I'm Gina Smith

Making Way for Designer Insects (Washington Post)

Making Way for Designer Insects (TechNews.com)

The insect world could shortly undergo a genetic makeover in the laboratory. Scientists are at work developing silkworms that produce pharmaceuticals instead of silk, honeybees resilient enough to resist pesticides and even mosquitoes capable of delivering vaccines, instead of disease, with every bite.

Researchers are tinkering with insect genes to develop more than a dozen new varieties, offering potentially broad social benefits while posing complicated new health and environmental risks. Though most of the designer insects are at least five to 10 years away from reality, concern is growing that government agencies have yet to think about how to oversee the research.

A new report scheduled for release this morning warns that the issues posed by gene-altered insects are so complex that unless federal agencies begin now to design methods of oversight, the necessary rules may not be in place when scientists are ready to start releasing insects into the environment.

The report by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a think tank in Washington, outlined laboratory work of astonishing ambition, with goals that go far beyond the relatively limited uses to which genetic engineering has been put to date.

"Intoxicating" gene found in worms. (AP)

MSNBC - 'Intoxicating' gene found in worms

Excerpt from the Associated Press:

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers found a gene responsible for drunkenness in worms after plying thousands of the tiny creatures with booze, a discovery that could boost the fight against alcoholism.

The experiment was conducted by University of California, San Francisco researchers and was to be published Friday in the science journal Cell.

Because it is believed that alcohol affects all animals similarly, humans, like worms, may also possess a single gene responsible for drunkenness.

“Our end goal is to find a way to cure alcoholism and drug abuse,” Dr. Steven McIntire said. “We hope to develop effective therapeutics to improve the ability of people to stop drinking.”

After six years of work on the project, McIntire can now spot a soused worm about as well as a highway patrol trooper can spot a drunken driver.

He and the other scientists dosed hundreds of thousands of worms with enough alcohol that they would be too drunk to drive legally — if they were human with the same blood-to-alcohol levels.

The drunken worms moved slower and more awkwardly than sober ones, and laid fewer eggs. Teetotaler worms form a neat S shape to power propulsion while the bodies of drunken worms were straighter and less active.

Researchers found that the sober worms had the same mutated gene that appears to make them immune to alcohol

...

Live, Love, Last.

I just found this excellent interview in newscientist.com with Cynthia Kenyon, a researcher at The University of California, San Francisco. Based on her work with worms, she thinks it will be possible to engineer us to live much longer lives.

She says:

"We found that mutations that lowered the activity of a single gene, called daf-2, caused the worms to live more than twice as long as normal. We showed that their long lives weren't caused by changes in feeding or reproduction - two boring possibilities. But the best thing was that the long-lived worms remained active and healthy long after normal worms were decrepit or dead. They were like 90-year-old people who looked like 45-year-olds."

Two things are certain. 1.) People are going to want to believe this. And 2.) Cynthia Kenyon is soon to become very famous. Speaking strictly as a journalist, this is good copy!

Controversial Three-Parent Pregnancy Revealed (New Scientist)

U.S. and Chinese scientists today reported a human pregnancy with fetuses resulting from three genetic parents. The technique used is nuclear transfer, description is below.

An excerpt from New Scientist:

"The work in China was led by John Zhang and colleagues at the Sun Yat-Sen University of Medical Science in Guangzhou, China, and presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's meeting in San Antonio, Texas, US. They removed the fertilised nuclei (pronuclei) from one set of eggs and implanted them into another set of emptied eggs.

The eggs produced by this nuclear transfer had genetic material from three people - nuclear DNA from the man and woman who created the pronuclei and mitochondrial DNA from the woman donating the second egg."

I should note that children with three genetic parents have actually been born. That fertility treatment work was revealed back in 2001.