By James Pethokoukis and Beth Shapiro

For a time it seemed as if advances in science and technology would unlock a future of limitless progress, but in the 1960s and 1970s environmental worries began to eclipse that optimistic vision. Today, ecological concerns and endangered species have caused some to wonder whether humans should pump the brakes on science and stop meddling with the natural world before it’s too late. Others hope to use the tools of science to fix the problems we’ve created and engineer the environment to suit human needs. On a recent episode of “Political Economy,” Beth Shapiro discussed the state of synthetic biology and how its tools can be used for conservation.

Beth is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book is Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: We’ve always been modifying the environment. But why are we so squeamish about that notion going forward?

Shapiro: I think what you’ve been talking about are all these different technologies that our ancestors have been developing and using for tens of thousands of years. I think that when people think about what’s next, this idea that we might be using genetic tools to manipulate DNA from organisms directly, they see this — I think correctly to some extent — as something that’s different than what we’ve been doing in the past. We have been manipulating DNA, but we haven’t really been able to get rid of that element of chance that is evolution as we’ve been doing this. When we take two lineages and we breed them together, there is some randomness in how their DNA combines. And what we’re trying to do now is really eliminate that sense of randomness to make changes in an organism that we know are going to get into the next generation, and then into all the generations that come after that. And that makes us feel a little bit squeamish, I think.

What is synthetic biology? And how has this technology advanced over the past 10 years?

Synthetic biology refers to the suite of biotechnologies that allow us to directly manipulate the genomes of other species. This might include something that we call cisgenic changes, which means that we’re making changes within the species or a lineage (really within a species), and transgenic, which means that we’re moving DNA between lineages. Cisgenic technologies, for example, can create new organisms, or new lineages of organisms by doing things like turning off a gene, or turning up a gene, or maybe moving genes between lineages, things that might be able to admix or hybridize in nature. But that would be a little bit messier.

The real advance has come with CRISPR gene editing, which makes it much easier to make the desired changes that you want, especially when you’re just doing cisgenic changes, when all you want to do is turn a gene off that stops something from happening or turn a gene up.

How does synthetic biology play into global biodiversity?

Yeah, so there’s been a lot less attention that has gone to thinking about how we might use synthetic biology for conservation and biodiversity preservation than for agriculture. And I think that there is tremendous potential here. We can use these same tools to help species to adapt to changes in their environment or habitat.

A great example is the black-footed ferret. The cousin of black-footed ferrets, the domestic ferret, is naturally immune to plague. So they’re working to discover what the genetic underpinning of this natural immunity to plague is. And, once this is known, their plan is to use gene editing to introduce that natural immunity from domestic ferrets into the captive population of wild black-footed ferrets. And, in doing so, they will have created a black-footed ferret that is mostly black-footed ferret with a little bit of DNA from the domestic ferret that allows them to survive when they get released into the wild and come into contact with plague.

What are we doing with woolly mammoths?

With all of the technological, ecological, and ethical challenges that come with bringing something back, I prefer to focus on how we might use these technologies to maintain the biodiversity that exists today, but everybody wants to talk about mammoths.

There isn’t any mammoth tissue that is still alive. So we’re not going to be able to clone a mammoth. A new company, Colossal, intends to take the DNA sequences from several different mammoths and compare that to the genome sequence of the Asian elephant. Using the tools of gene editing, they can just tweak Asian elephant cells that are growing in a dish a little bit at a time until they contain a mammoth genome, or an approximate mammoth genome. And then you have a living cell that you could clone, assuming that you could clone an elephant, which we can’t do right now. But Colossal’s idea is that they will build an artificial womb that will be capable of growing a mammoth for the two years of gestation.

Where does fear surrounding this technology come from?

Well, it comes from the anti-GMO movement. And part of that is scientists’ fault because people just glommed onto the idea that scientists thought that this was scary — all because scientists just wanted to do this the right way. But it was appropriate hesitancy, I think, that has been mischaracterized and misconstrued.

And now it’s very hard to find truth in conversations about genetic engineering and gene editing technologies online because there’s such a loud voice of a minority of people who are deliberately spreading misinformation to keep people scared. I don’t really know how to get beyond this other than having louder voices that are trying to have conversations with all of the stakeholders to make people really understand what’s going on. One of the ways might be to think more about how this isn’t a sudden shift into people controlling nature. We’ve been controlling nature for a really long time. Yes, it’s the new suite of technologies that allows us to do things at a more rapid pace, but this is also a pace that might be the only thing that lets us keep up with the pace of the crises that the world is going through.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Beth Shapiro is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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