StemCell Therapy

In Cuba there are 26,952 persons infected with the HIV/AIDS virus until the end of November, according to data released this Thursday by the islands National Center for Health Promotion and Education (CNPES).

Among those diagnosed, the most affected are transsexual women, with 19.7%; men who have sex with other men (MSM), 5.6%; and people who practice transactional sex (in exchange for objects, money or privileges), which are 2.8%.

The Cuban provinces that show the highest incidence of contagion are Havana, the central Cienfuegos and the eastern Las Tunas and Guantnamo, said CNPS Deputy Director Otto Pelez, cited by the state-run Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN) news agency.

The islands public health authorities highlight the control in maternal-infant transmission in children under 14, in heterosexual people, as well as the early detection of the disease, among the positive results of the Cuban program to prevent the spread of the virus, which is recognized by international organizations.

At the close of 2018, about 25,494 persons with HIV/AIDS had been detected in the Caribbean country, and more than 2,200 of them were new cases.

At that time 80% (20,446) were men and the rest (5,048) women, aged between 15 and 49, 74%, according to data from the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) collected by state media.

Ms de 2,200 nuevos casos de VIH en Cuba en 2018

In 1985, four years after the disease was discovered, the first case of HIV/AIDS was detected in Cuba in a man who had spent two years in Mozambique, Africa. Since then, the number who have contracted the virus is more than 30,000, of which a part died.

In the early days after the onset of the epidemic in the country, the diagnosed persons were admitted to health centers where they received treatment and were kept in isolation, with exceptional outings, in order to avoid the transmission of the virus.

On the island, patients receive a free treatment of five locally produced retrovirals combined with other imported ones. The objective of this therapy is to keep the levels of the AIDS virus low in blood and control its multiplication, which means that the patient has no complications and remains stable, according to the specialists.

Last March, pre-exposure prophylaxis pills (PrEP) started being given out in Cuba to prevent the spread of HIV in healthy people, a relatively new treatment in the Americas that is estimated to reduce the probability of contracting the virus by 90%.

In addition, since 2017 Cuban scientists have been testing the TERAVAC-VIH vaccine, developed at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana and designed to reduce the viral load of patients with the virus and improve the quality of life of the patients.

EFE / OnCuba

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Almost 27000 persons with HIV in Cuba - OnCubaNews

FDA for the first time has approved an experiment that involves temporarily transplanting pig tissue into humans, a move that experts say could lead to further developments in animal-to-human donations, Emily Mullin reports for Medium's "OneZero."

CRISPRand 7 other technologies that could transform health care

Each year in the United States, the waiting list for organ transplants grows and outpaces the number of available donations. And due to strict donor criteria, skin is also difficult to acquire, Mullin reports.

The new FDA-approved trial will focus on skin transplanted from pigs to humans.

Usually, second and third-degree burns are treated with human skin grafts to protect the wounds and help fight off infection. But researchers at biotech company XenoTherapeutics have genetically engineered miniature pigs to allow for use in humans. The skin, called Xeno-Skin, is made from living pig tissue.

So far, the Xeno-Skin has been transplanted to one patient who received a five-by-five centimeter piece of pig skin as well as human skin grafts. Five days after the transplant, doctors removed both skin grafts and replaced them with permanent grafts from the patient's thigh. The donor pig skin healed as well as the human skin graft, according to doctors involved in the trial. The patient also did not experience any adverse reactions to the graft.

Now, as part of the FDA-approved trial, Xeno-Skin will be transplanted as temporary skin grafts to five more burn victims at Massachusetts General Hospital. The grafts will be removed once the patients' skin grows back.

The experiment is the first of its kind to be approved by FDA, Mullin reports.

XenoTherapeutics is also developing nerves in the genetically engineered pigs that could be transplanted into people with nerve damage from accidents. The clinical trial for the new treatment will likely begin next year, Mullin reports.

In the past, donations from animals to humans, also called xenotransplantation, have almost always failed, Mullin writes, with common issues including patients experiencing an immune response to the donation or the transmission of an animal virus to the human recipient. Surgeon Keith Reemtsmain the 1960s transplanted chimpanzee kidneys into humans, but most of the transplants were rejected or became infected within a few weeks. And in 1984, a baby called "Baby Fae," received a heart transplant from a baboon, but died within a month.

After transplants from apes and monkeys failed, doctors started to consider pigs as potential human donrs, Mullin reports. "The reasons are largely practical," Mullin writes. "For one, pigs take only months to grow to a size suitable for organ donation, unlike monkeys, which require 10 to 15 years. Pig organs are also closer in size to human ones."

When it comes to skin transplants, while dead, processed pig skin is already used for wound dressing, living pig tissue had never been used in humans, Mullin reports. To prevent rejection, scientists used genetic engineering to eliminate molecules found in pigs that would trigger an immune system reaction in humans. Researchers also used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to remove a group of viruses found in pigs that are considered an infection risk for human donation recipients.

While temporary pig skin grafts are much more low risk than transplanting major pig organs into humans permanently, the successful skin graft transplant further demonstrates that "the risk" of xenotransplants "is manageable," according to Megan Sykes, director of the Center for Translational Immunology at Columbia University. "The fact that the FDA allowed this [pig skin] trial reflects that thought as well."

While xenotransplants are often used as bridge transplants, or temporary transplants that are designed to keep patients alive for a period of time before they receive a transplant from a human donor, Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of the cardiac transplantation program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has led research on pig transplants, believes that organ xenotransplantation might evolve enough to become a longer term solution. "[O]nce we have an ideal pig available and it survives for a longer period of time, there will not be a need to replace that organ," he said.

But convincing the public that pig transplants are safe might prove to be more difficult, he added. "If you tell someone, 'We want to put a pig heart in you,' there would probably be quite an uproar," Mohiuddin said. "If this trial is successful, that will pave the way for other types of transplantations, like kidneys, hearts, lungs, or livers."

While these types of transplants might not happen for another few decades, Ardehali said the field is getting closer. "Are we about to embark on a new chapter? I don't know the answer to that. This requires a significant leap of faith" (Mullin, "OneZero," Medium, 11/11).

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'A leap of faith': FDA just approved the first pig-to-human tissue transplant - The Daily Briefing

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The central dogma of biology describes the flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to proteins. While RNA was originally believed to be a carrier of genetic information, subsequent work has shown something completely different: RNA is now known to have function independent of proteins, with a rich layer of regulatory networks. In fact, a large amount of the RNA present in a cell does not actually make proteins. This increased appreciation and understanding has led to many fascinating mechanistic insights into RNA and its role as a central player in cellular regulation and human disease.

Helping to facilitate RNA function are a large number of proteins that can bind to and regulate RNA. These RNA-binding proteins, or RBPs, number in the thousands and are made up of many different independent modular segments similar to a childs set of building blocks. In much a similar fashion, these blocks or domains provide nature with a way of mixing and matching different domains to generate new functions. In recent years, researchers have sought to learn from biology and use these building blocks to engineer new proteins with unique functions that are helpful in research and human health. In a recent study published in WIREs RNA, Professor Andrew Berglund and his colleagues describe recent advances and challenges in engineering RBPs.

Engineering [RBPs] is a powerful tool for researchers to probe the mechanisms of RNA processing pathways says Dr. Andrew Berglund, the newly appointed Director of the RNA Institute at the University at Albany. It is also a promising approach for the development of novel therapeutic molecules.

Potential targets for this approach are abundant as many human diseases have a strong RNA or RBP component, including the most common cause of muscular dystrophy and amylotrophic lateral sclerosis. For therapeutic purposes, engineered RBPs can be designed to replace a defective cellular RBP or bind and destroy toxic RNA. RBPs can also be engineered with new functions and/or targets as well as being marked or tagged so that the researcher can follow their progression within the cell, like a GPS tracker for RNA. The modular nature of RBPs makes it possible to add or mix function to suit the goal of almost any researcher.

In their study published in WIREs RNA, the research team highlights two specific types of RBDs domains, PPR and PUF domains, which are the most straightforward choice for protein engineering. Researchers have studied these domains, understand how to design them to bind specific RNA sequences, and even have websites that can be used to design a domain to target your RNA of choice. Not all RBP engineering is this straightforward, with most researchers having to consider other factors such as the type of linker between domains, where in the tissue or the cell that protein must go, and how to attach other domains to give the engineered protein function.

Ultimately, as more functions of RNA are discovered and more diseases are linked to RNA misregulation, the greater the importance will be for designing, engineering, and testing novel RNA binding proteins. Somewhere in a jumble of RBP building blocks may lie the key to unlocking the next big discovery on RNA and potentially the next generation of therapeutics to improve human health.

Kindly contributed by the authors.

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Engineering RNA Binding Proteins to Improve Human Health - Advanced Science News

Geneticist Kat Arney takes a look at the science of de-extinction, asking whether its feasible or even ethical to bring species back from the past.

In 2003, Spanish researchers used cloning techniques to bring back the recently extinct bucardo (a type of mountain goat), only for the first cloned animal to die within minutes of birth.Other scientists are using genetic engineering techniques to stitch together the genomes of extinct species like passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths with their modern-day relatives.

Could these tools ever be used to bring back the biggest animals of them all, the dinosaurs? And is all this effort really worth it, or should we be focusing on conserving the species we already have on Earth?

Arney also investigates the history of one of the most famous diagrams in biology the Tree Of Life which Charles Darwin famously drew in 1837 to illustrate the evolutionary relationships between species.

Todays trees much more complex, bushy thickets, informed by modern genomics. But all this data brings a new challenge: deciding what counts as a species in the first place.

Full transcript, credits and show notes are available here.

Genetics Unzipped is the podcast from the UK Genetics Society, presented by award-winning science communicator and biologist Kat Arneyand produced byFirst Create the Media.Follow Kat on Twitter@Kat_Arney,Genetics Unzipped@geneticsunzip,and the Genetics Society at@GenSocUK

Listen to Genetics Unzipped onApple Podcasts(iTunes)Google Play,Spotify,orwherever you get your podcasts

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Podcast: From Jurassic Park to woolly mammoths is it right to bring back extinct species? - Genetic Literacy Project

"Theres been an enormous collapse in diversity," said Mr Blazey, the founder of gardening business The Diggers Club, which his family donated to the charity Diggers Foundation in 2011. He will also talk about the threat to food security at an event at Camperdown's Pocket City Farms on Sunday.

The number of seeds owned by the public had shrunk since genetic engineering was introduced in the early 1980s, Mr Blazey said.

First grown in 1802, the "lazy housewife" bean was one seed away from being lost forever, when it was propagated by The Diggers Club. The heirloom variety is now sold as a good bean for cooks and gardeners of any gender.

He started rescuing heirloom seeds 25 years ago, including the stringless bean, which was down to its last seed - in Germany - and sent to Australia. Since then, the world had lost about 60 per cent of vegetable varieties while the big companies such as Monsanto sold hybrids, he said.

"Thats a serious problem but most people dont see it. When you are buying a tomato, it is a hybrid and it won't be true to type [if you try to reproduce it]," he said. It also doesn't taste as good.

"If pestilence and climate change force us into disaster, we will have to ask Monsanto [recently taken over by Bayer] if we can grow [its] seeds and collect them.

"It is a disaster scenario, which nobody understands. Most of us don't realise we have lost complete control of seed supply," Mr Blazey said.

Five colour silverbeet, a very old variety, now sold by The Diggers Club.

The Grow It Local Festival and its website were started to encourage people to grow their own food, said co-founder Darryl Nichols, who also started the Garage Sale Trail 10 years ago.

There's also some "crowd farming": connecting locals who know how to garden with those who don't. Hundreds of people have registered their gardens, some running classes, including Composting 101, while others have offered advice and unused garden space.

When one of the site's Perth members offered a "seven-course plant-based patch-to-plate degustation", 14 strangers turned up, Mr Nichols said.

Like the Pocket City Farms, which is encouraging gardens in unused urban spaces, the site's members are growing vegetables wherever they can, horizontally and vertically.

In Bondi Junction, Tina has the beginning of a banana grove, with plans to fill up the nature strip with vegetables and ornamentals. In Killara, Mike is growing chili in his 15-square-metre back-garden. In Randwick, Jess and Andrew are "challenging the concept that you cant grow much in a concreted backyard". A woman is growing herbs on a vertical pallet on the verge to share with her neighbours.

It is a similar concept to The Diggers Club, which sells nearly 700 seed varieties, many heirloom, some brought to Australia by members when they migrated.

Different varieties of potatoes. Credit:David Cavanaro.

They include the pumpkin ironbark, which was down to 10 seeds a few years ago and unavailable anywhere else in the world. Reg, a market gardener, passed on seeds to two old heirloom varieties, red odourless onion and a carrot called "western red" before he died.

The number of vegetable seeds has shrunk to a fraction since 1900, according to this chart by Diggers Club. Credit:Clive Blazey

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Collapse in diversity threatens food security, seed rescuer says - The Age

Just as physics and chemistry have given humans power over the world of the inanimate, biology is giving us the ability to engineer living systems, from viruses and bacteria to animals and people.

Which is why [Wired co-founder Jane] Metcalfe thinksdesigncould be the next big thing in medicine.

Well combat disease and improve human health by designing biological systems from the ground up. We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans, Metcalfe said.

The ultimate goal is writing whole human genomes from scratch, and [Andrew] Hessel cofounded Genome Project-write (GP-write) to convene the worlds top synthetic biologists to do just that.

There are obviouslybig hurdles that still need clearingincluding software that can make design more accurate and efficient and DNA synthesis tools that assemble longer base-pair sequencesand Hessels group recently published a paper outlining the challenges.

Literally in 10 years weve gone from making proteins synthetically to making a eukaryote, he said. As soon as we can start making whole chromosomes, well, weve only got 23 of them.

Read full, original post: Why Designing Our Own Biology Will Be the Next Big Thing in Medicine

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How synthetic biology will allow us to redesign humans 'from the ground up' - Genetic Literacy Project

A thought-provoking new exhibition by world-renowned artist Bonita Ely has opened at Griffith University Art Museum.

Bonita Ely: Future Tense explores dystopian futures wrought by environmental degradation and genetic engineering.

The major survey exhibition brings together several of Elys major works imagining an impossible future where nature has adapted with the assistance of science, and flourished despite the devastating effects of pollution and climate change.

Shown in Australia for the first time since its debut at documenta14 in 2017, Plastikus Progressus 2017/19 parodies natural history displays. Set in 2054, it features genetically-engineered creatures that consume plastic and, in the process, clean up our mess in the streets, oceans and rivers. The installation includes a new section examining the plastic pollution of the Brisbane River.

We Live to be Surprised 1989/2019 is Elys latest installation of snabbits half snail/half rabbits. Engineered as a food source for an over-populated planet, these creatures have evolved into an ominous feral monoculture.

The exhibition also includes a major 1973 painting by Ely, The Locust People, which shows Elys interest in environmental issues since the earliest years of her practice.

Director of Griffith University Art Museum Angela Goddard, who curated the exhibition, said Ely was a fascinating artist whose practice blurred the lines between art and science.

I like her intuitive way of working and projecting ideas, and how she imagines the future and how we might adapt to it, she said.

Bonita is a major figure in contemporary art and her work has great currency, as evidenced by both installations having recently been shown in EuropePlastikus Progressus in Poland and We Live to be Surprised in the UKwe are fortunate to be able to see these works here in Australia.

Griffith University Art Museum acknowledges the generosity of exhibition partners Lock, Stock and Barrel, Shut the Gate Wines and Solver Paints.

The exhibition runs until 8 February 2020 at Griffith University Art Museum, South Bank.

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Exhibition explores a brave new world - Griffith News

Justice Markandey Katju-

Although the Constitution of India declares India to be a secular country, the ground reality is very different. In recent years, particularly after the Hindu right wing Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) came to power in 2014, Indian society has been considerably polarized on religious lines.

Consider the following facts :

It is clear that in recent years polarization of Indian society on religious basis has witnessed an exponential upsurge. Earlier too there was communal feeling, but it was largely latent, erupting only on occasions. Now under BJP rule from 2014 it has become open, virulent. and continuous. What is the cause?

Some people say that it is because of reaction among Hindus who were earlier suppressed due to appeasement policy of Congress towards Muslims who were treated as a vote bank. Others say that Muslims are inherently fanatics and bigots, who often resort to terrorism, etc. But what is the truth?

The truth is that 99% of all people, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsi or Buddhist are good people. Most Muslims, like most Hindus, are peaceful, upright and law abiding. So it is absurd to say that all, or even most, Muslims are bigots and terrorists.

In fact there was no communal feeling before 1857, as I have explained in my article The Truth about Pakistan published in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation some years back. Before 1857 Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously, Hindus used to participate in Eid and Muharram, and Muslims in Holi and Diwali.

Communalism was artificially created after suppressing the 1857 Mutiny ( in which Hindus and Muslims fought together against the British ) by the British rulers as part of their divide and rule policy ( see BN Pandes History in the service of Imperialism online ), and this was continued even after Independence, but now it has increased exponentially.

There are two reasons for the recent upsurge in communal polarization in India, one internal, and the other external. Let me explain

Internal causes of polarization

The Congress Party, by its Muslim appeasement policy (to get Muslim votes ) created a strong reaction among many Hindus, who though forming 80% of the Indian population, felt they were being ignored, and all the Congress cared for was the 15% Muslims. This naturally created a backlash, which helped the BJP to come to power in 2014. Of course, the scandalous corruption by most Congress leaders and Modis vikas slogan also helped.

However, now the Indian economy is tanking, with huge dip in GDP, manufacturing sector, IT, real estate etc. on the rapid decline, and record unemployment as admitted by National Sample Survey, a Govt of India organization ( 12 million Indian youth are entering the job market every year but jobs are shrinking ), child malnourishment ( every second Indian child is malnourished, according to Global Hunger Index and UNICEF ), 50% Indian women anaemic, farmers suicides ( already well over 300,000 ) continuing unabated, almost total lack of proper healthcare and good education for the masses, etc.

The present Govt of India has no inkling how to resolve these massive problems, so to divert public attention from them it has to have a scapegoat. This scapegoat is the Muslims, who, like the Jews in the Nazi era, are blamed for all social evils. Muslims are vilified as fanatics, anti-national and terrorists. The Indian media, which has largely been Modified, dutifully obliges by spreading communal hatred.

Propaganda is such a powerful thing that even good peoples minds can be poisoned. For instance, Germans are ordinarily very good people, but during the Nazi era almost the whole German nation went mad, their minds poisoned by Hitler and Goebbels. Similarly, by the communal propaganda and other wicked techniques of the BJP most Hindus have been made Muslim haters in recent years.

Some people deny that BJP is anti-minority, and they refer to Modis statement Sabka saath, sabka vishwas but everyone knows this is hypocrisy and empty rhetoric. BJPs entire politics is based on hatred of minorities, particularly Muslims. BJP is dominated by an organization called the RSS (Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh ), which is rabidly anti minority ( see the book Bunch of Thoughts by the former RSS leader M.S.Golwalkar). Only by spreading and increasing religious hatred can the BJP thrive.

This world really consists of two worlds, the world of the developed, highly industrialized countries ( North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and China ), and the world of the underdeveloped countries ( which includes India ).

The national objective of India must be to transform and uplift itself into the ranks of the developed countries, for then only can it abolish poverty, unemployment and its other massive problems.

However, this transformation will be opposed tooth and nail by the developed countries, which have an unwritten rule that underdeveloped countries must not be allowed to join the ranks of the developed countries. Why this is so needs to be explained.

Cost of labor is a big chunk of the total cost of production. So if the cost of labor is less the cost of production is less, and one can sell his product at a cheaper price and eliminate his business rival by underselling him i.e. by selling the same quality goods at a cheaper price. There is competition in the market, and one businessman eliminates another not with guns, bombs or tanks but by underselling him.

For instance, after the 1949 Revolution, the Chinese leaders built up a massive industrial base in China. That massive industrial base, coupled with the cheap labor available in China, enabled the Chinese to undersell the whole world in consumer goods. Today the supermarkets of Western countries are packed with Chinese goods, which sell at less than half the price of goods made by Western manufacturers (because the Western labor is expensive). Consequently, many Western industries, which could not face the Chinese competition, had to close down.

Now coming to India, the situation in 1947, when India became independent, was that there were then very few industries and very few engineers. This was because of the policy of the British rulers who did not want India to become an industrialized nation, and wanted to keep it backward and feudal. However, after Independence there was a limited degree of industrialization in India, a heavy industrial base (steel plants etc.) were set up, engineering colleges like IITs were established, etc. The result is that today India is very different from the India of 1947. Today it has all that is required to become a highly industrialized nationa huge pool of technical talent (its IT engineers are largely manning Silicon Valley, and American Universities are full of Indian Professors in Engineering, Science and Mathematics) and immense natural resources.

But if India in fact becomes a highly industrialized country then with its cheap labor it will undersell the Western industrial products. Our labor is even cheaper than Chinese labor, so we will even undersell the Chinese if we get highly industrialized. So, if India gets highly industrialized who will buy the expensive products of the industries of the presently developed countries? Will they not have to close down causing massive unemployment?

India is presently the most developed of the underdeveloped countries, and with correct modern minded leadership it can become a highly developed country in 15-20 years (with modern minded leaders after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan took only this much time to transform itself from a feudal to a highly developed country). But if it does, will it not greatly damage the industries of the developed countries with their expensive labor?

So developed countries will strongly oppose Indias joining the ranks of the developed countries. And how do they do that? By supporting and inciting religious and caste conflicts. In other words, by making Indians fight with each other. I strongly suspect their hidden hand behind the increased religious polarization of Indian society.

[Justice Markandey Katju is former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.

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The religious polarization of India - indica News

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By Eva FrederickNov. 8, 2019 , 4:20 PM

Caribbean excavation offers intimate look at the lives of enslaved Africans

To an outsider, the archaeological finds from Estate Little Princess in the U.S. Virgin Islandsfish and pig bones from centuries-old meals, buttons that fell off clothing, bits of coarse local potterymight not look like much. But to archaeologists, they are treasures that offer an intimate look into some of the most enigmatic lives in modern history: those of the enslaved Africans who once lived there.

New genetically modified corn produces up to 10% more than similar types

Genetic engineering proponents have long promised the technology will help meet the worlds growing demand for food. But despite the success of genetically modified pest -resistant crops, scientists havent had much success with boosting crop growth. Now, researchers have shown for the first time that they can increase corn yields up to 10% by changing a gene for plant growth.

Bad dog? Think twice before yelling, experts say

Few things are more adorableor destructivethan a new puppy. When they pee on rugs, chew furniture, and get aggressive with other pups, their stressed-out owners usually turn to dog training. Now, a novel study suggests programs that use even relatively mild punishments like yelling and leash-jerking can stress dogs out, making them more pessimistic than dogs that experience reward-based training.

What do you see when you look at these photosanimals or humanmade objects?

Live in the urban jungle long enough, and you might start to see thingsin particular, humanmade objects like cars and furniture. Thats what researchers found when they melded photos of artificial items with images of animals and asked 20 volunteers what they saw. The people, all of whom lived in cities, overwhelmingly noticed the manufactured objects as the animals faded into the background.

Colombian womans genes offer new clues to staving off Alzheimers

In 2016, a 73-year-old woman from Medelln, Colombia, flew to Boston so researchers could scan her brain, analyze her blood, and pore over her genome. She carried a genetic mutation that had caused many in her family to develop dementia in middle age. But for decades, she had avoided the disease. The researchers now report that another rare mutationthis one in the well-known Alzheimers disease risk gene APOEmay have protected her.

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Top stories: The archaeology of slavery, superproductive corn, and how NOT to train your dog - Science Magazine

We expect to have more than one variety of apple to choose from. Even at the most modestly stocked produce stand, youre likely to see mounds of Galas, McIntoshes and Honeycrisps. When it comes to the banana, though no matter where you shop theres only ever one: The Cavendish.

As far removed as we are from tropical growing regions, youd be forgiven for assuming the fruit we recognize as a cheap and reliable staple is the one true banana. In reality, however, there are over a thousand types, each exhibiting a different flavour profile, texture, shape, colour, ripening pattern and durability. And for the second time in recent history, the very existence of the sole breed we rely on which represents the single most exported fresh fruit on the planet is under threat.

Researchers, seeking a solution, are looking towards a new form of genetic modification. Could specific alterations of the genetic makeup of the Cavendish help stave off the disappearance of such a critical commodity?

In August, Colombia declared a state of emergency when scientists confirmed a banana-killing fungus had reached the Americas for the first time. Known by its common name, Panama disease, the strain of fungus Fusarium oxysporum cubense Tropical Race 4 (TR4) has been a known issue since the early 1990s, but until this year, it was largely contained to Asia. Immune to pesticides, the lethal soil-borne organism, for which there is no known cure, obliterates yields by choking banana trees of essential water and nutrients.

The Cavendishs predecessor as worlds presiding banana was the Gros Michel, a variety that dominated fruit stands in temperate regions until it was decimated by fungal strain Tropical Race 1 in the 1950s. That the extreme monoculture approach replicated with the Cavendish would result in a similar fate should have seemed inevitable.

Cavendish bananas are sterile and breeding them requires a cloning process that creates genetically identical plants. Because of their inherent lack of biodiversity, monocultures such as this banana are especially vulnerable to diseases and pests; when theres a weakness, such as little or no resistance against TR4, it can have sweeping and ruinous effects.

Given the bananas immense importance to producers and consumers, researchers have been attempting a variety of methods to create a resistance to the deadly fungus. According to Nature, James Dale, a biotechnologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, is currently field testing genetically modified bananas in Northern Australia with some success. Dale has added a gene from a wild banana into the Cavendish variety that makes it more resistant to the TR4.

However, even if scientists are able to breed a TR4-immune Cavendish, they wouldnt be permitted to grow or sell them in a significant portion of the world. In Europe, for example, GM crops are restricted. And in Canada, although GMOs have been on the market since the late 1990s, nearly 90 per cent of Canadians believe they should be subject to mandatory labelling.

As a result, researchers like Dale and Leena Tripathi, from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Kenya, have begun experimenting with CRISPR technology. Where GMOs have a foreign gene inserted into the organism, CRISPR allows for the organisms genes to be edited. In the case of Dale, hes discovered a dormant gene in the Cavendish he hopes to activate.

The technique is perhaps best described by Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University. In an interview with Gastropod, she likened DNA to a book and CRISPR to a pen: You can go in and you can edit the letters in a word, or you can change different phrases, or you can edit whole paragraphs at very specific locations.

CRISPR and GMO are further differentiatedin terms of consumer perception. As a December 2018 study published in Global Food Security found, 47 per cent of Canadian respondents were willing to eat both GM and CRISPR foods, but participants across the board (in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the U.S.) were more apt to eat CRISPR than GM food.

Nevertheless, editing the genes of the banana is still in the early stages. Dale told Nature that itll be a couple of years before these get into the field for trials. Can the Cavendish banana wait that long?

In a recent interview with KCRW, Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, said I think the time has come to stop looking at bananas as just one kind of fruit when there are thousands. Just as the range of apples at our fingertips is rich and getting richer, perhaps all the different varieties of bananas will prove ripe for discovery.

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The world's banana crops are under threat from a deadly fungus. Is gene editing the answer? - National Post

In the battle against heart disease, more than 400,000 coronary artery bypass grafting surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year.

While veins from a patients leg are often used in the surgical procedure, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVG), which are grown outside the body using a patients endothelial cells, are proving to be an effective and increasingly popular technique.

The most common reasons for TEVG failure are conditions like blood clots, narrowing of the blood vessels, and atherosclerosis. But what if these grafts could be engineered to detect and even prevent those ailments from occurring?

A team of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences students set out to answer that question for their project in this years International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. The project, dubbed FlowGlo, seeks to use receptors that exist within the walls of human blood vessels to detect shear stress, a warning sign that a blood vessel may be narrowing.

Shear stress is important to detect because it is a marker of a lot of different cardiovascular diseases. When there is narrowing of a blood vessel due to a blood clot, shear stress jumps exponentially, maybe up to 10 times its normal level, said Teagan Stedman, S.B. 22, a bioengineering concentrator. Our idea is to link the activation of these receptors due to some level of shear stress to a modular response.

Shear stress is a function of viscosity and how rapidly different layers of fluid are flowing over each other through a blood vessel. Because the walls of the vessel must move and roll with the strain of blood flow, receptors naturally activate at different levels of shear stress.

For instance, when shear stress rises above 4 Pascals, channels open in one specific protein receptor, Piezo1, and calcium ions enter the cell, signaling the activation. The students engineered Piezo 1 and two other protein receptors to present different colored fluorescent proteins when that activation occurs.

Down the road, instead of using a fluorescent protein, you could possibly swap it out so the cells secrete some kind of clot busting protein to break up the clot and treat it on site, said Patrick Dickinson, A.B. 22, an applied math concentrator. Current clot-busting medication is delivered through an IV, and it is system-wide and much less targeted, so there are greater risks for side effects. We think this could be a more targeted treatment in the long run.

As part of their project, the team gathered feedback from Elena Aikawa, Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Director of the Vascular Biology Program at Brigham and Womens Hospital, who studies tissue-engineered vascular grafts. They also conducted a survey to better understand public perception of genetic engineering ethics, since their technique would require engineered cells to be implanted in the human body.

As they gathered qualitative data, they worked long hours in the lab on intricate experiments. Since beginning the project this summer, the teammates overcame many challenges caused by the difficulty of cloning cells. Relying on the support of their mentor, Timothy Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Pamela Silver at the Harvard Medical School, they brainstormed, troubleshot, and learned volumes about synthetic biology along the way.

I learned that biology is messy, Dickinson said. In a lab setting, there is a lot that is hard to predict. We certainly encountered a lot of frustration and stress along the way, but it was a good window into what research really is.

Now that the competition has concluded, the teams work will be included in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a repository of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to build synthetic biology devices and systems.

For Rahel Imru, it is gratifying to know that future iGEM teams and research groups from around the world could someday build off the research she and her peers have done.

While the weeks leading up to the competition were a whirlwind, the experience was well worth the effort, said Imru, A.B. 21, a biomedical engineering concentrator.

This was my first lab experience, so I definitely learned a lot, she said. I look back and see how much weve grown. Maybe we didnt get all the data and results we wanted to by the end, but for the size of our team and the time that we had, seeing what we are able to accomplish is especially rewarding.

The rest is here:
Glowing with the flow - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

PeakPx

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook when he was 19 years old. By 25, his company was valued at over $5 billion. At 28, he took Facebook public. Now, at the age of 35, he is among the top 10 richest people in the world.

When we think of entrepreneurs, we tend to think of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world youthful visionaries who disrupt traditional businesses with a new and better ways of doing things.

New research, however, challenges the view that youth is advantageous to entrepreneurial success. Perhaps a better entrepreneurial archetype is that of Herbert Boyer. Boyer founded Genentech at the age of 40 based on his breakthrough discoveries in genetic engineering. Or, consider the story of David Duffield. Duffield founded Workday, a financial and human capital management software company, in his 60s, after spending a career in application software. Now, Workday has a market capitalization of over $40 billion.

The data is increasingly showing that its never too late to start a business. Below are five research-backed reasons why entrepreneurial success may come quickest to those who wait.

1) The stereotype of the very young and very successful entrepreneur is exactly that a stereotype.

It turns out that the media may be the biggest culprit in perpetuating the belief that entrepreneurship is a young mans game. For example, the website TechCrunch gives annual awards to the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The average age of award recipients from 2008 to 2016 was 31. Inc. magazine and Entrepreneur magazine also publish lists of entrepreneurs to watch. In 2015, the average age of entrepreneurs who made this list was 29. Compare that to the average age of a typical startup founder (42) to see the discrepancy.

2) Not only are older entrepreneurs more common, they are more successful.

42 is the average founder age of all S-corporations, C-corporations, and Partnerships that registered in the United States between 2007 and 2014. Examining the performance of these companies reveals yet another trend: companies with older founders tend to outperform companies with younger founders. Looking at the top 1% of startups (in terms of company performance), the average founder age increases to 43. Looking at the top 0.1%, the founder age increases even more, to 45. Moreover, the average age of startup founders who achieved a successful exit (as defined by an acquisition or an IPO) is 47.

3) Entrepreneurs working in major entrepreneurial hubs are no younger than other entrepreneurs.

Another misconception is that startup founders practicing in the hottest entrepreneurial hubs think Silicon Valley and New York City are younger than in other areas of the country. Again, the data does not show this to be the case. The average age of entrepreneurs in California, Massachusetts, and Silicon Valley is also 42. And, in New York City, the average entrepreneurial age is only one year younger than average (41).

4) The average age of new entrepreneurs entering the market over the past decade has increased.

Given the rise of technology and technology-related entrepreneurship, one might guess that the average entrepreneurial age has fallen in recent decades. Again, the data suggest the opposite. The average founder age has risen from 41.8 in 2007 to 42.5 in 2014.

5) Certain fields attract entrepreneurs that are older than average.

Not surprisingly, there is truth to the idea that technology is a young mans game. However, the age spread is not as wide as one might think. For instance, startup founders operating in the software publishing industry are, on average, 40 years old (two years younger than the overall average). That said, there are other fields that attract older entrepreneurs. For example, the average age of founders in the pipeline transportation of natural gas, basic chemical manufacturing, and paint, coating, and adhesive manufacturing industries are 51, 48, and 48, respectively. Startup founders operating in oil and gas extraction and engine, turbine, and power transmission equipment manufacturing are also significantly older than other types of entrepreneurs.

Conclusion. The novelist George Eliot famously said, Its never too late to be what you might have been. This is sage advice for all aspects of life, but it might be especially relevant in the case of entrepreneurship.

Link:
Five Reasons Why Its Never Too Late To Start A Business - Forbes

A local scientist is sequencing the genomes of Burbanks plums to verify their history and create a genetic roadmap for future plant breeders

Luther Burbank is still a well-known name around Sonoma County it graces the regions largest arts center and a couple of public gardens. Burbank was Americas most famous horticulturalist (that is, someone who specializes in growing fruit, vegetables and flowers). Since he lived in a time when most Americans still made their living from agriculture, his discoveries seemed as vital and important as those of his contemporaries Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, both of whom visited him here in Sonoma County.

Luther Burbank died in 1926, and over the ensuing 93 years, his reputation has faded considerably, but the plants he created live on. An essay in the Journal of Heredity in 2006 estimated that Burbank introduced between 800 and 1,000 new plants to the American horticultural universe, including the Russet-Burbank potato (still the most common potato in America), Shasta Daisies, the Elberta peach and the luscious Santa Rosa plum.

With only a high school education and no scientific training, Burbank was a self-taught genius and a relentless experimenter, who, it turns out, took extremely poor notes. Still, Burbank filled a collection of notebooks with his large, ungainly scrawl, describing in the briefest of terms his plant breeding experiments. Many of these descriptions are accompanied by hatchmarks the meaning of which is still a mystery today and fruit prints, which he made by cutting a fruit in half and pressing it onto the page.

Because Burbank was secretive about his plant breeding methods and iffy with his notetaking the origins of some of his most famous crosses are still mysterious.

THE PLUM DETECTIVE Rachel Spaeth is the garden curator at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa. A fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, she is attempting to establish the identity and ancestry of Luther Burbank plum varieties through genetic sequencing. She is holding one of Burbanks fruit prints.

Enter Rachel Spaeth, the garden curator at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, working in the horticulture and agronomy graduate group.

Spaeth said she is looking at all of the genetic diversity that we can find in Luther Burbank plums, working to unravel their identity and ancestry.

We kind of know what he said they (his hybrid crosses) were, and genetically, I should be able to tell that, she said.

When talking to laymen, Spaeth likes to begin with this clarification: When somebody says the word plum, its a generic term and its kind of a misnomer, because plum actually refers to between 17 and 40 different species of organisms, Spaeth said, depending on which kind of taxonomist youre asking.

Spaeth is looking at 60 living plums within 10 of those species. She is using plant material from living Burbank plum trees to sequence the genomes of Burbanks plum varieties and she ultimately hopes to make use of the roughly century-old DNA in Burbanks fruit prints to confirm these identifications.

Spaeth said her goals are to verify Burbanks claims about his crosses and to establish a genetic collection of characteristics, based on Burbanks discoveries, for plant breeders in the future.

One of the major goals is to just verify his claims, she said, noting that Burbanks breeding claims were often disbelieved. Luther would say that these were the parents of something, but especially with his plum-apricot crosses, people didnt really believe that he crossbred a plum with an apricot until 50 years after his death, when somebody else was able to reproduce a plum-apricot crop.

NOTEWORTHY With only a high school education and no scientific training, Burbank was a self-taught genius and a relentless experimenter, who, it turns out, took extremely poor notes.

Long before genetic engineering was even dreamt of, Burbank took a swashbuckling approach toward plant breeding blithely crossing species boundaries to create fertile hybrids, something youre not supposed to be able to do.

Luther was unique in that he would frequently cross different species, especially ones that people didnt think were possible, Spaeth said. But if he saw that the flower morphology was similar or they had overlapping bloom periods, or if the fruit looked really similar, then he would deduce that, OK, maybe I can cross these and hed just try it sometimes repetitively if he really wanted it to work, and sometimes he would get really good results.

Spaeth said the Santa Rosa plum is probably the prime example of this.

Its a cross between a European plum and the Japanese plum. And in creating that hybridized cross, he created a plum that was partially self-fertile, but then also could be used to pollinize both European and Japanese plums. So the Santa Rosa plum became the universal pollinizer a role she said it still plays today. Even if its not grown commercially for fresh market, theyll always have a couple in the orchard just to make sure that they get a good fruit set on everything else.

The other thing is its really intermediate in bloom time, she said. So whenever youre looking at plant patents for plums, almost all of them will tell you it flowers two weeks before Santa Rosa or two weeks after Santa Rosa. So really its kind of like the gold standard.

Before heading out to the orchards to gather plant material, Spaeth needed to get a comprehensive list of all the plums introduced by Burbank. She used two different source books, W.L. Howards Luther Burbanks Plant Contributions (1945), a near comprehensive guide to everything Burbank introduced, and U.P. Hedricks Plums of New York (1911), a 750-page tome, filled with beautiful watercolor illustrations of plums.

Spaeth hit gold immediately.

When I looked through the Hedrick book, I used an online PDF and searched for the keyword Burbank, and I was able to discover six plums that Howard didnt find, just because of the modern tools that we have available to us. So that was really exciting, she said.

Then using that list as her starting point, she began gathering plant material leaves and fruit from plum trees at three different sites: Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa (where theres a small orchard with 34 varieties of plums grafted onto five trees); the Burbank Experiment Farm in Sebastopol (where some of the plum trees are so old they were planted by Burbank himself); and the USDAs Wolfskill Experimental Orchards in Winters.

If we find a cultivar thats in all three places when we sequence the genome, it should all be identical, Spaeth said. And then we can say this is exactly that plum. Then that becomes the voucher.

To make a definitive identification, You have to corroborate material from three different sources, she said. Two different sources is OK; three is better. So if we have a sample from all three, and it comes back that one of them is different, then we have to do a little bit more legwork with phenotyping: so it would be like really looking at fruit quality, flowering time and all of that information to try to match it to the historic data that we have.

BURBANK The Burbank plum was produced from a plum pit sent to Burbank by a Japanese agent in 1883. It was named in honor of Burbank, who introduced it to the United States.

Fruit prints then and now

Ultimately, she would like to do genetic testing on Burbanks original fruit prints, which will require scraping some of the dried fruit matter off. Some of Burbanks fruit prints are located at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, but many more are located in the Library of Congress.

To figure out the smallest amount of materials she can take to get a good sample, Spaeth has been making her own fruit prints and practicing on those.

The goal is to use my prints to see how little material possible you need to be able to get DNA. Were using techniques that people would use in forensic archaeology, adding different compounds or increasing the amount of time that your reaction has to take place so that you can get good data out of it, said Spaeth, who sometimes jokes that she feels like the Indiana Jones of the plant world.

When shes confident in her sampling method, shell request permission to take samples from Burbanks fruit prints in the Library of Congress.

Creating a genetic list of ingredients, a l Burbank

The ultimate goal of Spaeths genetic research is to pinpoint which sections of a plums genetic code create certain characteristics. This is done through quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis, which is a statistical method that links phenotypic data (measurements of traits such as color, shape, disease resistance, etc.) with genotypic data in order to explain the genetic basis of a specific trait.

The cool thing about Luthers plums is that they have a huge range of not only genetic diversity, but phenotypic diversity. So youre looking at every color under the rainbow of plums, every size, every shape, whether its free stone or cling stone, Spaeth said.

All of those characteristics get scored. And then we compare all of those characteristics to the genome, she said. Youre looking for QTL markers.

In other words, youre looking for the recipe that makes the pointy bottom plum versus the recipe that makes a smooth bottom. And then once you know that recipe, people can use that information in future breeding experiments.

According to Spaeth, the ability to create such a recipe really emphasizes the importance of historic collections, such as those at Luther Burbank Home & Gardens and the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm.

Because we wouldnt have this resource, if we didnt have people that were curating and cataloging these sorts of things, she said.

Bringing the past into the future

Knowing the recipe for a phenotypic trait allows researchers to target specific regions of the genome for genetic engineering as well as traditional breeding.

From a genetic engineering perspective, knowing the recipe for the gene you want allows you to target and edit specific sequences, Spaeth said. This is highly useful if you want to do something like move a disease-resistance gene from cherry into plum without having to shuffle and sort the two genomes through traditional methods.

What would Burbank think of modern genetic engineering?

"It is unfair to impart our 21st century mindset on someone who lived most of his life without electricity or cars, Spaeth said. However, if I had to venture a guess, I would say that Luther would be open to using all of the tools in the kit to further advance his breeding lines.

By cracking the genetic code of Burbanks hybrids and by creating a genetic database of their component parts, Spaeth is giving Luther Burbank a new place in the modern world so that future generations of scientists and plant lovers can benefit once more from his prodigious creativity.

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Unraveling the mystery of Luther Burbank's famous plums - Sonoma West

For us in the West, the ferocious debate over genetic engineering isnt a matter of life and death. We argue about the safety of Impossible Burgers and the potential risks associated with new breeding techniques like CRISPR gene editing, but nobody will go hungry or die of malnutrition pending the outcome of these arguments. Sadly, the same isnt true in the developing world.

The tragic tale of global vitamin A deficiency (VAD) and the life-saving (but still unavailable) solution known as Golden Rice has been told millions of times, 246 million according to Google. But to briefly recap: roughly 250 million people, mostly preschool children in southeast Asia, are vitamin A deficient. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of them go blind every yearand half die within 12 months of losing their sight. Genetically engineered Golden Rice, fortified with the vitamin A precursor beta carotene, could alleviate much of this suffering without otherwise harming human health or the environment, according to a mountain of studies.

So why are so many people still dying of a preventable condition?

Thats the rather frustrating part of the story science writer Ed Regis examines in his new book Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood. In just over 200 pages, Regis gives a crash course on genetic engineering and explains the messy history of Golden Rice, disabusing the reader of many popular myths along the way. Environmental activist group Greenpeace, for example, is often identified in the press as the primary obstacle to releasing Golden Rice. Despite all its lobbying, however, the NGO has had a relatively minor impact on the crops development.

Instead of pointing the finger at Greenpeace, Regis says the blame lies mostly with overly cautious governments, many of which regulate GMOs as if they were biological weapons. Hoping to avoid the unintended (and so far undiscovered) consequences of growing genetically engineered crops, regulators unintentionally rob people of their eyesight and often their lives.

In a Q&A session with Genetic Literacy Project editor Cameron English, Regis offers a birds eye view of the ongoing controversy and highlights some lesser-known but still significant aspects of the Golden Rice story.

Cameron English: Golden Rice seems simple conceptually. As you point out, scientists just had to direct the plants existing biochemical machinery to synthesize beta carotene in the rice grain, as it does in the rest of the plant. Why did this prove so challenging to achieve in the lab?

For one thing, it had never been done beforerewriting a plants genes to make it express a trait that it normally did not have. Nobody was sure that it was even possible. There were different ways of accomplishing that goal, and there were a lot of technical difficulties in doing the actual hands-on lab work, and getting everything lined up correctly at the genetic level so that beta carotene would appear in the rice grain. There were incredible numbers of false starts, dead ends, and unforeseen technical problems to overcome, and it took years of trial and error for the inventors to get it all working properly. It was just a hard problem, both scientifically, in theory, and technologically, in practice.

CE: You write that Golden Rice could make VAD a thing of the past in developing Asian countries. Why is this biotech crop a better solution than alternative proposals, like distributing vitamin supplements?

Supplement programs have been tried, and of course they do some good, but the problem is that such programs require a substantial and permanent infrastructure. They require a supply chain, personnel to distribute the stuff, record keeping, and the like, plus sufficient and continuous funding to keep it all going across time. Also, there is no way to guarantee that supplements will reach every last person who needs them.

Golden Rice, by contrast, requires none of that. The seeds will be given at no cost to small landowner farmers, and the rice will be no more expensive to consumers than plain and ordinary white rice. Plus, theres the principle that Plants reproduce, pills dont. Once Golden Rice is introduced, its a system that just goes of itself. The product replaces what people already eat on a daily basis with something that could save their sight and lives in the process.

CE: Tell us the story about night blindness you recount from Catherine Prices book. Does that anecdote underscore the problem that Golden Rice could solve?

We in the rich, developed Western countries know practically nothing about [VAD]. We have virtually no experience of it because we get the micronutrients we need from ordinary foods and vitamin supplements. One of the first symptoms of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness, which means pretty much what it says. But to convey this as an actual, lived experience I quote from Catherine Prices excellent book, Vitamania, in which she describes what happens to vitamin A deficient children in poor, developing countries.

While they lead an active life during the day, they gradually withdraw and stop playing as twilight approaches. With the fall of night, they basically just sit in place and wait for help, because they have lost their sight in darkness, and their life grinds to a halt. In countries such as the Philippines, where people eat rice as a staple, at every meal, Golden Rice could prevent this from happening, and even reverse the symptoms in children already affected by VAD.

CE: You point out that Greenpeace struggled with a moral dilemma before forcefully coming out against Golden Rice. Tells about that situation.

In 2001, the year after the Golden Rice protype was announced in Science, a Greenpeace official by the name of Benedikt Haerlin visited Ingo Potrykus, the co-inventor, at his home in Switzerland. Haerlin discussed whether or not to make the provitamin A rice an exception to Greenpeaces otherwise absolute and rigid opposition to any and all genetically engineered foods. He had initially acknowledged that there was a moral difference between GMOs that were merely agriculturally superiorin being pesticide- or herbicide-resistant, for exampleand a GMO that was so nutritionally beneficial that it actually had the potential to save peoples lives and sight.

But apparently that distinction made no difference because in the end both Haerlin himself and Greenpeace as an organization soon took the view that Golden Rice had to be opposed, even stopped, no matter what its possible health benefits might be.

CE: Greenpeace also claimed that poverty and insufficiently diverse diet were the root causes of vitamin A deficiency. Therefore, they said, developing biofortified crops was misguided. That sounds like a reasonable argument, so whats wrong with Greenpeaces analysis here?

This is like arguing that until we find a cure for cancer we should not treat patients by means of surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy. This is totally illogical on the face of it. And the same is true of the argument that since poverty is the cause of the problem that therefore the only solution is to eradicate it. Everyones in favor of eradicating poverty, but there are things we can do in the interim while advancing that far-off and utopian goal, which arguably will take some time to accomplish. Biofortified Golden Rice, along with supplementation and a more diverse diet, can help prevent vitamin A deficiency. If a solution, or a set of solutions, is available, lets implement them while also striving to reduce poverty. Both can be done together, you dont have to choose between one and the other.

CE: Many people believe that Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups are the main roadblock to getting Golden Rice into the hands of farmers. But you write that the activists dont deserve that much credit. What else has kept Golden Rice off the market?

Greenpeaces long history of anti-GMO rhetoric, diatribes, street demonstrations, protests, dressing up in monster crop costumes, and all the rest of it actually did nothing to halt research and development of Golden Rice. There are two reasons why it took 20 years to bring Golden Rice to the point where it won approval for release in four countries: Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. The first is that it takes a long time to breed increasingly higher concentrations of beta carotene (or any other valuable trait) into new strains of rice (or any other plant). Plant breeding is not like a chemistry experiment that you can repeat immediately as many times as you want. Rather, plant growth is an inherently slow and glacial process that cant be [sped] up meaningfully except under certain special laboratory conditions that are expensive and hard to foster and sustain.

The second reason is the retarding force of government regulations on GMO crop development. Those regulations, which cover plant breeding, experimentation, and field trials, among other things, are so oppressively burdensome and costly that they make compliance inordinately time-consuming and expensive.

CE: Whats the Cartagena Protocol and how has it affected the development of Golden Rice?

The Cartagena Protocol was an international agreement, sponsored and developed by the United Nations, which aimed to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology that may have adverse effects on biological diversity, taking into account also risks to human health.

On the face of it, this precautionary approach is plausible, even innocuous. In actual practice, the protocol amounts to a sweeping set of guidelines, requirements, and procedures pertaining to GMOs that were legally binding on the nations that were parties to the agreement, coupled with a set of mechanisms to enforce and ensure compliance. These oppressive and stifling rules and regulations soon turned into a nightmare for GMO developers, and did more than anything else to slow down the progress of Golden Rice.

Ingo Potrykus, the co-inventor of Golden Rice, has estimated that adherence to government regulations on GMOs resulting from the Cartagena Protocol and the precautionary principle, caused a delay of up to ten years in the development of the final product. That is a tragedy, caused by the very governments that are supposed to protect our health, but in this case did the opposite.

CE: Once a prototype of Golden Rice was developed, the prestigious science journal Nature refused to publish the study documenting the successful experiment. Why do you think Nature reacted that way, and what does it tell us about the cultural climate during the period when Golden Rice was first developed?

Well, I cant speak for the Nature editors, so in this case youre asking the wrong person. In my book, I quote what Ingo Potrykus had to say about the matter, which was:

The Nature editor did not even consider it worth showing the manuscript to a referee, and sent it back immediately. Even supportive letters from famous European scientists did not help. From other publications in Nature at that time we got the impression that Nature was more interested in cases which would rather question instead of support the value of genetic engineering technology.

And I will leave it at that.

CE: The classic objection to GMOs, including Golden Rice, is that theyre unnatural. Would you summarize your response to that claim in the book?

In the book I show that in fact most of the foods that we eat are unnatural in the sense that they are products of years of artificial selection, often using techniques other than conventional crossbreeding.

In particular I cite the example of Rio Red grapefruit, which is sold all over America and is not considered a GMO, despite the fact that its genes have been scrambled over the years by artificial means including radiation mutation breeding, in the form of thermal neutron (thN) bombardment, which was done at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This highly mutant and genetically modified grapefruit variety is on file at the Joint FAO/IAEA Mutant Variety Database, at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna, Austria. You can hardly get more unnatural than Rio Red grapefruit.

By contrast, there is a plant whose roots in the ground are potatoes, but whose above ground fruit are tomatoes. This is the so-called TomTato, and was created by exclusively conventional means, i.e., grafting, which goes back thousands of years. But which of the two is more unnaturalthe Rio Red grapefruit or the freakish TomTato? And why does it matter?

CE: There are a lot of transgenic crops being developed, so why did Golden Rice become such a lightening rod for controversy in the GMO debate?

Because if it gets approved, works, and ends up saving lives and sight, it will lead to greater acceptance of GMO foods in general, which is the very last thing that GMO opponents want. That cannot be said of any other GMO.

CE: Bangladesh appears poised to release Golden Rice before the end of 2019. Are you hopeful that farmers will soon have access to it, or do you foresee more political and regulatory obstacles getting in the way?

In the words of Jack Reacher (the hero of Lee Childs crime novels), Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Seeing what has happened to Golden Rice over the course of 20 years, nothing would surprise me going forward. I would sort of be more surprised if Bangladesh approved it and it was grown and people ate it than if it were banned outright in the countries where its needed most. That is the most infuriating part of the whole story.

Ed Regisis a science writer whose work has appeared inScientific American,Harpers,Wired,Nature,Discover, and theNew York Times,among other publications. He is the author of ten books, includingWhat Is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.

Cameron J. English is the GLPs senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He co-hosts the Biotech Facts and Fallacies podcast. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

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How misguided regulation has kept a GMO 'superfood' off the market: Q&A with Golden Rice author Ed Regis - Genetic Literacy Project

Ryo Takahashi, CEO

Ryo Takahashi (MBA 20) speaks with Professor Michael Sandel.

Bracing for a Brave New World

Scenes of genetic selection in Gattaca (1997), the telescreen surveillance state depicted in Orwells 1984 (1948), and the apprehension of criminals before they commit a crime as depicted in Minority Report (2002) may seem like distant dystopian science fiction.

Until recently. The rate of progress in technology has surpassed not only our ability to regulate its uses, but also our ability to engage in meaningful discourse on how technology ought to be used.

Recent advances in human trials for gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, the deployment of emotion recognition in surveillance systems, and innovations in predictive policing technology all suggest that we are getting progressively closer to the use of such technologies, once the work of dystopian fiction, without adequately thinking through the potential consequences.

Growing interest over the promises and perils of technology has led to Professors Douglas Melton and Michael Sandel to offer Tech Ethics, a university-wide course being taught this year at HBSs Klarman Hall.

This is a new version of a course that Doug Melton and I have taught on and off over the past 10 years or so, said Professor Sandel.

The course was originally called Ethics and Biotechnology. The original focus of the course was on the ethics of stem cell research, genetic engineering, and the ethical implications of the genetic and biotech revolution.

Since then, the course has evolved and we have added topics related to AI, robots, algorithms, and big data, given the growing importance of those areas.

When we were debating questions of stem cell research and parents genetically creating designer babies, these were fascinating but somewhat distant from students personal experience. But when we talk about the ethics of the internet, or of the behaviors of technology companies, these are very immediate questions, because these are technologies that students interact with every hour of every day. This has heightened interest in the course.

Inviting debate on ethical issues

To date, the course has focused on topics as far-ranging as gene editing and genetic enhancement, algorithmic fairness and discrimination, the role of big data and social media, and genetically altered athletes and animals. Issues such as fairness, paternalism, freedom, and agency of the individual have oftentimes been at the core of many debates.

Sandel urges students who enroll in the course to come ready to think through and explore issues, as opposed to coming in with fixed opinions.

As democratic citizens, we have to be asking these questions today. If we dont think through the ethical implications of new technologies, we will be at their mercy. Technology is a tool. But its something we can use responsibly only if we reflect on how the tools should be used.

How can the tools be made to advance the common good, rather than to acquire a momentum of their own that winds up undermining democratic elections, or transforming the relations of parents to children, or leading to global warming if we dont think through our relation to nature? asks Sandel.

A course for all students

Each week, the course draws students from Harvards various schools, ranging from undergraduates to students pursuing professional degrees, including from Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School.

When I saw the course, I knew immediately that I want to take it, said Alex Mao (MBA 20).

I enrolled in Tech Ethics because I want to hear what other people think. On some issues I have a firm opinion whereas on others Im eager to hear others perspectives. We need to think about the implications of these technologies since its moving so quickly.

Previous versions of the course were for undergraduates, said Sandel.

Over time, it became clear to us that tech ethics is a subject that has become central to the various professionsof business, law, medicine, public health, government and public policy, the divinity school, etc.

Thats why we decided to make the course open to all students across the university, he said.

Klarman Hall seemed like the perfect venue for such an endeavor.

In a conversation with President Bacow about our ambition to launch a university-wide course, he strongly encouraged us to do it across the river, in this gorgeous new auditorium at HBS. He felt it would symbolize the idea of drawing together students from across the University into a shared, One Harvard academic community.

I was unsure whether undergrads would travel across the river for a course. We didnt know until the first day of class, when more than 1,000 students packed Klarman Hall, he said.

Given whats at stake, the long march may well be worth it.

Ryo Takahashi (MBA 20), originally from Japan, is a management consultant and writer. Prior to Harvard Business School, he worked as a Project Manager at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and was a Senior Associate at McKinsey & Company. Prior to these roles he worked at the Economist and the Japan Times. His writing has appeared in Time magazine, the Economist, the Japan Times, and the World Economic Forum, among other outlets. He received his B.A. in Economics (with Distinction) from The University of Tokyo and was also a Rotary Scholar to the London School of Economics.

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A Brave New World: Tech Ethics Course Encourages Students to Mull the Implications of New Technologies - Harbus Online

For the last few years, writers and scientists have marveled at the potential for gene editing to allow farmers to grow more food on less land and allow more of the earth to grow carbon-sucking forests and savannas.

The main advantage of gene editing is precision. Its right there in the name: Instead of dealing with the randomness of breeding, or the rough power-tool work implied by the term genetic engineering, the editing suggests that scientists could now change the letters of genetic code with the same ease that a writer corrects typos.

But in late July, FDA scientists found a chunk of bacterial DNA in gene-edited calves, prompting people to wonder if this precision tool wasnt as precise as advertised. That hopeful vision of a gene-edited future verdant with pesticide-free, carbon-sequestering crops flickered.

On Monday, the scientists studying these gene-edited cattle published a paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology explaining what happened. Essentially, this new paper tells us that gene editing precisely tweaked specific letters of DNA, exactly what it was supposed to do. But scientists also used older, cruder tools, and one of those caused the genetic typo. Even so, the end result might be that gene-editing slides into the muck of controversy over GMOs.

To be clear, the cows at the center of this study have nothing to do with creating more productive, pest-resistant foods. The scientists had edited their genes in stem cells, which grew into calves without horns. Farmers usually remove the horns to prevent cattle from injuring each other goring is a real danger.

When I visited the University of California Davis in 2015, I saw a pair of these black-and-white bull calves standing and chewing in an outdoor pen, like ordinary but adorable bovines. Unlike other calves, however, they wouldnt have to suffer through a painful dehorning operation, in which a veterinarian burns out their horn buds.

Some cows are naturally hornless: Angus and Hereford breeds, for instance. But those are beef cattle. For dairy you want Holsteins or Jerseys, and these champion milk producers are more carefully bred than the winners of the Westminster dog show. If you started crossing muscled Herefords with black-and-white Holsteins, it would take decades of breeding to move the hornless trait into the dairy line then weed out all the beefy traits.

What if you just plucked a single gene and moved it into dairy cows? With gene editing, you could tweak dairy cows without messing up their finely tuned milk-producing DNA so that they would no longer have to endure dehorning. The Minnesota-based company Recombinetics tried this using a technique called TALENS (you might have heard of CRISPR this is just a different version of the same thing).

To run with the editing metaphor, Recombinetics basically took out the DNA that laid out instructions for HORN and replaced it with 202 letters of DNA that said HORNLESS. But first, they attached it to a bacterial plasmid think of it as a sub-cellular copy machine that would reproduce this strand over and over again (HORNLESS, HORNLESS, HORNLESS!). Then they injected all those copies into a cow cell that gave one of those copies a much better chance of bumping into the one spot in the DNA that read HORN. This is where things went wrong. Instead of just replacing HORN with HORNLESS, the plasmid also folded into the cells DNA so that it read something like HORNLESS-COPYMACHINE-HORNLESS. That genetic information went into an egg, which went into a cows uterus, and, in 2015, grew into a hornless calf. No one noticed until years later.

The calves I saw at Davis were there to be studied by Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist. Funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to assess the risks of biotech, her team first verified that the hornless trait was being passed down through generations of cattle. Basically, we found that Mendel knew his shit, said Van Eenennaam (thats Gregor Mendel, the scientist from the 1800s who described how traits are inherited).

With this new paper, Van Eenennaams team showed that the bacterial plasmid had also been passed down to some of the calves, again following the rules of genetics 101. It doesnt seem to be causing a problem its fairly normal for DNA from germs and viruses to work its way into genomes (the human genome is about 8 percent virus DNA), and critters can usually just roll with it. But because these cattle had DNA from a bacteria, it meant they were genetically modified organisms, or GMOs in the eyes of government regulators. That, in turn, meant they would have to undergo years of testing. A giant corporation like Bayer could afford that, but not a small startup like Recombinetics. The FDA is now treating gene-edited animals like new drugs, requiring multiple rounds of safety testing, which effectively puts an end to the quest to make hornless dairy cows. Longtime opponents of biotechnology think that would be a good thing. Friends of the Earth recently released a report with Janet Cotter, who runs the consultancy Logos Environmental, condemning gene edited animals.

The scientific evidence shows that gene editing, particularly in animals, is far from precise. Cotter said in a statement. Instead, it can produce unintended changes to genetic material and disrupt genetic processes. Such effects could have far reaching consequences for food safety, so these applications will require a rigorous assessment if they are to be used in agriculture.

It would be easy enough to screen out plasmids before putting gene-edited eggs into a cows womb. Thats a routine procedure, said Van Eenennaam. But she worries that wont quell fears that gene editing is sloppier than expected. Treating gene-edited animals like drugs is not proportionate with the risk, Van Eenennaam said, and would prevent breakthroughs that might help us meet the challenge of climate change, whether its cows that dont belch methane, or corals that can survive heat., Van Eenennaam said.

The debate has pretty much blocked the technology in animals through my whole career. I was hoping gene-editing would be different, she said. I have students who are excited about gene editing for disease-resistance but now I feel like its Ground Hog Day. Here we go again.

As a nonprofit news outlet, we rely on reader support to help fund our award-winning journalism. Were one of the few news outlets dedicated exclusively to people-focused environmental coverage, and we believe our content should remain free and accessible to all. If you dig our mission and agree news should never sit behind a paywall, donate today to help support our work. Chip in what you can.

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Gene editing could help save the planet if scientists can avoid the typos - Grist

Death was conquered, via an elaborate cloning technique, and everything looked as if things were finally turning around for Charles Xaviers friends and foes.

And then Powers of X explicitly states that things will always turn out badly for mutants.

Its much worse than that. We always lose, Moira MacTaggart tells Xavier midway through the series, and she should know; by this point in the narrative, she has lived and died nine different times, trying alternative ways to maintain the survival of the mutant race without success. (As the final issue of Powers of X reveals, Moira has lived for a thousand years in one timeline and it still ended with the mutantkind being outstripped by a humanity augmented by its own invention.

Mutants are an evolutionary response to an environment. You are naturally occurring. The next step in human evolution, a character from 1,000 years in the future explains in the issue. But what happens when humanity stops being beholden to its environment? When man controls the building blocks of biology and technology Evolution is no match for genetic engineering. What good was one mutant adapting to its environment when we could make ten super men?

Turning the franchises long-running theme on its head, the core conflict of the X-Men property isnt homo superior (mutant) versus homo sapien (man), but homo superior versus homo novissima (post-human, or genetically engineered human) a battle that, its suggested, mutantkind will lose no matter what.

Armed with this knowledge, Moira has manipulated events throughout the franchise and certain people to try and equip mutantkind as best she can in the upcoming conflict, leading to a united Xavier and Magneto announcing that she has honed them into perfect tools for an imperfect age that would change things moving forward.

The new era of X-Men comics, therefore, is one in which the majority of characters believe that theyre living in a golden age of mutantkind, but theyre actually part of the latest in a series of conflicts for survival that they are, perhaps, destined to lose. How this thread will continue through the multiple Dawn of X spinoff titles remains to be seen, but with Powers of X author Jonathan Hickman writing the ongoing X-Men series launching in the wake of this reveal, one thing is for certain: This isnt an idea that is going to go away anytime soon.

Powers of X No. 6 is available now in comic book stores and digitally.

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Marvel's 'Powers of X' Ends With Surprising Revelation - Hollywood Reporter

This story is part of The 2010s: A Decade in Review, a series on the memes, people, products, movies and so much more that have influenced the 2010s.

The first decade of the 21st century introduced us to sweeping mobile and social revolutions largely driven by names like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Bezos. In the second decade that's now closing, things got a little more complicated. During those years, a new collection of faces have joined the earlier tech titans to continue moving us into the future. Here's CNET's list of the top technology innovators and all-around unavoidable personalities of the 2010s.

A person wears a Guy Fawkes mask, which today is a trademark and symbol for the online hacktivist group Anonymous. From 2012.

More a decentralized collective than a personality, Anonymous was the name claimed by the loose affiliation of hackers who brought "hacktivism" into the mainstream. During the first half of the decade, Anonymous launched attacks against targets like ISIS, the governments of the US and Tunisia, and corporations such as Sony and PayPal. The group's tactics included distributed denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm a target's website and knock it offline and compromising private databases to access and later leak confidential information, such as the personal details of members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 2019, the group's prominence has faded somewhat -- last year it said it would debunk the QAnon conspiracy theory -- but concerns about hacking remain in the forefront, in part because one large collective of unknown activists put it there.

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks during a livestreamed press conference in 2017.

The founder of online portal WikiLeaks, Assange had a mission to reveal the secrets of the powerful. It made him an instant hero to many and a wanted man to others (in May the US government charged him with violating the Espionage Act). WikiLeaks started the decade by publishing documents obtained by whistleblower Chelsea Manning between 2010 and 2011, and it supported NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after he sought refuge in Russia in 2013. To avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of rape -- the charges were dropped in 2017, but the case has since been reopened -- Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he remained for seven years.

Despite its founder being stuck in the same building for much of the decade, WikiLeaks still managed to play a role in the 2016 US presidential election by publishing leaked emails that were detrimental to Hillary Clinton and the next year releasing thousands of documents showing how the CIA can hack into phones. The Assange saga is far from over, though. In 2019 he was booted from the embassy by the Ecuadorian government and arrested by London police. He remains in British custody and could be extradited to the US.

Now playing: Watch this: Step inside Julian Assange's office

3:25

GM CEO Mary Barra says the self-driving technology can help relieve driver stress.

The General Motors CEO became the first woman to lead a major carmaker when she took over in 2014 and has been consistently ranked among the world's most powerful women over the past decade by Forbes and Fortune.

Her tenure has been marked by GM's push to keep up and even eclipse Tesla's efforts to bring electric and driverless cars into the mainstream. The Chevy Volt EV actually brought a sub-$40,000 EV to market ahead of Tesla's Model 3, and GM has also invested in ride-sharing technology to help ensure it stays relevant in the future.

Under Barra, GM is also one of just two global businesses to completely do away with its gender pay gap, according to a study by Equileap.

Bezos speaking at an Amazon press event in 2018.

Even after losing a quarter of his Amazon shares in his divorce settlementin April, Bezos remains the world's richest person, worth more than $107 billion as of this month, according to Forbes. Throughout the decade, he spread his money around,buying the Washington Post in 2013 and growing his company phenomenally. Amazon is now a vast empire that's not only become the world's warehouse, but that also encompasses the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform, game streaming platform Twitch, a fleet of freight aircraft, music streaming,branded convenience stores, the Kindle e-reader, the Whole Foods Market grocery chain and a space startup meant to give Elon Musk and SpaceX some competition. Its Prime subscription service delivers goods in hours, and serves up a huge gallery of movies, TV programs and audiobooks.

Amazon also makes plenty of products of its own, including its Alexa-powered home assistants and Ring security system, both of which have forced the company torespond to privacy concerns over its increasing expansion into homes. And the company continues to face criticism over working conditions and pay for its employees.

Now playing: Watch this: Jeff Bezos reveals plans for the moon and beyond

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danah boyd

She may not be a household name, but danah boyd (who prefers to spell her name with lowercase) has become a leading thinker and researcher on the effects of technology on society and our children. In her 2014 book It's Complicated, she argued that social media provides an important space for youth to express themselves and to engage with each other and with society.

She's also a principal researcher for Microsoft and has broadened her research to focus on the relationship between social inequality and technology through her research institute Data and Society. In awarding her its 2019 Pioneer award, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called boyd a "trailblazing technology scholar."

Richard Branson at a Virgin Mobile event.

The billionaire magnate is willing to try just about anything, it seems. Branson's Virgin brand has dabbled in everything from media to hotels to health care, and in the last decade it has also made some far-out bets. In recent years, Branson has invested in Elon Musk's futuristic hyperloop transport technology and is working on Virgin Orbit, which could launch satellites using a combination of rockets and a high-altitude launcher plane. In the coming months, Virgin Galactic mayfinally begin launching tourists (including Branson himself) into orbit using a similar approach from the New Mexico desert.

By 2040, there will be 1 million more young women of color with coding skills if Kimberly Bryant meets her ambitious goal. The electrical engineer and Vanderbilt grad founded Black Girls Code in 2011 with the goal of reaching 1 million girls by midcentury. That could transform places like Silicon Valley, where only 2% of women working in tech are people of color, according to a 2018 report from the Kapor Center. Bryant's work has been widely recognized -- by the White House, the Smithsonian and others -- helping to bring in funding for the mission and increasing the chances that the next Steve Jobs is a woman of color.

Mark Cuban at CNET's Next Big Thing panel at CES 2013

During the 2010s, Cuban became much more than just one of the billionaires from the original dot-com boom of the late 1990s. He completed his crossover to become a major figure in the worlds of sports, entertainment and even politics.

Cuban's riches can be traced to successful exits from old, old-school internet properties like Broadcast.com, but he's since leveraged those early moves into a career as an NBA franchise owner, a TV personality (most notably on Shark Tank) and an investor in dozens of companies including Dropbox, Magnolia Pictures and Alyssa's Cookies. He was even floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, but says he won't run without his family's permission.

Tim Cook at WWDC 2019.

It was a difficult job to take the mantle after Steve Jobs died in 2011, but Cook has maintained Apple's dominance over the past several years. Cook may not be the showman of his predecessor, but the brand is as far-reaching as ever. The iPhone still rules the mobile roost alongside Android, and under his guidance the company has launched forays into areas like the Apple Watch, content production, Apple Arcade and even finance with the Apple Card.

While it might be a stretch to call Cook a gay icon (he came out in a 2014 essay), he's certainly one of the most powerful LGBTQ people in the world, and his worldview has informed his drive to make Apple more ethical, diverse and values-driven, according to author Leander Kahney.

A pre-beard Dorsey.

Assuming the role of Twitter's CEO in 2015, Dorsey's been the face of one of the most highly trafficked and often toxic online platforms. Over the past decade, Twitter helped give rise to revolution in the Middle East, including the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and also gave us the platform that @RealDonaldTrump has used more effectively than any other American politician to rally support and spin news events. Twitter has also enabled floods of hate speech, fake news and misinformation. Though the company has tried to combat them with new rules and technology, it's only subject to more criticism when the regulations are unevenly enforced.

As he tries to guide Twitter's central role in reshaping global media, Dorsey's also CEO of payments company Square, giving him an outsized influence in how information and money move around the world now and in the coming years.

Jennifer Doudna

One of the key innovations of the 2010s goes by the unwieldy name CRISPR/Cas9, and Doudna is a pioneer in its use to edit DNA. This new tool holds the potential to revolutionize biology, medicine, agriculture and other fields.

Doudna's lab at the University of California, Berkeley has also spun off a for-profit venture to commercialize CRISPR applications, and Doudna has become a leader in the ongoing ethical discussions around the future of genetic engineering.

Susan Fowler at the Women Transforming Technology conference

The #MeToo movement swept through the tech world and other industries beginning in 2017, thanks in large part to Fowler's personal blog chronicling sexual harassment and abuse within Uber, where she worked as a software engineer. The fallout resulted in a shakeup of Uber's power structure and the demotion of founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. Fowler's memoir, Whisteblower, is due out in 2020, and she has a new role writing for the New York Times opinion section.

This power couple has taken the money that Bill made producing the software suites we all love to complain about and turned it into a philanthropic empire. The $50 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured millions into global health and development efforts, as well as education in the US. Bill says the foundation played a major role in a drastic reduction of the child mortality rate, saving over 100 million lives. Bill has also stayed relevant through the reading lists he releases regularly, and Melinda debuted as an author herself with a book about empowering women around the world.

Elizabeth Holmes in a still from The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.

Like Pixelon's Michael Fenne (real name: David Kim Stanley) almost two decades earlier, Holmes serves as a cautionary tale for what can go wrong when the hype becomes unmoored from reality in tech.

In the span of a few years, Holmes took Theranos and a never-quite-ready-for-primetime blood-testing technology from a subject of interest to one of investment, investigation and now, potentially Holmes' own incarceration as she faces charges of criminal fraud.

The decade began with Jobs' introduction of the iPad in January 2010, nearly two years before he died in October 2011. Apple, whose iPhone helped change the way we live, has continued to be one of the most iconic and valuable brands in the history of capitalism. His legacy has been a topic of near constant discussion since his passing, including treatments in multiple Hollywood movies and major books from the likes of Walter Isaacson and Jobs' daughter Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs.

John Legere

T-Mobile's CEO could be the most interesting person in the wireless industry. Over the past decade, he's masterfully played the role of underdog fighting against telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon. Nearly everything the exec does seems calculated to turn heads, whether it's lacing a press conference with profanity, launching barbs at the competition on social media or dressing in the company's trademark magenta. But Legere also produced results, greatly increasing T-Mobile's customer base over the years, revamping the carrier's customer service and bucking industry trends by keeping unlimited data plans. Despite it all, Legere's future going into 2020 is uncertain, with talk he might be replaced should a pending merger with rival Sprint finally go through.

Travis Kalanick exits federal court after taking the stand during the Waymo v. Uber trial over allegedly stolen driverless car trade secrets.

The Uber founder embodies the success-at-all-costs mentality that has driven many other Silicon Valley success stories. He led a ride-sharing revolution that quickly spread around the world and made Uber the prototypical startup "unicorn." But allegations of sexual harassment (brought by whistleblower and engineer Susan Fowler) and Kalanick's own abrasive leadership style would soon see him pushed out as the company's leader in June 2017, although he still retains a seat on the board.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Musk wants to save the planet with electric cars and solar panels, take us to Mars, connect our brains to computers and shoot us around the world in pressurized tubes at near the speed of sound with his hyperloop-creating Boring Company. Most of this visionary's big visions are still in progress, but his credibility comes from simultaneously disrupting both the automotive and commercial space industries over the past decade with the success of Tesla and SpaceX. The world tends to watch his every move, which he often gleefully shares on social media. Musk's tweets have brought him trouble, especially when they move Tesla's stock price and invite lawsuits and the ire of the SEC or appear to smear a diver trying to rescue a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a company event.

This Indian immigrant with a degree in electrical engineering turned out to be the right man for the job of making Microsoft cool again. Or at least making it cooler. Since becoming CEO in 2014, Nadella has helped increase Microsoft's bottom line and make it a trillion-dollar company. He's overseen a transformation that has done away with the company's cutthroat reputation, both toward competitors and internally, though in 2014 he apologized after making controversial comments about women's pay in an interview. Nadella has also advanced forward-looking acquisitions in artificial intelligence, gaming and brand names like Github, LinkedIn and Mojang, creator of Minecraft.

Very few people seem to know who Nakamoto really is. The presumed pseudonym is attached to the person or persons responsible for the development of bitcoin, which launched a cryptocurrency revolution that started slowly in 2009 but picked up steam over the decade that followed.

A once-worthless digital currency, bitcoin has been valued at up to $20,000 per coin. It inspired the development of countless other cryptos and an entirely new industry around its underlying technology, blockchain. Although some have claimed to be the real Nakamoto and others have been falsely outed as the actual Satoshi, his true identity remains unclear.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Google has gone from "Don't be evil" to increasingly having to convince consumers and regulators that it isn't. When the company transformed into Alphabet in 2015 and the Google name was attached to its internet-focused subsidiary (including Android, YouTube and search), Pichai became the new face of Google as CEO. During his first four years, the Googleplex has continued to dominate everything from search to mobile operating systems to online cat videos, while making big moves with new hardware like Google Home and a fleet of Pixel devices. It hasn't been all sunshine, though. Pichai has also had to navigate the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on YouTube, deal with walkouts over sexual harassment allegations directed at Google executives and confront criticism over a possible censored search service in China. That's to say nothing of the James Damore saga over the company's diversity policies. Still, Pichai and Google seem likely to remain on top for the foreseeable future.

Zoe Quinn.

Years before #MeToo, Gamergate gave us all a preview of the widespread bad behavior and abuse by people in positions of power that would soon be exposed across a number of industries. Quinn, along with fellow game developer Brianna Wu and culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, was among the first to be harassed and threatened by mobs of online trolls that would eventually coalesce around the #gamergate hashtag. It was an early warning sign of how bad things would become online.

Quinn, who uses they/them pronouns, turned their experience and insights into the 2017 book Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate. They have continued to be vocal about instances of abuse within the gaming industry while also churning out new comics (for both Marvel and DC) and collaborating on indie games.

IBM CEO Gini Rometty

CEO of IBM is another job title that doesn't seem as cool as it was 50 years ago. But since taking over in 2012, Rometty has moved the company from dinosaur status to focusing on the future. IBM today is invested deeply in nascent technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and quantum computing.

Sheryl Sandberg in 2015.

Sandberg was the fresh face Facebook often needed when Mark Zuckerberg spent too much time in the spotlight. While she deserves some credit for building Facebook up to the global force it is today, her 2013 business and leadership memoir Lean In made her a household name. Facebook and Sandberg have since received a healthy dose of criticism for the platform's myriad scandals, ranging from privacy concerns to the spread of misinformation, but they continue to stand their ground.

Former Instagram executive Adam Mosseri, flanked by Mike Krieger on the left and Kevin Systrom on the right.

As social media scandals increasingly give platforms like Facebook and Twitter a bad rep, Instagram seems to remain an almost-pristine place for all our best moments, no matter if they're earnest or fake AF, a la Fyre Festival. The disastrous music festival was promoted using Instagram and harnessed the power of its many "influencers" and the FOMO it engenders perhaps better than any other platform. Systrom and Krieger co-founded the photo-sharing site in 2010 and the service was snapped up by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. Systrom stayed on as CEO through 2018, growing the service to almost a billion registered users. While the platform has faced criticism over censorship in several countries and other practices like "shadowbanning" (in which posts are hidden from the view of others without it being apparent to the user), Instagram has remained relatively scandal-free compared to its parent company in recent years.

Peter Thiel in 2014.

Like Musk, Thiel made his first big pile of money from the sale of PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay in 2002. The hits continued when he became Facebook's first outside investor in 2004 and went on to make early investments in Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yelp, Spotify and SpaceX, just to name a few.

Over the past decade, though, he's become better known for his political and social stances, particularly his growing disdain for Silicon Valley and his fervent support of President Trump. He also backed a lawsuit filed in 2012 over wrestler Hulk Hogan's sex tape that ultimately bankrupted gossip site Gawker, allegedly over a grudge he held against the site for a 2007 article outing him as gay. Thiel's Libertarian views have also inspired projects like the Seasteading Institute, which aims to create a society at sea, beyond the reach of any government.

Desktops are still alive and kicking, according to HP CEO Meg Whitman.

The former CEO behind the early growth of eBay is always doing something interesting. After losing a bid for governor of California in 2010, Whitman spent the first half of the decade leading and splitting up Hewlett-Packard into two businesses. After leaving HP in 2017, she turned her energies to new efforts focused on younger consumers than the typical HP customer. She's now CEO of upcoming short-form video service Quibi and an investor and board member at Los Angeles esports startup Immortals.

Mark Zuckerberg discusses Oculus at an event last month.

The decade opened with Jesse Eisenberg playing Zuck in the 2010 film The Social Network, and in recent years the Facebook founder probably would have been happy to have an actor continue to play him as CEO. As we've debated the power of Facebook and how much it knows about us, Zuckerberg has confronted multiple scandals and sat for hours of grilling by Congress over the proliferation of fake news on his platform. Through it all, Facebook has arguably been at the center of everything during the past 10 years, whether it's influencing the Brexit vote and the 2016 presidential election or the revelations that data research firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent. Now presidential candidates talk of breaking up the social networking behemoth even as Zuckerberg hopes to move forward into the brave new world of VR with the help of companies like Oculus that it has swallowed over the past decade.

Originally published Oct. 10, 5 a.m. PT.

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From Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, these 30 personalities defined the 2010s - CNET

The word agriculture conjures up an array of images: endless fields of corn stalks, amber waves of grain, the deserts of Africa Africa? While thoughts of the African landscape may tend to invoke a dry and empty countryside, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are working to develop self-sustaining plants that could eventually turn the Sahara into a sea of green.

Himadri B. Pakrasi, the Glassberg Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor in the department of biology in Arts & Sciences and director of the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES), and Costas D. Maranas, professor of chemical engineering at Penn State, were recently awarded a $1.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation for their collaborative study of systems biology. Specifically, the Pakrasi and Maranas labs hope to decode the inner workings of cyanobacteria for the ultimate purpose of producing nitrogen-fixing crop plants.

For more than a century, farmers around the world have relied heavily on chemical fertilizers to help grow their plants and crops. Fertilizers contain nitrogen, an essential building block for all life forms to grow, and an element that is abundant in the earths atmosphere. However, creating man-made fertilizers is an energy intensive process that contributes to greenhouse gases and leads to run-off issues that severely damage the environment. A solution to this problem is to engineer plants to absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into fertilizer, a process known as nitrogen fixation, so that the plants would become self-sufficient.

If you have engineered seeds that you give to an African farmer, that farmer can then plant the seeds, which gives rise to a field of crops that would not need chemically synthesized fertilizer to grow, Pakrasi said. This has huge agricultural implications not just for the affluent, Western world,but to the areas hardest hit by climate change.

Easier said than done. Nitrogen fixation cannot take place in the cells of most photosynthetic organisms plants that convert sunlight into energy because when plants are undergoing photosynthesis, a byproduct is oxygen. And oxygen is like a poison when it mixes with nitrogenease, the enzyme that enables nitrogen fixation. However, there is an organism that can accommodate both photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation in the same cell: cyanobacteria.

Just like human beings, cyanobacteria have a robust circadian rhythm a 24-hour biological cycle during which they photosynthesize in the day and fix nitrogen at night. Scientists have long studied these bluish-green creatures, but do not have a detailed understanding of how circadian rhythms allow cyanobacteria to adjust its metabolism for both nitrogen fixation and photosynthesis to take place in the same cell. With advances in genetic modification tools, it is now possible to probe deeper into the details of this process.

There are still missing parts of the cyanobacterial puzzle, Pakrasi said. The only way to identify what those missing parts are is to actually go into the cyanobacterium and tease apart the machinery. And thats what this grant will allow us to do.

In other words, the Pakrasi lab will perform a series of genetic modifications to the cyanobacteria and generate new data. The Maranas lab will then take the data and develop a predictive model for the inner working of the cyanobacterium. This iterative process will take some time, but the research is imperative to combating the climate changes facing the planet, Pakrasi said.

Its kind of like building an electric pickup truck, Pakrasi said. How do you go from a gasoline fueled car to a Tesla pickup truck? The basic technology for making a gas fueled car is already known, but were moving to a new paradigm of production in the form of a Tesla truck. Once we figure it out, we can deploy the new technology to our partners all over the world.

Read more:
NSF funds research on nitrogen fixation - Washington University in St. Louis Newsroom

We have the choice to attack one of our oldest enemies with genetic engineering. But should we do it?

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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

Harvard FAQs on gene drive:http://bit.ly/1TYNIAo

Research paper on using CRISPR for malaria gene drive:http://bit.ly/2cGXNqp

Nature article on engineered mosquitos:http://go.nature.com/1Ij39yS

STAT new article on using gene drive against Zika:http://bit.ly/2ctw24X

Tech review article on using gene drive against malaria:http://bit.ly/1V0Qpr7

Smithsonian on deadliness of mosquitos:http://bit.ly/1sqQ1D7

Science article about the risks of the technology:http://bit.ly/2dgtpCt

New Yorker on Pros and Cons:http://bit.ly/1PTKGlt

Gates note on death rate through mosquitos:http://bit.ly/1UdvIqI

Status quo on field trial in the U.S.:http://bit.ly/2b16ufu

Evolution working against gene drive technology:http://theatln.tc/2cmMjau

Research paper on evolution of resistance against gene drive:http://bit.ly/2cGWPKO

Science news on possible safety feature for gene drive:http://bit.ly/29I0Z26

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Genetic Engineering and Diseases Gene Drive & Malaria ...