Royal Society Open Access Week Until November 6th

RoyalSociety |  Since we launched in 2014, the Royal Society’s broad interest open access journal Royal Society Open Science has been publishing high-quality research across the biological sciences, engineering and mathematics. 

The journal is at the forefront of the Society’s mission to disseminate high-quality science regardless of topic or likely impact, and includes innovative features such as optional open peer review and Registered Reports.

As a broad interest journal, we’ve published many papers that have excited readers, and to celebrate Open Access Week, we wanted to share with you some of our most frequently read papers. We hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as we have!

how could non-haplo-diploidy humans comprise a superorganism?

ufla.edu  |  Insects exhibit several levels of social organization. Many species live in groups for some portion of their lives, but not all of these groups are truly social. For instance, chimney bees, 

Anthophora abrupta, do live in groups for periods of time, but they are nevertheless solitary bees. Female chimney bees build nests in large aggregations, giving the impression that they are social, but in fact each female builds and provisions her own nest. In contrast, some insects, ants, for instance, live in complex societies called colonies and depend on continual social interactions to survive. Members of these social species cannot survive as individuals; they must live as a part of a colony.

Three characteristics define the levels of sociality observed in insects. These characteristics are: 1) reproductive division of labor: most individuals are non-reproductive and specialize in colony growth, maintenance, and defense while only a few reproduce; 2) cooperative brood care: individuals within the colony care for offspring that are not their own; and 3) overlapping generations: offspring contribute to colony labor while their parent(s) (at least their mothers) are still alive and inside the colony. Species that express all three of the above characteristic are highly social or eusocial. The most common eusocial insects are bees, wasps, ants, and termites (Table 1).

Honey bees (Hymeoptera: Apidae: Apis) meet all three of the criteria described above and are therefore eusocial:

• Reproductive division of labor—Each honey bee colony consists of a queen (reproductive female), workers (non-reproductive females), and drones (males). Each caste has a clearly defined role that is not performed by any other caste.
• Cooperative brood care—Workers care for the queen’s offspring. In most cases the queen’s offspring are sisters to the workers who are rearing them.
• Overlapping generations—Honey bee queens can live several years and coexist in the colony with their offspring (workers and drones).

The desire to fit in is the root of almost all wrongdoing

aeon |  Imagine that one morning you discover a ring that grants you magic powers. With this ring on your finger, you can seize the presidency, rob Fort Knox and instantly become the most famous person on the planet. So, would you do it?

Readers of Plato’s Republic will find this thought experiment familiar. For Plato, one of the central problems of ethics is explaining why we should prioritise moral virtue over power or money. If the price of exploiting the mythical ‘Ring of Gyges’ – acting wrongly – isn’t worth the material rewards, then morality is vindicated.

Notice that Plato assumes that we stray from the moral path through being tempted by personal gain – that’s why he tries to show that virtue is more valuable than the gold we can get through vice. He isn’t alone in making this assumption. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes worries about justifying morality to the ‘fool’ who says that ‘there is no such thing as justice’ and breaks his word when it works to his advantage. And when thinking about our reasons to prefer virtue to vice, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) David Hume confronts the ‘sensible knave’, a person tempted to do wrong when he imagines ‘that an act of iniquity or infidelity will make a considerable addition to his fortune’.

Some of history’s greatest philosophers, then, agree that wrongdoing tends to be motivated by self-interest. Alas, I’m not one of history’s greatest philosophers. Although most assume that an immoral person is one who’s ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values. In these cases, it’s not that we care too little about others; it’s that we care too much. More specifically, we care too much about how we stack up in the eyes of others.

would classifying antisemitism as mental illness help to curb it?

algemeiner |  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM.) Aside from defusing the anger and shame of many gays and lesbians — which helped to improve their mental health — the APA shift facilitated great strides in the social, cultural, political, and legal arenas in subsequent decades. As unceremoniously absurd as the overnight change of status was, it remains a stunning model of social engineering, cultural amelioration, and of what grassroots political activism can achieve. As a Jew fighting antisemitism, I find this very instructive.

If the APA has the power to de-stigmatize human behavior by eliminating supposed disorders, might it have the power to stigmatize and shun other behavior by adding previously unlisted ones?

I would like to propose that if renewed research on antisemitism can more forcefully demonstrate its association with psychopathology, its institutional recognition through the APA manual may help to curb it.  

There is indeed a body of literature that makes a good case for antisemitism as a sign or symptom of serious mental illness. To be accurate, antisemitism itself would not be the disorder, but the content of some other structural disorder, such as delusional or narcissistic personality disorder. 

Furthermore, it has been broadly proposed by several prominent researchers that racist and antisemitic feelings, thoughts, and behaviors can be a principal co-occurring symptom of psychopathology.

is racism a psychopathology?

emory |  In the third and final CMBC lunch talk of the 2013 fall semester, Dr. Sander Gilman (Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory) treated participants to an engaging presentation on the interconnected history of racism and mental illness in Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The topic of the talk grew out of a CMBC-sponsored undergraduate course and graduate seminar offered by Dr. Gilman last fall, titled “Race, Brain, and Psychoanalysis.”

Gilman opened by citing a 2012 study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of scientists at Oxford. Based on clinical experiments, they reported that white subjects who were given doses of the beta-blocker drug Propranolol showed reduced indicators of implicit racial bias. The authors of the paper wrote that their research “raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs.” Time Magazine soon thereafter ran a headline story with the title “Is Racism Becoming a Mental Illness?” Dismissing these claims as unscientific, Gilman instead posed a different set of questions: at what point, historically, does racism come to be classified as a form of mental illness? Why? And what are the implications of such a “diagnosis”?

the mistrust of science

newyorker |   If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.

As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”

The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

morality, stereotypes, and scientists—the anatomy of science denial

physorg |  Individuals tend to group others based on their perceived morality, often employing stereotypes to describe individuals or groups of people beliveved to have different morals or values. According to Fiske et al., stereotypes are well described using two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth (or lack of it) refers to the perceived positive/negative intent of another person, while competence refers to the other person's capacity to achieve their intent. Using this terminology, the ingroup, or the group that you belong to, is both warm and competent, and thus trustworthy. Stereotypes with high perceived competence and low perceived warmth, including stereotypically wealthy individuals, are often not trusted because perceived intent is either unknown or negative. Similarly, scientists have unclear intent due to their perceived amorality, and they are not trusted.

I believe that in order to incur more trust from the public, scientists must cultivate more warmth from the public.

I propose two ways to achieve this goal. First scientists need to make their intentions clear. Social psychologist Todd Pittinsky, mentioned in the introduction, has some terrific ideas on how to clarify intentions. One strategy is open access to data and methods, which is readily achieved through open access publishing. Scientists also need to treat misconduct by other scientists more seriously so that people don't, for example, deem that all vaccine science is fraud due to one case of misconduct. Finally, we need to treat science denial without disdain and acknowledge uncertainty properly when describing scientific results.

Second, scientists need to move into the ingroup sphere by imitating those already in the ingroup. Kahan et al. point out that an individual's established ideology greatly influences how they process new information. I would suggest scientists frame their findings in a way that fits with the audience's ideology, thus promoting "warmth". For example, the Pew report that reveals 37% of the public thinks that GMOs are not safe, which violates the individual foundations. Highlighting how certain crops can be genetically engineered for health (e.g. rice that is genetically engineered to produce beta carotene) shows how GMOs can be compatible with individual foundations. Behaving like an ingroup can then move scientists into the ingroup sphere.

Battling misinformation is definitely an uphill climb, but it is a climb scientists must endeavor to make. Climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement threatens the future of scientific progress, and while the danger cannot be ignored, we should not belittle non-scientific ideas. Scientists can build goodwill through increased transparency and communicating the significance of their findings to the public. By taking other worldviews into account, we can find common ground and create open dialogue and perhaps find solutions to benefit everyone.

brainjacking: the future of security for neural implants

boingboing |  In a new scientific review paper published in World Neurosurgery, a group of Oxford neurosurgeons and scientists round up a set of dire, terrifying warnings about the way that neural implants are vulnerable to networked attacks. 

Most of the article turns on deep brain stimulation devices, which can be used to stimulate or suppress activity in different parts of the brain, already used to treat some forms of mental illness, chronic pain and other disorders. The researchers round up a whole dystopia's worth of potential attacks on these implants, including tampering with the victim's reward system "to exert substantial control over a patient's behaviour"; pain attacks that induce "severe pain in these patients"; and attacks on impulse control that could induce "Mania, hypersexuality, and pathological gambling." 

The researchers discuss some of the ways in which the (dismal) state of medical implant security could be improved. I recently co-authored a set of comments to the FDA asking them to require manufacturers to promise not to use the DMCA to intimidate and silence security researchers who come forward with warnings about dangerous defects in their products. 

The paper has a delightful bibliography, which cites books like Neuromancer, anime like Ghost in the Shell, as well as papers in Nature, Brain, The Journal of Neurosurgery, and Brain Stimulation.

there's something missing from our drug laws: SCIENCE

WaPo |  Congress and President Obama are under pressure to reschedule marijuana. While rescheduling makes sense, it doesn’t solve the state/federal conflict over marijuana (de-scheduling would be better). But more important, it wouldn’t fix the broken scheduling system. Ideally, marijuana reform should be part of a broader bill rewriting the Controlled Substances Act.

The Controlled Substances Act created a five-category scheduling system for most legal and illegal drugs (although alcohol and tobacco were notably omitted). Depending on what category a drug is in, the drug is either subject to varying degrees of regulation and control (Schedules II through V) — or completely prohibited, otherwise unregulated and left to criminals to manufacture and distribute (Schedule I).  The scheduling of various drugs was decided largely by Congress and absent a scientific process — with some strange results.

For instance, while methamphetamine and cocaine are Schedule II drugs, making them available for medical use, marijuana is scheduled alongside PCP and heroin as a Schedule I drug, which prohibits any medical use. Making matters worse, the CSA gives law enforcement — not scientists or health officials — the final say on how new drugs should be scheduled and whether or not old drugs should be rescheduled. Unsurprisingly, law enforcement blocks reform.

Starting in 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration obstructed a formal request to reschedule marijuana for 16 years. After being forced by the courts to make a decision, the agency held two years of hearings. The DEA chief administrative law judge who held the hearings and considered the issue concluded that marijuana in its natural form is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man” and should be made available for medical use. Similar hearings on MDMA, a.k.a. ecstasy, concluded that it also has important medical uses. In both cases, the DEA overruled its administrative law judge and kept the drugs in Schedule I, unavailable for medical use.

we don't need no stinking eric schmidt, we need reed richards and benton f'ing quest!!!

reuters |  Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.

Carter unveiled the new Defense Innovation Advisory Board with Schmidt during the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco, saying it would give the Pentagon access to "the brightest technical minds focused on innovation."

Schmidt, now the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), the parent company of Google, said the board would help bridge what he called a clear gap between how the U.S. military and the technology industry operate.

Schmidt also said he saw the group looking for ways to use new technologies to solve new and emerging problems.

The board is Carter's latest effort to kick-start innovation across the U.S. military by building bridges to the technology industry. The U.S. defense chief announced the board's creation on Wednesday during his third trip to Silicon Valley since taking office just over a year ago.

It had been 20 years since the last U.S. defense secretary visited Silicon Valley.

let your imagination run wild with weird science's inevitable endgame...,

NYTimes |  Biologists in the United States and Europe are developing a revolutionary genetic technique that promises to provide an unprecedented degree of control over insect-borne diseases and crop pests.

The technique involves a mechanism called a gene drive system, which propels a gene of choice throughout a population. No gene drives have yet been tested in the wild, but in laboratory organisms like the fruit fly, they have converted almost the entire population to carry the favored version of a gene.

Gene drives “could potentially prevent the spread of disease, support agriculture by reversing pesticide and herbicide resistance in insects and weeds, and control damaging invasive species,” a group of Harvard biologists wrote last year in the journal eLIFE.

A much discussed application of gene drives would help rid the world of pest-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever and Lyme disease.

A gene drive designed to render a population extinct is known as a crash drive. A crash drive being developed for mosquitoes consists of a gene engineered into the Y chromosome that shreds the X chromosome in the cells that make the mosquito’s sperm, thus ensuring that all progeny are male. Unless the drive itself is damaged through mutation, the number of females would be expected to dwindle each generation until the population collapses.

Biologists led by Andrea Crisanti and Tony Nolan at Imperial College London reported this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology their development of mosquitoes with gene drives that disrupt three genes for female fertility, each of which acts at a different stage of egg formation. Because the female mosquitoes are infertile only when a copy is inherited from both parents, the gene drives would be thoroughly disseminated through a population before taking their toll. They could “suppress mosquito populations to levels that do not support malaria transmission,” the authors wrote.

The mosquitoes are not yet ready for release. Because natural selection will heavily favor any wild mosquitoes that acquire resistance to the gene drives, the researchers need to prevent such resistance from arising. One approach would be to target two or three sites in the same fertility gene, giving natural selection a much higher barrier to overcome.

why it's important to keep an eye on weird politics and science...,

SA |  Robert G. Edwards might not be a household name, but the innovation he pioneered along with Patrick Steptoe certainly is. In vitro fertilization (IVF), the process whereby human eggs are fertilized outside of the body and the resulting embryos implanted in a woman's womb, led to the 1978 birth of Louise Brown—the world's first "test tube baby." To date, an estimated five million children worldwide have been born using this innovation. Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this remarkable achievement.

Edwards’s passing earlier this year prompted an outpouring of praise. He has been widely described as a maverick researcher disinterested in personal recognition who simply wanted to give babies to those who couldn’t make them on their own. The New York Times quoted Edwards’s former collaborator, Barry Bavister, as saying “Dr. Edwards’s motivation—his passion, in fact—was not fame or fortune but rather helping infertile women.” Bavister continued, “He believed with all his heart that it was the right thing to do.”

But Edwards’s views on the technology he created and the uses to which it should be put may be more complicated than this portrayal. One detail omitted from the obituaries published around the world was that Edwards was a member in good standing of the Eugenics Society in Britain for much of his career. Recently uncovered documents show that Edwards served on the organization’s Council—its leadership body—as a trustee on three separate occasions: from 1968 to 1970, 1971 to 1973 and once again from 1995 to 1997 after the group euphemistically renamed itself  "The Galton Institute" for the founder of the eugenics movement, Francis Galton. As we consider Edwards’s legacy in light of his recent passing, it is important to think critically about the relationship between Edwards’s development of IVF and his participation in an organization that was dedicated to promoting one of the most dangerous ideas in human history: that science should be used to control human reproduction in order to breed preferred types of people.

Coined by Galton in the late 1800s to mean "well-born," eugenics became a dominant aspect of Western intellectual life and social policy during the first half of the 20th century. It started with the seemingly simple proposition that one's social position is rooted in heritable qualities of character and intellect.

Eugenicists of that era also believed that people with what they considered the least desirable traits tend to have the most children, precipitating what they saw as an inevitable decline in a society’s intellectual and physical vigor. Taking their cue from livestock breeders, eugenicists argued that socially disadvantageous characteristics could be bred out of human populations through policies that limited the reproduction of "the unfit"—the "feebleminded," the poor and the weak. Many eugenicists considered these qualities to be more prevalent among racial and ethnic minorities.

totally misses the point: N-1 is an in-group marker for human breeding populations...,

osu.edu |  Throughout history, scholars and researchers have tried to identify the one key reason that people are attracted to religion.

Some have said people seek religion to cope with a fear of death, others call it the basis for morality, and various other theories abound.

But in a new book, a psychologist who has studied human motivation for more than 20 years suggests that all these theories are too narrow. Religion, he says, attracts followers because it satisfies all of the 16 basic desires that humans share.

“It’s not just about fear of death. Religion couldn’t achieve mass acceptance if it only fulfilled one or two basic desires,” said Steven Reiss, a professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University and author of The 16 Strivings for God (Mercer University Press, 2016).

“People are attracted to religion because it provides believers the opportunity to satisfy all their basic desires over and over again. You can’t boil religion down to one essence.”

panksepp

helian |  So who is Jaak Panksepp?  Have a look at his YouTube talk on emotions at the bottom of this post, for starters.  A commenter recommended him, and I discovered the advice was well worth taking.  Panksepp’s The Archaeology of Mind, which he co-authored with Lucy Biven, was a revelation to me.  The book describes a set of basic emotional systems that exist in all, or virtually all, mammals, including humans.  In the words of the authors:

…the ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains contain at least seven emotional, or affective, systems:  SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy).  Each of these systems controls distinct but specific types of behaviors associated with many overlapping physiological changes.

This is not just another laundry list of “instincts” of the type often proposed by psychologists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.  Panksepp is a neuroscientist, and has verified experimentally the unique signatures of these emotional systems in the ancient regions of the brain shared by humans and other mammals.  Again quoting from the book,

As far as we know right now, primal emotional systems are made up of neuroanatomies and neurochemistries that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species.  This suggests that these systems evolved a very long time ago and that at a basic emotional and motivational level, all mammals are more similar than they are different.  Deep in the ancient affective recesses of our brains, we remain evolutionarily kin.

If you are an astute student of the Blank Slate phenomenon, dear reader, no doubt you are already aware of the heretical nature of this passage.  That’s right!  The Blank Slaters were prone to instantly condemn any suggestion that there were similarities between humans and other animals as “anthropomorphism.”  In fact, if you read the book you will find that their reaction to Panksepp and others doing similar research has been every bit as allergic as their reaction to anyone suggesting the existence of human nature.  However, in the field of animal behavior, they are anything but a quaint artifact of the past.  Diehard disciples of the behaviorist John B. Watson and his latter day follower B. F. Skinner, Blank Slaters of the first water, still haunt the halls of academia in significant numbers, and still control the message in any number of “scientific” journals.  There they have been following their usual “scholarly” pursuit of ignoring and/or vilifying anyone who dares to disagree with them ever since the heyday of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  In the process they have managed to suppress or distort a great deal of valuable research bearing directly on the wellsprings of human behavior.

unleashing the power of neuroscience

royalsociety |  In addition to causing distress and disability to the individual, neuropsychiatric disorders are also extremely expensive to society and governments. These disorders are both common and debilitating and impact on cognition, functionality and wellbeing. Cognitive enhancing drugs, such as cholinesterase inhibitors and methylphenidate, are used to treat cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, respectively. Other cognitive enhancers include specific computerized cognitive training and devices. An example of a novel form of cognitive enhancement using the technological advancement of a game on an iPad that also acts to increase motivation is presented. Cognitive enhancing drugs, such as methylphenidate and modafinil, which were developed as treatments, are increasingly being used by healthy people. Modafinil not only affects ‘cold’ cognition, but also improves ‘hot’ cognition, such as emotion recognition and task-related motivation. The lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs' raises both safety concerns as well as ethical issues, including coercion and increasing disparity in society. As a society, we need to consider which forms of cognitive enhancement (e.g. pharmacological, exercise, lifelong learning) are acceptable and for which groups (e.g. military, doctors) under what conditions (e.g. war, shift work) and by what methods we would wish to improve and flourish.

smart drug modafinil safe for widespread use

reason |  Good news, overachieving students, ADHD-havers, Limitless fans, and pillheads everywhere: A meta-analysis of the data on "smart drug" modafinil has found that yes, it's safe, and yes, it's effective as a cognitve enhancer.

Published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, the review covers 24 placebo-controlled studies of modafinil—also known by the brand name Provigil—that were conducted between 1990 and 2014 on healthy, non-sleep deprived individuals. "Such an analysis overcomes some of the limitations of each of the smaller studies, such as narrow demographics or conflicting results, and draws an overarching conclusion," notes Quartz writer Akshat Rathi. 

Officially sanctioned in the U.S. to treat sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, modafinil is sometimes prescribed off-label to treat conditions like depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Parkinson's disease. It's also become popular as a cognitive enhancer, or nootropic. A 2008 poll from science journal Nature found that 44 percent of its readers had tried modafinil. And while less popular than Adderall, it's also a hit among college students as a study aid. 

Without a prescription, modafinal is still pretty easy for Americans to purchase online from foreign pharmacies (where it's sold under names such as Modalert, Modvigil, and Alertec), albeit also pretty illegal. Some countries, such as India and Mexico, neither classify modafinil as a controlled substance nor require buyers to have a medical prescription; in others, such as Canada, Australia, Germany, and the U.K., it's not a controlled substance but a prescription is required. In the U.S., however, it's both a Schedule IV controlled drug and prescription-only. 

Could that change? In the new review, researchers found that "modafinil appears to consistently engender enhancement of attention, executive functions, and learning," all without "any preponderances for side effects or mood changes." Modafinil "appears safe for widespread use," concluded researchers, calling it "one of the most promising and highly-investigated neuroenhancers to date."

partial ectogenesis exists..., let the pearl-clutching and vapor-catching begin

geneticliteracyproject |  Scientifically, it’s calledectogenesis, a term coined by J.B.S. Haldane in 1924. A hugely influential science popularizer, Haldane did for his generation what Carl Sagan did later in the century. He got people thinking and talking about the implications of science and technology on our civilization, and did not shy away from inventing new words in order to do so. Describing ectogenesis as pregnancy occurring in an artificial environment, from fertilization to birth, Haldane predicted that by 2074 this would account for more than 70 percent of human births. 

His prediction may yet be on target.

In discussing the idea in his work Daedalus–a reference to the inventor in Greek mythology who, through his inventions, strived to bring humans to the level of the gods–Haldane was diving into issues of his time, namely eugenics and the first widespread debates over contraception and population control.

Whether Haldane’s view will prove correct about the specific timing of when ectogenesis might become popular, or the numbers of children born that way, it’s certain that he was correct that tAt the same time, he was right that the societal implications are sure to be significant as the age of motherless birth approaches. They will not be the same societal implications that were highlighted in Daedalus, however. 

Technology developing in increments

Where are we on the road to ectogenesis right now? To begin, progress has definitely been rapid over the last 20-30 years. In the mid 1990s, Japanese investigators succeeded in maintaining goat fetuses for weeks in a machine containing artificial amniotic fluid. At the same time, the recent decades have seen rapid advancement in neonatal intensive care that is pushing back the minimum gestational age from which human fetuses can be kept alive. Today, it is possible for a preterm fetus to survive when removed from the mother at a gestational age of slightly less than 22 weeks. That’s only a little more than halfway through the pregnancy (normally 40 weeks). And while rescuing an infant delivered at such an early point requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and care, the capability continues to increase.

A comprehensive review published by the New York Academy of Sciencesthree years ago highlights a series of achievements by various research groups using ex vivo (out of the body) uterus environments to support mammalian fetuses early in pregnancy. Essentially, two areas of biotechnology are developing rapidly that potentially can enable ectogenesis in humans, and, along the way, what the authors of the Academy review callpartial ectogenesis.

meticulously planned parenthood WILL NOT be taken slowly because tards are scared of it...,

SA |  The official policy of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine is as follows: “Whereas preimplantation sex selection is appropriate to avoid the birth of children with genetic disorders, it is not acceptable when used solely for nonmedical reasons.” Yet in a 2006 survey of 186 U.S. fertility clinics, 58 allowed parents to choose sex as a matter of preference. And that was seven years ago. More recent statistics are scarce, but fertility experts confirm that sex selection is more prevalent now than ever.

“A lot of U.S. clinics offer non-medical sex selection,” says Jeffrey Steinberg, director of The Fertility Institutes, which has branches in Los Angeles, New York and Guadalajara, Mexico. “We do it every single day. We did three this morning.”

In 2009 Steinberg announced that he would soon give parents the option to choose their child’s skin color, hair color and eye color in addition to sex. He based this claim on studies in which scientists at deCode Genetics in Iceland suggested they could identify the skin, hair and eye color of a Scandinavian by looking at his or her DNA. "It's time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,” Steinberg proclaimed to the BBC at the time. Many fertility specialists were outraged. Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the whole idea was absurd and the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying that “no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they'd be ostracized." Likewise, Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCode, did not mince words with the WSJ: “I vehemently oppose the use of these discoveries for tailor-making children,” he said. Fertility Institutes even received a call from the Vatican urging its staff to think more carefully. Seifert withdrew his proposal.

But that does not mean he and other likeminded clinicians and entrepreneurs have forgotten about the possibility of parents molding their children before birth. “I’m still very much in favor of using genetics for all it can offer us,” Steinberg says, “but I learned a lesson: you really have to take things very, very slowly, because science is scary to a lot of people.” Most recently, a minor furor erupted over a patent awarded to the personal genomics company 23andMe. The patent in question, issued on September 24th, describes a method of “gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations." 23andMe would first sequence the DNA of a man or woman who wants a baby as well as the DNA of several potential sperm or egg donors. Then, the company would calculate which pairing of hopeful parent and donor would most likely result in a child with various traits.

Illustrations in the patent depict drop down menus with choices like: “I prefer a child with Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer; “High Probability of Green Eyes;” "100% Likely Sprinter;" and “Longest Expected Life Span” or “Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care." All the choices are presented as probabilities because, in most cases, the technique 23andMe describes could not guarantee that a child will or will not have a certain trait. Their calculations would be based on an analysis of two adults’ genomes using DNA derived from blood or saliva, which does reflect the genes inside those adults’ sperm and eggs. Every adult cell in the human body has two copies of every gene in that person’s genome; in contrast, sperm and eggs have only one copy of each gene and which copy is assigned to which gamete is randomly determined. Consequently, every gamete ends up with a unique set of genes. Scientists have no way of sequencing the DNA inside an individual sperm or egg without destroying it.

“When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics. But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so,” 23andMe spokeswoman Catherine Afarian said in a prepared statement. Nevertheless, doctors using PGD can already—or will soon be able to—accomplish at least some of what 23andMe proposes and give parents a few of the choices the Freemans made about their second son.

terrified to hear the truth, deuterostems ought not ask scary questions...,

thenation |   On April 18, scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, published an article in the obscure open-access journal Protein & Cell documenting their attempt at using an experimental new method of gene therapy on human embryos. Although the scientific significance of the results remains open to question, culturally the article is a landmark, for it has reanimated the age-old debate over human genetic improvement.

The Chinese scientists attempted to correct a mutation in the beta-globin gene, which encodes a crucial blood protein. Mutations in this gene lead to a variety of serious blood diseases. But the experiments failed. Although theoretically the new method, known as CRISPR (short for “clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repeats”) is extremely precise, in practice it often produces “off-target” mutations. In plain English, it makes a lot of changes in unintended locations, like what often happens when you hit “search/replace all” in a word-processing document. The principal conclusion from the paper is that the technique is still a long way from being reliable enough for the clinic. Nevertheless, the science media and pundits pounced on the story, and for a while “#CRISPR” was trending on Twitter. 

CRISPR is the fastest, easiest, and most promising of several new methods known collectively as “gene editing.” Using them, scientists can edit the individual letters of the DNA code, almost as easily as a copy editor would delete, a stray comma or correct a speling error. Advocates wax enthusiastic about its promise for correcting mutations for serious genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia. Other applications might include editing HIV out of someone’s genome or lowering genetic risks of heart disease or cancer. Indeed, every week brings new applications: CRISPR is turning out to be an extraordinarily versatile technique, applicable to many fields of biomedical research. I’m pretty immune to biomedical hype, but gene editing has the marks of a genuine watershed moment in biotechnology. Once the kinks are worked out, CRISPR seems likely to change the way biologists do experiments, much as the circular saw changed how carpenters built houses. 

The timing of the paper was provocative. It was submitted on March 30 and accepted on April 1; formal peer review was cursory at best. Two weeks before, scientists in the United States and Europe had called for a moratorium on experiments using CRISPR on human “germ-line” tissue (eggs, sperm, and embryos), which pass alterations on to one’s descendants, in contrast to the “somatic” cells that compose the rest of the body. The embryos in the Chinese experiments were not implanted and in fact could not have become humans: They were the unviable, discarded products of in vitro fertilization. Still, the paper was a sensational flouting of the Westerners’ call for restraint. It was hard not to read its publication as an East Asian Bronx cheer. 

The circumstances of the paper’s publication underline the fact that the core of the CRISPR debate is not about the technological challenge but the ethical one: that gene editing could enable a new eugenics, a eugenics of personal choice, in which humans guide their own evolution individually and in families. Commentators are lining up as conservatives and liberals on the issue. Conservatives, such as Jennifer Doudna (one of CRISPR’s inventors) and the Nobel laureates David Baltimore and Paul Berg, have called for cautious deliberation. They were among those who proposed the moratorium on using CRISPR on human embryos. “You could exert control over human heredity with this technique,” said Baltimore. George Q. Daley, of Boston Children’s Hospital, said that CRISPR raises the fundamental issue of whether we are willing to “take control of our genetic destiny.” Are we ready to edit our children’s genomes to perfection, as in the movie Gattaca? Could the government someday pass laws banning certain genetic constitutions or requiring others?

genetic engineering: technical challenge or moral challenge?

waitbutwhy |  He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherf---er, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes s--t for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.