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Dear Aventine Readers,
We’ve written a fair bit about climate change. And we’ve written about CRISPR. Today we’re looking at how gene editing tools, applied to crops and livestock, might both mitigate global warming and help plants and animals adapt to rising temperatures. Critics fear that we’ll be opening up a Pandora’s Box of unknown consequences we won’t be able to roll back. Others say current farming practices could be improved and that gene editing could make agriculture more efficient and humane. Read on as five experts weigh in.
Also in this issue:
As always, thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Danielle Mattoon
Executive Director, Aventine
Gene Editing to Tackle Climate Change
The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of rising rates of food insecurity worldwide. Already, acute hunger affects an estimated 343 million people in 74 countries, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). And while the last few decades have seen a significant decrease in world hunger, climate change threatens to reverse that progress as increased frequency of droughts, heat waves and floods threatens crop yields and livestock production. By 2050, the risk of hunger and malnutrition could rise by 20 percent due solely to climate change, the WFP warns.
One proposed solution involves precision gene editing, which allows scientists to make highly specific changes in the DNA sequences of living organisms to, for example, make plants and animals more resilient to climate change. There are several methods, but CRISPR-based tools are notable for being the most cost-effective and efficient.
The discovery of CRISPR by the American biochemist Jennifer Doudna and the French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2012 represented a significant leap in gene editing, transforming the pace of agricultural research and plant breeding. In the decade-plus since then, CRISPR-edited products have hit the market in Japan (with a more nutritious tomato, a faster-growing pufferfish and a larger red sea bream) and the United States (with less pungent mustard greens).
Many more are in development and await commercialization in response to both climate change and global food shortages. In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared that two CRISPR-edited cows — engineered to have a slick, shorter coat to better withstand heat — are safe for meat production. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded in 2023 that CRISPR-edited teff — an important staple in Ethiopia — is safe to consume and can be made higher yielding without crowding out other crops.
Other research goes a step further, aiming to leverage gene editing for climate mitigation rather than just adaptation. For example, scientists are trying to use CRISPR to supercharge plants and soil microbes to both capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. Another ambitious project targets the methane-making genes within microbes that live in a cow’s gut to literally stop emissions at the source. Methane in cow burps comes from gas-producing microbes that digest the large quantities of fiber in the plants they eat.
But this all raises some big questions: How far should we go in using CRISPR to fine-tune our food system and what are the risks? Advocacy groups that oppose genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have spoken out against gene-edited crops on the grounds that they could impact ecosystems in unpredictable and potentially permanent ways. One Greenpeace briefing warns that gene editing could exacerbate the negative effects of industrial farming on nature, animals and people, creating “a gigantic genetic engineering experiment with unknown, potentially irrevocable outcomes.”
Aventine spoke with five experts about the future of gene editing in agriculture and how it can and should be applied in a world with a rapidly changing climate. Most agreed on the need to pursue it on a carefully scrutinized case-by-case basis, and some even believe it could improve current breeding techniques and lead to the more humane treatment of animals.
There are 37 billion tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere annually. That's not what's there — it's what's being added every year. And if you take CO2 equivalents like methane and nitrous oxide into account, it's closer to 57 billion tons annually. You can't impact that by just changing our current lifestyles a little bit. We need to do a lot more than what we're doing, and that's why these gene editing methods are a big deal.
Crops have already been bred to have insect resistance, herbicide resistance and drought tolerance, which has generally improved yield. Engineering crops with tools like CRISPR, which are more tolerant to changes in temperature, for example, would presumably increase yield, which also draws down more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So, there's both a farming benefit and a climate change benefit.“
— Charles DeLisi, Dean Emeritus in the College of Engineering at Boston University
If you look at the history of genetic interference, there have been huge problems for the health and welfare of modern farm animals. Over about the last 60 or 70 years, farm animals have been bred to grow faster or bigger. For example, the typical meat chickens, broiler chickens, have been selectively bred to grow about three times as quickly as, say, 70 years ago. A massive number of birds are suffering from very painful leg disorders because their legs are simply not able to properly support the rapidly growing body. And some can't even reach the age of 36 or 37 days without succumbing to heart disease.
The idea that you're then going to take a sophisticated technology like CRISPR and push that genetic interference further is really worrying. I could recognize that cattle gene-edited to be able to better cope with hot conditions would probably be beneficial. But I'm approaching gene editing very nervously and tentatively. And the basic rule of thumb would be no gene editing or genetic engineering.”
— Peter Stevenson OBE, chief policy adviser at Compassion in World Farming
With traditional breeding, you mix all of the genes in two plants, and you don't actually know exactly what genes you've picked up. Even though you select for the ones that have the properties you want, you pick up a lot of other genes in the process, and you don't really know what they do. Gene editing using techniques like CRISPR is much more precise. For me, it is much safer than traditional breeding.
But satisfying the regulatory requirements for gene-edited crops is extremely expensive, so it's only something that the big agricultural companies have been able to afford. Scientists and small farmers who are trying to make efforts to help don't have the money to satisfy the regulators. Furthermore, many of the regulations are somewhat nonsensical. They just go overboard because Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations have gone out of their way to say that GMOs are really dangerous, and so you've got to be very careful before allowing the farmers to grow them. But it's simply not true that GMOs are dangerous.“
— Sir Richard J. Roberts, Nobel laureate and chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs
I think the cultural prohibition on intervention in natural systems is one which we apply without really thinking of how profoundly unnatural existing intensive animal agriculture is. I have such deep ethical reservations about the existing intensive animal agriculture that I view engineering biology as having some remarkable potential to address current issues like animal suffering and ecological impacts.
One of the areas that I'm most excited about is precision fermentation of milk, which is already in production in the United States. Basically an engineered yeast has been specifically designed to produce milk proteins without the involvement of cows, and therefore without the methane emissions, the land use, carbon emissions and the animal cruelty involved in the dairy industry. I'm enormously excited by both the climate and animal welfare benefits that that technology might offer.”
— Jonathan Symons, associate professor in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University
Globally, we've seen really steady increases in crop yields, on average, for decades. Over the past 50 years, the world has warmed about 1 degree Celsius, yet global agricultural output — the total amount of food we've been able to produce — has increased fourfold. So, even though climate change is putting additional pressure on crop yields, we've been able to overcome that because of technological advancement. An estimated 50 percent of historical yield increases are due to genetic improvement, and CRISPR is a faster, more precise way to make those changes.”
— Emma Kovak, senior food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute
Advances That Matter
Playing Tetris can help some patients with PTSD. Doomu/IStock
Simple tech-based treatments could help treat mental illness. A new breed of treatments for mental health conditions such as psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are taking inspiration from the world of video gaming, and early trials show that they are effective. The Financial Times reports on several ways that this approach could help make certain mental health interventions more accessible. One approach is so-called avatar therapy, in which patients suffering from psychosis and who report hearing voices are encouraged to create a digital character that looks and sounds like the person or entity they imagine is speaking to them. They chat with this avatar while a therapist provides responses. Results show that the treatment improves mood and lessens the incidence of voices. Another technique encourages PTSD sufferers to play Tetris when they experience flashbacks, because arranging the game’s constantly cascading shapes uses the same part of the brain that generates traumatic thoughts. Playing the game during a flashback prompts that part of the brain to create new associations. Results show that patients who use the Tetris therapy have fewer flashbacks within four weeks. Other PTSD symptoms, such as insomnia and anxiety, also ease. These approaches are still in early trials, but with treatments such as talk therapy often prohibitively expensive and a paucity of new drugs to treat mental illness, there is an opportunity for them to be useful.
Digital twins of human organs could steer medical treatments. Highly detailed virtual copies of body parts, including eyes, hearts and kidneys, could help physicians predict disease progression, develop treatment protocols, plan operations and even perform digital medical trials. MIT Technology Review reports that after a decade or so of research, medical engineers are now testing digital twins of organs in the hope that they may be used in routine clinical practice over the next five to ten years. These models are created using data taken from medical imaging, such as CT or MRI scans, along with other patient data like blood pressure or heart rate. Researchers then create virtual representations of entire organs from small digital building blocks, guided by their knowledge of the biology of that particular organ. The result is a digital organ that can be virtually poked and prodded. Currently, the most mature models are of the heart, and several trials are underway. One uses digital twins of hearts to understand disrupted heartbeats, or arrhythmia; another is studying the best location for pacemakers. Other organ twins are also being developed, including models of the retina, to help guide treatment of macular degeneration, and of the placenta and uterus to help predict if interventions will be required during pregnancy. For some researchers, the long-term goal is to build a digital twin of an entire body, though critics contend that would raise concerns about who owns such personal data and whether physicians might be able to bypass actual patients in planning procedures.
NATO’s plan to build a fail-safe internet. A multinational team of researchers is developing technology to detect failures in undersea internet cables and swiftly reroute data. Undersea internet cables, which have become critical infrastructure in recent decades, are vulnerable to damage from wear and tear as well as sabotage. Because compromised cables pose a meaningful threat to financial systems, cloud computing services and international security, a new NATO project called HEIST will explore new ways to monitor and supplement the undersea network. IEEE Spectrum reports on the first two goals of the project, which is being led from a research lab based in Karlskrona, Sweden. The first is to develop sensing technology capable of identifying the location of a cable failure within one meter, which would help the crews of specialized repair ships find and fix breakages more quickly. The second is to develop and advance systems that can quickly switch the transmission of data from one system to another in order to ensure that internet connections are as seamless as possible. In particular, the project is focused on shifting emergency data transmission to satellites, which will require developing ways to increase the bandwidth of satellite internet communication, potentially using lasers as a means of transmitting data. While the initial focus is on maintaining security for NATO countries, such advances will, over time, ensure that connectivity more broadly is as resilient as possible.
Magazine and Journal Articles Worthy of Your Time
AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it, from MIT Technology Review
5,200 words, or about 25 minutes
If, like most people, you use Google to search the web, you’ve probably been getting used to — and possibly even dependent upon — the AI Overview summary that sits at the top of most Google results pages. Powered by a combination of large language models and the company's trusted Knowledge Graph, the summaries present well-written digestible search results that aim to answer search queries in a way that a list of websites never could. And while such systems are by no means perfect, in many cases (and particularly) for low-stakes queries, they’re undeniably useful. Now there’s a race between Google, OpenAI and startups such as Perplexity to build improved versions of this technology — a competition that could be worth billions or trillions of dollars for the disruptor who successfully dominates the hugely lucrative internet search business. As the article points out, this competition is likely to be messy, with botched answers to queries, upended industries and a huge shakeup in the way that we all access information online.
How to stop the next viral pandemic, from Scientific American
4,100 words, or about 20 minutes
Bats are increasingly spreading viruses to other animals and humans, and understanding why could lead to solutions. Bats happen to be the only mammals that can fly, and perhaps partly because of that, they have substantially different immune systems than other mammals, allowing them to live with, and pass on, a host of viruses, some of which are potentially deadly. An increasing body of research shows that in times of high stress — such as malnutrition brought on by climate change or habitat shifts caused by human development — bats shed those viruses into the wild, infecting other mammal populations. This story dives into the role bats play in environments where disease, human development and climate change intermingle. But it also offers hope: By understanding the links between these systems, it may be possible to predict how and when bats release these viruses, and introduce approaches — to improve their habitats, say, or provide them with better nutrition — to shield bats from high-stress, virus-shedding moments.
This essential element of the power grid is in critically short supply, from IEEE Spectrum
2,600 words, or about 13 minutes
It’s easy to get excited about wind, solar, geothermal, small nuclear reactors and all the other kinds of renewable energy the world is busy rolling out. But there’s a small, significant stumbling block facing the build-out of these technologies: a shortage of transformers. This story explains that wait times for these devices, which are used to boost voltages created by power generation facilities so that electricity can be efficiently distributed over the grid, have doubled to nearly two years since 2021, with costs rising by as much as 80 percent over a similar period. A big part of the problem is that transformers are relatively bespoke, tailored to specific needs, and R&D labs are busy trying to develop more adaptable devices that can be used in any setting. But there’s a potentially larger issue: The transformer industry has historically been cyclical, with demand waxing and waning but never exploding exponentially. The article warns that this has created a reluctance in the industry to drastically increase manufacturing capacity for fear that demand will once again fall off. But with all projections pointing to huge growth in electricity demand, that could leave the energy market facing even longer waits for these devices in the future.