Decoding and Making Life

I listened to a podcast of WNYC's show Radiolab called (So Called) Life recently. You can see it at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/14

It was all about splicing together genes in unique new ways that don't occur in nature to make new life. I was taking a very long and enjoyable early morning walk in Wamego Kansas when I listened to this show the first time.

The show starts out talking about mash-ups from the natural world. These are mythological beasts like lions with eagle heads. Whether it's Pegasus or a Unicorn, people are fascinated with the improbable mixes of various creatures. The display of fantasy creatures at the Museum of Natural History was very popular.

The desire to play god and reinvent life is something that is of great interest to people. There have been examples of mixtures of two beings in a form called a chimera. The original Chimera was a creature of Greek myth that was a combination of various animals. DNA testing has made us realize that we have humans walking among us that are actual chimeras. What happens is you have two twins (not identical) that merge together in the womb and create a single person. The odd thing about this is that different organs or parts of the body would yield different DNA results. Somehow, the body makes one of each part correctly from the mash-up of two original organisms.

Some scientists have messed around and created artificial chimeras from dissimilar animals. They talked about Geeps, a mash-up of a sheep and a goat. You can see various attributes of the input animals expressed in various attributes, a sheep head and goat fur, for example.

The interesting part of the show talked about how early life was supposedly able to exchange genetic information from one organism to another. Genetic swapping caused a rapid increase in diversity. At some point in evolutionary history, this swapping stopped. They talked about the modern stage being human directed evolution.

The story talked about changes in bacteria and other simple forms, but there is also a counter movement that believes this could end up being a very bad idea. This is expressed in the movie "I Am Legend" where genetic manipulation to cure cancer mutates into a plague that almost wipes out all human life. The question is "Do we really understand the consequences of what we are doing?"

I've often thought that as I got older, there would be a opportunities to restore or enhance my senses. I figured medical technology would be developed to repair damage or aging that would also unlock the way these senses worked, making it easy to alter those senses. Imagine being able to see better in the dark, hear like a bat, see like a hawk, or smell like a dog. Imagine being able to breath water or run without tiring. I'm not the only one imagining it. The TV series Dark Angel was the forerunner of this speculation. In that show, Jessica Alba and her cohorts were genetically engineered/enhanced humans, made to be soldiers. Of course, there are massive problems with this, as they have to be kept under tight control or they will overcome "normal" humans. This was also addressed in the original Star Trek and one of the Star Trek movies about the Kahn character played by Ricardo Montebon. He was an enhanced human tried to take over the world and had to be exiled. Still, I would like to be able to see like a hawk.

Other issues that touch upon this way of thinking is the glut of DNA testing. Medical research has a strong desire to test, learn from, and study DNA for potential problems like human disease. They could just as easily search for people that are more enhanced than the baseline and figure out which genes provide these enhancements. The technology is not that great right now. It is much cheaper to analyze nowadays. My brother is a veterinarian and offers DNA tests for dogs for $80to figure out what their lineage is. We are not that far from being able to quickly and inexpensively read the genetic codes of people or whatever animals they want. The problem here is that you have 25,000 genes, each one with multiple functions and expressions, and all interacting with each other. Our chances of getting it right the first time are surely slim. They also bring up the potential for abuse, for deliberately inventing harmful agents and releasing them into the world. That is another question.