Scientist defends DNA manipulation to save species – 04/19/2023 – Science

Maybe you don’t know, but most likely at your breakfast today, if you consumed a wheat-based product, like the simple French bread, you ingested a genetically modified product. And, if it’s close to lunchtime, the famous Brazilian “pê-efe”, with beans and rice, has a great chance of also having species with altered DNA.

Genetic modifications in agricultural crops, approved by the main bodies and regulatory agencies in the world, have been done for years. Such changes generally aim to improve some desired aspect —such as, for example, juiciness, firmness and ripening time, in the case of fruits, and resistance to pests, for grains and legumes. In these cases, genetic manipulation research has already evolved enough to make the process safe and with consequences (at least, for us) relatively tenuous and known.

But what about wild species? Is it valid to genetically modify them so that they can survive in a world that is constantly changing due to human actions?

There are those who argue that it is and, even more, that perhaps this is the only way of survival for a few dozen or perhaps hundreds of beings now threatened with extinction.

In “Brincando de Deus”, her book recently released in Brazil by Contexto, geneticist Beth Shapiro, professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, states that biotechnology can be a powerful tool to help preserve ecosystems .

“If we have the ability to modify the genome and create species that are going to be better adapted, healthier and able to live better in the modified environments, I don’t see why not try that. Using these technologies to help the species may be the only way to save them,” Shapiro said in an interview with Sheet.

Scientists recognize that the rate of extinction of species today is about 20 times greater than that found in the fossil record. This means that we are driving several species to extinction at a much faster pace than natural selection itself.

That is why efforts to reverse the process of extinction and bring back to life some of these species, such as the mammoth and the dodo, which were extinct with probable human action, pop up around.

Colossal Biosciences, which is leading this project, says the desire to “de-extinct” species is to repopulate natural habitats and stem climate change. Shapiro acts as a consultant to the company for the process of recreating the dodo, a pigeon-like bird that became extinct in the 17th century.

Many experts, however, are against it, claiming that it is a considerably high effort and that it will still take many years to manage to breed the animals in captivity before releasing them into the wild.

The researcher agrees that we are still a long way from having the Siberian steppes repopulated with mammoths, but she also refutes criticism of the use of biotechnology to preserve the organisms.

“We already do species manipulation through artificial selection for races [de cachorro], we have wildlife sanctuaries where we choose which species can live there. Claiming that we cannot venture into the world of biotechnology [para conservação] and that we should instead change our behavior towards the world and wait for things to get better, maybe it’s too late.”

The use of money invested in animal genetic manipulation programs far outstrip global efforts for traditional conservation, such as the creation of parks or reserves and attempts to recover populations of endangered organisms. And there are also those who criticize, from an ethical point of view, the manipulation of wild species without a specific purpose.

“There are risks involved, but they are much smaller than the knowledge we will have when exploring these technologies and how they can be used to, for example, invest in the conservation of birds that in a few years may be critically endangered”, he said.

The geneticist says she believes that the investment made in biotechnology is not “money taken from traditional conservation”. “They are not people who were previously involved in conservation projects and are now investing in technology. They are two lines that have different objectives”, she says.

Whether in 20 years we will have polar bears with genes modified to withstand global warming in the Arctic or areas of chestnut forest in the United States that are resilient to long periods of drought, we do not know.

What we do know, however, is that the efforts to reduce the increase in global temperature to a maximum of 2°C by the end of the century are already well known and involve more direct actions, such as reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and curbing the logging.