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Oops! Gene editing not as precise as advertised
Oops! Gene editing not as precise as advertised
Sometimes a headline gives you practically the entire story. Take this one: “Gene-Editing Unintentionally Adds Bovine DNA, Goat DNA, and Bacterial DNA, Mouse Researchers Find.” The writer details how this happens, of course. And, there is an important subtext. The problem is chalked up by scientists and regulators to incompetence on the part of the company doing alterations to create cattle without horns.
But the real news is this according the author: “[F]oreign DNA from surprising sources can routinely find its way into the genome of edited animals. This genetic material is not DNA that was put there on purpose, but rather, is a contaminant of standard editing procedures.” [My emphasis.]
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (remember records?), as Garrett Hardin, the author of the first law of ecology, reminds us, “we can never merely do one thing.” Why is this truism so hard to accept, so hard that I feel compelled to refer to it in consecutive posts? The simple answer is that as long as there is profit in ignoring it and as long as it is possible to pass the bad consequences on to others, people will act as if Hardin’s first law was never spoken.
Unfortunately, we ignore Hardin in practically everything we do. For example, we discover the convenience of tough, clear plastics and create health damage with the chemical that makes them that way. We later discover that plastic degrades into very tiny particles that are now ubiquitouson the planet and in our bodies as well.
In each case the damage is spread around as the profits mount for the makers. But even they can no longer escape their handiwork. The damage now makes its way into the corporate suites and penthouses.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence
Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence
Garrett Hardin’s idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons” has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; that is the interplay of individual advantage versus public goods; the basic factor that leads to what we call “overexploitation.”
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hardin used the example of sheep and pastures to explain the reasons of the tragedy, but that’s rather unfamiliar to my students (as well as to most of us). For instance, many of my students don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of “overgrazing”, that is the fact that grass doesn’t regrow if it is grazed too much. Besides, the pastures that Hardin was considering never experienced the “tragedy”; they were well managed and well regulated, specifically in order to avoid it.
So, let me propose a different example for the mechanism of overexploitation, based on a real event that happened to me. Maybe it can explain the concept better.
Just a few days ago I was literally kidnapped inside an underground parking in Florence because I had lost my entrance ticket, with the employees of the place insisting that they won’t let me out unless I was willing to shell out 237 euros for about two hours of parking (!!).
I described the experience in detail in a post in Italian, that you may machine translate if you are really interested. The gist of the story, anyway, is that I found myself caught in a trap mainly designed to siphon out some money out of the pockets of the hapless foreign tourist passing by. In my case, I was able to negotiate my release and avoid paying the exorbitant surcharge.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity
Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity
We live in an era of ecological crisis, which is a direct result of human actions. Natural scientists have been debating whether the current historical epoch should be called the Anthropocene, in order to mark the period in which human activities became the primary driver of global ecological change.[1]
Initially, it was proposed that this new epoch, corresponding with the rise of modern capitalist and industrial development, began in the eighteenth century. The growth imperative of capitalism, as well as other sociocultural changes, is a primary factor generating major environmental problems that culminate in ecological crisis.[2]
It has become increasingly clear that humans face an existential crisis. The environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben explains:
Earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived…. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet…. This is one of those rare moments, the start of a change far larger and more thoroughgoing than anything we can read in the records of man, on a par with the biggest dangers we can read in the records of rock and ice.[3]
Many modern ecological problems are referred to as a tragedy of the commons, a concept developed by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s to describe the overexploitation or despoliation of natural resources.[4]We contend that they are actually associated with the tragedy of the commodity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
