Category Archives: Genetic Engineering

Access the Orbis Fall 2020 issue here

At the intersection of emerging technologies and international affairs, one of the most provocative areas is the applications of advancedgenetic engineering. The COVID-19 global pandemic and uncertainty about the origin of the causative virus illustrates both immediacy and the potential geopolitical implications of such technologies. These new gene editing techniques include one which has garnered a great deal of attention, the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) systems, as well as other, less well-known ones. CRISPR is not the first type of gene editing technology, but it is the most well-known within national and international security debates. Such advancements now allow for easier and more tunable manipulation of the genetic code of life with implications for governance of science and technology and with international security significance in the context of proliferation, deterrence, and unconventional weapons. Biosecurity and other emerging technologies require new models, not simpleextrapolationsof Cold War or more recent deterrence (or nonproliferation) paradigms.

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Emerging Life Sciences and Possible Threats to International Security - Foreign Policy Research Institute

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS You can hear the love in Mariah Gillaspies voice as she talks about her daughters Emma and Abby, who suffer from a rare genetic disease that causes seizures and development issues.

Emma, shes our oldest, and shell be 4 in October, Mariah said. Shes our calm, sweet little child. She has these little coos that sound like a dove. She really enjoys music, and she loves being around other kiddos her age.

Abby is our younger daughter, and shell be 2 in October, and she is our feisty little thing, Mariah continued. So, she lets you know when shes happy; she lets you know when shes not happy.

There is no question the two girls, the only two people in the world believed to have this disease, are surrounded by the love they get from Mariah and their dad Mark.

Mark grew up in Steamboat Springs and graduated from high school here in 2001. The couple now live in Centennial, but Marks parents, Jeanne and Joe Gillaspie, still live in Steamboat as does Marks older brother.

Four years ago, Mark and Mariah were overwhelmed with joy as they welcomed their first child Emma to the world, but when she was three months old, the couple started to notice she was having some strange movements, and when she started having episodes where she would hold her breath until she would turn pale, the couple took her to the doctor.

The doctor initially thought it was reflux, but when Emma stopped breathing in the doctors office, she was rushed to Childrens Hospital of Colorado for more evaluation and tests.

Throughout all this, I was convinced everything was going to be OK, Mariah said. It never crossed my mind that something was seriously wrong, and I had never considered that these were seizures.

Eventually, Emma was diagnosed with infantile spasms, which Mariah said didnt look serious on the outside but were damaging Emmas brain and impacting her development from the inside. Emma started treatment immediately, and the family was encouraged with the results. But then there was a relapse and a new medication, and then another relapse and another new medication.

Mariah said each new medicine came with a longer list of side effects, and Emmas immune system suffered. She had a bout with pneumonia that left her in the hospital for two months.

Through it all, the Gillaspies continued to search for answers.

We did a whole slew of genetic testing, and it came back inconclusive, Mariah said. They found absolutely nothing that could be the cause of her disease, and they told us this is probably some completely random condition that was caused by something that happened in utero.

They also told the Gillaspies that Emmas condition was rare, and there was less than a 3% chance of it happening again. So after extensive genetic testing, they decided to have a second child.

When Abby arrived two years later, they were thrilled, but at about six weeks, they noticed their youngest daughter was displaying the same movements that Emma had shown prior to her diagnosis. So it was back to the doctors, and it was confirmed through genetic testing that Abby and Emma shared the same mutated gene THAP12.

After discovering their daughters were suffering from the same condition, the family embarked on a grassroots effort to drive research about the rare genetic disease, which led to the creation of a foundation, Lightning and Love, a name that was chosen because the family believes lightning struck their family twice in the form of two daughters with the same rare disease.

The doctors would say, Im sorry, theres nothing we can do. We have to wait for science to catch up,' Mariah said. Every doctor that weve encountered has really been amazing and done their very best for us. Its just unfortunate science hasnt caught up to the girls, yet. Thats kind of, whereas parents, were passionate enough to move science along a little faster.

The nonprofit organization is supported by a GoFundMePage, and tax-deductible donations can be made through the Lightning and Love website.

The latest research funded by the foundation involved genetically engineering a zebrafish model to see if it showed symptoms of disease, specifically seizures. The zebrafish did have seizures, which Mariah said was a major breakthrough toward the ultimate goal of finding a gene replacement cure for her daughters.

But the journey for Mark and Mariah has proven to be more than just research and discovery.

What were realizing is the more we talk about it, and the more we do to get our story out there, the more were realizing that theres a lot of other parents that are going through tough times with their kids, too, Mark said. In an odd twist, or an ironic twist, this tough hand that weve been dealt has actually been a very positive light to a lot of other people out there. For me, that is just as important as the research.

The familys story was recently featured on the podcast, Go Shout Love.

The couples positive message is guiding them along the road they hope will lead to a better life for their family. But in the meantime, Mark and Mariah will continue to put smiles ontheir daughters faces the same way most other parents do by offering their love, support and opportunities to find happiness.

For Emma, that means being tossed into the air and caught by her daddy, and for Abby, it is time in her sensory room and being around her dad and her family.

Emma loves very big movements. Shes not mobile, and she cant walk, so when we kind of throw her around in the air or fly her around the room, she absolutely loves it, Mariah said. Abby loves her daddy. She gives big old smiles when he walks into the room.

To reach John F. Russell, call 970-871-4209, email jrussell@SteamboatPilot.com or follow him on Twitter @Framp1966.

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Family seeks answers, finds hope after daughters diagnosed with rare genetic condition - Steamboat Pilot and Today

Back in the halcyon days, when I somehow got paid for messing with the minds of the impressionable youth of UAF, I liked to ask said minds to project themselves back in time 400 years, to take a look around and report back what, if anything, they noticed different between those times (counting back from now, for example, to the Lords Year 1620. (James I was King, if that helps) and our own times: changes in musical tastes, ethics, physics, theology or attitudes regarding leprosy, for instance.

1620 CE was earlier than heart transplants, genetic engineering and baseball. It was before George Washington and water-seal toilets. Oxygen wouldnt be invented until the mid-1700s (Really: no Periodic Table of Elements, no radioactivity). The Holy Inquisition was in practice: pious religious officials were still torturing heretics and burning witches. It was before abortion rights. Autochthonous peoples in many parts of the world had not been introduced to the blessings of European economics, religion and warfare. It was before Facebook.

Things had changed in the last 400 years. Bigly. My students always got that answer right.

Then Id ask them to project themselves 400 years into the future, to the early 25th Century, say, to look around, to report back. I asked them to pay particular attention to the way our descendants in 2420 look back on our (presumably long-obsolete) ways of doing things: our medicine, say, or our governmental systems, or our responses to global hunger, overpopulation, pollution.

This was a harder task. The problem with prognostication is that we normal people are not particularly good at it, being annoyingly set in our ways. This is not to say that we cant make predictions, but even deeply considered and finely calibrated events such as space launches, brain surgery, or steering an oil tanker around Bligh Reef occasionally go awry. Some events, like nuclear meltdowns or worldwide pandemics, can present unanticipated difficulties.

I asked my students to avoid fantasies like self-aware computers, two-way wrist radios or honest politicians. I was hoping for revolutionary ways of perceiving the world, something on the order of the atalatl, General Relativity or Akira Kurosawa. I was angling for new stuff: examples of true scientific, artistic or musical invention.

My students always protested. Were on to you, old man, you you English teacher! Youve been harping all semester about how we mortals really cant see into the future, that we make up the future with our words. Now you want us to think something no one has ever thought before!

Thats exactly what I wanted them to do, of course. To be fair, really new ideas are not particularly common. It took humans millennia to come up with the atlatl (c.20,000 BCE), even longer to invent the calculus (c.1665 CE) or germ theory (c.1840). But without inventive ways of looking at the world, humanity might still believe that malaria is caused by bad air, that light travels across a medium called luminiferous ether, or that things burn because they contain phlogiston.

Theres been much talk lately of returning to normal, but I wonder if thats really what we want. I wonder if normal isnt what got us into our present public health and economic crises. I think for a lot of people in our community normal is worrying about buying groceries, paying the rent, health care, personal safety.

In this Year of Our Trump and the Corona pandemic (known also to certain elderly cynics as the beer virus or the sniffles) the question for my students would be, Given that we really cant see into the future and given that our current pandemic is unlikely to be our last, whats our best strategy for the survival of Our People (defined however you like) for the next seven generations or so?

Id hope for some inventive thinking along the lines of how to take care of every person on Earth in honest and practical ways. Emphasizing that we have plenty to be humble be about when predicting the future, Id ask them to come up with ideas never tried before. Id suggest that food, shelter and health care need never to be money-dependent, for example. Id ask our youth for creative ways of feeding people, sheltering people, caring for people all people on this, our planetary spaceship.

Id invite them to approach the task with an honest and generous spirit.

Lynn Basham lives in Fairbanks. He taught atthe University of Alaska Fairbanks as an instructor, mostly in the English Department, for about 20 years and retired about10 years ago.

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Inventing the future for humankind | Community Perspectives - Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

LONDON, Sept. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (Companies Included: Crispr Therapeutics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Intellia Therapeutics, Horizon Discovery, and Synthego Corporation)

In another instance, in early May, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Sherlock Biosciences an emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 diagnostic assay, beating out other companies and academic groups trying to use the powerful gene-editing technology to figure out who is infected with the novel coronavirus. Sherlocks test is the first FDA-authorized use of CRISPR technology for anything. Sherlocks test is a molecular diagnostic, intended to identify people who have acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. It capitalizes on a CRISPR-based technology developed in the lab of Feng Zhang, a scientist at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a cofounder of Sherlock.

The Business Research Companys report titled CRISPR Technology Global Market Report 2020-30: Covid 19 Growth And Change covers the CRISPR market 2020, CRISPR technology market share by company, global CRISPR technology market analysis, global CRISPR technology market size, and CRISPR technology market forecasts. The report also covers the global CRISPR technology market and its segments. The CRISPR technology market share is segmented by product type into Cas9 and gRNA, design tool, plasmid and vector, and other delivery system products. The CRISPR technology market share is segmented by end-user into biopharmaceutical companies, agricultural biotechnology companies, academic research organizations, and contract research organizations (CROs). By application, it is segmented into biomedical, agriculture, diagnostics, and others.

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The global CRISPR technology market value is expected to grow from $685.5 million in 2019 to $1,654.2 million in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.6%. The application of CRISPR technology as a diagnostic tool is expected to boost CRISPR technology market growth during the period. The Sherlock CRISPR SARS-CoV-2 kit is the first diagnostic kit based on CRISPR technology for infectious diseases caused due to COVID-19. In May 2020, the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) announced emergency use authorization of Sherlock BioSciences Inc.s Sherlock CRISPR SARS-CoV-2 kit, which is a CRISPR-based SHERLOCK (Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing) diagnostic test.

This test helps in specifically targeting RNA or DNA sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from specimens or samples such as nasal swabs from the upper respiratory tract, and fluid in the lungs from bronchoalveolar lavage specimens. This diagnostic kit has high specificity and sensitivity, and does not provide false negative or positive results. Widening the application of CRISPR technology for the diagnosis of infectious diseases will further increase the demand for CRISPR technology products and services and drive the CRISPR market 2020.

Several advancements in CRISPR technology are trending in the market. Advancements in technology will help in reducing errors, limiting unintended effects, improving the accuracy of the tool, widening its applications, developing gene therapies, and more. Scientists, researchers and companies are increasingly developing advanced CRISPR technologies for more precise editing and to get access to difficult to reach areas of human genome. For instance, in March 2020, scientists at University of Toronto developed CHyMErA, a CRISPR-based tool for more versatile genome editing. Similarly, in March 2020, researchers at New York genome center developed a new CRISPR screening technology to target RNA, including RNA of novel viruses like COVID.

In November 2019, researchers at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, swapped CAS9 enzyme for Cas 12a, that allowed the researchers to edit genes in 25 target sites. It is also estimated that hundreds of target sites can be modified using the above method. In October 2019, a team from MIT and Harvard developed new CRISPR genome editing approach called prime editing by combining CRISPR-Cas9 and reverse transcriptase into a single protein. The prime editing has the potential to directly edit human cells with high precision and efficiency.

The CRISPR technology market share consists of sales of CRISPR technology products and services, which is a gene-editing technology that allows researchers to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. The revenue generated by the market includes the sales of products such as design tools, plasmid & vector, Cas9 & gRNA, and libraries & delivery system products and services that include design & vector construction, screening and cell line engineering. These products and services are used in genome editing/genetic engineering, genetically modifying organisms, agricultural biotechnology and others, which include gRNA database/gene library, CRISPR plasmid, and human stem cell & cell line engineering.

CRISPR Technology Global Market Report 2020-30: Covid 19 Growth And Change is one of a series of new reports from The Business Research Company that provide market overviews, analyze and forecast market size and growth for the whole market, CRISPR technology market segments and geographies, CRISPR technology market trends, CRISPR technology market drivers, CRISPR technology marketrestraints, CRISPR technology market leading competitors revenues, profiles and market shares in over 1,000 industry reports, covering over 2,500 market segments and 60 geographies. The report also gives in-depth analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the market. The reports draw on 150,000 datasets, extensive secondary research, and exclusive insights from interviews with industry leaders. A highly experienced and expert team of analysts and modellers provides market analysis and forecasts. The reports identify top countries and segments for opportunities and strategies based on market trends and leading competitors approaches.

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The Global CRISPR Technology Market Size Is Seeing Exponential Growth Due To The Application Of CRISPR Technology In Treating COVID-19 - GlobeNewswire

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Sept. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Novavax, Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX), a late stage biotechnology company developing next-generation vaccines for serious infectious diseases, today announced that it has initiated its first Phase 3 study to evaluate the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity of NVX-CoV2373, Novavax COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The trial is being conducted in the United Kingdom (UK), in partnership with the UK Governments Vaccines Taskforce, and is expected to enroll and immunize up to 10,000 individuals between 18-84 (inclusive) years of age, with and without relevant comorbidities, over the next four to six weeks.

With a high level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission observed and expected to continue in the UK, we are optimistic that this pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial will enroll quickly and provide a near-term view of NVX-CoV2373s efficacy, said Gregory M. Glenn, M.D., President, Research and Development at Novavax. The data from this trial is expected to support regulatory submissions for licensure in the UK, EU and other countries. We are grateful for the support of the UK Government, including from its Department of Health and Social Care and National Institute for Health Research, to advance this important research.

NVX-CoV2373 is a stable, prefusion protein made using Novavax recombinant protein nanoparticle technology that includes Novavax proprietary MatrixM adjuvant. The vaccine has a favorable product profile that will allow handling in an unfrozen, liquid formulation that can be stored at 2C to 8C, allowing for distribution using standard vaccine channels.

Novavax has continued to scale-up its manufacturing capacity, currently at up to 2 billion annualized doses, once all capacity has been brought online by mid-2021.

About the Phase 3 Study

Consistent with its long-standing commitment to transparency and in order to enhance information-sharing during the worldwide pandemic, Novavax will be publishing its UK study protocol in the coming days.

The UK Phase 3 clinical trial is a randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blinded study to evaluate the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity of NVX-CoV2373 with Matrix-M in up to 10,000 subjects aged 18 to 84 years. Half the participants will receive two intramuscular injections of vaccine comprising 5 g of protein antigen with 50 g MatrixM adjuvant, administered 21 days apart, while half of the trial participants will receive placebo.

The trial is designed to enroll at least 25 percent of participants over the age of 65 as well as to prioritize groups that are most affected by COVID-19, including racial and ethnic minorities. Additionally, up to 400 participants will also receive a licensed seasonal influenza vaccine as part of a co-administration sub-study.

The trial has two primary endpoints. The first primary endpoint is first occurrence of PCR-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second study vaccination in volunteers who have not been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2. The second primary endpoint is first occurrence of PCR-confirmed symptomatic moderate or severe COVID-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second study vaccination in volunteers who have not been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2. The primary efficacy analysis will be an event-driven analysis based on the number of participants with symptomatic or moderate/severe COVID-19 disease. An interim analysis will be performed when 67% of the desired number of these cases has been reached.

For further information, including media-ready images, b-roll, downloadable resources and more, click here.

About NVX-CoV2373

NVXCoV2373 is a vaccine candidate engineered from the genetic sequence of SARSCoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease. NVXCoV2373 was created using Novavax recombinant nanoparticle technology to generate antigen derived from the coronavirus spike (S) protein and contains Novavax patented saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant to enhance the immune response and stimulate high levels of neutralizing antibodies. NVX-CoV2373 contains purified protein antigens and cannot replicate, nor can it cause COVID-19. In preclinical trials, NVXCoV2373 demonstrated indication of antibodies that block binding of spike protein to receptors targeted by the virus, a critical aspect for effective vaccine protection. In its the Phase 1 portion of its Phase 1/2 clinical trial, NVXCoV2373 was generally well-tolerated and elicited robust antibody responses numerically superior to that seen in human convalescent sera. NVX-CoV2373 is also being evaluated in two ongoing Phase 2 studies, which began in August; a Phase 2b trial in South Africa, and a Phase 1/2 continuation in the U.S. and Australia. Novavaxhas secured$2 billionin funding for its global coronavirus vaccine program, including up to$388 millionin funding from theCoalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations(CEPI).

About Matrix-M

Novavax patented saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant has demonstrated a potent and well-tolerated effect by stimulating the entry of antigen-presenting cells into the injection site and enhancing antigen presentation in local lymph nodes, boosting immune response.

About Novavax

Novavax, Inc.(Nasdaq:NVAX) is a late-stage biotechnology company that promotes improved health globally through the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative vaccines to prevent serious infectious diseases.Novavaxis undergoing clinical trials for NVX-CoV2373, its vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. NanoFlu, its quadrivalent influenza nanoparticle vaccine, met all primary objectives in its pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial in older adults. Both vaccine candidates incorporate Novavax proprietary saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant in order to enhance the immune response and stimulate high levels of neutralizing antibodies.Novavaxis a leading innovator of recombinant vaccines; its proprietary recombinant technology platform combines the power and speed of genetic engineering to efficiently produce highly immunogenic nanoparticles in order to address urgent global health needs.

For more information, visit http://www.novavax.com and connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Novavax Forward-Looking Statements

Statements herein relating to the future ofNovavaxand the ongoing development of its vaccine and adjuvant products are forward-looking statements.Novavaxcautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. These risks and uncertainties include those identified under the heading Risk Factors in the Novavax Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year endedDecember 31, 2019, and Quarterly Report on Form 8-K for the period endedJune 30, 2020, as filed with theSecurities and Exchange Commission(SEC). We caution investors not to place considerable reliance on forward-looking statements contained in this press release. You are encouraged to read our filings with theSEC, available atsec.gov, for a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements in this press release speak only as of the date of this document, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of the statements. Our business is subject to substantial risks and uncertainties, including those referenced above. Investors, potential investors, and others should give careful consideration to these risks and uncertainties.

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Novavax Initiates Phase 3 Efficacy Trial of COVID-19 Vaccine in the United KingdomClinical trial to enroll up to 10000 volunteers across the UK to...

Starting in 2022, food producers will be required to label genetically engineered foods.

Nearly 70 percent of processed foods at U.S. grocery stores contain at least one genetically engineered ingredient. Even though most scientists believe that genetically engineered foods pose no health risks, around half of Americans polled by Pew Research Center think genetically engineered foods are worse for ones health.

After decades of controversy, many genetically engineered foods will require labels in the United States starting in 2022, due to the national bioengineered food disclosure standard adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2018.

Almost 80 percent of Americans polled by the Mellman Group in 2015 strongly favor mandatory labeling of what is commonly known as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. But for years, members of Congress had attempted to pass GMO labeling laws with no success. In 2014, however, Vermont was the first state in the United States to pass a GMO labeling law.

Given fear that other states would follow Vermonts example and subject food producers to a variety of requirements nationally, congressional gridlock eventually thawed. In July 2016, the same month the Vermont labeling requirements were slated to take effect, President Barack Obama signed federal legislation that now preempts states from imposing labeling requirements. That legislation also directed the USDA to develop a federal labeling standard.

USDA officials compiled a list of bioengineered foods to help delineate exactly what needs to be labeled under this program. For a food to be added to this list, it needs to be food authorized for and in commercial production somewhere in the world. Thirteen different foods currently meet these criteria, including at least one type of pineapple, salmon, corn, and soybean. USDA officials review and update this list annually.

A food manufacturer may choose between three different labeling options to comply with this standard. The first option, which is similar to requirements of the preempted Vermont law, calls for food to be labeled with the phrase bioengineered food. If the food product is a multigradient food, the regulation requires the label to state that the product contains a bioengineered food ingredient.

A second option allows for manufacturers to use a new bioengineered symbol. This symbol, designed specifically not to disparage biotechnology, depicts a stem growing from a field with a sun in the background. Around the symbol appears the word bioengineered.

A third option allows manufacturers to use an electronic label, like a QR code, which a consumer can scan using a smartphone to obtain more information.

The USDA labeling standard does not address the question of whether or how food manufacturers can label foods to indicate the absence of genetically engineered ingredients. The USDA maintains that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration retains regulatory authority over absence claims. Currently, the Non-GMO Project remains a popular private labeling regime that privately certifies food that reportedly does not contain genetically engineered ingredients.

While the USDA program allows food manufacturers to choose from a variety of labeling options, there are a few exemptions that allow manufacturers to bypass labeling. First, any food served at a restaurant or similar establishment, such as a salad bar or food truck, is exempt from the program. Second, very small food manufacturers, specifically those with annual receipts less than $2.5 million, are exempt from the program. Third, any food labeled as USDA organic will also be presumptively free of genetically engineered food under this program and will not require a label. Finally, meat or dairy products derived from animals fed genetically engineered crops will not require a label.

Although this program finally establishes a nationwide genetic engineering label for food, something critics have long fought for, some stakeholders argue that the requirements fall short.

Advocates from the Non-GMO Project argue that the USDA program is misleading given that the categorical exemption for meat and dairy products derived from animals fed genetically engineered crops prevents the program from providing meaningful disclosure.

Groups such as the Organic Trade Associationargue that the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard falls short of fully informing U.S. consumers. The association argues that, among other things, the option to include an electronic label without the need for on-pack language is misleading to consumers. Similarly, the Environmental Working Group opposes the electronic labeling option and argues that rural consumers without expensive phones or living with irregular service will be unable to use these kinds of labels.

Both of these major criticisms, however, concern parts of the statutory mandate under the 2016 Act. Specifically, the 2016 Act calls for the USDA to permit an electronic label option and forbids the labeling of meat derived from animals fed with genetically engineered crops.

The USDA labeling requirements will become mandatory in January, 2022.

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The Newest Label Coming to a Grocery Store Near You - The Regulatory Review

Aug 22nd 2020

HUMANS THINK of themselves as the worlds apex predators. Hence the silence of sabre-tooth tigers, the absence of moas from New Zealand and the long list of endangered megafauna. But SARS-CoV-2 shows how people can also end up as prey. Viruses have caused a litany of modern pandemics, from covid-19, to HIV/AIDS to the influenza outbreak in 1918-20, which killed many more people than the first world war. Before that, the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans was abettedand perhaps made possibleby epidemics of smallpox, measles and influenza brought unwittingly by the invaders, which annihilated many of the original inhabitants.

The influence of viruses on life on Earth, though, goes far beyond the past and present tragedies of a single species, however pressing they seem. Though the study of viruses began as an investigation into what appeared to be a strange subset of pathogens, recent research puts them at the heart of an explanation of the strategies of genes, both selfish and otherwise.

Viruses are unimaginably varied and ubiquitous. And it is becoming clear just how much they have shaped the evolution of all organisms since the very beginnings of life. In this, they demonstrate the blind, pitiless power of natural selection at its most dramatic. Andfor one group of brainy bipedal mammals that viruses helped createthey also present a heady mix of threat and opportunity.

As our essay in this weeks issue explains, viruses are best thought of as packages of genetic material that exploit another organisms metabolism in order to reproduce. They are parasites of the purest kind: they borrow everything from the host except the genetic code that makes them what they are. They strip down life itself to the bare essentials of information and its replication. If the abundance of viruses is anything to go by, that is a very successful strategy indeed.

The world is teeming with them. One analysis of seawater found 200,000 different viral species, and it was not setting out to be comprehensive. Other research suggests that a single litre of seawater may contain more than 100bn virus particles, and a kilo of dried soil ten times that number. Altogether, according to calculations on the back of a very big envelope, the world might contain 1031 of the thingsthat is ten followed by 31 zeros, far outnumbering all other forms of life on the planet.

As far as anyone can tell, virusesoften of many different sortshave adapted to attack every organism that exists. One reason they are powerhouses of evolution is that they oversee a relentless and prodigious slaughter, mutating as they do so. This is particularly clear in the oceans, where a fifth of single-celled plankton are killed by viruses every day. Ecologically, this promotes diversity by scything down abundant species, thus making room for rarer ones. The more common an organism, the more likely it is that a local plague of viruses specialised to attack it will develop, and so keep it in check.

This propensity to cause plagues is also a powerful evolutionary stimulus for prey to develop defences, and these defences sometimes have wider consequences. For example, one explanation for why a cell may deliberately destroy itself is if its sacrifice lowers the viral load on closely related cells nearby. That way, its genes, copied in neighbouring cells, are more likely to survive. It so happens that such altruistic suicide is a prerequisite for cells to come together and form complex organisms, such as pea plants, mushrooms and human beings.

The other reason viruses are engines of evolution is that they are transport mechanisms for genetic information. Some viral genomes end up integrated into the cells of their hosts, where they can be passed down to those organisms descendants. Between 8% and 25% of the human genome seems to have such viral origins. But the viruses themselves can in turn be hijacked, and their genes turned to new uses. For example, the ability of mammals to bear live young is a consequence of a viral gene being modified to permit the formation of placentas. And even human brains may owe their development in part to the movement within them of virus-like elements that create genetic differences between neurons within a single organism.

Evolutions most enthralling insight is that breathtaking complexity can emerge from the sustained, implacable and nihilistic competition within and between organisms. The fact that the blind watchmaker has equipped you with the capacity to read and understand these words is in part a response to the actions of swarms of tiny, attacking replicators that have been going on, probably, since life first emerged on Earth around 4bn years ago. It is a startling example of that principle in actionand viruses have not finished yet.

Humanitys unique, virus-chiselled consciousness opens up new avenues to deal with the viral threat and to exploit it. This starts with the miracle of vaccination, which defends against a pathogenic attack before it is launched. Thanks to vaccines, smallpox is no more, having taken some 300m lives in the 20th century. Polio will one day surely follow. New research prompted by the covid-19 pandemic will enhance the power to examine the viral realm and the best responses to it that bodies can mustertaking the defence against viruses to a new level.

Another avenue for progress lies in the tools for manipulating organisms that will come from an understanding of viruses and the defences against them. Early versions of genetic engineering relied on restriction enzymesmolecular scissors with which bacteria cut up viral genes and which biotechnologists employ to move genes around. The latest iteration of biotechnology, gene editing letter by letter, which is known as CRISPR, makes use of a more precise antiviral mechanism.

The natural world is not kind. A virus-free existence is an impossibility so deeply unachievable that its desirability is meaningless. In any case, the marvellous diversity of life rests on viruses which, as much as they are a source of death, are also a source of richness and of change. Marvellous, too, is the prospect of a world where viruses become a source of new understanding for humansand kill fewer of them than ever before.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The aliens among us"

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How viruses shape the world - The Economist

Global CRISPR and CRISPR-Associated (Cas) Genes Market: Snapshot

Over the years, biomedical researchers have increasingly focused on developing efficient and reliable methods for precise and targeted changes to virtually any point of genome of any living cell. Recent advances in the genome engineering has triggered several biological researches and translational applications. Economical manipulation and modification of genomic sequences enable molecular biologists identify and characterize key genetic determinants to facilitate the investigation of various biological processes.

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Genome editing via clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated (Cas) is considered as an innovative technique in programmable and high-throughput functional genomics. CRISPR-Cas system consists of pattern of repetitive sequences in the DNA of certain bacteria, who used it as an adaptive immune system to find a protection mechanism against invading foreign DNA.

In less than a decade, a host of novel targeted techniques and genomic engineering tools have been developed that facilitates precise and diverse genomic modifications in a variety of organisms and tissues. The recent tool having enormous potential in biomedical researches is the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats associated Cas9/sgRNA system, also called Cas9/sgRNA. Cas9 protein is an RNA guided endonuclease. Along with its variants it has generated considerable excitement versatile genomic engineering tool in the development of genetically edited (GE) crops. Primary areas research for this include examining gene function, understanding the regulatory signaling networks, and rewiring sgRNA for advance loss-of-function screening. This will help in combating biotic and abiotic stresses, thereby leading to the development of climate resilient crops and sustainable agriculture practices in the coming years.

Global CRISPR and CRISPR-Associated (Cas) Genes Market: Overview

In the past few years research and development of CRISPR or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats has allowed molecular biologists to designs solutions for repairing cells by genome editing. This method allows a change to a specific genome by the introduction of a new function or by correction of a mutation. The exceptional fidelity, simplicity of construction, and low cost has triggered a monumental demand for the several solutions offered by the global CRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes market. The market is riding a wave of success as these factors have augmented the uptake of this method in several molecular biology laboratories.

The well-documented research report presents a fair case study of the global CRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes market. The report includes a SWOT analysis and Porters five forces analysis, which help in understanding several facets of the global market in greater depth. Furthermore, analysts have used primary and secondary research methodologies, which ensure the authenticity of the facts. This information in the report has also been seconded by market experts with comments and recommendations about the subject matter. The comprehensive research report is aimed at guiding each of its readers to make well-informed business decisions.

Global CRISPR and CRISPR-Associated (Cas) Genes Market: Trends and Drivers

The products available in the global CRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes market are DNA-free Cas and vector-based Cas. The widening applications of these are expected offer several lucrative opportunities to the global market. Out of various applications, genome engineering is expected to be a key contributor to the soaring revenue of the overall market in the near future. This trend will be attributable to eh increasing uptake of genome editing method for the therapeutic development and germline modifications. The report indicates that advancements in plant genome engineering will result in positive impact on the global market.

Analysts predict that CRISPR could be the next biotechnology treatment that has the ability to gradually replace the present single-antibody drugs. Genome engineering is anticipated to pick up a phenomenal pace in the coming years as it is being developed to build an immune response for targeting cancer. The widening application of these methods in the field of oncology is likely to change the game for the global market in the coming years.

Global CRISPR and CRISPR-Associated (Cas) Genes Market: Regional Outlook

In terms of geography, the global market is segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Europe. North America is estimated to lead the global CRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes market as the U.S. has shown a keen interest in developing effective therapeutics. Asia Pacific is also expected to offer several growth opportunities to the overall market as the region is facing a challenge of mounting unmet medical needs.

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Key Players Mentioned in the Report are:

The report has identified the following as the key operating players in the globalCRISPR and CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes market: Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Caribou Biosciences, Inc., CRISPR THERAPEUTICS, Addgene, Mirus Bio LLC, Merck KGaA, Editas Medicine, GE Healthcare Dharmacon Inc., Takara Bio USA, Horizon Discovery Group plc, and Intellia Therapeutics, Inc.Analysts predict that these companies will focus on making strategic collaborations to ahead of the competition present in the overall market.

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CRISPR and CRISPR-Associated (Cas) Genes Market Analysis Growth Opportunities and Trends by Forecast To 2025 - Scientect

For about a week this past September, I adopted a wellness routine thatat the timefelt like neurotic overkill. I didnt bother with masks or hand sanitizer; back then, the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 was still presumably nestled in the warm body of an unknown animal. Instead, each morning, I spritzed my arms and legs with picaridin, a chemical repellent meant to ward off parasitic bugs. Then I covered myself with one of several increasingly crusty sets of khaki pants and long-sleeved shirts that I had infused with the insecticide permethrin. Only then, force field up, would I venture outside.

I had come to Dakar, Senegal, to get closebut not too closeto Aedes aegypti, a globally invasive mosquito that is arguably the worst animal in the world. The species carries yellow fever and dengue, both of which can cause more severe disease in young adults than SARS-CoV-2; Zika virus, which can lead to birth defects; and chikungunya virus, which can leave victims with debilitating joint pain.

Unlike viruses that travel person-to-person, most of these pathogens can spread only in places where mosquitoes live. Then again, aegyptis range is immense. All told, her bitesand only females bitecause an estimated 400 million infections each year, which means that several dozen people have been infected in the time it took you to read this sentence. In 2019, when the World Health Organization compiled a list of threats to global health, dengue got a whole slot to itself. Zika showed up in another slot, sharing billing with Ebola, SARS, and disease X, the prospect of some then-unknown pathogen with epidemic potential.

In Senegal, my own illusion of invulnerability lasted until I met Mawlouth Diallo, a medical entomologist from the Pasteur Institute in Dakar. Wearing a matching blue kaftan set, he sat with me in my hotel lobby for more than an hour, earnestly explaining his teams mosquito research in smooth, French-accented English. Finally, I had to ask a nagging, basic question.

Sitting here, right here, I said, gesturing to the air-conditioned lobby, where is the nearest Aedes aegypti?

Diallo seemed confused at the question. Where?

Like, could we go find some of them outside right now?

No, it is inside, he said, then laughed out loud at the expression on my face. For sure, aegypti is inside the hotel. When dengue broke out in Dakar in 2009, the citys Lebanese population was hit the hardest. One reason, Diallo said, was that mosquitoes and wealthy foreigners are both drawn to luxury indoor environments. In this lobby, he said, the best place to find Aedes aegypti would be the flowerpots.

I laughed with him, albeit less easily. Of the 3,000-plus mosquito species alive, most are fairly harmless. Only a handful are a concern for public-health officials. But Aedes aegypti is different. Whether in Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, or Miami-Dade County, it will breed in clean water supplies, it will come indoors, it will make a beeline toward human odor, and it will bite when the sun is up, circumventing bed nets that protect at night. Masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 wont make a difference. Neither will staying at home, unless you live in a closed, air-conditioned house. No other mosquito is so perfectly suited to live with, and on, human beings.

The problem will get worse. Beyond the tropics and subtropics, the species has strongholds in Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona, and at least one population has managed to survive multiple winters in Washington, D.C. One recent study projected that by 2050, thanks to the climate crisis, the North American range of Aedes aegypti will extend to Chicago; in China, its range will go as far north as Shanghai.

In response, the world is readying an arsenal of shiny new biological tools. But as scientists and policy makers plan to subvert the species evolutionary future, its especially important to grapple with its origins, the kind of processes that begin long before once-obscure pathogens emerge from clear-cut rainforests or animal markets. In tropical Africa, especially Senegal, researchers are uncovering the shared history of aegypti and its favorite host, learning how environmental change, slavery, and colonialism turned a local mosquito into a global menace.

After chatting in the hotel lobby, Diallo agreed to find me some mosquitoes. Outdoors, we walked half a block and poked around a construction site, looking for standing water in buckets and concrete blocks before fending off a nervous manager. Then Diallo saw a tire leaning against a wall. Reaching inside with a discarded coffee cup, he scooped out a little waterin which he pointed out at least a dozen larvae.

Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting

Cup in hand, Diallo hailed us a cab and negotiated a fare to the Pasteur Institute. In his lab, he led me into a room full of mesh cages of aegypti from all over the country. The mosquitoes looked, in my paranoid imagination, very eager to get out.

That afternoon, when I returned to my hotel, I walked over to the pool. I waited until nobody was watching, then bent to look into the wet, shaded basin under one of the large flowerpots. The shadows wriggled, and I recoiled. The next morning, despite all my defenses, I noticed the first bites on my arm.

Aedes aegypti, whatever else you want to say about it, is a good-looking animal. Entomologists have described it to me as elegant, quite attractive, and even beautiful. Photographs often show it perched delicately on pink skin, displaying long limbs with black-and-white jailbird stripes. That pretty pattern belies an ugly disposition; the name of its scientific genus is derived from the Greek for unpleasant.

Fair enough. But aegypti wasnt always unpleasant. Within the past few thousand years, somewhere in Senegal or farther down the continent in modern-day Angola, biologists suspect that aegypti took its first step toward world domination.

Early hints of this story surfaced in the 1960s, when medical entomologists in the Rabai region of Kenya saw the species breeding in earthenware pots of water and feasting on their human hosts. Every house theyd go into would just be teeming with these mosquitoes, says the Princeton evolutionary biologist Lindy McBride, who has revisited the same sites.

No surprise so far. This was the familiar, human-obsessed aegypti. But outside the Rabai houses, researchers spotted another form of aegypti. This variant laid its eggs in holes in the trunks of trees, not pots of water; it preferred to bite animals, not people. Yet it wasnt a new species. It was a trace of the ancestral aegypti, a relic of a more innocent time.

Scientists have since found undomesticated populations of the species across tropical Africa. They hope to understand not just how the domesticated form picked up its particularly nightmarish set of skills, but how other species might be bending the same way under the same forces. If we can understand where [aegypti] comes from and how it works, the hope is, we can figure out how to stop it, says Noah Rose, a postdoc in McBrides lab at Princeton.

Senegal, especially, might be the key. Starting in 2017, Rose went on a series of road trips across sub-Saharan African countries. In Senegal, Rose teamed up with the ecologist Massamba Sylla, who had already discovered something unique about the countrys mosquitoes.

After an hour-and-a-half-long cab ride inland from Dakar, during which I watched the scenery change from very dusty to extremely dusty, I met Sylla in a caf in the city of This. Over croissants and caf au lait, we flipped through photos from his expeditions on his laptop as he described his lifelong, wife-vexing passion for field entomology. Once it catches you, you put all your time into doing it, he said.

During his travels, Sylla discovered a pattern. Senegals climate ranges from desert in the northwest to tropical rainforest in the southeast; as these habitats blend into one another, so do the parasites. In dry cities on the coast such as Saint Louis and Dakar, Sylla and collaborators found only domesticated mosquitoes. But in towns in the far southeast, they collected almost exclusively undomesticated mosquitoes, breeding in tree holes or in the husks of fallen fruit. Between the two extremes, Sylla found a continuum of domesticated and undomesticated aegypti.

Read: No one knows exactly what would happen if mosquitoes were to disappear

When Rose came to the country in August of 2018, he and Sylla drove along the same gradient, from dry Dakar in the south to where the countryside flushes green and rivers block the roads. The trip was not without risk: A decade earlier, another American researcher working in the southeast with Sylla flew back home before developing flu-like symptomsZika, it turned out, which he then transmitted to his wife through sex.

This time, though, no one got sick, and the collection process they followed was alarmingly easy. They collected the eggs in oviposition traps lined with filter paper, upon which the eggs can survive dormant for months. Once back in New Jersey, Rose submerged the eggs in water; most hatched overnight. Youve suddenly just transferred a whole population of mosquitoes between continents, he told me, with almost no effort expended.

Rose tested mosquitoes from across the Senegal transect and other countries, imprisoning them in plexiglass cages and presenting them with two olfactory options. They could fly down a tube that led to his own arm, or down another that led to a hapless guinea pig. Screens shielded both Rose and the guinea pig from actual bites.

These tests, recently summarized in the study, show that places in northern Senegal near Dakar with severe dry seasons but crawling with people, who come with their own water supply host the most human-craving mosquitoes Rose harvested anywhere in Africa. But the country also contains the widest range of aegypti behaviors, from almost exclusive animal-biting in the southeast to exclusive human-biting in the northwest. This diversity suggests that Senegal could be where the transformation happened.

Scientists still dont know the specific reasons for the change. But heres one plausible scenario of aegypti evolution, described to me by the biologist Jeffrey Powell at Yale University. Imagine a city near or encroaching on the forest. The climate slides into a drought, and animals are scarce. But human communities still offer warm-blooded bodies to drink from and cisterns of clean water to lay eggs in, enough to support aegypti until the rains return. Now imagine aegypti, over several generations, adapting to this new, more reliable lifestyle.

Some 500 years ago, after our domesticated aegypti had evolved in dry coastal cities in Senegal, Angola, and elsewhere on the African continent, European ships arrived on the Atlantic coast and began to carry away human beings. As the global tragedy of slavery unfolded, aegypti unleashed itself on the wider world.

Dakar, a French- and Wolof-speaking city clogged with determined street vendors, honking cabs, and clomping horse-drawn carts, was once the administrative center of French West Africa. Now its Senegals capital. The larger metropolitan area, home to some 3 million people, is still trying to cram itself onto the Cape Verde peninsula, which curls out into the Atlantic from the westernmost point of Africa like an arm bent at the elbow.

When the Portuguese sailed into the peninsulas enclosed harbor in 1444, the city of Dakar did not exist. For societies living between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, the Atlantic was a dead end. Trade came instead from the Muslim world to the east. But after Europeans arrived, the slave-trading outposts they built along the African coast began to exert their own gravity.

To meet the European demand for enslaved people, some societies launched massive manhunts against neighbors. Normal economies collapsed. Famines struck, leaving victims so hungry that they offered themselves up to enslavers. This predatory business, which reduced the producer to an export commodity, pushed Senegambian societies into a state of regression, writes the West African historian Boubacar Barry. Violence became the dominant motive force of their history.

At staging grounds such as Goree Island, enslavers conducted invasive physical examinations to screen out unhealthy people. After loading their captives on boats, though, they locked many inside the hold in rank, appalling conditions rather than risk having them revolt or jump overboard. Disease and death were rampant. For the crew and a profitable percentage of the captives to survive the two-to-four-month journey across the ocean, the ships also needed to carry dozens of water barrels. The concentrated humanity combined with the abundant standing water offered domesticated aegypti everything it needed to stow along.

Meanwhile, the same bottomless avarice that brought enslaved people and aegypti to the Caribbean had terraformed their destination. After uprooting indigenous populations, enslavers cleared large areas for sugarcane, then razed even more forest for the fuel they needed to reduce cane juice to crystals. Clearing the dense, moist stands, they assumed, would also eliminate the noxious miasmas that they believed to be the ultimate source of disease.

They were wrong. With forests gone, invasive species replaced insect-eating birds. Erosion caused flash floods. Loose sediments collected into marshland, creating new breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Native Anopheles mosquitoes ingested the malaria parasite from the blood of incoming West Africans and spread malaria throughout the islands. As for the arriving aegypti, it found the Caribbeans ports and sugar plantations teeming with human victims, standing water, and pure cane juicewhich the species will also drink in a pinch. By the 1640s, aegypti had made itself at home in the islands, and was quietly setting the stage for something worse.

Around this time, the yellow-fever virus must have also made the trip over from Africa, likely volleying between mosquitoes and infected enslaved people or sailors during the long voyage. Yellow fever wreaks special havoc on adult immune systems that have never encountered it before. First victims get flu-like fever and aches for a few days, then appear to recover. Typically this recovery sticks. Otherwise, they get sick again, this time with jaundicehence the yellowand start vomiting up blood, hence the diseases Spanish name, vomito negro.

An early outbreak hit Barbados in 1647, leaving 6,000 people dead before rippling through the rest of the Caribbean. Yellow fever then sloshed from port to port for centuries, borne on silent wings. Ships, ports, and cities formed an invisible circulatory system. In summertime, the yellow-fever virus could materialize far outside its normal rangeas in 1793, when one of Americas foundational disease outbreaks killed one in 10 Philadelphians and abated only once fall brought frost.

Read: Two ways of making malaria-proof mosquitoes

Here aegypti, itself shaped by history, began to shape history back. Once established in the Americas, as the historian J. R. McNeill argues in his 2010 book, Mosquito Empires, endemic malaria and especially yellow fever gave local populations an advantage against foreign powers, whose soldiers would show up to fight with less seasoned immune systems. All locals had to do was survive outright confrontationand wait. Yellow fever helped Spain defend its holdings against European competitors; malaria weakened British forces during the American Revolution. When Toussaint LOuverture fought to liberate Haiti, yellow fever may have been his staunchest ally.

The domesticated aegypti had established itself quickly across the Atlantic, altering the history of the Americas in the process. In 2018, Powell at Yale published a landmark study showing that mosquito genomes and epidemiological records reflected the historical timeline. The histories of the slave trade, the mosquito populations, and the disease outbreaks are all telling the same story, he said.

And then aegypti kept going. After ships crossed from Africa to the Americas, they headed back to Europe laden with goods such as sugar. Soon, a few mosquitoes likely hitched a ride on this leg of the trip too. In 1801, Spains queen consort, Maria Luisa de Parma, suffered from a disease she called dengue. Around then, aegypti was making itself comfortable in the Mediterranean, and would go on to cause outbreaks of yellow fever and dengue there for decades. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it offered the species a back way out of the Mediterranean into the Pacific. Before that centurys end, the first clear outbreaks of chikungunya and dengue had appeared in Asia.

Meanwhile, yellow fever kept burning through the tropics. Nobody even knew what carried it until the 1880s, when a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay made a then-preposterous proposal: Maybe mosquitoes caused these outbreaks. The U.S. Army pathologist Walter Reed proved Finlays theory in 1900, finally giving humans a chance to slow the spread of the disease by putting up screens and getting rid of standing water. Between then and now, though, the sun still hasnt set on aegyptis empire.

Yellow fever itself has been mostly brought to heel. The breakthrough came in 1928, when competing American, French, and English research teams across Africa convened in Dakar to discuss the tragic case of one Adrian Stokes.

After France had abolished slavery in Senegal, in 1848, the colonial government conquered inland states and set up peanut farms, devising new systems to profit from African labor that soon expanded into other colonies. Senegal was a laboratory for the European powers, says Mor Ndao, a historian of tropical medicine at Dakars Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Disease stood in their way. Yellow fever was an obstacle for the exploitation of the African continent, Ndao told me. Senegals coastal cities had long been gripped by their own yellow-fever outbreaks, which public officials and even scientists invoked to justify race- and class-based sanitary segregation long after the mosquito hypothesis had proved what really carried the disease. But the death of Stokes, an Irish pathologist, offered a new way forward.

Read: How the rise of cities helped mosquitoes thrive

The year before, in 1927, Stokes had contracted yellow fever while helping isolate the virus from the blood of a Ghanaian man named Asibi. The pathologist demanded that his colleagues draw his blood and let mosquitoes bite him. Injections of that blood and bites from those mosquitoes both caused fatal yellow-fever cases in monkeys, proving that the team really had captured the infectious substance itself. Stokes died four days after contracting the virus, and was buried in Lagos. He was the first author on the pivotal scientific paper.

Upon hearing of this success, the French team at the Pasteur Institute isolated their own strain from a local patient named Francois Mayali. After sharing their findings in the Dakar meeting, multiple groups of scientists started working on vaccines. Mass vaccination campaigns began in the following decades, pushing yellow fever and its bloodsucking vector out of mind and making the tropics less scary for Ndaos would-be exploiters. Today, virtually every yellow-fever vaccine, including the one I got before visiting Dakar, bears a hint of these colonial beginnings: They still use a watered-down version of the strain taken from Asibi.

With the worlds attention diverted, this win soured. During the past century, similar viruses emerged from forests in Africa and Asia. Reaching urban areas, they all found aegypti ready to ferry them from person to person. First came dengue, which leaked out into a bigger global problem as southeast Asia urbanized after World War II. Then in 2006, more than a million people in India may have caught chikungunya. This past decade, Zika emerged on a similar scale in the Americas. Even yellow feverstill the only aegypti-carried disease with a safe, publicly available vaccinehas staged a comeback: two African outbreaks in 2016.

All this, remember, wrought by what were once inoffensive forest insects.

Roses study projects that Africas milder, wilder populations of aegypti may crank up their own appetite for humans by 2050, as dense cities spring up across the continent. In response to that alarming forecast, a new collaboration of scientists from across the Sahel, the semiarid region south of the Sahara, is collecting more local eggsbut that research has gotten off to a slow start thanks to COVID-19 and extremist groups in the region, Rose says.

Perhaps a deeper worry is that thousands of other mosquito species out there have their own capacity to change. During the Second World War, when Londoners hid in the citys Underground tunnels to escape bombing during the Blitz, they were swarmed by a form of the mosquito Culex pipiens that had already adapted to the worlds oldest subway system. That same pest now haunts subterranean Manhattan. And just in the past four decades, Aedes albopictus, an aegypti cousin from Southeast Asia that carries many of the same diseases, has exploded its range through Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Not to mention unknown others. We could be missing the tip of the iceberg here, says Scott Weaver, who directs the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas. I think understanding aegypti, as a first step, will be very important.

As we approached the island, a crumbling stone fort with grass growing on top came into view, then a few buildings painted in fading pastels. Then a dock next to a small beach. The ferry engine kicked into reverse, sending a deep rumble through the deck.

This is Goree Island. Within sight of Dakar, its the kind of place where aegypti likely hitched a ride across the Atlantic. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the island is already steeped in the global memory of slavery. First established as a coastal base by the Portuguese, Goree was controlled by the Dutch, the British, and the French until Senegal achieved independence in 1960.

After disembarking and buying admission to Goree, I headed southeast, passing a massive baobab tree and a few lounging stray kittens on my way to a museum called the House of Slaves. Since the 1990s, historians have argued that Goree was a relatively minor location in the overall slave tradethat perhaps only 33,000 captive human beings came through the islandand that the role of this specific house might have been mostly symbolic.

But memory, once established, doesnt work that way. The three U.S. presidents before the current one came here, and when Nelson Mandela visited, the story is that he sat by himself for five minutes in a cramped chamber marked for recalcitrant captivesand then came out shaken, his eyes red.

After the entrance, visitors pass through a pink courtyard. The ground floor under the house is divided by stone walls into various dim holding chambers, each room labeled by the museum with a sign in French: women, children, the sick. Running your hand along the wall, you can feel the occasional seashell embedded in the stone.

Read: The quest to make a better mosquito repellent

Behind the house, visitors paused for selfies in the Door of No Return, an empty frame backlit by the sky and ocean. I waited my own turn. The conceit here is that anyone kept under this house and then led through that door never came back. Their world was forever altered. The wider world was also altered, both by the tragedy of slavery and by its still-unfolding consequences, among them 400 million annual infections.

For this insect problem, at least, fixes are in the works. By asking questions about where aegypti came from, scientists such as Diallo and Sylla in Senegal and their overseas colleagues hope to save lives too. Understanding aegyptis evolution on its home turf might also help us anticipate and counter copycat trends in other mosquitoes or disease-vector species. And unravelling why aegypti and its viruses are so good at parasitizing us could also help us fight them.

For example, if McBride can pinpoint the genes and neurological systems that control the domesticated aegyptis fixation on people, hijacking that system to find new chemical repellents could be easier. So would crafting new kinds of bait, which would manipulate aegypti to avoid populated areas and head elsewhere. We might be able to design a super-stimulus that would be more attractive than humans, that would pull them into traps, she says.

But the limiting factors in 2020 are focus and funding, especially with another virus falling on the world like an anvil. Im optimistic that people are finally understanding we cant continue this boom and bust funding cycle, Weaver says, where a new outbreak occurs and we put a lot of resources into that viruswhether it be chikungunya, or Zika, now SARS-CoV-2and we do that by taking away resources from other diseases.

For now, though, public-health systems across the Global South have also been diverted to coronavirus work, scientists say, leaving papers unpublished and mosquitoes uncollected. And whereas vaccines for Zika and chikungunya have been in development for many years, the fact that the outbreaks of those diseases are unpredictable and their victims clustered in poorer countriesunlike those of the more widespread COVID-19means that the vaccines are difficult to test and less lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry, and thus still havent made it to market.

As for engineering options to target the mosquitoes themselves, new technologies are already out in the world, aiming to reshape this little critter at the nexus of so much suffering.

One option is a bacterium called Wolbachia, bred into laboratory aegypti and then into wild populations. A greedy pathogen itself, the bacteria competes with the viruses that want to piggyback on the mosquitos life cycle. Tested in Indonesia, Malaysia, and even in Fresno, California, it reduces the mosquitos ability to spread disease.

An even more formidable option might be the gene drive, a type of genetic modification that would spread altered genes from a few sterile or disease-free mosquitoes throughout entire wild populations. The method is undergoing preliminary testing in Burkina Faso and elsewhere, and aegypti is high on the list of potential targets.

Meanwhile, less fancy kinds of genetically altered aegypti are already out in the wild. From 2013 to 2015, for example, one mosquito-control program released millions of modified male mosquitoes designed by a British company called Oxitec in the city of Jacobina, Brazil. The idea was that when they mated with wild females, the resulting offspring would die in infancy, causing populations to plummetwhich they did.

Apparently, though, not all those doomed offspring actually died. Some found a way to live and breed, passing on little bits of themselves. As Powell and other researchers pointed out in an eyebrow-raising study this past September, the wild aegypti population near Jacobina now contains a sprinkling of mosquito genes from Mexico and Cuba, where the Oxitec mosquitoes ancestors were harvested.

This crossbreeding might have actually strengthened the Jacobina aegypti, the study suggestedsparking a media firestorm, a fierce response from Oxitec, and concern from several of Powells Brazilian co-authors. I thought I was pretty conservative, Powell said, but it seems like that got blown out of hand. This summer, both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Florida granted Oxitec permits to begin releasing a version of the same technology in the Florida Keys, although there are still regulatory hurdles to clear.

As we continue to influence its evolution, aegypti, as it always does, is beginning to respond. Standing on Goree Island, though, I didnt think much about the wizardry of all these fixes in the works, or the engineering required, or the consideration of known and unknown consequences. Instead, I took a moment to dwell on what has already happened.

And maybe with this past in mind, or maybe because of a simpler superstition, I didnt walk through the threshold of the Door of No Return when I got to it. I just stood there, blinking in the light, looking out at the turquoise waves.

Ousmane Balde contributed reporting.

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The Worst Animal in the World - The Atlantic

I know a stiff wind. They call this place Storm Lake, after all. But until recently most Iowans had never heard of a derecho. They have now. Last Monday, a derecho tore 770 miles from Nebraska to Indiana and left a path of destruction up to 50 miles wide over 10m acres of prime cropland. It blew 113 miles per hour at the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River.

Grain bins were crumpled like aluminum foil. Three hundred thousand people remained without power in Iowa and Illinois on Friday. Cedar Rapids andIowaCity were devastated.

The corn lay flat.

Iowas maize yield may be cut in half. A little napkin ciphering tells me the Tall Corn State will lose $6bn from crop damage alone.

We should get used to it. Extreme weather is the new normal. Last year, the villages of Hamburg and Pacific Junction, Iowa, were washed down the Missouri River from epic floods that scoured tens of thousands of acres. This year, the Great Plains are burning up from drought. Western Iowa was steeped in severe drought when those straight-line winds barreled through the weak stalks.

A multi-decade drought is under way in the Central Plains and the south-west. Wildfires are spreading from Arizona to California, and are burning ridges north of Los Angeles not licked by flames since 1968. Cattle in huge Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma feedlots will drink the Ogallala Aquifer dry in 20 years. This drought, which could rival or exceed the Medieval Drought that occurred about AD1200, could last 30 to 50 years, according to research from the Goddard Space Institute. It will become difficult to grow corn in southern Iowa, and impossible in western Kansas. By mid-century, corn yields could decline by 30%, according to the Iowa State University climatologist Dr Gene Takle.

Takle notes that the 20th century was the wettest on record. This could be the driest.

The last century was our Goldilocks period, Takle said. Just right. And that period is coming to an end.

We have cyclone bombs in winter and derechos on top of tornadoes. We have 500-year floods every 10 years. And we have a steady increase in night-time temperatures and humidity that makes it difficult for the corn to breathe even with the latest in genetic engineering. Protein content in the kernel is falling. Livestock and plants fall prey to new diseases and pests along with extreme heat stress.

It will lead to a reckoning more quickly than most of us realize.

The pandemic exposed the fragility of the food supply when meat processing plants teetered last spring for lack of healthy workers. Prices shot up 50% at the grocery counter.

Farmers didnt share in that windfall. Corn prices are at a 10-year low in a broken industrial system propped up by government design.

When Takle was a teenager, baling hay in 1960, there were 18-20 days a year when the temperature would get above 90 degrees. By the end of the century, Takle warns, this region could be scorched by temperatures over 100 degrees 50 to 60 days a year.

Soil that can hold water and defy heat is losing that capacity to erosion driven by extreme rains. Poor soil, combined with the extreme heat Takle describes, assures crop failures. Takle said corn crops could fail every other year if we go on with business as usual pumping out carbon.

Its already happening in Latin America. Decades of drought are driving Guatemalan campesino refugees to Storm Lake to work in meatpacking. Similarly, epic migrations were driven by the Medieval Drought. It is believed that the Mill Creek people who settled here were driven north up the Missouri River to the Dakotas as they were droughted out of Iowa. That drought also led to wars in Europe, not unlike the contemporary conflicts and migrations in Africa whose roots are in failing agricultural and food systems.

The impacts of climate change are real and profound for our most basic industry: food. Fortunately, sound science tells us that we can make a real impact on climate change by planting less corn and more grass that sequesters carbon. Paying farmers to build soil health and retain water is a better investment than writing a crop insurance check for drought. Farmers on the frontlines of climate change are trying to become more resilient to extreme weather by planting permanent grass strips in crop fields, and planting cover crops for the winter that suck up nitrogen and CO2. The rate of adaptation would be quickened if conservation funding programs were not always under attack.

The derecho is yet another destructive reminder that heat leading to extreme storms will destroy our very food sources if we dont face the climate crisis now.

Teaser photo credit: National Weather Service (Quad Cities Office) https://www.weather.gov/dvn/summary_081020 Author: Glenn Rushworth

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Extreme Weather Just Devastated 10m Acres in the Midwest. Expect More of This - Resilience