Will Saletan of Slate gave this new blog a very gracious shout-out yesterday - many thanks. He also replied to my earlier post taking Will to task a bit about “designer dogs.” I’d suggested that dog breeding is a bad analogy to bring home the problems of genetic trait selection in humans, because the former is so familiar and non-threatening. Will replied that he used a familiar example on purpose, and wondered what other analogies might work better.

To answer that, it helps to think a bit about what’s troubling in the first place about genetic trait selection for people. Breeding dogs with 25-year-old frozen sperm from a former champion doesn’t quite get at what disturbs me about human trait selection. Some people already have done a version of the dog trick with the now-defunct “Nobel Prize sperm bank” - the moral equivalent of breeding a former dog show champion. The Nobel bank was creepy, but it remained something of a fringe practice, even though it offered an easy route to instant eugenics.

One reason it stayed a fringe phenomenon may have been the lack of control prospective parents had over the outcome. You couldn’t really be sure your Nobel offspring would be an Einstein, and the child might lack good looks and social graces altogether. The Nobel bank may have boosted the odds that your child would have the desired traits, but it still relied on old-fashioned, largely unsupervised egg-sperm unions.

Pre-implantation screening of traits gets you more control, and that kind of control is what worries me most. Babies should be a little surprising - as in, “Whoa, red hair! Where did that come from? Loves art - who knew?” Having a child has always meant opening yourself up to something new and unpredictable. But meticulously screening out the traits you don’t want would bring a level of control that the Nobel bank never offered.

Maybe gambling is a better analogy for the problem than designer dogs. Reproduction the old way amounted to an honest roll of the dice. Now the dice could be loaded to prevent novelty.

That idea doesn’t make me sick - sorry, Will - but it does violate my parental sense of fair play. And if children lose their power to surprise, it will drain a bit of wonder from the world.

There’s a fine pancreatic cancer piece in the Chicago Tribune today by Robert Mitchum, a friend of the blog who recently got his Ph.D. in neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Rob uses a new study on a potential method of detecting pancreatic cancer to talk about the urgent need for such early screening methods. Pancreatic cancer typically causes few symptoms until a relatively late stage, when the tumor has spread and treatment options are limited. The statistics are stark - each year, more than 37,000 people get pancreatic cancer and 34,000 die from it.

Despite the grim numbers, some people do survive, and new efforts at early detection could boost their chances further. What I find amazing is how patients - and doctors - find the hope to continue their fight in the face of such daunting odds. How do you muster the energy for a struggle you know you’re unlikely to win, though future progress may depend on lessons learned from your failure? Many diseases that are now treatable once seemed hopeless. Most of those successes are built on knowledge gained from countless tragedies.

We hope to write a lot about pancreatic cancer in this blog. I’ll return later this week to the subject of finding hope in a seemingly hopeless field.

William Saletan of Slate has a nice piece this week warning of recent developments that could bring genetically selected “designer babies” a step closer to reality. He begins by noting that the idea is so shopworn that he’d stopped taking it seriously - me, too. Then he goes on to list some studies and changing practices by certain fertility clinics that could be a prelude to selection for traits such as gender, eye color and hair color. None of the news items he mentions is scary on its own, but as a group they suggest something troubling is in the air.

Or that’s what I thought, until I read Will’s post the next day on “designer dogs.” Dogs are basically a designer species - living, drooling examples of eugenics in action. Without thousands of years of artificial selection by humans, dogs as we know them wouldn’t exist. To Will’s mind, dogs are “an ecologically reckless genetic experiment.”

He’s being a little facetious, but just a little. The piece goes on to lament the origins of this year’s winner of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show - a poodle conceived with frozen semen from a former champion dog. That use of standard reproductive technology to make the dead poodle a dad again proves too much - “I want to throw up,” Saletan writes.

Leon Kass has praised the “wisdom of repugnance” in thinking about bioethics, but in this case repugnance seems more silly than wise. Dog breeders have been using frozen sperm since the 1960s. As bioethical dilemmas go, it’s a Brave Old World.

Saletan wants to use dog breeding as an analogy for designer babies, but it may be hopelessly flawed for that purpose because it’s so familiar. Such comfortable examples are of little help in imagining how awful genetic trait selection in human babies would be.

A confession: as much as I like the idea of bloggingheads.tv, I often find the thing itself unwatchable. Too much chit-chat, not enough substance. One longs for an irritating Chris Matthews-like presence, badgering everyone to stay on topic.

But this is a worthwhile exchange between two very good science bloggers - biology blogger Carl Zimmer and astronomy blogger Phil Plait. The question is whether science blogs might do a better job of covering science than traditional media sources, which are constantly cutting back on many specialties, including science coverage. Plait in particular believes that the rise of blogs powered by real scientists offers something as good or better than the coverage from newspapers or CNN.

The idea has some appeal, and it’s one of the reasons why we started this site. In terms of sheer science knowledge, the researchers and physicians at this university would beat any news desk in the country. If we can unleash more of that expertise, it can benefit medical consumers and the broader conversation about science.

Yet I would hate to see newspapers fade as providers of reliable science coverage. Plait is right that many scientists are excellent writers, and blogs like his can cover some stories more effectively than traditional media (his recent real-time coverage of the “Texas fireball” - probably a meteor - is a great example). But science stories benefit immeasurably from good editors, along with teams of photographers and graphic artists who can pull together complicated information into a package that any reader can digest in a few minutes (see Zimmer’s engrossing Times package from last November on changing ideas about the role of genes). Scientists excel at producing knowledge, but only some can make good sense of their field for a general audience. Newspapers ought to help fill that need.

Of course, fewer and fewer papers or networks have the resources to do that. It’s a problem not just for science journalism, but for science in general.

You’d rather not live without any organ, but some are easier than others to replace with technology. Kidney fails? Get dialysis. Diabetes saps your pancreas? Take insulin. Heart gives out suddenly? Try a left ventricular assist device.

Credit: HepaLife

But the liver poses a special problem. Its biochemistry is so complex that no one understands all the functions it serves, or the details of how it works. We do know it’s essential for blood clotting and for removing a wide range of toxins from the bloodstream. Acute liver failure can lead to death within 48 hours. Yet even the liver’s well-defined functions are difficult to mimic completely. Then there are the thousands of proteins the liver produces, many of which have poorly understood roles in the body.

All of that makes it hard for artificial livers to do much more than help patients survive a few more hours while they wait for a donor organ. Even the term “artificial liver” is a bit misleading, because most of the devices rely on liver cells of some kind. Duplicating their function from scratch is just too difficult. (Imagine if heart assist devices had to use actual heart muscle cells.)

As this Forbes piece observes, several companies have gone out of business trying to make artificial livers. One of the rare success stories that the story cites is a University of Chicago patient, Amy Petrovic, who nine years ago survived on a synthetic liver for a few days - long enough for her condition to improve so she could survive a liver transplant operation. 

Attempts to make reliable devices keep coming - one company this week announced plans for a new Phase III trial of an artificial liver system, and a separate trial started last month. But stories like Petrovic’s also underscore the immensity of this challenge, and the limits of medical knowledge. Many hurdles in medicine are purely technological in nature. In this case, researchers don’t know exactly where the technological intervention should start, because they don’t fully grasp the underlying biology.

Kenneth Miller gave a typically captivating talk at the AAAS meeting yesterday in which he showed an eye-popping video illustrating what goes on in our cells all the time.

Ken was kind enough to send us a link to the full library of videos, by the BioVisions group at Harvard University. Here’s a YouTube video with highlights - watch for the big vesicle being tugged along a microtubule by a motor protein with little protein “shoes.”

Paul Davies with ancient fossils in western Australia

If life has emerged more than once in the universe, where would we look for it?

That was the subject of “Weird Life,” a symposium held this morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

A natural step is to use instruments like the Kepler telescope to look for Earth-like planets that could support life. But even if likely suspects emerge, it’s much more difficult to find clear signs that life has actually started and evolved on such distant planets.

An alternative tack is to search for signs that life arose more than once right here on Earth.  If it did, that might be a sign that life is a cosmic imperative and that it probably is popping up on all sorts of worlds. Paul Davies, a professor of theoretical physics at Arizona State University, believes we may still be able to find traces of such “shadow life” within fossils or in the microorganisms around us. “If life did happen many times, there could be something like a shadow biosphere that either was or is all around us,” Davies said. “How do we know there isn’t an alternative form of life on Earth?”

Credit: NASA

This would be great fodder for an “X-Files” episode, but how could you prove it? One route might be to search for microbes with biochemistry based on a different “chirality” - or orientation of chemical components - than our own. For example, all DNA that we know of is “right-handed,” but some biologists think there’s no good reason why left-handed versions couldn’t have emerged. We see only right-handed DNA because all of the known life on Earth is part of a single ancestral tree. If we could find microbes that rely on a different system of chirality, they might represent a separate tree of life.

But that’s not a sure bet. Maybe life emerged twice, but the other lineage got the same coin-flip that our remote ancestors did, and wound up with identical chirality to ours. It would be a nasty little trick on nature’s part.

One way of finding out would be to craft experiments that disable life that relies on our chirality, and see if anything is left alive. Another is to develop a nutrient soup consisting entirely of compounds with the wrong chirality, and see if anything grows. But again, that wouldn’t prove that the microbes had a different origin - maybe they just evolved ways of grooving on exotic food.

Still, the possibility of finding homegrown aliens thriving under our noses - or even inside them - is so tantalizing that it seems worth figuring out ways of detecting them. “We’re open to suggestions,” Davies said. 

Suddenly George W. Bush is no longer the easiest target for anyone frustrated at the pace of scientific progress.

He started to occupy that position at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 9, 2001, when he went on national television to outline restrictions on federal funding for the new field of embryonic stem cell research. It seemed an arbitrary and even arrogant policy. No federal funds could be used for research on cell lines derived after the moment Bush began his speech - exactly 9:00:00 p.m. He portrayed the decision as a compromise - the original intention was to give no funds at all - but many researchers saw it as a fiat that would stifle a promising field and send a message that scientists served at the pleasure of the president. Science-related decisions in subsequent years tended to bear out that early impression.

Now there’s no obvious scapegoat for the obstacles facing researchers and patients eager for new treatments. President Obama has pledged to lift Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research, and to “put science back in its rightful place.” But we still don’t have a good sense of what that means.

This could be a rare opportunity to make a new strategy for American biomedical research. It would be a massive undertaking, centered on the sprawling National Institutes of Health, which currently lacks a permanent director. The $28 billion NIH budget supports 27 centers and institutes, and an army of researchers around the country.

A blog post last week by Stanford researcher Stephen Quake suggested that this is “the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded.”  He proposed more long-term grants to scientists and better incentives to pursue creative projects. The current system has some incentives for researchers to follow the agencies’ institutional priorities, rather than give reign to their best ideas.

My op-ed last Monday in the Chicago Tribune suggested creating a new NIH institute devoted to stem cell research. Yet some of the response to that piece reflected a widespread wariness of doing anything to complicate the federal research bureaucracy. My e-mail friend Yuval Levin, a National Review writer who worked in Bush’s domestic policy office, said that if anything the NIH needs a simpler management structure, not more institutes. He echoed Quake’s point that the current system doesn’t do enough to support younger investigators or new ideas.

In the short run, how Obama handles the NIH may be a better test of his managerial success than the outcome of the stimulus plan. It’s one thing to sign a piece of paper and reverse Bush’s stem-cell policy; it would be a much greater feat to free the awesome creativity of America’s scientists.

Credit: CHRISTINE VERNA/MPI-EVA

Like PZ at Pharyngula, I’m still looking for some concrete news in today’s seemingly big announcement - at the AAAS conference here in Chicago -  that scientists have sequenced most of the Neandertal genome from 38,000-year-old bones taken from a Croatian cave. In some ways the feat itself is an amazing story - getting enough usable DNA from these ancient bones to sequence 3 billion bases, in hopes of finally learning more about the biology of the last extinct subspecies of humans.

But the Science news story about the find doesn’t elaborate on a key bit of perspective until the sixth paragraph - “For now, there’s not enough sequence to do more than make a rough sketch of Neandertals.” That’s not at all surprising, but it seems to limit the news value of this. After all, the team’s stated ambition is to decipher “what really made modern humans ‘modern.’” But barring further elaboration from the research team today, I can’t see even a preliminary result that speaks to that issue. So the real news today is probably just the technical feat required to get this far. The rest is speculation - including the very far-out idea of using a Neandertal genome to modify human DNA and produce a Neandertal-like baby. As tough as today’s feat was, actually cloning a Neandertal appears to be “technically impossible.”

CREDIT: JOHANNES KRAUSE/MPI-EVA

Neil Shubin is far more than a renowned evolutionary biologist - he’s actually been on the Colbert Report. That gives him a special kind of authority that’s hard to get merely from uncovering an historic missing link between fish and land animals. Neil said Colbert tells his guests to think of him in simple terms. “I play an idiot,” Colbert tells them. “I will be willfully ignorant of everything you say. Just ignore me, let me make the jokes, and you be as smart as you can be.”

At least I think Neil told me that story. Maybe it was Kenneth Miller, another evolutionary biologist I know who’s been on Colbert’s show. Colbert’s character seems inexorably drawn toward talented evolutionary scholars. Is no articulate biologist safe from this man? Someone warn Richard Dawkins - oh, wait. Better watch your backs, Sean Carroll and Jerry Coyne.

[UPDATE]: Apparently Colbert just recently had on Denis Dutton, who tries to explain art via evolution. I think that counts, too.

While we ponder why Colbert has such a jones for evolution, here’s Neil talking about what Darwin got wrong - and the big picture that he got profoundly right.

And here’s Colbert’s interview with Neil from last year. Granted, my video looks a bit low-end by comparison. But then I didn’t ask the question, ”What is it about evolutionary biologists that they just can’t let people think what they want about themselves?’

I sat down yesterday with Robert Richards, author of “The Meaning of Evolution,” to talk about Darwin’s cultural influences and his place in history. Richards gave a very nice explanation of how deeply Darwin was influenced by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

When [Darwin] was on The Beagle, he carried Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with him everywhere. He read the poem incessantly. And of course it’s the story of death and suffering - man’s fall. But man’s fall is a necessary prerequisite for the coming of the savior, and the production of life more abundantly, a new kind of life. And if you read those last paragraphs [in "The Origin of Species"], it looks as though Darwin is trying to justify suffering and death. How do you do it? Death and suffering are justified because of the production of the higher animals, life more abundantly. A life leading to the production of the highest animal, namely us, with our moral sentiments.

Darwin’s theory has been so successful that we sometimes overlook the extent to which it was a product of his time, and his distinct way of seeing the world. This link to “Paradise Lost” casts the evolutionary process as something tragic, yet containing the seed of great beauty.

One of the interesting riddles of evolution is how single-celled organisms became integrated into larger communities of cells, finally resulting in cumbersome creatures like us. But sometimes even we get glimpses of what life before the multi-cellular era might have looked like.

When cancer develops, the affected cells abandon the body’s well-regulated union and revert to form as freelancers. They become single cells with ravenous needs. Genetic mutations make those cells ditch polite conventions, like having the courtesy to self-destruct when they collect too many harmful changes. Immortal and more prolific than the surrounding cells, they gain an advantage and start undermining the body’s essential functions.

Here’s Dr. Ezra Cohen, a specialist in head and neck cancer here, explaining how Darwinian principles aid the study of cancer.

This blog will cover a lot of research that happens beyond the walls of this university, but with some of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin and evolutionary biology just a short walk away, I wanted to collect some of their thoughts about Darwin Day.

Here’s Neil Shubin, bestselling author of “Your Inner Fish” and leader of a team that made one of the great paleontological finds in recent history - Tiktaalik roseae, also called the ”fishapod.” Neil keeps a funny little Darwin toy in his office that he uses to explain a central misconception about evolution - the idea that evolution always progresses toward ever greater complexity.