of an individual, but its offspring and future generations, creating legal issues around consent of the unborn. It also presents the future of "designer babies" where physical attributes like hair and eye color, and height and strength, become genetic choices.

Laws governing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibit the funding and testing of "germ-line" editing, but other countries are not bound by American laws or ethical standards.

Wealth will drive the new world of privilege and access to gene editing and embryo modification.

Welcome to Gattaca.

Sunkissed

Upper Makonikey, Bildad's Roost ~ Martha's Vineyard

Internet Magazine

Kinda sums up the online DailyMail.com experience, and that of so many other internet news and social media sites.

The New Yorker ~ Roz Chast

35 Going On 25

A marvel.

Shaun Botterill ~ Getty Images

Orphaned

My mother died on Father's Day. She was 85 and had been in hospice care for 15 months. She was usually alert but bed-ridden and heavily medicated with Fentanyl and Lidocaine patches for assorted musculoskeletal pain.

My father, her husband for 59 years, died in 2013. She lost much of her will to live after that, but soldiered on for nearly four more years in her stoic Maine Yankee fashion. As her mobility and body declined, she kept in reasonably good spirits, reading, and listening to music and books on her iPod. On rare occasions when pain and frustrations overcame her she'd make melancholic and pointed remarks like "Where's the gas pipe?"

Losing my surviving parent has been less about grief and more about the finality of death. No more visits or phone conversations, stories and remembrances, questions asked and answered, and weekly notes mailed in between the visits and calls. She's gone.

I'm an orphan now but certainly not in the Dickensian sense one fears when young. It's also the realization and acceptance of generational rhythms and the natural order of things, and the fact that my new place as an elder and patriarch has moved closer to the end of that line. My wife's mother died in 1987 and her father in 1995. She's experienced these feelings for some time.

I walked by a Pottery Barn store this morning and saw this pillow on a couch. It stopped me in my tracks. I sat down and thought long and well about her, and said aloud "I love you Mom." She didn't answer back. I got up and left, alone in my thoughts.

Runyonesque

Nathan Detroit, Sorrowful Jones, and Sam the Gonoph have it all over these guys and dolls, one and all.

The New Yorker ~ Tom Chitty

The METI Debate

The New York Times ~ Paul Sahre

Since 1960, NASA has funded and supported efforts to search for extraterrestrial life. NASA's SETI, short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now a privately funded group that continues to look for signals. Some of its latest searches are guided by scientist Stephen Hawking and funded by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

A newer and related group, METI, for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as Active SETI, goes beyond passive searching and actively targets radio messages to known star systems that fit the Goldilocks zone profile of planets presumed capable of supporting life.

Recent transmissions of prime numbers and other visual and tonal mathematical data known as exosemiotics have stirred debate about the wisdom and consequences of advertising life here on Earth. Proponents say these "Hey, here we are!" messages are the continuum of man's existential search for meaning. Opponents warn that evolution pits species against one another and mankind's track record of exploration and colonialism is ample proof of the potential for "extinction-level risk."

As reported last week in The New York Times, Greetings E.T., Please Don't Murder Us:

"There is something about the METI question that forces the mind to stretch beyond its usual limits. You have to imagine some radically different form of intelligence, using only your human intelligence. You have to imagine time scales on which a decision made in 2017 might trigger momentous consequences 10,000 years from now. The sheer magnitude of those consequences challenges our usual measures of cause and effect. Whether you believe that the aliens are likely to be warriors or Zen masters, if you think that METI has a reasonable chance of making contact with another intelligent organism somewhere in the Milky Way, then you have to accept that this small group of astronomers and science fiction authors and billionaire patrons debating semi-prime numbers and the ubiquity of visual intelligence may in fact be wrestling with a decision that could be the most transformative one in the history of human civilization."

Calvin & Hobbes ~ Bill Watterson

An observation. Nowhere in this long and thoughtful article, or in as far as I got in the Comments section, did I find the word God. Is intelligent design purely a terrestrial notion? Cognitive scientists advance the ideas of teleological naturalism and Panpsychism that claim a universal proto-consciousness. Isn't that why are we searching for intelligent life beyond Earth?