'Designer baby' patent raises ethical questions

23forMe says the patent was for a calculator that offered a ways for parents to see what kind of traits such as eye colour the child might inherit(Source: loops7/iStockphoto)

Bioethicists have raised the red flag over an American patent for a method that could allow people to choose genetic traits like eye colour in children sired from donor eggs or sperm.

The patent for what is called a "gamete (egg or sperm) donor selection" method, was granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to the firm 23andMe on 24 September.

A description on the USPTO website said the "technique allows the potential gamete recipients to make more informed donor choices".

"What 23andMe is claiming is a method by which prospective donors of ova and/or sperm may be selected so as to increase the likelihood of producing a human baby with characteristics desired by the prospective parents," write medical ethicists from Belgium, the Netherlands and France in the journal Genetics in Medicine.

This would be based on a computerised comparison of the genomic data of the egg provider with that of the sperm provider.

Characteristics on the parents' "shopping list" could include height, eye colour, muscle development, personality traits, or risk of developing certain types of cancer and other diseases, say the commentators.

A figure attached to the patent application would allow prospective parents to indicate whether "I prefer a child with": "longest expected life span", "least expected life cost of health care", or "least expected cumulative duration of hospitalisation", they say.

There were also options for "0 per cent likely endurance athlete" and "100 per cent likely sprinter", though the company had stated it could not guarantee the outcome but merely boost the chances of a child having the desired traits.

The commentators describe the method as "hugely ethically controversial" -- particularly as it allows for the selection of characteristics that have nothing to do with the child's health.

"At no stage during the examination of the patent application did the patent office examiner question whether techniques for facilitating the 'design' of future human babies were appropriate subject matter for a patent," they write.

Crossing the line

Associate Professor Jayne Lucke from the Centre for Clinical Research at the University of Queensland says the patent granted to 23forMe appears to cross the line between the accepted practice of preimplantation genetic diagnosis to eliminate a specific disease risk and the controversial idea of selecting socially desirable traits.

"By framing the proposal around the method, the patent has been granted without appearing to address the moral and ethical implications, or the question about whether the procedure is appropriate," says Lucke.

She says the commentary in Genetics in Medicine raises a number of questions for public debate surrounding the use of genetic and reproductive technologies.

"The idea of a "baby farm" manufacturing babies on demand for customers with no emotional or biological connection to the gametes or the resulting child is clearly unacceptable. But where should we draw the line between methods for disease prevention and those seeking to enhance future children with the "right" characteristics, whatever they may be?" she asks.

Medical ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold says patent law was never intended to manage the moral complexities that arise from 23and Me's screen.

"It is up to society to get our collective heads around what is happening in the the lab, and to deploy the political process to regulate it accordingly, says Cannold, who holds an adjunct position at Monash University.

"While it is questionable whether science can deliver many of the genetic predispositions promised in the 23andMe patent, what is certain is that the science that forms the foundation of the application was never intended for such frivolous use."

Broad definitions

23forMe says the patent, applied for more than five years ago, was for a tool dubbed Family Traits Inheritance Calculator that offered "an engaging way for you and your partner to see what kind of traits your child might inherit from you" -- from eye colour to whether the child will be able to perceive bitter taste or be lactose intolerant.

The language of the patent was much broader than the technology to support the calculator, the company says in a blog on its website.

"At the time 23andMe filed the patent, there was consideration that the technology could have potential applications for fertility clinics, so language specific to the fertility treatment process was included," it says.

"The company never pursued the concepts discussed in the patent beyond our Family Traits Inheritance Calculator, nor do we have any plans to do so."

Via www.abc.net.au

Red Wine Chemical Could Let You Live to 150 years

A number of studies have pointed out the health benefits of resveratrol, a compound found naturally in red wine and other foods like berries and peanuts. Now scientists are testing synthetic forms of resveratrol on patients with an eye toward extending life.

Like calorie restriction and exercise — but without weight loss — resveratrol speeds up a target enzyme called SIRT1, which has the potential to prevent disease and slow aging. The latest findings were recently reported in the journal Science.

“Some of us could live to 150,” Harvard genetics professor David Sinclair told the Daily Mail. “But we won’t get there without more research.”

The drugs that were tested are 100 times stronger than what you’d find in a glass of wine. They could be oral or topical and may be available within five years. via the Daily Mail

Image: iStockphoto

Artificial DNA Brings Us Closer Than Ever to Synthesizing Entirely New Forms of Life

New research has brought us closer than ever to synthesizing entirely new forms of life. An international team of researchers has shown that artificial nucleic acids - called "XNAs" - can replicate and evolve, just like DNA and RNA.

We spoke to one of the researchers who made this breakthrough, to find out how it can affect everything from genetic research to the search for alien life.

The researchers, led by Philipp Holliger and Vitor Pinheiro, synthetic biologists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say their findings have major implications in everything from biotherapeutics, to exobiology, to research into the origins of genetic information itself. This represents a huge breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology.

The "X" Stands for "Xeno"

Every organism on Earth relies on the same genetic building blocks: the the information carried in DNA. But there is another class of genetic building block called "XNA" — a synthetic polymer that can carry the same information as DNA, but with a different assemblage of molecules.

The "X" in XNA stands for "xeno." Scientists use the xeno prefix to indicate that one of the ingredients typically found in the building blocks that make up RNA and DNA has been replaced by something different from what we find in nature — something "alien," if you will.

SEXPAND

Strands of DNA and RNA are formed by stringing together long chains of molecules called nucleotides. A nucleotide is made up of three chemical components: a phosphate (labeled here in red), a five-carbon sugar group (labeled here in yellow, this can be either a deoxyribose sugar — which gives us the "D" in DNA — or a ribose sugar — hence the "R" in RNA), and one of five standard bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine or uracil, labeled in blue).

SEXPAND

The molecules that piece together to form the six XNAs investigated by Pinheiro and his colleagues (pictured here) are almost identical to those of DNA and RNA, with one exception: in XNA nucleotides, thedeoxyribose and ribose sugar groups of DNA and RNA (corresponding to the middle nucleotide component, labeled yellow in the diagram above) have been replaced. Some of these replacement molecules contain four carbons atoms instead of the standard five. Others cram in as many as seven carbons. FANA (pictured top right) even contains a fluorine atom. These substitutions make XNAs functionally and structurally analogous to DNA and RNA, but they also make them alien, unnatural, artificial.

Information Storage vs Evolution

But scientists have been synthesizing XNA molecules for well over a decade. What makes the findings of Pinheiro and his colleagues so compelling isn't the XNA molecules themselves, it's what they've shown these alien molecules are capable of, namely: replication and evolution.

"Any polymer can store information," Pinheiro tells io9. What makes DNA and RNA unique, he says, "is that the information encoded in them [in the form of genes, for example] can be accessed and copied." Information that can be copied from one genetic polymer to another can be propagated; and genetic information that can be propagated is the basis for heredity — the passage of traits from parent to offspring.

SEXPAND

In DNA and RNA, replication is facilitated by molecules called polymerases. Using a crafty genetic engineering technique called compartmentalized self-tagging (or "CST"), Pinheiro's team designed special polymerases that could not only synthesize XNA from a DNA template, but actually copy XNA backinto DNA. The result was a genetic system that allowed for the replication and propagation of genetic information.

A simplified analogy reveals the strengths and weaknesses of this novel genetic system: You can think of a DNA strand like a classmate's lecture notes. DNA polymerase is the pen that lets you copy these notes directly to a new sheet of paper. But let's say your friend's notes are written in the "language" of XNA. Ideally, your XNA-based genetic system would have a pen that could copy these notes directly to a new sheet of paper. What Pinheiro's team did was create two distinct classes of writing utensil — one pen that copies your friend's XNA-notes into DNA-notes, and a second pen that converts those DNA notes back into XNA-notes.

Is it the most efficient method of replication? No. But it gets the job done. What's more, it does all this copying to and from DNA with a high degree of accuracy (after all, what good is replication if the copy looks nothing like the original?). The researchers achieved a replication fidelity ranging from 95% in LNA to as high as 99.6% in CeNA — the kind of accuracy Pinheiro says is essential for evolution:

"The potential for evolution is closely tied with how much information is being replicated and the error in that process," he explains. "The more error-prone… a genetic system is, the less information can be feasibly evolved." A genetic system as accurate as theirs, on the other hand, should be capable of evolution.

SEXPAND

The researchers put this claim to the test by showing that XNA strands made up of the HNA xeno-nucleotides like the one pictured here could evolve into specific sequences capable of binding target molecules (like an RNA molecule, or a protein) tightly and specifically. Researchers call this guided evolution, and they've been doing it with natural DNA for some time. The fact that it can also be accomplished in the lab with synthetic DNA indicates that such a system could, in theory, work in a living organism.

"The HNA system we've developed," explains Pinheiro, is "robust enough for meaningful information to be stored, replicated and evolved."

The researchers' findings are published in today's issue of Science.
Top image via Shutterstock; XNA moieties via Science; all other images via Wikimedia Commons

First Artificial Pancreas Approved to Treat Diabetes

Diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and many other countries around the world. And unlike the more common acquired form of diabetes, the Type 1 form of the illness has neither prevention nor cure. Sufferers simply don’t produce insulin, the hormone excreted by the pancreas to process glucose in the body. Patients are stuck monitoring their blood sugar levels with pinpricks and injecting themselves with synthetic insulin.

The Food and Drug Administration recently issued its first-ever approval of an artificial pancreas that may make life easier and healthier for such patients. The device, made by Minneapolis-based Medtronics, relies on a computer algorithm to sync the results of a continuous reading of the wearer’s glucose levels with a pump that provides appropriate amounts of insulin.

Diabetics can currently get continuous glucose monitoring devices and insulin pumps, but the two are not connected.

“This is a significant step towards an artificial pancreas device system,” FDA press officer Jenny Haliski told Singularity Hub.

Although the Medtronics device is called an artificial pancreas, it looks more like pager, which hooks over to the belt and attaches to a sensor that patients insert under the skin.

Its advantage is that it can automatically shut off the supply of insulin if the wearer’s glucose levels fall too low, which can lead to a diabetic coma. The device first alerts the wearer if blood sugar becomes dangerously low, but if s/he doesn’t respond, it shuts off the insulin supply for two hours. The sensor is also billed as more accurate, though still not as accurate as one might hope: Its false alarm rate is 33 percent, according to Medtronics.

Still, the connected monitor and pump setup has been some time in the making and may be the best way to treat diabetes in the absence of a  breakthrough.

For patients it offers real improvements in quality of life.

“Wow, this is amazing. It says a couple of weeks from now it will be available. Wow! This is huge. No competitor is anywhere near this,” said Ami Eaton, a San Franciscan in her 30s who suffers from Type 1 diabetes. She uses a Medtron insulin pump, which allows her to set how much insulin to provide based on manual blood sugar readings.

Eaton explained that, for fear of passing out, she sometimes gives herself only a conservative amount of insulin, which at times leaves her blood sugar levels higher than her doctor would like.

Medtronic says it will begin selling the device, called the MiniMed 530G, in the next few weeks.

The company hopes its next model will be a “fully automated artificial pancreas” that requires almost no input from the wearer.

Images: Medtronic MiniMed courtesy Medtronic; chart via FDA, report via singularityhub.com

Pregnant Smokers Have Babies With Smaller Brains, Behavioral Problems

If pregnant women needed another reason to quit smoking, here it is: there’s new evidence that children of mothers who smoked throughout pregnancy have smaller brains and more emotional problems, including depression and anxiety.

The study, published today in Neuropsychopharmacology, involved 226 children, ages 6-8 years, in the Netherlands. Half of the group had not been exposed to cigarette smoke in utero. Of the other 113 children, 17 were born to smokers who kicked the habit the day they learned they were pregnant, reducing the length of time the fetus was exposed to smoke. The remaining 96 children in the study were exposed to maternal cigarette smoke throughout all trimesters, ranging from one to more than nine cigarettes a day.

Risky Addiction

Researchers assessed the children for behavioral problems and also performed MRI scans to study their brains’ volume. The 96 children whose mothers smoked throughout pregnancy had both smaller overall brain volumes and notably reduced cortical gray and white matter. Some of the most reduced brain regions were ones associated with behavior and emotions. Using established behavioral tests, researchers found the 96 children scored higher for a range of behavioral and emotional problems than other children in the study.

Interestingly, despite a wide range in the quantity of cigarettes smoked by the 96 women throughout their pregnancy, their children showed no difference in degree of cortical thinning, suggesting that even a single daily cigarette does the same harm as a pack-a-day habit.

The good news is that children whose mothers stopped smoking as soon as they learned they were pregnant showed the same levels of brain development and behavior as children who were not exposed to cigarette smoke in utero.

The authors stressed their study was observational and did not establish causality: It’s possible, for example, that the mothers themselves had genetically smaller brain volumes and a greater disposition toward emotional problems, traits their offspring inherited. Or perhaps a woman who continues to smoke while pregnant, despite mounting evidence of damage done to the fetus, has other parental shortcomings that result in long-term developmental issues for her children.

Via.... blogs.discovermagazine.com

The oceans are heating, acidifying and choking - environment - 04 October 2013 - New Scientist

The oceans are heating, acidifying and choking - environment - 04 October 2013 - New Scientist

Trying to treat stress, scientists may have accidentally stumbled on a cure for baldness

Your body responds to stress in many ways. It gives you bursts of energy, and a reduced response to pain. It lets you run faster and farther. It also entirely messes you up. Stress releases a battery of hormones that give you superhuman abilities, and they all have down sides. Many of them result in bone density loss or reduced immune response, but one, the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is a really nasty customer. It's been linked with severe gastrointestinal problems, increased drug use, and hair loss. A recent research group tried to cure the first of those symptoms, but stumbled into curing the third. At least in mice.

The group engineered mice with a heightened level of CRF. As a result, large patches of the test mice's hair fell out. The mice were tagged and photographed, and then given injections of a special hormone meant to suppress CRF, and put them back in their habitats. Three months later, scientists returned to find a habitat full of furry mice. The compound had caused them to regrow their hair. The researchers later found, in other tests, that the compound kept the mice from losing their hair at all.

The compound, called astressin-B, was also found to improve the gastrointestinal system of the mice, as well as tuning up their cardiovascular system. The compound improved every part of the body that had a receptor for CRF. (Which leaves us to wonder why CRF is being released into the body in the first place, since all it seems to do is try to murder us in various ways. Perhaps it's meant to kill us quickly so as not to give predators the satisfaction of doing it for us?)

Astressin-B could do a lot of good, but the cosmetic applications are really giving it heat; especially since one hundred percent of the mice regrew their hair. The group of scientists are now trying to raise money to get the compound into the next phase of testing. There's no guarantee that it will be as successful on humans as it is on mice - especially since the mice in the test only lost their hair in the first place because of an increase in the specific hormone that the compound was designed to repress. If the testing proves fruitful, a lot of things could change. (Although I hope the person pictured here never does. Don't do it Jean-Luc! You're perfect just the way you are!)

Via America Medical Association