I could use bigger muscles, but I’m not going to get them with biotech in my garage

Josiah Zayner is a self-proclaimed bio-hacker. He sells CRISPR/CAS9 home gene editing kits, and he goes to conferences where he publicly injects himself with chemicals to modify his own genes. For instance, at a biotech conference, he got up on stage and injected himself with a cocktail to knock out the myostatin gene, to give himself “bigger muscles”.

If you want to genetically modify yourself, it turns out, it’s not necessarily complicated. As he offered samples in small baggies to the crowd, Zayner explained that it took him about five minutes to make the DNA that he brought to the presentation. The vial held Cas9, an enzyme that snips DNA at a particular location targeted by guide RNA, in the gene-editing system known as CRISPR. In this case, it was designed to knock out the myostatin gene, which produces a hormone that limits muscle growth and lets muscles atrophy. In a study in China, dogs with the edited gene had double the muscle mass of normal dogs. If anyone in the audience wanted to try it, they could take a vial home and inject it later. Even rubbing it on skin, Zayner said, would have some effect on cells, albeit limited.

He does not look particularly muscular in his photos.

He’s a snake-oil salesman. He’s doing this demonstration, confident that nothing will go wrong, because he must know that this is a spectacularly inefficient way to use CRISPR/CAS9. I looked over his website, and there’s no information on the frequency of incorporation of his edited sequence into cells, or even on whether they’ve seen any phenotypic effects with this approach. I suspect there’s little effect, which is a good thing. Even if he does get incorporation into some cells, he’s not going to get much of a result — myostatin affects the growth and differentiation of myocytes (it’s not going to do a lot for an adult), and regulates protein synthesis in muscle cells, which could, in fact, promote more ‘bulking up’ of existing muscle mass.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. Cardiac hypertrophy is not something you want to have, and Zayner isn’t exactly controlling delivery of his reagents to specific subsets of muscle cells.

But again, he’s almost certainly not getting enough DNA modification to have either his desired result or a deleterious result. He’s just gambling that the injections will be innocuous enough that they won’t actually do anything except look impressive to the rubes. Here’s hoping he doesn’t get erroneous editing of random cells so that basically, all he’s doing is giving himself a low-dose mutagen.

George Church is the voice of reason on this one.

If you modify your DNA, it’s possible to then sequence your DNA to see if you made the targeted change. But a garage experiment also can’t provide as much information as more conventional methods. “You can confirm that you’ve altered the DNA, but that doesn’t mean that it’s safe and effective,” says George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School (who also serves as an advisor to Zayner’s tamer kit company, recognizing the value of a biology-literate public in what’s being called the century of biology). “All it does is tells you that you’ve molecularly done the right thing, but it could be unsafe because you’ve also done something off-target. It could be ineffective in the sense that not enough cells were altered, or it’s too late in life and the damage has already been done.” If a baby is born with microcephaly, for example, changing the genes in its body likely won’t be able to change the effects of the condition on its brain.

Zayner’s vial of CAS9 myostatin knock-out juice is really cheap, at only $20. It also makes me wonder about quality control and safety at his workplace, though. I’d worry more about contaminants in a random vial of fluids that I’m expected to inject into my bloodstream than that it contains the latest biotech buzzword.

Changing face of Easter Island

Easter Island has been used as a cautionary tale — the inhabitants denuded the island of palm trees while wasting their resources on colossal religious statuary, and then destroyed themselves in an orgy of self-destructive wars. Only there are a few problems with that myth emerging.

It seems that the palm trees were demolished early in the colonization of the island…not by the people, but by rats that had hitchhiked to the island. The people of Rapa Nui adapted and had a stable agricultural system that allowed them to thrive, and what caused their population to collapse was not internal conflict, but external forces.

Throughout the 19th century, South American slave raids took away as much as half of the native population. By 1877, the Rapanui numbered just 111. Introduced disease, destruction of property and enforced migration by European traders further decimated the natives and lead to increased conflict among those remaining. Perhaps this, instead, was the warfare the ethnohistorical accounts refer to and what ultimately stopped the statue carving.

There’s a lesson here, all right. That lesson is that you should trust the hard work of serious anthropologists who do deep, evidence-based research, rather than the self-serving stories spread by colonial empires or the speculations of dilettantes.

research

Did you know that the human hand might evolve to better use cell phones, according to research? You know, quote-unquote research, that version of inquiry that involves click-baity wild guesswork and misinformed speculation?

The freakish forecast includes a pointed finger to tap the screen with greater precision, gel-like pads for a more secure grip and an indented palm where the device could sit.

The evolutionary changes to the shape of the human hand would not only make it easier to use a smartphone, but also avoid a range of injuries and strains associated with using your mobile phone.

The gruesome concept image came after a study of 1,000 British adults revealed more than a quarter of respondents had injured themselves while using their phone.

The research, conducted by the mobile phone comparison team at www.broadbandchoices.co.uk, found black eyes from dropping the device while using it in bed was the most common complaint.

Oh, yeah, from the prestigious University of Broadband Choices. That’s plausible.

They also made an x-ray of that hand in Photoshop, in case you doubted the scienceyness of it all.

Hey, Daily Express, next you should do research on how your journalists will evolve. I’m picturing something with an enlarged pelvis, a clawlike hand, and a long, kinked forearm, the better to reach up their asses and pluck out stories.

How about a nice story?

We need some of these now and then. I know I was reading about the possibility of the Yellowstone supervolcano destroying us all, and it took me a few minutes to figure out if that was a bad thing or a good thing.*

Anyway, go read this story about David Bowie and an autistic little boy. It cheered me right up, I say while wearing my nifty new invisible mask.

*The article ends by saying the yearly odds of a supervolcano eruption is 1 in 730,000. Still not sure if that’s good or bad.

Evolutionary Psychology poisons everything

This study comes to a happy conclusion, and then wrecks it all with EP bullshit. What the researchers did was to email requests for either a pdf of a paper or copies of the raw data to researchers, and what they found was a high degree of cooperativity: 80% were willing to send a pdf, 60% were willing to send data. They seem to think this is surprisingly prosocial, but actually, I was a little surprised the numbers were so low. I was brought up to consider this to be expected — back in my old-timey days, when you published a paper, you also ordered a great big box of reprints, because people would send you postcards asking for a copy, and you’d mail it to them. Now you just push a button on a computer, and only 80% oblige? OK, I guess that’s an alright result.

They analyzed further, though, and also found a sex difference. If you were a man requesting a paper from a man, you were 15% more likely to get a positive response. That’s troubling. I’d say that that could be interpreted as indicating a continuing sexism in science. But that’s not enough for these authors.

There is no evolutionary analysis involved in this study, but of course, the reason for their result is…evolution.

Massen and his colleagues say that one possible explanation for their results “may be that among male academics there is a network at play, in which they favor each other much like ‘Old Boy’ networks”. They also suggest that this imbalance might have evolutionary roots and point to an idea called the male-warrior hypothesis, which states that men have evolved to form strong bonds with other males in their group because in the past this enabled them to defend territory from hostile attackers.

“Men are more ready to cooperate with genetic-stranger males to form these fighting coalitions,” says Mark van Vugt, an evolutionary psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam who first suggested the theory in 2007. Some of the evidence for this idea comes from lab-based tasks such as public-goods games (in which volunteers choose how many tokens to keep or share), but there are some real-world hints too, he says. Boys tend to play in larger groups than girls, van Vugt says, and in sports such as tennis and boxing, men make more effort to bond with their opponent after a match or fight than women do. However cultural factors are also thought to be at work.

Jebus. Can I just say the words “US Women’s Soccer Team” and see this whole bogus line of reasoning vanish in a spray of flop sweat and tears from the men’s team?

The Apocalypse is nigh: Rush Limbaugh is correct about something

Now I’m getting worried. Limbaugh characterized lefties, and he got it right.

You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.

Holy crap. I had to peek outside to see if it is raining blood or a trumpet was sounding or chariots were descending out of the sky, because that actually is the magic key. If two willing, unimpaired adults consent to a behavior that does no harm to others, I’m not going to complain, much less try to stop them. It doesn’t have to be sexual, either. If my wife and I agree to have lutefisk for dinner tonight, here in the privacy of my home, we may do so. If she says “NO!”, I don’t get to compel her.

That’s how it works. That’s what we’ve always been saying is how it works.

Does the right think that a lack of consent in a sex act is OK? Because that’s not a slur I would have considered fair, but Limbaugh is implying that yes, in the right wing universe, consent is not a reasonable requirement for sex.

A little too close to home

The latest xkcd:

The alt text: “It's like I've always said–people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.”

Somebody turn that into a poster that we can hang up as a reminder at atheist conferences.