Month: October 2022

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Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

The second is the use of gene drives. These allow a gene to copy itself from one chromosome in a pair to the other so it will be passed on to almost all offspring. If that gene causes infertility, the gene drive spells the extinction of the population that carries it. Gene drives have been proposed as a way to eradicate malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and they have been tested in the lab, but the technology has not been deployed in the wild yet.

Enlarge (credit: TEK IMAGE / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

The second is the use of gene drives. These allow a gene to copy itself from one chromosome in a pair to the other so it will be passed on to almost all offspring. If that gene causes infertility, the gene drive spells the extinction of the population that carries it. Gene drives have been proposed as a way to eradicate malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and they have been tested in the lab, but the technology has not been deployed in the wild yet.

Enlarge (credit: Elena Lacey/Getty Images)

Next week, a law takes effect that will change the Internet forever—and make it much more difficult to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act comes into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force Amazon, Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable in 2023. That could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps, in a new reminder that Europe has regulated tech companies much more actively than the US.

“We expect the consequences to be significant,” says Gerard de Graaf, a veteran EU official who helped pass the DMA early this year. Last month, he became director of a new EU office in San Francisco, established in part to explain the law’s consequences to Big Tech companies. De Graaf says they will be forced to break open their walled gardens.

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Android phones around San Francisco’s Bay Area buzzed with an alert on Tuesday morning: A 4.8 magnitude earthquake was about to hit. “You may have felt shaking,” some of the messages read. More than a million Android users saw the alert. And for some, it arrived seconds before the ground even started moving.

It’s not the first time Android devices have received these alerts, says Marc Stogaitis, the project lead for the Android Earthquake Alerts System. But because the Bay Area is so densely populated, the alert hit enough phones that the larger public took notice. Earthquakes have historically come without warning, catching people off guard and leaving them with no advance notice to drop and take cover. Alerts like this aim to take some of the unpredictability out of earthquakes—even if by just a few seconds.