Gene drives are ways that a gene editor can be used to spread a genetic trait through
a population quickly, and a research lab in California was recently able to use this kind
of strategy to spread a trait through a population of fruit flies in a laboratory setting very
quickly.
And I think what amazed many people—many scientists—was how efficient this was at
creating effectively a new strain of fruit flies that had a different genetic trait in
every individual.
I think that this potential to use that kind of spreading of a genetic trait is both exciting
in terms of controlling vectors that can spread disease, but it also makes a lot of people
nervous because of the potential to spread a trait that might become something that would
be deleterious somehow in the environment.
So for example, imagine that it were possible to spread a trait that wiped out mosquitoes
or created a population of insects that were somehow damaging in the environment.
I think that those are applications of this technology that are very important to discuss
and to think about before we sort of forge ahead and release animals like that into the
environment.
So for people that have seen Jurassic Park (or if you have kids like me you've seen it
many times) it's sort of a really interesting idea, sort of this was Michael Crichton's
idea in the book and in the movie, to think about being able to take bits and pieces of
DNA that come from extinct animals and somehow piece them back together perhaps using sequences
of DNA from existing animals to create genomes that would allow once-extinct animals to be
alive again—and could that really be done?
And I think that the CRISPR technology offers scientists a tool now where, at least in principle,
maybe not to the level that it was in the film Jurassic Park, but in principle could
allow introduction of new genes into existing genomes that would recreate animals that have
traits that have been lost by extinction.
And so a number of scientists have been thinking about this.
I think George Church is one of the prominent scientists who's been discussing this in the
context of de-extinction of woolly mammoths, could you actually take DNA that's been sequenced
from the remains of woolly mammoths and use elephant DNA to recreate these animals somehow?
And it's sort of a fascinating idea.
Now whether that would actually work—I think there's a lot of technical challenges to doing
that experiment, but could we do things like bringing back the carrier pigeon or animals
that might have gone extinct very recently where we have close genetic relatives that
we could actually study?
To me it's an interesting idea because of the potential for understanding genetic networks
and what genes are really doing, how they really give rise to certain traits.
I think one thing to appreciate is that in most cases the traits that we observe in animals
or in ourselves are coming from interactions of many, many genes.
It's not just one gene that gives rise to somebody's height or intelligence or anything
else, it's really a whole network of genes that are interacting.
And to start to understand that I think would be very exciting and potentially could be
done using this kind of strategy of introducing genes from extinct animals back into existing
animals.
And it's hard to say how soon that will be a reality, but I think the potential to learn
a lot about the genetics of living systems is exciting.
I think with any new technology people get excited and they see opportunities not only
for doing research in the case of this kind of science, but also for commercial use and
to make a profit.
And in the case of gene drive this is a tool that could really enable the creation of organisms
that might be commercially valuable, and yet one could also say well there needs to be
close supervision of that, close regulation of release of animals or organisms like that
that are engineered in such a fashion.
And I think with any new technology one always has to try to get the balance right.
On the one hand we of course want to see technologies and science in general being used to solve
real world problems, real human problems.
But on the other hand we want to ensure that progress is responsible progress, that we
are working together with the stakeholders to ensure that there's not an unintended or
even a negative intended consequence of the use of these technologies.
How to do that is a big challenge.