Manipulating Biology: Costs, Benefits and Controversies

Introduction

Whether you're a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

-Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler¹

In Parable of the Sower, a young-adult science-fiction dystopian novel by African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, the protagonist, Lauren, writes a fictional book titled Earthseeds: The Books of the Living. The overarching theme of the book is God is Change.  For Lauren, religion is about action, because the nature of reality is change. The way to be a good Earthseed follower is to go out and make the world better. She lives in a world of constant change; mostly pessimistic, depressing, change. Within that change, she always carries hope. The need to steal or even murder in order to save oneself or a loved one is a dilemma that is presented in the novel several times. The protagonist needs to make very difficult choices to survive. There are many other ethical questions posed in the book about the role an individual should take in making the world better. While the theme concentrates mostly on societal issues, I wonder what Ms. Butler would say about applying Earthseed’s teachings to science.

Looking at this passage from a science teacher’s point of view, natural selection, adaptation, and evolution come to mind. My question is, “Is it ethical for humans to interfere with the process of natural selection and evolution to slow down or speed up change?” In the book, Unnatural Selection by science writer Emily Monosson, she poses the question, “Why not let nature take her course?” She argues that we have adapted our environment to suit us, but we cannot adapt quickly enough to the environment we are creating.² As an example, by contributing to global warming, we are contributing to the greater ability for mosquitoes to spread to new geographic areas as these become warmer, in turn creating greater opportunities for mosquito-borne transmission of viruses and parasites that cause diseases such as malaria.³ Are we ready to deal with the aftermath of climate change? In Parable of the Sower, Butler describes living in a world in which climate change has caused destruction and despair to our Earth. In her novel, she illustrates a hypothetical future of our Earth if we do not stop global warming in its tracks now. It is as if she foreshadowed through her literature, the dangers that are beginning to present themselves in our present day. In Parable, it only rains once every six or seven years and it is evident that there is a depletion of natural resources, and an abundance of forest fires due to climate change.⁴

The reason I have begun the unit with this classic young-adult novel is because I believe that education should be taught through various lenses and using different mediums. Introducing a science concept by using a quote from a novel may be a good way to engage students who are, otherwise, intimidated by science. They can make connections to text that they are more familiar with and use that as a vehicle to guide them in the understanding of some more complex science concepts. According to science writer, Carl Zimmer, who spoke at our seminar, people love to hear stories. He encouraged us to try to teach science through these stories. Professor Paul Turner begins his seminar presentations by showing an image of a historical figure. He tells a story and then makes the connection to the science lesson of the day. It is engaging, and a strategic way to pull the audience to the rest of the presentation.

In our hands, we now hold the tools to make great scientific change. When Butler wrote the words The only lasting truth is Change, gene drive technology had not been discovered. At the time, it was unimaginable that decades later, change in organisms would be viable using gene drive technology. Although she was a science fiction writer, again, I believe she was writing from the perspective of creating social change. As science educators, we too can instill in our students that, through science, they can also participate in making positive change. This scientific change also comes with an ethical responsibility. Tough choices are going to have to be made when using this new technology. This is the beauty of literature, the reader is able to read and make interpretations to whatever their present reality is. When she was talking about change, was she writing about the immense possible change that can be created by humans through new technology such as CRISPR? No, but here we are faced with that dilemma. If I could have a conversation with her now, I would ask her opinion about the possibility of human intervention contributing to this type of genetic change.

What is gene drive technology and CRISPR, you may be asking? Gene drive is technology that is capable of altering the genomes of entire species. Gene drives ensure that chosen mutations are passed on to nearly all of an animal’s offspring. This causes a higher number of an organism’s offspring to inherit a favorable gene that would ordinarily happen by chance, allowing a mutation to spread quickly through a population.⁵ If we were to let natural selection take its course, a genetic change in an organism could take an extensive amount of time to spread through the population. The probability of inheriting a mutation carried on a pair of chromosomes is 50 percent. Using CRISPR technology, that probability increases dramatically. It allows a mutation made by CRISPR on one chromosome to copy itself to its partner in every generation. Nearly all the offspring will inherit this change in a much faster time.⁶ As a science teacher who has not read too many science-fiction books, this sounds like the recipe for a great sci-fi story, except this time it is real and it is here. The idea that we have access to technology like CRISPR left me with my mouth open on more than one occasion during our seminar, Manipulating Biology: Costs, Benefits and Controversies.

In Unnatural Selection, Monosson writes that “New vaccines may allow us to slow the evolutionary process, giving us all a fighting chance.”⁷ Technologies such as vaccines protect against diseases that might ordinarily kill people; thus, diminishing the opportunity for natural selection to remove the least resistant individuals and, hence, any underlying genes responsible for their weakened resistance.⁸ Over 99 percent of species that ever lived on Earth, are now extinct.⁹ Should we slow down the evolutionary process by keeping individuals alive in the face of diseases that might ordinarily kill them, perhaps contributing to the preservation of humans as a species here on Earth for longer than what, otherwise, is expected? Is that an ethical thing to do? Or, should we allow nature to take its course? Are we being unethical if we have the technology to save lives but do not use it? I feel that there are more questions than answers when it comes to this topic. Hopefully, our students will begin to ask some of their own.

Imagine that you are a 7^th grade student walking into science class and your teacher tells you that there is a chance that in the near future we could witness a type of Jurassic Park where woolly mammoths and other extinct species are roaming our Earth once again. As a 7^th grader, your first reaction would probably be an open-mouthed, “Wow!”. That’s what my middle-aged reaction was when I first began hearing about all the amazing gene editing tools that science has discovered and developed. I assume most people would have the same initial reaction. Then after some processing, we would probably move from the “Wow” to the “What would all this mean?” This train of thought could take us to so many unknowns that it would make our heads hurt. What else could we do with gene editing technology? How far can we go? As I began reading, I realized that there is an unlimited number of things we could do with this fairly new technology.

One potentially useful benefit of gene drive technology would be the eradication of harmful diseases affecting people worldwide. The idea of teaching our students content through a global perspective is something that I feel our society could benefit from. Since the seminar revolves around manipulating biology, my unit topic will focus on manipulating biology to eradicate malaria. The guiding questions throughout the unit will be, is it justifiable to ever force a species into extinction? For example, should we make an attempt to drive malaria-carrying mosquitoes into extinction? Should we use gene drive technology to do this, or should we concentrate on changing their DNA to keep them from transmitting malaria to humans while saving them from extinction? Is it possible to use gene drive technology to cure sickle cell anemia? We will look at the way humans have evolved adaptations to fight diseases in their environments over thousands of years. These adaptations have caused populations in areas with high prevalence of malaria to develop high incidences of sickle cell anemia; heterozygotes with some (but not all) sickle-celled blood cells are the most fit for resisting malaria parasites that invade our blood. The unit will include an understanding of how malaria, through natural selection, has contributed to sickle cell anemia. Students are expected to look at geographical maps and make a connection to the regions with high incidences of malaria, to understand why people whose ancestors lived in these parts of the world are the ones most often affected with sickle cell anemia.