The Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University presented Dr. Drew Endy of Stanford University as part of its annual Silverstein Lecture Series Monday night (10-27-08). Endy, voted by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21^st century, gave the audience a small taste of what the future holds for bioengineering. One of Endy’s main goals is to turn bioengineering into an accessible field by creating tools which can help scientists design and implement projects more easily and quickly.

Dr. Endy spent part of his lecture giving the audience a glimpse of what currently is being done in the field of bioengineering. Japanese scientists have already manipulated DNA at the scale of 8 million base pairs, almost the size of the yeast genome. Bacteria have been engineered already with the environmental input and logic capabilities to enable them to attack cancer cells specifically. Still other bioengineers are creating yeast organisms that manufacture drugs for malaria.

The heart of the talk, however, was the unveiling of an ambitious plan to make bioengineering a simpler, fabrication enterprise like that of civil engineering or software programming. Endy and his team are currently stocking an open, online database, called the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, with components that researchers can use to assemble their own biological machines. The different biological parts are created by scientists who change the DNA coding of a cell so that it will produce a desired biological product, such as a protein used in a cell’s cytoskeleton. The technical specifications, including the genetic code, are then filed away in the Registry’s database.

The Registry, filled with what are known as BioBricks, is the foundation for Endy’s vision of making bioengineering an easier process. Researchers already are planning a bioengineering programming architecture that would allow engineers to build biological machines without having to know all the ins and outs of the genetic code itself. Some would work on the more basic parts that would be held in the registry, others would create devices that make use of these parts, and others would work on the macro level creating entire biological systems made out of these devices. Dr. Endy and his colleagues are convinced that bioengineering can be done in a manner akin to software design, thus providing the means for creating a number of biological machines on a large scale.

After the lecture, several graduate students discussed the presentation and came to the conclusion that Dr. Endy’s discussion of safety only glossed over the hazards that could develop as a result of such bioengineering projects. His concluding remarks brought up concerns of the use of such technologies in areas such as military weaponry, yet he offered no substantive solutions. An audience member’s question about high schoolers or undergraduates working with such sophisticated biological tools led only to a discussion of a list of safety guidelines that students are to discuss with supervising professors. These comments appear to be a strong indication that significant ethical work remains to be done alongside these scientific developments. It is very likely that Endy and his team consult with others who can help provide ethical parameters for such work, but his open-ended questions at the conclusion of his lecture led the audience to believe that many ethical issues have been left unaddressed.

Such bioengineering does in fact threaten to create problems in areas ranging from the environment to warfare.  Because such research involves the very substance of life, special care must be taken when considering the ethics of such projects. Basic guidelines on how to prevent biological components from harming individuals are helpful; but as we are able to build more powerful, living machines, we will need to reflect more on the question of what it means to be human, upon the nature of human life, and how technological advances in the area of bioengineering should interact with them.

Review of Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique:
In a hair-raising final chapter, Gazzaniga turns to the question of whether technology may eventually make us something other than human, exploring such potential enhancements as brain implants and germ-line gene therapy, which alters the DNA in sperm, egg or embryo (thus passing the changes on to future generations). It’s one thing to eliminate genes that cause cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, which tests already allow us to detect in developing embryos. But what happens, Gazzaniga asks, when we identify genes that indicate a high probability of developing diabetes or heart disease in middle age? Will we toss the embryo, “start all over again and try for a better one?” Or change the offending genes based on probabilistic outcomes? (New York Times)

The news from Barbara Wagner’s doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. (ABC News)

High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

Shooing away flies and beaming at the tiny, toothless elderly mother who is his sole caregiver, Mr. Jiménez, a knit cap pulled tightly on his head, remains cheerily oblivious that he has come to represent the collision of two deeply flawed American systems, immigration and health care. (New York Times)

A “disease in a dish” method has been used on patients with 10 serious disorders to boost worldwide efforts to find new treatments.

American researchers have used a Japanese technique to turn cells from people with different diseases into stem cells with the same genetic errors.

Stem cells, which can be grown indefinitely in the lab, have the ability to grow into the 200 plus cell types found in the human body, from muscle to heart to brain cell.

They say these cell lines can be used to mimic human disease more reliably than mice and other animal models and will be a boon for efforts to find new treatments. (Telegraph)

A new study calls into question the use of two common infertility treatments for couples who have unexplained problems having children.

Doctors in Scotland tested a drug that stimulates ovulation and artificial insemination against doing nothing in couples who had no obvious reasons for their inability to conceive.

Among the three groups, researchers found little difference in the numbers of couples who had babies. The study was published Friday in the British Medical Journal.  (New York Times)

This report from The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System examines fragmentation in our health care delivery system and offers policy recommendations to stimulate greater organization—established mechanisms for working across providers and care settings. (The Commonwealth Fund)

A drug-like molecule called Wnt can be substituted for the cancer gene c-Myc, one of four genes added to adult cells to reprogram them to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, according to Whitehead researchers. (ScienceDaily)

NeoStem, Inc. announced today that the new Southern Florida stem cell collection center located in Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami, is targeted to open in September. (MarketWatch)

But a growing number of doctors and medical organizations question the usefulness and expense of privately banking cord blood, which they say currently has limited applications, such as treating certain rare blood cancers and blood disorders in children.  They say more research is required before other uses are discovered, and they advocate instead a public system in which cord blood is donated for no cost and is accessible by all people who are in need. (Chicago Tribune/Boston Globe)

Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate an era in which biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being.

The end result would be a new form of “posthuman” life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans.  (CNN)

Today’s neuroscientists need more than laboratory skills to discover how the brain works. Professor Judy Illes from the University of British Columbia describes the ‘critical challenges’ that the ethics of neuroscience - neuroethics - presents.

“These aspects involve every aspect of human life,” she said Tuesday 15 July at Europe’s major neuroscience conference in Geneva. New technology, particularly brain imaging, has the potential to predict not only neurodegenerative diseases, but to delve into our thoughts and reveal patterns of behaviour.

Whilst brain imaging is a powerful tool in research, medicine and surgery, its use in, say, the law courts to prove a criminal’s intentions are very much more controversial.  (FENS/Swiss Society for Neuroscience from Medicexchange)