PLOS Biology in the media – May

PLOS Biology in the media – May   post-info This year is flying by, and May was another bumper month at PLOS Biology. In May we’ve covered all things hair, mind-controlled avatar races, and plant

Making the World Go Round: Building a Circular Bioeconomy with Synthetic Biology

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6828-1000 Written by EUSynBioS steering committee members Daniel Bojar, Adam Amara and Clea Lachaux. On April 2010, the Gulf of Mexico turned black. The largest marine oil spill initiated by an explosion of methane gas

GMO wild organisms: As if GMO crops weren’t controversial enough…

The big biotech controversy of last year was over the ethics of using CRISPR to edit human embryos – something which a team of Chinese scientists did last April. The possibility of designer babies led to a major scientific summit meeting, hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, during which the attendees concluded that “It would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of germline editing” until safety concerns are allayed and society comes closer to an ethical consensus.

While the world was fretting about edited embryos, scientists introduced an even more ethically fraught biotechnology: gene drives, a tool to genetically modify organisms in the wild. Gene drives have the potential to do a lot of good, by controlling disease vectors like malaria-bearing mosquitos. But if you thought GMO crops were controversial, just wait to see how people react to GMO wild organisms.

I cover the new CRISPR-based gene drive technologies in my latest Pacific Standard column. Here’s the tl;dr version: Gene drives can do a lot of good, but because they are simple to make, and because their consequences aren’t confined by political borders, we’re going to have a hell of a time ensuring they’re used responsibly.


Filed under: Curiosities of Nature Tagged: biotechnology, Science in Society

Starch, Oil, Water and Arsenic: New Plant Translational Research

by Christina Kary   PLOS launched a Collection last year, “The Promise of Plant Translational Research”. Here’s an update on how it’s going, and where we hope to go from here.   In my former life as ‘Plantina’ (I can … Continue reading »

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Toward True Public Engagement in Science

As California struggles with a measles epidemic brought on by vaccine-refusing parents and surveys reveal that 80 percent of Americans support mandatory labeling on foods that contain DNA, it might appear that efforts to bridge the gap between scientific facts … Continue reading »

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Through the Anthropocene Looking Glass

There’s no doubt that humans have drastically changed the Earth. The global scale impacts of humans on the environment has led many scientists, scholars, and environmentalists to use the term...

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This week in PLOS Biology

In PLOS Biology this week, you can read about interdisciplinary community building, how yeast cells deal with stress, 3D printing and conservation of the Antarctic.

During their lifetime, cells accumulate damage such as aggregated proteins, which is

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If you wish to make a gene from scratch

According to the New York Times, synthetic biology is creating DNA out of thin air. A recent article about synthetic biology and consumer goods describes DNA synthesis as a process where “DNA...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com