On the subject of misery in the world, Darwin wrote: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”50 Beyond malaria and Lyme disease, there are many appalling diseases that could be tackled using the latest genome editing gadgetry. Taming the desert locust would be one.
In similar vein to the Ichneumonidae—wasps that paralyze caterpillars, lay their eggs, which hatch and proceed to eat the caterpillars alive from the inside out—consider the New World screwworm. One poor victim was a twelve-year-old girl who returned from a school trip to Colombia and headed straight to the hospital complaining of severe pain in her scalp. After giving the girl morphine, doctors resorted to a novel therapy as described in the medical report: “During her hospital stay, a total of 142 larvae were manually extracted, aided by the application of raw bacon which served as an attractant and petroleum jelly occlusion.” Doctors deduced that the episode resulted from a female fly laying eggs in a scalp wound.51 In another gruesome example, a British woman became infected in her ear canal after walking through a swarm of flies while on holiday in Peru. Back home, doctors found maggots had burrowed more than 1 centimeter through her ear canal. They drowned the maggots with olive oil before finally extracting the parasites.
The screwworm looks like a psychedelic housefly, with large orange eyes and a blue-green body. Its official name, Cochliomyia hominivorax, translates as “eater of man.” Pregnant “eaters of men” are adept at finding open wounds, sores, and other niches in which to lay eggs. Cattle and livestock also make unsuspecting hosts. Gratifyingly, the screwworm was eradicated across North America in the late 1960s using the sterile insect technique. By irradiating and releasing millions of sterile male flies—a factory in Florida was producing 50 million infertile flies a week—the population was halted in its tracks. During the Reagan administration, an outbreak erupted in Libya due to the import of tainted sheep from South America. The U.S. government stealthily arranged to airdrop millions of sterile flies, technically violating its own sanctions. In 2016, the menace resurfaced in the Florida Keys. After dozens of Key deer deaths, officials employed the same sterile insect technique to squash the screwworm before it could spread onto the mainland.
But this method won’t eradicate the screwworm at the source—South American sheep—because of the more rugged terrain. One option is to use the gene drive approach, if the Mercosur countries agree. Esvelt has suggested a more limited “daisy drive” approach, a self-exhausting CRISPR-based gene drive.52
An even worse nightmare than accidental outbreaks or unforeseen ecological consequences of a gene drive would be the malicious use of CRISPR as a bioweapon. “Research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products,” the National Security Agency noted drily in its 2016 threat report.53 CRISPR thus joined the ranks of North Korean nuclear weapons and Syrian chemical weapons.
Adding his voice to the chorus of concern is Bill Gates. “The next epidemic has a good chance of originating on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering” to create a synthetic smallpox virus or a “super contagious and deadly strain of the flu”—and killing more people than nuclear weapons, Gates told a security conference.54 His biggest worry: the nefarious use of CRISPR to engineer a new flu strain, combining potent virulence with extreme infectivity. Gates’ worry is not frivolous: CRISPR can be used easily without expensive lab equipment or specialized training. CRISPR-based kits available from outfits like the Odin, launched by biohacker Josiah Zayner, sell for less than $500 in some cases. Pathogen-specific kits are “offered up like so many choices at a grocery store,” according to a RAND Corporation report.55
These are legitimate concerns, but have been overshadowed by recent events. As the world saw in 2020, we don’t need DNA-designing despots or basement biohackers playing with CRISPR to cause a pandemic—nature is quite capable on her own.
I. Most people pronounced the company “gnome” but Church insisted on calling it “know-me.”
II. GP-write was originally named HGP-write, but quickly dropped the H (human) prefix as it made some people uncomfortable to contemplate totally synthetic human genomes.
III. Martha is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, although no longer on display.
IV. Oxitec has dubbed its non-biting mosquitoes Friendly™ but that hasn’t convinced all of the affected residents, or the Environmental Protection Agency.
V. In PACE, only phage that evolve with the desired gene activity can induce production of an essential protein to continue its life cycle. The phage evolve a couple of generations in an hour, generating a billion variants at a time.
VI. Neither the Broad Institute nor Caribou will grant a CRISPR license that does not include a rider that says the IP cannot be used for a gene drive.
CHAPTER 21 FARM AID
In the late 1990s, Mark Lynas was a proud environmental activist, a member of a group called Earth First! that would frequently lay waste to fields of genetically modified (GM) crops with machetes in the middle of the night. In 1998, Lynas devised a plan that, if successful, would have made him a household name. Hatched in secret for fear of being bugged, Lynas and his fellow hoodlums decided to kidnap Dolly the sheep.
Created by a Scottish team at the Roslin Institute led by Keith Campbell and Sir Ian Wilmut, the lamb formerly known as 6LL3, cloned from an ovine mammary gland cell, was born in July 1996. Affectionately renamed by a technician, Dolly lived at the Institute just outside Edinburgh. Her birth was kept secret until the results were published to worldwide acclaim and angst six months later. Posing as a researcher, Lynas was granted access to the Institute’s library, before hunting for the shed holding the world’s most famous sheep. Meanwhile, a female accomplice posed as a lost American tourist outside the institute’s perimeter. The audacious plan might have worked, except that Dolly’s whereabouts weren’t signposted. Nor was it immediately obvious how to tell Dolly apart from the hundreds of other sheep in the facility. “The Roslin scientists had outfoxed us by hiding Dolly in plain sight,” Lynas later confessed.1
Several years after his Scottish caper, Lynas had an epiphany. The more he researched the science underlying genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and climate change for books such as Six Degrees, the more he realized his blinded ignorance. Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the safety of GMOs. In 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine published a major report concluding that GMOs did not harm animals nor cause any health problems in humans in the food supply.2 A group of more than one hundred Nobel laureates called on Greenpeace to end its opposition to GMOs.3
Lynas admitted his own mistakes during a keynote speech in 2013 at a major farming conference before a shocked audience.4 He apologized for ripping up GM crops and helping to demonize a technology with profound environmental benefits. He was immediately accused of being a Monsanto shill and worse. A journalist meeting the reformed Lynas at his home near Oxford remarked that the former ecowarrior was handsome and vaguely fashionable, in the manner of a member of Coldplay whose name you can’t quite remember.5