Review 589: De-Extinction, Designer Babies, Gene Drives and More

Our latest Review provides updates on an array of biotech developments and accompanying mythologies: from gene drives to cloning, from transhumanism to CRISPR babies, from lab-grown sperm to de-extinction disinformation, from AI-assisted gene editing to immortality projects. What unites many of these is not just the massive gap between the myth making and the reality, but the immense financial and political leverage now propelling them forward.

It turns out that it’s not just Bill Gates that people need to worry about when it comes to tech-fixated billionaires. Elon Musk has made it clear that immensely rich tech bro extremists can now be found right at the centre of power. And anyone celebrating Musk’s departure from Washington DC needs to remember that other ideologically aligned associates and protégés of the hugely influential tech titan Peter Thiel are said to be running half the Trump administration, where they are busy transforming it into their preferred operating system.

Thiel, of course, is the dystopian ideologue who founded the spy tech firm Palantir, which is extending its reach ever further into government. He is also a keen supporter of transhumanism, i.e. re-engineering humans, and other extreme techno-futurist ideas that have become increasingly entrenched in Silicon Valley (see THE CRAZY WORLD OF THE TECHNO-FUTURISTS), where Thiel has wielded tremendous influence for the last two decades.

These ideas have led Thiel to invest millions in biotech projects aimed at radical life extension, or what he calls “the immortality project”. Thiel is also helping fund embryo-screening start-ups that claim to enable would-be parents to engage in “genetic optimisation” of their offspring (see GENETIC TESTING/SUPER-BABIES). He has also backed the Harvard geneticist George Church’s research effort to “resurrect” extinct species (see DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION).

Some experts see such projects, including Church’s de-extinction work (see DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION), as also aiming for the acceptance of heritable human gene modification, i.e. the editing of human embryos with technologies like CRISPR. In fact, despite the many well-founded concerns about the genetic modification of humans, there are tech billionaires and rogue scientists already making open moves to commercialise CRISPR babies while talking up a future “trillion-dollar” industry. For some of these techno-boosters, embryo editing, embryo screening, and even lab-made eggs and artificial wombs are all on the table in their quest for genetically superior children (see HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING for more on all of this).

We also have updates on CLONING, BIOSAFETY, GM (AND NON-GM) INSECTS, and GMO BIOLOGICALS, but we start with a commentary on the hype around GENE DRIVES.

GENE DRIVES

Gene drive: Communication, hype, and the public
An article in the Journal of Medical Entomology critically reflects on the hype surrounding gene drive technologies, a novel self-spreading form of genetic modification that is designed to engineer entire populations of wild species. The author, a specialist in vector-borne diseases at the University of Montpellier, France, concludes that current communication around gene drives “often borders on propaganda rather than fostering a balanced, 2-way dialogue”. The rhetoric surrounding gene drive technologies is also often couched in pessimistic language regarding “conventional” tools. But in fact, “several other strategies… are expected to deliver similar impacts but with higher success rates of development and shorter development times”. Hype and exaggerated claims for gene drives could lead to focusing research efforts on their development, biasing policy discussions and diverting “resources away from simpler, proven approaches”.

HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING

The tech billionaires and rogue scientists moving to commercialise CRISPR babies

Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children. Heritable gene editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. But advocates of such germline editing who command enormous financial resources are moving ahead with no regard for its safety, societal, or eugenic risks. These include Bootstrap Bio, whose founders have talked about “gene editing adults to make them smarter”. The company may be planning to launch human trials – that is, using altered embryos to initiate pregnancies – in 2026 or 2027, possibly at Próspera, the libertarian crypto-financed enclave in Honduras, backed by Peter Thiel and other tech investors, where controversial gene therapy trials have already taken place. A more recent investor in Próspera, the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, also says he is “ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos”. The Coinbase founder predicts the “IVF clinic of the future will combine a handful of technologies” – embryo editing, lab-made eggs, artificial wombs, and polygenic testing of thousands of IVF embryos, which he terms “the Gattaca stack”, referencing the sci-fi film about a dystopian future where genetically engineered people reign supreme over those conceived naturally.

Opposing human genetic engineering
Professor Stuart Newman, the developmental and evolutionary biologist and co-author of Biotech Juggernaut (Routledge, 2019), has published a fascinating piece about his long history of opposition to human genetic engineering – not least because of the biological hazards involved – and the steps he and colleagues have taken to flag up their concerns. He writes, “As a biologist who has worked on the complexities of genotype-phenotype relationships, I am certain that human genetic modification will always remain in the realm of uncontrolled experimentation, with unpredictable outcomes”. For that reason, he continues to support an unequivocal ban on human embryo-stage genetic modification.

Joint call for 10-year moratorium on heritable human gene editing
“Human heritable gene editing is clearly a terrible solution in search of a problem,” said Tim Hunt, chief executive officer at the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, which, along with the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy and the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy, recently called for a 10-year global ban on heritable gene editing, citing safety concerns, lack of medical need. They said it risked a new form of “eugenics” that would have the effect of “potentially altering the course of evolution”. As Tim Hunt commented, “If you make a mistake, the mistake passes onto all future generations. So that’s a pretty big ethical roll of the dice.”

IVG: Lab-grown sperm and eggs just a few years away, scientists say
According to a pioneer in the field, Prof Katsuhiko Hayashi, scientists are only a few years from being able to transform adult human skin or blood cells into eggs and sperm, a feat known as in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). Hayashi’s lab previously created mice with two biological fathers. Other frontrunners include a California-based startup, Conception Biosciences, whose Silicon Valley backers include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, and whose CEO told the Guardian that growing eggs in the lab “might be the best tool we have to reverse population decline” and could pave the way for human gene editing. Stuart Newman and Tina Stevens have pointed out that molecular tests of cells artificially transformed in the lab “invariably show them to be not identical to their natural counterparts”. In other words, the products of IVG will only be egg-like or sperm-like. In their view, “Based on the state of the relevant science and the lack of any pressing health need we conclude that IVG for reproductive purposes should be strongly opposed”. You can read more about their concerns here.

UK researchers announce eight babies born through three-person IVF, but questions remain
Researchers at the UK’s Newcastle Fertility Centre have published the findings of their years-long experiment with “mitochondrial donation” (the transfer of healthy mitochondria from a donor egg), also known as three-person IVF. They reported on eight children born from the technique. The children born to mothers with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)-related disease are all reported to have been born healthy. But mitochondrial donation doesn’t guarantee a child will stay healthy. There have been reports of mitochondrial reversal, where traces of the mother’s faulty mtDNA increase over time, sometimes overtaking the healthy donor mtDNA. This could potentially lead to mtDNA-related disease, exactly what three-person IVF is purported to prevent. And that is not the only risk from a procedure that is currently illegal in the US, among other countries. “It’s dangerous,” says Professor Stuart Newman. “It’s biologically dangerous. And then it’s dangerous culturally because it’s the beginning of biological manipulation that won’t just end with preventing certain diseases, but will blossom into a full-fledged eugenics program where genes will be manipulated to make designer babies.”

Meet Cathy Tie, bride of “China’s Frankenstein” – or is she?
Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first “CRISPR babies”. At first he trod carefully, promising to only pursue his dream of genetically engineering more children “after society has accepted it”. But that changed after he hooked up with Cathy Tie, a Chinese-Canadian bio-entrepreneur and former Thiel Fellow. Tie, along with the biohacker Josie Zayner, has been part of the Los Angeles Project, which aims to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and possibly, one day, it claims, actual unicorns. Despite the fact that He Jiankui’s editing of human embryos is known to have gone badly awry, He – with Tie’s assistance – started tweeting defiant and sometimes bizarre claims about his “mission of editing human embryos”. He also says US investors are “providing several million dollars’ worth of funding” and that $GENE – a crypto meme coin created for him at Tie’s prompting – is worth another half million. He has even claimed, “My new lab in Austin, Texas will become the world center of gene editing”. For the moment, though, He’s passport is being held by the Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country. And towards the end of July, Tie – He’s new wife – tweeted, “I have now relocated my base of operations to New York and, for a variety of both scientific and personal reasons, Jiankui and I will be pursuing separate paths.”

Tie launches “Manhattan Project” as part of “future $Trillion” designer baby industry
Moving rapidly on from her failed marriage, in early August Cathy Tie announced the launch of a new company, dubbed Manhattan Project, that says it plans to eliminate inherited disease by genetically modifying embryos to create gene-edited babies. Given the melodramatic company name and some of Tie’s past antics, it would be easy to dismiss this as just another attention-seeking provocation from someone who enjoys getting in the spotlight. But in this case, Tie seems to have drawn serious – if controversial – scientists to her cause. Her Manhattan Project co-founder is Eriona Hysolli, who until recently headed biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences (see DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION), and previously worked in George Church’s Harvard genetics lab, which is known for “pushing CRISPR to the boundaries of areas including multiplexing [multiple gene editing] technology, de-extinction, xenotransplantation, and gene drives”. In her promotional video for the launch, Tie also mentions Shoukrat Mitalipov, who has been called “a push the envelope biologist known for his work on human cloning, mitochondrial replacement [three-person IVF], and gene editing in human embryos”. An article that Mitalipov co-authored reviewing the results of gene-editing in human embryos notes a raft of problems from gene editing, including large deletions, chromosome loss and off-target changes, yet was titled, “The case for germline gene correction…”. The Manhattan Project also claims to be backed by “visionary institutional investors”. Certainly, the money was right upfront in Tie’s tweet announcing the launch, which was headed, “Tackling the future $Trillion dollar germline gene correction industry”.

GENETIC TESTING/SUPER-BABIES

Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies
The Washington Post reports investors in embryo-screening startups as saying that the genetic prediction services for embryo selection, used by Elon Musk and others, are a trust fund for future children. Thiel FellowNoor Siddiqui, the founder of Orchid, for instance, offers custom-built algorithms and genome analysis that she claims will help eradicate illness and disease. Her vision, she says, is a world where “the vast majority of parents in the future are not going to want to roll the dice with their child’s health”, i.e. most babies will be born using Orchid-type screening and, by extension, IVF. In addition to Peter Thiel, Orchid’s investors include the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, who recently said he was “ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos” (see HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING), George Church, the co-founder and lead geneticist of the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences (see DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION), and Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and CEO of the recently bankrupted 23andMe (see items below).

IQ, “liberal eugenics”, and Nazi books and posters
A growing number of embryo-screening startups don’t stop at illness and disease but provide intelligence predictions, along with a wide range of other traits. One of these is Nucleus Genomics, which, like Orchid, is funded by Peter Thiel. Another embryo-screening start-up that claims to enable would-be parents to pick the embryo with the highest potential IQ using genetic data is Herasight, which is closely intertwined with another such company – Heliospect Genomics. Jonathan Anomaly, a bioethicist who advocates for “liberal eugenics”, is a senior executive of both firms. In 2024, the anti-fascist research group Hope not Hate, after conducting an in-depth investigation into Heliospect, accused Anomaly and several others associated with the firm of having links to scientific racism and far-right activists. One of Heliospect’s geneticists even got busted buying Nazi books and posters online and was eventually let go by the company. Commenting on the accusations, the statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev drily observed, “This is an interesting cast of characters to be involved in a product which, while clearly conceived and marketed around the idea of IQ prediction, has also elected to hide all the relevant validation until some date in the future.”

“Genetic optimisation” of embryos is Theranos-style hype
The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of the embryo screening for polygenic risks, as offered by firms like Nucleus Genomics, Herasight/Heliospect and Orchid, “unproven”. And it warns that such tests “should not be offered” by clinicians. Although the heritability of certain monogenic – single gene – conditions like cystic fibrosis, is comparatively easy to identify, polygenic traits that can be derived from thousands of genes, like height or the propensity for illnesses like diabetes, are not. No peer-reviewed research supports such testing. And an op-ed in Scientific American points out that “the predictive power of such polygenic risk scores remains so severely limited that you won’t find them part of standard clinical care anywhere in the world”. Yet Nucleus Genomics, for instance, offers prospective parents testing not just for intelligence, but for a host of other polygenic traits that include height, left-handedness, body-mass index, longevity, and even acne. The Thiel-backed firm terms such embryo screening “genetic optimisation”, which the SciAm authors suggest is reminiscent of the level of hype that the Silicon Valley startup Theranos went in for – not, they add, that they are accusing the company of the kind of dishonesty that saw that biotech company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, sentenced to eleven years in jail.

DNA testing firm 23andMe fined £2.3 million by UK regulator for data hack
The California-based genetic testing company 23andMe has been fined more than £2.3m for failing to protect the personal information of more than 150,000 UK residents after a large-scale cyberattack in 2023.

23andMe is out of bankruptcy. You should still delete your DNA
Nearly 2 million people protected their privacy by deleting their DNA from 23andMe after it declared bankruptcy in March, having never made a profit in the 18 years since it was founded. Now it’s back with the same person in charge – its cofounder Anne Wojcicki – and the concerns about privacy and consumers’ DNA have not gone away. The company could still sell people’s genetic information to the highest bidder in the future. And the attorneys general of California, North Carolina, Maryland and Connecticut all still recommend people delete their 23andMe accounts.

CLONING

Human cloning and the myth of “technological inevitability”
Back in the 1990s, leading scientists like Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins signed a declaration dismissing any obstruction to the “responsible development” of human cloning as “the Luddite option” that had “never proven realistic or productive”. Human cloning was inevitable, we were often told, and you cannot “stop science”. But political communication professor Dave Karpf points out: “The human cloning future proved to be neither inevitable [n]or immutable. The path of scientific progress veered in different directions. And, honestly… good! Does anyone regret that we haven’t empowered rich egomaniacs to create clones whose organs they can then harvest? When you tally up the state of the world today, with all its problems and opportunities, do you find yourself thinking ‘aw damn. It sure would help if we had clones’?... The broader lesson is that inevitability was never more than a framing device... Inevitability serves as a rhetorical dodge, an attempt to change the temporal register of the argument from ‘if’ to ‘when’.” Professor of Science and Technology Policy Andy Stirling has long pointed out that technologies are not hard-wired in nature; that tech directions are deliberate choices; and that to treat any particular tech development as unavoidable or self-evidently good is absurd.

The troubling world of animal cloning: How to make cloning pay
While the quest for human cloning appears to have largely been abandoned, multiple attempts have been made to clone animals for profit, despite the substantial ethical and welfare concerns due to the severe health problems and suffering that can be involved. Pets, sheep, cattle, and now horses have all been cloned, but the ventures have largely proven unsuccessful in generating much revenue (though the firms mostly survive), or in creating the exact same animal. However, animal cloning has also played a role in so-called “de-extinction” – something Colossal Biosciences has made a $10 billion fortune out of (see DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION below).

The dream of human cloning lingers on
Even though it took 276 unsuccessful attempts before Dolly the cloned sheep was produced in 2003, and many cloned animals that are carried to term die shortly after birth and suffer deformities, various people and groups have over the years claimed that they were going to clone a human being. Nothing ever seems to have come of it, though a sci-fi religious cult – the Raëlians – claim to have created as many as 13 human clones, while declining to provide any evidence to confirm their existence. Still the dream lingers on. In May of this year, the synthetic biology pioneer/entrepreneur Andrew Hessel, who, together with George Church, leads the artificial gene synthesis project Genome Project-write, published an article soliciting would-be cloners. Hessel said he’d “met someone who wants to be the first human cloned” and “I’m convinced he’d move forward if any clinic wanted to pursue this, and I’d be happy to broker the introduction and advise the project”. Presumably no clinic bit, because in a tweet on August 7, Hessel repeated his plea for “a clinic willing to do the embryo engineering” for someone “willing and financially able to be the first verified human clone”. According to Hessel, pioneering human cloning will open up a market worth “probably in the tens of billions of dollars”. Hessel has previously saidthat he himself would “like to be cloned after I die”, as this would bestow a kind of immortality. Hessel explained that his interest in cloning was “deep-rooted, sparked by reading Frank Herbert’s Dune when I was a kid”. Cloning humans is just one strand of the human future Hessel is keen to broker. Elsewhere, he remarks that synthetic humans are not far off: “Synthetic biology advances could see engineered humans being booted up in a few decades.”

THE CRAZY WORLD OF THE TECHNO-FUTURISTS

New book unmasks Silicon Valley’s crusade to control the fate of humanity
A new book by Adam Becker, a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics, has been called “a masterclass” in debunking the bad science and sinister ideas driving the “ideology of technological salvation” so rife in Silicon Valley. That ideology includes transhumanism and a cluster of other loosely connected techno-futurist credos. In More Everything, Forever, Becker very effectively shows that many of the most hyped claims of the techno-elite are pure sci-fi fantasy that appeal to tech-billionaires by making them feel as if they are key players in humanity’s future, helping justify their lust for wealth and power. The only serious reservation we’ve seen about Becker’s book comes from the writer on human genetic engineering Pete Shanks, who says that while Becker takes a wrecking ball to many of the techno-elite’s scientifically ridiculous claims, he fails to delve deeply enough into their dangerous techno-eugenics. That said, Shanks still considers the book “well written, well produced, and important” and as deserving a wide audience – something with which we completely agree.

What the current Epstein brouhaha is missing
While speculation swirls around the exact nature of Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, many may have missed the recent New York Times revelation that the pedophile financier also had notable ties to Peter Thiel. Though Epstein met with many powerful people in finance and business during his career, he invested with very few. In Thiel’s case though, Epstein put some $40 million into funds Thiel co-founded. And investments weren’t all the two had in common. Like Thiel, Epstein was a strong supporter of transhumanism and much of his “philanthropy” was directed to its financing and promotion. A latter-day eugenicist who, Elon Musk-like, wanted to seed the human race with his own DNA, Epstein donated $120,000 in total to the Worldwide Transhumanist Association, now named Humanity Plus. He also bankrolled George Church to the tune of $686,000. Donors whom the sex trafficker introduced to Church also provided Church with another $2 million for his genetics research, some of which has also been supported by Thiel. Epstein also supported cryonics, which freezes bodies and body parts, particularly severed heads, in the hope that technological advances will eventually make it possible to resurrect the dead. Epstein apparently planned to have his own head and penis preserved in this fashion. Thiel also has a plan to be cryogenically frozen upon his death.

DE-EXTINCTION DISINFORMATION

“World’s first de-extinction” or “a Colossal pile of bullshit”
The biotech firm Colossal Biosciences, which has George Church as its co-founder and chief geneticist, has recently generated a series of headline-grabbing claims concerning its mission to bring back extinct species. The latest iconic animal to be added to its revival wish list, joining the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, is a 12ft tall bird that went extinct in its New Zealand home 600 years ago – the giant moa. But Colossal’s biggest recent claim to fame is that it has achieved the world’s first successful de-extinction by resurrecting an animal that went extinct some 13,000 years ago and has been made famous by Game of Thrones – the dire wolf. Many experts, though, point out that Colossal’s three “dire wolf” pups that the company billed as “the first animals in history to be brought back from extinction” are actually cloned transgenic grey wolves with an unusual fur colour (white) that dire wolves almost certainly didn’t have, but which makes them look like the fictional “Ghost” from Game of Thrones. The reality, the critics argue, is that Colossal’s gene-edited grey wolf pups’ genomes contain only 15 bits of dire wolf DNA, plus five other edits, whereas the two species differ by about 12 million DNA letters. The evolutionary geneticist Vincent Lynch points out that following Colossal’s argument that 20 mutations transmutes a grey wolf into a dire wolf, “every human that ever was or will be is a different species from each other” because “even parents and their children… differ from each other by on average about 150 mutations”. Lynch says the company’s de-extinction claims are so wildly misleading that they constitute a disinformation campaign – or “a Colossal pile of bullshit”.

Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossible

“You will never ever see a living woolly mammoth,” geneticist Adam Rutherford writes. “While this is an obvious truth to most geneticists, zoologists and mammoth experts, the endless promises that you might get to meet an extant version of this very-much extinct elephantid apparently necessitate me typing it. The latest on the conveyor belt of mammoth resurrection stories came... in the form of a slightly hairy mouse. Colossal Biosciences, the US company behind the ‘woolly mouse’ and ensuing media frenzy, published a non-peer-reviewed paper in which it has genetically engineered a mouse to express a gene that relates to mammoth hair, resulting in a mouse with slightly longer hair than normal.” Rutherford adds, “This unusually hirsute mouse was not created for any... noble purpose but rather as a farcical little sideshow for the fantasy that one day Colossal will breed a living mammoth.” Rutherford also says the venture won’t work and recommends directing “scientific excitement and energies towards real problems, things on which millions of lives depend, rather than on this mammoth circus of macabre fantasy and moral bankruptcy”.

Is the de-extinction disinformation campaign really about designer babies?
Back in January of this year, after their latest funding round left Colossal Biosciences valued at $10.2 billion, TechCrunch asked Ben Lamm – the Colossal CEO who co-founded the company with George Church – why investors had poured “so much capital at an eye-popping valuation” into a company that had yet to generate any revenue. Lamm explained: “The investor base has been very impressed with the speed at which we’ve created new technologies.” Some of these technologies, which include artificial wombs, Lamm said, “are world-changing for human healthcare, for agtech, for all these different categories”. TechCrunch also reported that “Colossal plans to spin off three businesses over the next two years, one of which will be for its artificial womb technology, which could have applications in fertility treatment”. Some scientific experts not only see this, rather than “de-extinction”, as the company’s real goal but as part of a disturbing trajectory. Dr Vincent Lynch, for instance, says, “It’s a remarkably tiny jump from ‘de-extinction’ technologies and deep fake species, to embryo selection, to eugenics”. And Stuart Newman suggested in a tweetthat the fakery of “de-extinction” is a key strategic element in that trajectory: “@colossal’s business model is founded in bio-disinformation that extends well beyond the bogus ‘dire wolf.’ They are aiming for acceptance of human embryo gene modification, a project that will necessitate manipulating the perception of aberrant outcomes as desired improvements”. To which Lynch responded [his X account is suspended due to complaints he believes originated with Colossal], “It's not just @colossal, other biotech companies are developing commercialised human embryo gene editing; this has amazing and horrific possibilities. Eugenics among them”. Newman and Lynch, incidentally, expressed these concerns before Cathy Tie announced she was founding an embryo editing start-up with the former Head of Biological Sciences at Colossal, Eriona Hysolli. Hysolli is a protégé of Colossal’s co-founder George Church, whose lab pioneered editing in human cells (see HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING).

GM (AND NON-GM) INSECTS

GM mosquitoes company Oxitec launches non-GMO production facility
The British company Oxitec, which for years has been trying to market its GMO mosquitoes around the world in the name of reducing mosquito-borne diseases, is now producing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Brazil. Wolbachia is a naturally occurring bacterium that biocontrol companies are using to reduce mosquitoes’ ability to transmit dengue and other diseases. It’s a non-GMO approach. Oxitec claims its Wolbachia infected mozzies are “capable of protecting up to 100 million people threatened by dengue”. Oddly enough, Oxitec previously opposed Wolbachia use in California. And its current proposal to release its GM mosquitoes in Queensland could undermine the success of Wolbachia control there – see next item.

Expert says releasing GM mosquitoes in Queensland is risky
Oxitec, in commercial partnership with Australia’s public research body CSIRO as Oxitec Australia, is seeking a licence for the commercial releaseof GM mosquitoes in Queensland. The aim of the initiative is claimed to be to reduce transmission of the dengue virus by reducing the size of the mosquito population. But mosquito expert Dr Perran Stott-Ross of the University of Melbourne says the plan is risky and unwarranted for several reasons. The first is that dengue transmission in Queensland is all but eradicated, thanks to a successful Wolbachia control programme that has now been running for over a decade. Releasing GM mosquitoes will directly interfere with what is already an effective and ongoing solution to dengue in Queensland. Unlike Wolbachia, which has little impact on the size of the mosquito population, GM mosquitoes are intended to wipe them out. This increases the risk that mosquitoes without Wolbachia could establish themselves via accidental introductions (like stowaways) or mosquitoes derived from the GM strain. There’s also been no testing of any interactions between the genetic modification and Wolbachia. Dr Stuart-Ross details more reasons for serious concern here.

BIOSAFETY

The new “Spirit of Asilomar”: Move fast, don’t ask questions
In Review 582 we reported that fifty years after the 1975 Asilomar biosafety conference – a moment of self-reflection and self-regulation of molecular biologists – a group of historians and bioengineers organised a three-day conference in the same place to reflect and learn for the future. Naomi Kosmehl of Save Our Seeds has since reported on the Spirit of Asilomar: “The common theme throughout the event wasn’t concern over biosafety or ethics – it was a perceived lack of public trust in biotechnology. Some working group exchanges would suddenly turn into PR strategy discussions about how best to lobby ministers using biotech success stories... It felt rather surreal that no one... was asking the question why trust had been broken in the first place... I found myself in PR boot camps and casual conversations with scientists who said things like, ‘I don’t want to be governed, I want to move fast, I want to move as fast as possible.’”

AI and genetic engineering: a biosafety issue – video available

We previously reported Testbiotech’s planned workshop exploring the risks arising from the convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering, including biosafety issues that often get overlooked. The presentations and recording of July’s workshop are now available online.

Trump executive order restricts gain-of-function research on pathogens
President Trump signed an executive order in May to further restrict experiments on pathogens that could make them more harmful. The debate over gain-of-function research sharpened during the pandemic. Trump and other elected officials have linked such research to the origin of Covid, stating that Chinese researchers produced the coronavirus in a lab in Wuhan. However, Trump’s crackdown turns out to be narrower than expected, writes Emily Kopp in the Daily Caller and on X.

GM microorganisms pose huge challenges for risk assessment and governance
A review by researchers from Environment Agency-Austria, Austrian Academy of Sciences and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation identifies critical biosafety and wider governance risks of environmental applications of genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs), including those developed by genome editing. It focuses on two case studies of commercialised applications: 1) GM microalgae for biofuel production and 2) GM soil bacteria for increased nitrogen fixation. The researchers write that GMMs are “fundamentally different to GM higher organisms”, raising specific challenges. Their microscopic size complicates detection of their environmental presence, hindering assessment and monitoring of their survival following intended or accidental release. Bacteria and microalgae also readily exchange DNA via horizontal gene transfer, raising the risk of spread of both intended and unintended engineered sequences and traits. Moreover, bacteria are capable of rapid genetic change, with the potential for evolutionary adaptation, providing “new opportunities to evolve, adapt, and spread”.

GMO “BIOLOGICALS”

Big Agribiz co-opts organic principles to promote Big Ag’s “biologicals”
In a classic example of how shamelessly Big Agribiz pivots its marketing, the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who was part of the legal team that scored the first major court victory against Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller, is being used as an unwitting front man for “biologicals”. These are substances derived from living organisms that agribusiness companies are increasingly promoting to farmers with claims of improving soil or crop health or controlling pests and diseases – all supposedly with the added benefit of reducing use of the chemical pesticides that still provide the largest chunk of the companies’ profits. “Biologicals” can be genuinely natural. For example, the biocontrols used in organic farming include ladybirds employed to combat aphids and nematodes used against slugs and snails. But they can also be GM microbes (see item above) – which can pose serious risks to human and animal health and the environment.

GMWatch News Review archive

Review 589: De-Extinction, Designer Babies, Gene Drives and More