This was the decade of the first face transplant, the first extinct species brought back from the dead, and printable human tissue; a decade that brought us closer to synthetic life forms and the invisibility cloak. But we've whittled it down to ten of the decade's biggest science stories, with discoveries, advances, and topics that are sure to change our lives in the next ten years.

It's Full of Planets: This was a big decade for planets, and not just because Pluto got a downgrade. In 2005, astronomers discovered Eris, a dwarf planet larger Pluto (as well as smaller dwarf planets Haumea and Makemake). Eris' discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union to actually define the term planet, leading to Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet. But the discovery of Eris after all this time suggests there is still a lot to learn about our solar system.

We also got our first direct look at exoplanets, worlds outside our solar system, thanks to the Hubble Telescope. In 2008, astronomers at the Keck and Gemini captured the first images of planets orbiting distant stars. And the planetary discoveries just keep getting more exciting; just this week, astronomers announced that they had observed a super-Earth that might be made largely of liquid water.

Water, Water Everywhere: The world watched on as the Phoenix Lander dug through the Martian terrain for signs of water on the Red Planet. In the summer of 2008, NASA announced it had found definitive proof of water ice on Mars. More recently, scientists discovered that large deposits of water ice exist beneath the planet's surface. This fall, the moon became the center of our watery attention when astronomers found evidence of water throughout the moon's surface. Although the supervillainous plot to bomb the moon didn't seem as initially impressive as we had hoped, the probe did confirm researchers' suspicions that the moon does, in fact, contain a significant amount of frozen water. These discoveries not only reveal more about our solar system, they indicate that, should humans try to colonize Mars or the moon, there will be resources to make survival a little easier.

Shaking Up the Human Family Tree: Humanity got a new great-great-grandmother (or perhaps she's our great-great-great-aunt) in Ardi, a fossilized hominid skeleton found in Ethiopia. Granted, Ardipithecus ramidus was discovered in 1992, but it wasn't until 2009 that she was revealed as a significant addition to our family tree. Although there's technically no "missing link" because humans didn't evolve from chimpanzees, Ardi is, so far, our closest link to chimps, and brings us closer to the common human-chimp ancestor than ever before. Analysis of Ardi's skeleton and probably anatomy reveals just how unlike either chimps that common ancestor is bound to be. One of the Ardi researchers even quipped that when we find that common ancestor, it might look less like we evolved from a chimp-like creature and more like chimps evolved from creatures more like us.

The Book of Life Recorded: Our understanding of human genetics reached a new milestone with the mapping of the human genome. The Human Genome Project announced a rough draft of the human genome in 2000, followed by a more complete version in 2003; the sequence of the last chromosome was published in 2006. Though the genome hasn't been 100 percent mapped, the Human Genome Project has completed its mapping goals. We still have to interpret the sequences we have recorded, but hopefully as we translate the book of our genetic lives, we will get a better understand of how our genes interact and improve our treatment of genetic diseases. Plus, the project has paved the way for sequencing other critters and plants, and, just this week, the lung cancer and melanoma genomes were sequenced.

Changing Your Genes: The promises of genetic engineering have really begun to bear fruit in the last few years, in ways far beyond Alba, the glowing transgenic bunny that grabbed headlines in 2000. In 1999, an 18-year-old with a, inherited liver disease died during a gene therapy trial, after suffering an unanticipated immune reaction to a viral vector. But in more recent years, gene therapy and genetic engineering have shown their promise. In 2000, scientists reported the first gene therapy success, having provided a patient with severe combine immunodeficiency (commonly known as "Bubble Boy" syndrome), though SCID gene therapy treatments were halted when patients developed leukemia. This year, gene therapy successfully treated children with a congenital form of blindness, giving them the ability to see for the first time in their lives. Meanwhile, genetic engineering experiments on animals have cured color blindness in monkeys, created super-strong monkeys, created drug-producing rats, and enabled animals to pass their altered genes to their offspring.

Stem Cells Grow Up: Embryonic stem cells have been a source of contention for years, but in 2007, Shinya Yamanaka helped sidestep that issue when he found a way to reprogram adult skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. Stem cells themselves have continued to aid important medical advances. In 2008, researchers generated motor neurons from elderly patients with ALS, an advance that could help researchers better understand the disease. A newly released study has suggested that a mini stem cell transplant could reverse sickle cell disease, and stem cell research has lead to advances in HIV research and the treatment of heart disease.

Climate Change Takes Center Stage: One of the biggest science stories of the decade has been less about scientific advances than about how the public responds to scientific research. Reports that the glaciers are melting faster than expected, a decade of record warmth, and Al Gore's Nobel Prize have all been part of the conversation on climate change and to what extent humans are responsible.

Commercial Spacecrafts Prepare to Take Flight: Amidst NASA budget cuts, commercial spaceflight has come to the forefront. The Ansari X Prize, first offered in 1996 for the first private enterprise that could fly a three-passenger vehicle 100 kilopmeters into space twice in one week. In 2004, the prize was finally won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures' SpaceShipOne. That same year, Virgin Galactic was founded to further space tourism. The company recently unveiled SpaceShipTwo, the first commercial spacecraft. 2004 also saw the certification of the Mojave Air and Space Port, the first licensed facility for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft in the US. In anticipation of the spaceflight business, one company claims it's readying a space hotel.

Our Cyborg Present: In the last decade, humans and machines have gotten closer than ever. We have machines that can read our memories, computers that let us type with our brains, and robotic arms controlled by monkey minds. Perhaps the most impressive cyborg advances have come in the last few months, with researchers hooking amputees up to robotic arms that not only respond to electrical signals from the human brain, but also provide tactile feedback.

The LHC Comes Online: The Large Hadron Collider has just begun colliding proton beams, but its construction represents one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings ever. The immense particle accelerator will hopefully give us first-hand observations of aspects of the universe that have been, thus far, the realm of theoretical physics. Despite fears from doomsayers that the LHC would destroy the world and a series of mishaps that led to claims that the device was being sabotaged from the future, the LHC came online this year and quickly got to smashing protons at record-breaking speeds.

In her essay collection Moving Targets Atwood explains that she doesn't consider the books she writes, including The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a future America taken over by a fascist government, and Oryx and Crake, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with genetically engineered creatures, science fiction, a genre she defines as "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today." Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels like The Left Hand of Darkness have gained critical acclaim under the science fiction and fantasy labels, suggests that Atwood is not making a viable literary distinction, but rather protecting her works from "literary bigots" who relegate genre fiction to a "literary ghetto."

Le Guin doesn't begrudge Atwood her genre hair-splitting ("Who can blame her?" she says), but she actually believes that Atwood's latest book, The Year of the Flood, itself a continuation of the post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake is less successful as "realistic" fiction than as genre fiction. In other words, reviewing it as a strictly realist literary novel instead of a speculative work forces Le Guin to write a more negative review:

I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.

With its vague references to a plague that wipes out humanity and characters better suited to morality play than emotional depth, she suggests that Atwood's novel nicely elucidates science fiction's power to "extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire," but that it is somewhat less successful as non-genre literary work. Le Guin seems ultimately less concerned with what Atwood's self-segregation means to the genre than that Atwood's refusal to label her book as science fiction makes the novel's bleak future at once upsetting and absurd:

It is no comfort to find that some of the genetic experiments are humanoids designed to replace humanity. Who wants to be replaced by people who turn blue when they want sex, so that the men's enormous genitals are blue all the time? Who wants to believe that a story in which that happens isn't science fiction?

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood [The Guardian]

The Daily Mail has the report on why three parents are better than one. Four monkeys have been wiped clean of any mitochondrial genetic diseases, by swapping out the nuclear DNA from the mother's egg with that of another egg donor. See the graph:

Fascinating stuff, but we say why just three? Why not go a third step and gestate the swapped egg in a surrogate, whose body chemistry affects how the genes are expressed in a variety of ways? That way, you increase your chances of having a genetically superior offspring.

I'm for any kind of Nuclear DNA sucking where the child retains the physical characteristics of the original parent, but ditches genetic diseases. Mainly because one, I know I'll be long dead before any serious GATTACA shit will hit the fan, two the more superior my offspring are the better chance I have to live off the money from their future achievements as an athlete or super brain, and three I'd love to see diseases that are possibly stemmed from mitochondrial malfunction gone forever, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and osteoporosis.

According to AFP:

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

Though still in its infancy, the research could eventually lead to hatching live prehistoric animals, but Larsson said there are no plans for that now, for ethical and practical reasons - a dinosaur hatchery is "too large an enterprise."

"It's a demonstration of evolution," said Larsson, who has studied bird evolution for the last 10 years.

"If I can demonstrate clearly that the potential for dinosaur anatomical development exists in birds, then it again proves that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs."

Larsson says he was inspired partly by the movie Jurassic Park. Did he somehow manage to miss the message of that flick, and the Michael Crichton novel that inspired it? Don't turn your chickens into dinosaurs, unless you've got Godzilla (or Jeff Goldblum) fighting on your side.

via Xenophilia

According to Variety, HBO executives approached Spotnitz some time about the possibility of developing a medical thriller. Given that Spotnitz spent eight years writing for The X-Files, it's not terribly surprising that he gave the idea a near-futuristic twist. Humanitas takes place in a future more medically advanced than our own, where doctors are able to manipulate genes and create viruses, resulting in a host of ethical dilemmas and general anxiety that a pandemic is imminent.

Spotnitz's second project with HBO is flung much farther into the future. He is looking to adapt The World Inside, Robert Silverberg's novel about humanity in the year 2381. The human population has exploded thanks to a strictly enforced culture of free love and uncontrolled reproduction, and most of the world's population lives inside vast, sprawling buildings and never go outside. It's an apparently utopian society of unfettered sex, happiness drugs, and mutual reliance, where everyone lives in harmony. But it's also a closely monitored and regulated society with no privacy or individuality, and deviation from the social norms can be punished by death. But a computer engineer in one city finds he has perverse thoughts of leaving the building and exploring the world outside.

Of course, there's no guarantee that either show will get picked up, but it's encouraging to see HBO, a channel whose recent speculative offerings have tended more toward modern fantasy, take an interest in shows with a scientific and futuristic bent.

[Variety]

Scientists have been looking at embryonic development and experimenting with organ regrowth for years. This team was working on regrowing 3D organs in place. Their experiments were a success, and they were able to regrow teeth in laboratory rats.

To make these glowing regrown teeth happen, first the team created a "germ," or a seed from which the tooth can grow. This germ was coded with the fluorescent glowing dye to track the tooth development. Then they transplanted the tooth germ into the jawbone of a rat. Finally, they tested the regrown tooth. The team found that the teeth were essentially as strong as natural teeth and were able to grow nerves throughout, making them very similar to naturally developed teeth.

In the research team's experiments, the fluorescent glowing dye was a side point, but it isn't hard to imagine bio-luminescent add-ons catching on in the future. Imagine showing off your new glowing teeth to your friends, or even growing a full head of fluorescent pink hair. It could mean a whole bio-punk movement: body modification taken to the next glowing level!

For now, though, the medical implications are as exciting as the aesthetic. The successfully regrown tooth experiment means being able to replace more complex organs more easily in the future.

Fully functional bioengineered tooth replacement as an organ replacement therapy [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]

The researchers, who worked with biotech firm Open Monoclonal Technology (OMT), wanted to create what are called "monoclonal antibodies," useful in fighting a number of human diseases. To do this, they needed to knock out certain gene sequences in rats. And they had to be sure that the mutated, antibody-producing rats that resulted would pass their mutations onto their children and grandchildren.

In a first for genetic engineering, a group of scientists from industry and academia managed to genetically engineer rats whose children carried the same engineered mutations as their parents (this has been done in other species, but not mammals). In the picture above you can see one example of the engineered rats. Two of the rats glow green under fluorescent light, but the rat on the right doesn't. He's the result of engineering that knocked out genes responsible for making the other two rats glow.

According to a release from OMT about the study:

With antibody sales expected to reach $50 billion within five years, many companies have entered the biologics market through acquiring antibody technologies or licensing/fee for service arrangements. Currently, the mouse is the only genetically engineered animal commercially available for the generation of human monoclonal antibodies, and many targets are licensed already. The expense and limitations of the mouse technology create an opportunity for OMT and its new monoclonal antibody platform with unrestricted development options . . .

Previously, it took either embryonic stem cells or nuclear transfer cloning — techniques that are not available for the genetic engineering of rats – to create a knockout, OMT used a new ZFN-mediated technique to generate immunoglobulin knockout rats. ZFNs are engineered proteins that induce double-strand breaks at specific sites in an organism's DNA. Such double-strand breaks stimulate the cell's natural DNA-repair pathways and can result in site- specific changes in the DNA sequence. Up to now, ZFNs have been used to edit specific genes in fruit flies, worms (C. elegans), cultured cells and zebrafish embryos, but this is the first example of successful, permanent, heritable gene-editing in a mammal.

My question is, how is this any different from using genetic engineering to intervene in evolution? If we can create whole families of mutants, who pass their mutations on to offspring, are we not forcing speciation?

There's also something squicky and intriguing about a new species of rat created entirely to produce drugs for humans.

via Science

What these scientists have done could give us the first foolproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures. This evening in PLoS Biology, they've published their ground-breaking research.

A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV - one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.

Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.

At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.

Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.

After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.

What intrigues me, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. Those of you who read Greg Bear's novel Darwin's Radio know that this scenario is familiar scifi territory: In that book, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA? What would it mean to have the whole crazy, giant human genome at our command?

via PLoS Biology

A Massachusetts company called GTC Therapeutics manufactures ATryn, which is designed to help people with blood-clotting disorders. Though ATryn is unlikely to become a blockbuster drug, since it aids only a small part of the population, its approval opens the door for more pharmed drugs to hit the market. But why genetically engineer a herd of goats instead of just making drugs the old-fashioned way?

According to the New York Times:

Proponents say such "pharm animals" could become a means of producing biotechnology drugs at lower cost or in greater quantities than the existing methods - which include extracting proteins from donated human blood or growing them in large steel vats of genetically engineered cells.

The protein in the goat milk, antithrombin, is sometimes in short supply or unavailable for pharmaceutical use because of a shortage of human plasma donations. GTC Biotherapeutics said one of its goats can produce as much antithrombin in a year as can be derived from 90,000 blood donations. And if more drug is needed, the herd can be expanded.

More pharmed drugs are already in production, including a cure for hereditary angioedema (a disorder that causes tissue swelling) produced in the milk of GMO rabbits.

SOURCES:

The Great Beyond [blog for Nature journal]

New York Times

It’s pretty open-and-shut, to my mind; and frankly, I’m surprised to have seen any support at all for tweaking your kids’ genetic makeup to taste on a forum like this one, where the taste of the mainstream public is routinely derided. How much of science fiction teaches us that people, and especially large crowds of people, tend to make terrible decisions? Cripes, look at how much of history teaches us this:

Salem Witch Trials

Nazism

The Macarena

And why would we expect it to be any different when it comes to passing on our DNA?

And therein lies the problem. It can be entertaining and illuminating to delve into the philosophical points of whether we should choose a baby’s sex or eye color or give them a chocolate-flavored penis, and whether we even have the right to do so in the first place—but ultimately, we have to look at the practical aspects of the question, too. And one of those relevant realities, sad or not, is that people love fads.

On a small scale, that might not seem like such a big deal. Like, OK, so violet eyes become popular—and you know they would; we’d have preschools teeming with little purple-eyed monsters named Carson and Sequoia—but what’s the damage? And perhaps there wouldn’t be any, although there are many people still alive who remember when differences in color determined, say, which water fountain you got to drink out of.

Sex selection is more worrisome. Again, maybe it would just all pan out that about half of parents would choose boys and half would choose girls—although, as was pointed out in last week’s post, even without science that allows them to choose, there are people who clearly lean one way. Yes, you could argue that this is actually a point in favor of sex-selection technology (as commenter icelight did)—that if a culture is going to kill its daughters, for example, then letting them opt for sons from the outset at least keeps babies from being murdered. That’s a fair point, but there’s an inherent danger in it, beyond the fact that it could be seen as implicitly condoning the culture in question’s inherent sexism (which, for the record, is not what I think icelight was doing).

The danger, which figures into all questions of designer offspring, is simply that we might skew our genetic portfolio the “wrong” way—and I put wrong in scare quotes because, short of being able to predict the future, there’s no way to tell which attributes may or may not be valuable two or three generations down the line. Is it good to be tall? Sure, unless something bad happens to your planet and you have to move underground, in which case a population whose average height is six-foot-two is a gross inconvenience. Is it good to have a super-efficient metabolism that keeps you from getting obese? Absolutely, unless food for some reason abruptly becomes much less plentiful.

Even in the case of predetermining and preventing a child’s predisposition for disease or disability, I’m wary. When it comes to cancer, it’s pretty cut and dry, but what about autism or dyslexia? The case has been made that these aren’t inherently crippling conditions so much as different modes of perception that aren’t aligned with the traditional or mainstream way of experiencing the world. By eliminating them from the gene pool just because we’re sure they’re “bad,” we may risk cutting ourselves off from a valuable kind of knowledge.

The thing about nature is that it makes our genetic choices for us randomly, impersonally, and incontestably. We can assume with some certainty that by leaving our biological makeup in its hands, we’re not going to end up with too many tall people, too many women, too many redheads, or too many or too few of anything else. I’m all for scientific progress, but I’m even more in favor of caution, particularly when it comes to something as irreplaceable and still well beyond our understanding as humanity’s genetic constitution. We have not, in my opinion, demonstrated sufficient wisdom to convince me that we can be trusted to ensure our future as a healthy species once we start futzing around with the biology that determines it. Once we do, hey—give your kids all the chocolate-flavored penises you want.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

He writes:

Couples in the developed world, where gender discrimination and biases are less prominent, should be allowed to use gender selection for family balancing purposes. I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this is still not a right in some countries, including Canada where couples and their doctors face the threat of large fines and jail terms.

Admittedly, not all countries are ready for sex selection; India and China certainly come to mind. But that's not our problem, nor is it an indication of how sex selection would be used here. The idea that sex selection would significantly skew the gender balance here in the developed world is terribly misguided and not based on any real evidence. Given the 2 children per couple tendency, it's highly likely that most couples would opt to have a boy and a girl.

Another argument against sex selection is that it is prejudicial by its very nature — that the very presence of preference indicates that gender biases exist and will continue to be reinforced. While this is a more nuanced argument, it fails to take into account an undeniable aspect of the human condition: we are a gendered species and gender differences do in fact exist.

I think there are a few problems with his argument here. First, nothing good can ever come of an ethics policy that policymakers claim certain countries aren't "ready for." What does that even mean? That people in India and China are too savage to make ethical choices for themselves? That's simply an unacceptable formulation.

That basic issue aside, I think the idea of picking a child's gender is so distasteful to people because it brings up the idea of designer babies. If we pick our children's sex, what else do we pick? Intelligence, hair color, sexual orientation, a propensity for making bad puns?

I tend to agree guardedly with Dvorsky about this being an outdated prejudice, simply because I think that we are heading for a world where rich people can design their own babies, and will. Now might be the time to decide what it is and isn't OK to design into a baby. Maybe, ethically speaking, picking your child's sex isn't the same kind of problem as picking her intellectual capacity or her sexual orientation. I don't claim to have the answers here, but I appreciate it when people dare to raise the questions.

[via Sentient Developments]

The BioBeer project will be entered into the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition to be held next month. Each team uses BioBricks, which are basically DNA toolkits, to create new lifeforms that do interesting things. Although the definition of "interesting" seems rather loose - past entrants included bacteria that smell different depending on whether they're growing or not.

The Rice team, several members of which are not old enough to drink, has genetically engineered a yeast so it will produce resveratrol in a two-step process (one gene produces some stuff, another gene makes the stuff into resveratrol). They haven't actually brewed any yet, and there are a whole lot of steps in between now and the day you can toss back a frosty mug of Cancer Destroyer Porter, but at least the team isn't creating something that could wipe out humanity. According the Rice press release:

Their entry last year, a bacterial virus that fought antibiotic resistance, was well-received but finished out of the prize running.

Now we just need some asthma-fighting pizza, or some anti-diabetes pretzels. Image by: a4gpa.

Better beer: college team creating anticancer brew. [Rice University via EurekAlerts!]

The "brainbow," with its dozens of glowing colors, was created when scientists mixed a few of the primary colors available from fluorescent jellyfish proteins (green isn't the only one). They wound up with nearly 100 colors, and used them to tag neurons in the brain so that they could follow the complicated interlinking pathways of each neuron and see the neurological structures of a mouse brain.

Early experiments with GFP created mice like these, which express the glowing green gene in all their cells — not just neurons. The result is a mouse that glows just like a jellyfish.

Usually, however, scientists link GFP with another gene — if the creature they've engineered emerges glowing like these monkeys, they know the linked gene is active too. These monkeys were engineered to have the gene for Huntington's Disease, and the gene was tagged with GFP. Because they glow, researchers are certain they have the sought-after gene and can study the monkeys to figure out possible cures for this neurodegenerative disorder.

Chemistry Nobel for Green Jellyfish Protein [New Scientist]

Nobel Prize for Chemistry Illuminates Disease [UK Guardian]

He continues:

Finding the set of genes that code for xenophobia in general - these days usually expressed though sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, Romaphobia and so on (and on, and on) - and knocking them out. Possibly then we'll be nice enough for the Culture or something like it. Of course maybe inventing true AIs will be enough, always assuming that they're as benign - and yet sympathetically interested in us - as they are taken to be in the Culture.

I love it when a progressive author comes out in favor of genetic engineering like this. GMO humans are a huge can of worms that Banks just blithely opened before hurling those squirmy nematodes all around the room.

Banks isn't the only progressive scifi author to advocate extracting our xenophobic tendencies via genetic engineering. In her series Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler describes how a group of (mostly) benevolent aliens think the basic problem with humans is that we are hardwired to be both intelligent and hierarchical, which is the most dangerous combination imaginable. They have to genetically alter humans to remove their hierarchical tendencies.

Could We Evolve into the Culture? [via Biology in Science Fiction]

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.

Peggy from Biology in Science Fiction writes:

The experiment that Natali is remembering is probably the work of Joseph and Charles Vacanti of the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. Back in 1997 their photo of a mouse with a human ear-shaped growth on its back made a splash in the popular media. It's no wonder that it caught Natali's attention.

He apparently didn't pay much attention to the story attached with the picture, though, because the experiment had absolutely nothing to do with genetic engineering. What the Vacantis and colleagues actually did was form a biodegradable polymer into the shape of a human ear, seed it with cow cartilage cells (bovine chondrocytes), and implant it under the skin of the experimental mice1. They found that new cartilage formed in the shape of the implant. And it turns out their methodology had immediate real-world applications. They used similar techniques to grow a "shield" in the chest of boy who was born with no cartilage or bone between his skin and heart. They also were able to grow a replacement thumb tip using a scaffold made of coral. It's very cool tissue engineering technology.

It isn't that surprising that Natali thinks that genetic engineering was involved. He may have seen the full page ad in the New York Times placed by the anti-biotechnology group the Turning Point Project, which (according to Wikipedia) showed the picture of the ear-bearing mouse with the description "This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back." The image also made the email chain letter rounds with similarly misleading information.

Splice: Rock and Roll Geneticists and the Horror of Genetic Engineering [Biology in Science Fiction]

According to Science Daily:

Dr. Richard Behringer describes the significance of his finding as such: "Darwin suggested that "successive slight modifications" would ultimately result in the evolution of diverse limb morphologies, like a hand, wing, or fin. The genetic change we engineered in mice may be one of those "slight modifications" to evolve a mammalian wing."

Molecular Evolution [Science Daily]

Same technique: just add a gene (from jellyfish) for fluorescence to your favorite cuddy creature of choice and presto! Instant cute glowingness. And no, despite what the researchers say, there really isn't any good "medical" or "scientific" reason for doing this. It just looks cool. Photos via Eduardo Kac and AFP.

Scientists claim the cat-friendly mouse they built (pictured) is proof that some fears are written in our genes. So when are they going to knock out the human gene for fearing oppression and create a race of super-obedient service workers? Image by Ko and Reiko Kobayakawa, Tokyo U, via Associated Press. Genetically-engineered mice [via National Geographic]

Among the many "delicate hybrids" that a writer for The New York Times recently found "thriving in the balmy climes of Provence, southern France's traditional perfume region," were "sweet jasmine, May roses - and fresh layers of artificial human skin."

One of the companies discussed in the article uses an inspired combination of amino acids, collagen gel, sugar, water, and low levels of ultraviolet light to cook up (and then "air dry") collections of fake skin. It's worth noting that many of these skin labs are located in Grasse, once a center for French leather-making, complete with disused tanneries (and now one of the world's perfume capitals). But I digress. Scientifically, the skin-making process seems to fall somewhere between Frankenstein and Campbell's new Chunky soup - by way of late Renaissance hermeticism - and, surreally, its real purpose is to eliminate animal testing from the European cosmetics industry.

In other words, the existence of this "artificial human skin" has everything to do with an impending EU ban on animal testing. That ban, which comes into effect in March 2009, means that cosmetics companies will no longer be able to test their perfumes, eyeliners, and blemish creams on animals - so they're looking frantically for new things to run such tests on.

One of those things is fake human skin.

The New York Times thus informs us that cosmetics firms are "striving to shape a new world of beauty research - and at the same time spare the lives of thousands of rabbits, mice, rats and guinea pigs."

All of this top secret "beauty research" means that there are now "advanced materials" entering the global marketplace - and these materials include "reconstructed eye tissue and tiny circles of skin developed from donor cells harvested from cosmetic operations." It's a whole new chapter in the global organ trade: a general economy of human body parts, broken down into germ lines and tissues.

Beauty giant L'Oréal has even devoted more than $800 million to finding "alternatives to animal testing." After all, we read, the "stakes are high."

Europe is the world's leading cosmetics market, and it also exports more than $23.4 billion worth of cosmetics every year. Cosmetics exported from the United States to Europe amount to nearly $2 billion a year, about 7 percent of the European market. After the United States, Japan is the second leading provider of cosmetics to Europe.

There is a firm called SkinEthic, for instance, that has been "developing and manufacturing a line of cellular tools that includes a wide range of human tissues." SkinEthic was bought by L'Oréal last year, an investment "which propelled the parent company into a dominant position in the testing field, with two critical patents on reconstructed skin." Patented skin! Where intellectual property and the human body collide.

SkinEthic's various fields of research even include the frighteningly named "vaginal metabolism" - which makes me wonder if io9's earlier look at mutant pussy might now have to be updated.

In any case, as cosmetic scientists continue to "develop" entire new lines of human skin and the "cellular tools" that maintain them, are we simply witnessing the further privatization of human anatomy? If there is a market in body futures, in other words, with whole new types of specialty organs being developed in top secret labs, then the cosmetic industry is surely one of that market's most interesting examples.

Perhaps implying that legendarily deranged Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Leatherface, had, in fact, been a futurist, we might yet find that the Michael Jacksons of tomorrow will simply FedEx themselves special orders of patented skin - a kind of dead skin mask that you wear to the Oscars ("Just where did you get that face?" nervous reporters ask) - to make the fashion statement of a lifetime.

We'll simply wear new skin.

For now, though, these patented expanses of lab-grown flesh are being used as nothing but test swatches: Apply mascara or blush or a new perfume and watch for allergic reactions. 4-inch by 4-inch squares of raw skin tremble under harsh fluorescent lights in unmarked factories outside Marseilles.

Or so the cosmetic companies say. What else are they growing in their climate-controlled labs, where the manufacture of human flesh can proceed without cause for alarm? Given time, will we all learn of some new horror, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Reanimator," in which a terrified journalist records his midnight flight from another lab, an unacknowledged lab located somewhere high in the Pyrenees, with dark curtains drawn over bulletproof windows, claiming that those secret acres of fake skin have started to move, self-assembling into a recognizable shape, something all too human to ignore...?