In our never-ending quest to get healthy, there's a constant, nagging hope that we'll find a hidden key to fitness — some trick or piece of information that finally makes it easy to look and feel how we want.

That's why bizarre diets take off and nutrition "breakthroughs" tend to go viral (even though these findings rarely change what we know about eating healthy).

Recently, dieters and investors alike have started betting on companies offering "personalized nutrition": dietary advice supposedly based on our own genes or even the bacteria living in our guts.

The pitch from such companies goes something like this: We're all unique, and we know that our genes and bacterial populations have a huge impact on our health — so harnessing that information can give us a tailored guide to healthy eating.

But there's reason to believe modern science may not be up to this task just yet. 

The promise of personalized nutrition

"No two humans are alike and no two diets are good for everyone," says Naveen Jain, the founder of a company called Viome, which monitors its clients' microbiomes (specifically, their gut bacteria) and other biomarkers and uses that data to give dietary advice. Viome charges its customers $99 a month (or $1,000 a year).

"We test you every 3 months to see how your body is reacting to carbs, protein, and fat, and we adjust your diet based on what is going on in your metabolic system," Jain says.

Personalized or precision dietary advice, like precision medicine, is based on the realization that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another — a perspective shift that could transform the way we think of health in general. People with certain genetic variants thrive on high fat diets, while others are much more sensitive to the effects of consuming dietary cholesterol. That's the reason why somanycompanies are offering these DNA- and now also microbiome-based dietary services. 

But Ginger Hultin, a registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, tells Business Insider that microbiome testing doesn't yet have any proven practical applications.

"It's too early," she says. "Right now, the science is still up and coming on dietary interventions for supporting the microbiome."

Our gut bacteria influence our metabolism, immune system, and other aspects of health, John Mathers, the director of the Human Nutrition Research Center at Newcastle University, tells Business Insider. But those complex interactions and relationships are not yet fully understood by health scientists.

"So far, we have limited evidence of how particular nutrients, foods or dietary patterns influence the gut microbiota and vanishingly little evidence of how knowledge of the gut microbiome influences nutritional needs," Mathers says.

According to Hultin, the current scientific understanding of our gut suggests that the more diversity of bacteria in there, the better. And we know that a high-fiber, plant-based diet is associated with diverse gut flora. But that knowledge basically backs up the idea that vegetables are good for you — standard advice that any dietitian or nutritionist could provide. Beyond that, Hultin says, we don't know enough to tell people how to eat based on their gut bacteria.

Business Insider asked Jain if he could provide evidence that Viome's dietary advice (based on the microbiome and other metabolic biomarkers found in the gut and blood) improves health. He responded, "that's a question you should be asking 6 months or a year from now."

Jain also acknowledged that for now, Viome can't diagnose disease based on their analyses of customers' microbiomes. The company is instead hoping that it will learn to do so as technology advances. 

Jain did, however, provide Business Insider with a number of studies indicating that the microbiome is connected to various chronic health conditions, ranging from obesity to Alzheimer's.

"Papers are showing that every single chronic disease — from Parkinson's to asthma — is directly linked to the microbiome," he says. "If you can balance your gut and remove chronic inflammation ... if we can do that, we can create a world where no one will ever get sick."

The problem, however, is that even if Viome does succeed in figuring out how to diagnose clients with certain conditions, no one has figured out how to cure any diseases by modifying the microbiome (with perhaps the exception of giving people a fecal transplant to fight off a Clostridium difficile infection). We're far from being able to "create a world where no one will ever get sick" based on treating the microbiome, good as that may sound.

"I don't think we know nearly enough about the microbiome to understand the significance of test results for dietary advice,"Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, tells Business Insider.

Dieting based on your DNA

In addition to personalizing dietary advice based on the bacteria in your gut, for years many companies have offered dietary services based on DNA tests — based on a science known as nutrigenomics.

"Our groundbreaking DNA test will change the way you think about fitness and nutrition forever,"reads the website of one such company, called DNAFit. "Whether you're looking to shape up, build muscle or just want to eat a little healthier, your genetics hold valuable information about the best way to do this, just for you."

In certain cases, a dietitian or genetic counselor can find useful information in a DNA test — certain genes may indicate a basic intolerance for foods like lactose or caffeine, and genes that are common among people with obesity might help explain why a person struggles to regulate their eating (though for the most part, genetic explanations for conditions like obesity are complex and not fully understood).

But this type of genetic information is most likely to be helpful in specific cases involving some kind of unsolved food sensitivity mystery, a rare occurrence since most people are already aware that they react poorly to certain foods.

Hultin says that so far, nutrigenomics "is actually further along [than microbiome research] and there's some really interesting things going on there."

But Nestle is skeptical.

"I suppose that DNA testing could turn up evidence of inborn metabolic errors" that make it hard for people to process certain foods, she says, "but most adults with them have figured out what they have to do to avoid symptoms."

A position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics concurs: "The use of nutrigenetic testing to provide dietary advice is not ready for routine dietetics practice," it states.

Are any of these services worth the money?

So is a DNA test or microbiome analysis worth it as a way to help you eat healthier? So far, most experts seem to think the answer is not yet.

Several reviews of existing research have found no evidence that genetic information, including the data gathered by several existing companies, improves dietary health. In other words, even if there's useful information hidden in our DNA, we haven't learned enough about genetics to use information successfully.

"I am skeptical about many of these products because of the slender — or nonexistent — scientific basis for them," John Mathers told Vox.

Hultin also points out that there are many things people can attempt to test or change before shelling out for one of these dietary services.

"Is there some work that needs to be done on your diet, lifestyle, stress, or sleep?" she asks. Genetic testing is likely only useful after you've dealt with the obvious issues and gotten professional advice, she says. And even then, any information you gain is probably best put into context by a medical professional.

Mathers warns consumers to beware of the initial excitement that usually surrounds new dietary trends. 

"In my view, there are been a lot of hype about links between the microbiome and health and, based on current evidence, the idea that knowledge of our microbiome can be used to tell us what we should eat is part of that hype," he says.

This doesn't mean that personalized nutrition services can't offer useful guidelines. Many of the companies that offer these products pair their testing results with advice from a nutritionist or other professional. Plus, much of their advice tends to be "eat more vegetables," which is a good suggestion for most people, even if they are charging a lot for that advice.

If nothing else, it might be fun to learn what's in your DNA or microbiome — though these are expensive ways to get that information. But don't expect them to solve some mystery of dietary health.

"The tests are fun but their usefulness has yet to be shown," says Nestle. "I'd rather spend the money on good dinners."

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A U.S. fertility doctor has started a company with a provocative vision for older women: become pregnant by having their DNA shifted into a young woman’s egg.

The company, Darwin Life, was quietly established last year by John Zhang, also founder of a New York City clinic called New Hope Fertility Center, to deploy a cutting-edge fertility technology called “spindle nuclear transfer.”

Originally developed as a way to prevent women from passing certain rare diseases on to their children, Zhang says it can also be used to create rejuvenated eggs. He calls it a “cure for infertility” and says Darwin Life will begin offering it to women aged 42 to 47, an age at which the chance of becoming pregnant declines dramatically.

Zhang is a highly skilled fertility provocateur who last year, in Mexico, carried out the first successful use of the technique, which employs delicate hollow needles to swap the chromosomes of a woman’s egg into the egg of a donor.

The process is controversial because it is largely untested and because some consider it a form of genetic modification. In March, after lengthy public debate, the U.K. became the first country to formally allow the use of a similar treatment, but only when a couple is at very high risk of having a child with a life-threatening genetic disease.

The technique remains illegal in the U.S., and Zhang says Darwin Life will offer it only overseas for now. He says the company is assessing a handful of hopeful women over 40 who may be able to benefit.

The formation of the company is alarming some observers, who say the process is too new to commercialize widely and could create increased demand for donors to supply eggs.

“This is a biologically extreme and risky procedure,” says Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a group that questions advances in biotechnology. “If you’re talking about using these techniques for age-related infertility, that’s really moving the human experimentation to a very large scale.”

In a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Darwin Life, incorporated at the same New York City location as Zhang’s clinic, said it had raised $1 million in an initial round of funding. Zhang declined to identify the investors.

First mover

Sometimes known as a “three-parent baby” technique, the procedure acts to combine one woman’s genes with the youthful contents of another’s egg, notably energy-making structures called mitochondria. Because mitochondria possess their own small number of genes, the resulting child has three genetic parents.

The cause of age-related infertility is still unknown, but Zhang and some other experts believe that faulty mitochondria are a reason why older women can’t easily produce viable embryos. That’s why Zhang thinks his technique of harnessing a young egg will help.

Last year, Zhang and his team performed spindle nuclear transfer on the eggs of a woman with a rare neurological disease called Leigh syndrome, caused by defective mitochondria. The parents, a Jordanian couple, had previously given birth to two children who died from the disease.

Zhang started by obtaining an egg from a donor and removing its nucleus. Into this genetically hollowed-out egg, he then injected the chromosomes of the Jordanian woman, which he had obtained from one of her eggs. Zhang then fertilized the reconstructed egg with the father’s sperm, as would occur in standard in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

Although that embryo was created in New York City, it was transferred to the woman’s uterus in Mexico because of a U.S. law that effectively outlaws the use of the technology here. A healthy baby boy was born in April 2016.

Concerns over “designer babies” led Congress to forbid the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from considering research applications involving any type of genetically modified embryos, including those made using the nuclear transfer technique.

Because of that regulatory red tape, Zhang says Darwin Life will continue making embryos in the U.S. but will perform the medical procedures at New Hope’s clinic in Guadalajara, Mexico, or in other countries he believes will embrace the idea.

“For now, our nuclear transfer technique is very much like an iPhone that’s designed in California and assembled in China,” he says.

Safety concerns

Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says Zhang’s effort to commercialize the technology is “concerning” because the procedure carries potential risks. Faulty mitochondria can still end up in the resulting embryo and there’s also a chance of genetic incompatibility.

Zhang’s own report of the Mexico birth, published in April, reveals that some damaged DNA from the mother was unintentionally transferred into the donor egg, which could lead to health problems for the child later in life.

Lovell-Badge was part of an expert panel in the U.K. that in November recommended that mitochondrial replacement therapy should be permitted there, reasoning it was worth the risk, but only to avoid debilitating genetic disease.

“I understand the desire of women to have children and to have genetically related children,” says Lovell-Badge. “But the risk-benefit ratio is different. It’s a question of having no children or having a child that is suffering from a terrible disease. It’s not quite the same.”

Ainsley Newson, associate professor of bioethics at the University of Sydney, also thinks that “limiting the use of mitochondrial replacement to prevent disease—under strict regulation and a research protocol, such as in the United Kingdom—is prudent.”

In the U.S., the federal government not only bars the procedure but also prohibits any funding into research on fertility treatments or human embryos. Sean Tipton, a spokesperson for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a trade group representing doctors, says Zhang’s choice to offer the process overseas is a result of those restrictions.

“When our government buries its head in the sand by refusing to let the FDA even evaluate this kind of procedure, we are going to see these efforts move to places where the oversight might not be done in the manner we would like,” says Tipton.

Designer babies

Zhang says Darwin Life will charge $80,000 to $120,000 for spindle nuclear transfer. He estimates there is a market worth $2 billion per year considering how many women can’t conceive because of their age. Of about 8,700 IVF attempts by women over 42 in the U.S. in 2014, less than 4 percent led to a successful pregnancy, showing how much age weighs against the odds.

Newson worries that marketing these procedures to infertile women equates to “selling hope to often vulnerable women.”

But IVF is already a costly, physically draining, and uncertain undertaking. The average price of an IVF treatment runs about $12,400 in the U.S., according to Tipton’s organization, and many women undergo two or three rounds of treatment before they become pregnant. 

Zhang says women who go through IVF are already committed to getting pregnant. For that reason, Zhang doesn’t think they will be dissuaded from traveling to another country to get the procedure. He says Darwin Life has already received hundreds of inquiries from prospective parents.

Zhang’s breakaway plans don’t stop at spindle nuclear transfer. He says a future step will be to combine the technique with editing genes, so that parents can select hair or eye color, or maybe improve their children’s IQ.

“Everything we do is a step toward designer babies,” Zhang says of Darwin Life. “With nuclear transfer and gene editing together, you can really do anything you want.”

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LONDON (AP) — The devastating fire that struck a high-rise tower in London may have been so powerful that it destroyed much of the DNA evidence needed to identify its victims.

As firefighters keep searching the charred ruins of the Grenfell Tower public housing complex with sniffer dogs and drones, Metropolitan Police commander Stuart Cundy said there was "a risk that, sadly, we may not be able to identify everybody."

Experts said the intensity of Wednesday's fire at the 24-story building will make naming victims extremely difficult, drawing comparisons to the 2001 World Trade Centre terror attacks in New York, where 40 percent of the victims were never identified.

"When you have a fire that takes hold like that, that is literally an inferno. You get a lot of fragmentation of bodies, charring of bones and sometimes all that's left is ash," said Peter Vanezis, a professor of forensic medical sciences at Queen Mary University in London.

He said the temperature of the blaze at Grenfell Tower was comparable to a cremation.

"The longer a fire burns, the less chance you have that there will be enough DNA left to test," Vanezis said. Still, he said if people were protected by any surrounding furniture or debris, it's possible there might be some viable DNA.

Vanezis said the best chance to identify victims may be if officials find any remaining bits of teeth or bone, which are usually the last parts of the body to be destroyed. He said sophisticated techniques could be used to amplify the DNA, but noted such tests can only identify a person's family, not the individual.

Vanezis added that medical devices like a pacemaker or any artificial implants could be used to identify people by finding their registration details.

Another complicating factor is that much of the DNA material that would normally be used to help pinpoint victims — like toothbrushes or combs — were probably also incinerated in the blaze.

"Even if we get some DNA, the question will be, do we have anything to compare it to?" said Denise Syndercombe Court, a forensic science expert at King's College London.

In those cases, Syndercombe Court said experts would need a DNA sample from other family members or need to see if there are any reference samples available elsewhere, like a hospital blood or tissue test.

Syndercombe Court said even tiny fragments of teeth or bone could help, explaining that DNA tests can be run on as few as 10 to 20 cells. She said many identifications would probably be done via dental records, predicting that such samples would be more likely found from people who died of smoke inhalation, rather than those killed by the fire itself.

Syndercombe Court said the testing process would likely take months, as officials scour through remains, search for things like comparison DNA and go through a lengthy verification process.

"People won't want to give up easily," she said, adding that officials would likely also encounter other obstacles, like trying to find people who weren't expected to be at the tower or differentiating between siblings where little DNA remains.

The timing of the fire — after the recent deadly attacks in Manchester and London — also doesn't help.

"The capacity of labs to do this kind of testing is limited," Syndercombe Court said. "They're already working on forensic evidence from Manchester and London. This just adds to the backlog."

As of Friday, London police said 30 people have died in the Grenfell blaze and they are still searching for an unknown number of missing.

SEE ALSO: Grenfell Tower protesters storm Kensington town hall

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Olympic medalist Andrew Steele knows that our current knowledge about genetics isn't enough to give complete predictions about health.

Nevertheless the company where he is Head of Product, DNAFit, is one of a number of organizations drawing on genetic data to give customers advice about their diet and exercise regimen. For £249 for the complete package, it uses a customer's DNA sample to create a personalized profile which provides diet and training advice that it believes best suits them, according to some limited genetic studies.

"There’s no scientific proof that this can be a prediction — it’s just learning more about you so you can better reach your goal," Steele told Business Insider.

Speaking on the concept of DNA testing, Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, told Business Insider reporter Kevin Loria, "The tests are fun but their usefulness has yet to be shown," adding, "I'd rather spend the money on good dinners."

A position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics offered the same sentiment, stating: "The use of nutrigenetic testing to provide dietary advice is not ready for routine dietetics practice."

Nevertheless, DNAFit has worked with several high-profile clients such as Greg Rutherford and the Egyptian National Football team. It's also used by trainers at some David Lloyd gyms, and the company is an official wellness provider for employees of LinkedIn.

Still, Steele said the core of its business is now "ordinary consumers who take the DNA swab test at home."

With that in mind, we tried it out. Scroll down to see how the process went.

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I'm Ali, Business Insider UK's Lifestyle Editor. I'm pretty interested in everything health and fitness, so when DNAFit, the company that uses DNA samples to produce personalized exercise and nutrition reports based on a person's genetic makeup, offered me a free trial of its services, I happily obliged.

After making a profile on the DNAFIt website, I was sent a kit that looked like this.

It contained a swab pack with clear instructions, along with some information on the company, privacy, and code of practice.

Here's proof of how far we've come in science - in a world-first, researchers have recorded up-close footage of a single DNA molecule replicating itself, and it's raising questions about how we assumed the process played out.

The real-time footage has revealed that this fundamental part of life incorporates an unexpected amount of 'randomness', and it could force a major rethink into how genetic replication occurs without mutations.

"It's a real paradigm shift, and undermines a great deal of what's in the textbooks,"says one of the team, Stephen Kowalczykowski from the University of California, Davis.

"It's a different way of thinking about replication that raises new questions."

The DNA double helix consists of two intertwining strands of genetic material made up of four different bases - guanine, thymine, cytosine, and adenine (G, T, C and A).

Replication occurs when an enzyme called helicase unwinds and unzips the double helix into two single strands.

A second enzyme called primase attaches a 'primer' to each of these unraveled strands, and a third enzyme called DNA polymerase attaches at this primer, and adds additional bases to form a whole new double helix.

You can watch that process in the new footage below:

The fact that double helices are formed from two stands running in opposite directions means that one of these strands is known as the 'leading strand', which winds around first, and the other is the 'lagging strand', which follows the leader.

The new genetic material that's attached to each one during the replication process is an exact match to what was on its original partner.

So as the leading strand detaches, the enzymes add bases that are identical to those on the original lagging stand, and as the lagging strand detaches, we get material that's identical to the original leading strand.

Scientists have long assumed that the DNA polymerases on the leading and lagging strands somehow coordinate with each other throughout the replication process, so that one does not get ahead of the other during the unraveling process and cause mutations.

But this new footage reveals that there's no coordination at play here at all - somehow, each strand acts independently of the other, and still results in a perfect match each time.

The team extracted single DNA molecules from E. coli bacteria, and observed them on a glass slide. They then applied a dye that would stick to a completed double helix, but not a single strand, which means they could follow the progress of one double helix as it formed two new double helices.

While bacterial DNA and human DNA are different, they both use the same replication process, so the footage can reveal a lot about what goes on in our own bodies.

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Humans may have had pet cats for as long as 9,500 years. In 2004, archaeologists in Cyprus found a complete cat skeleton buried in a Stone Age village. Given that Cyprus has no native wildcats, the animal (or perhaps its ancestors) must have been brought to the island by humans all those millennia ago.

Yet despite our long history of keeping pet cats and their popularity today, felines aren't the easiest of animals to domesticate (as anyone who's felt a cat's cold shoulder might agree). There is also little evidence in the archaeological record to show how cats became our friends and went on to spread around the world.

Now a new DNA study has suggested how cats may have followed the development of Western civilisation along land and sea trade routes. This process was eventually helped by a more concerted breeding attempt in the 18th century, creating the much-loved domestic short-haired or "tabby" cat we know today.

While the origin of the domesticated cat is still a mystery, it seems likely the process of becoming pets took a very long time. It seems that, because cats are so independent, territorial and, at times, downright antisocial, they were not so easy to domesticate as the co-operative, pack-orientated wolf. It's likely that cats lived around humans for many centuries before succumbing to the lure of the fire and the cushion, and coming in from the cold to become true companions to humans.

The cat found in Cyprus corresponds to the Neolithic period of around 10,000 BC to 4,000 BC and the agricultural revolution. This was when people were beginning to settle down and become farmers instead of carrying on the nomadic hunter-gatherer existence that humans had followed for the previous 200,000 years or so. An earlier DNA study of other ancient remains confirms that domestic cats first emerged in what archaeologists call the Near East, the land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean where some of the first human civilisations emerged.

Of course, farming brings its own problems, including infestations of rats and mice, so perhaps it's not surprising that it is at this time that we see the first occurrence of a cat buried in a human grave. It's not hard to imagine that early farmers might have encouraged cats to stay around by helping them out with food during lean times of the year, and allowing them to come into their houses.

The gaps in the archaeological record mean that, after the Cyprus remains, evidence for domestic cats doesn't appear again for thousands of years. More cat graves then start to appear among ancient Egyptian finds (although there is also evidence for tame cats in Stone Age China). It was in Egypt that cats really got their furry paws under the table and became not just part of the family but objects of religious worship.

To track the spread of the domestic cat, the authors of the new study, published in Ecology and Evolution, examined DNA taken from bones and teeth of ancient cat remains. They also studied samples from the skin and hair of mummified Egyptian cats (and you thought emptying the litter tray was bad enough).

They found that all modern cats have ancestors among the Near Eastern and Egyptian cats, although the contributions of these two groups to the gene pool of today's cats probably happened at different times. From there, the DNA analysis suggests domestic cats spread out over a period of around 1,300 years to the 5th century AD, with remains recorded in Bulgaria, Turkey and Jordan.

Over the next 800 years, domestic cats spread further into northern Europe. But it wasn't until the 18th century that the traditional "mackerel" coat of the wildcat began to change in substantial numbers to the blotched pattern that we see in many modern tabbies. This suggests that, at that time, serious efforts to breed cats for appearance began – perhaps the origin of modern cat shows.

Another interesting finding is that domestic cats from earliest times, when moved around by humans to new parts of the world, promptly mated with local wildcats and spread their genes through the population. And, in the process, they permanently changed the gene pool of cats in the area.

This has particular relevance to today's efforts to protect the endangered European wildcat, because conservationists often think interbreeding with domestic cats is one of the greatest threats to the species. If this has been happening all over the old world for the past 9,000 or so years, then perhaps it's time to stop worrying about wildcats breeding with local moggies. This study suggests that none of the existing species of non-domesticated cats is likely to be pure. In fact, cats' ability to interbreed has helped them conquer the world.

Janet Hoole, Lecturer in Biology, Keele University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. 

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It started with rotting flesh.

Slicing into the green skin of a Hawaiian papaya ordinarily yields juicy, salmon-colored fruit that's almost custard-like in its consistency and sweetness. But in the early 1990s, one Hawaiian farmer instead found bits of whitish, dried-out flesh in his recently harvested fruit. On the skin were discolored spots resembling tiny rings.

It was a sign of trouble for hundreds of Hawaiian papaya farmers who, for the next several years, would lose field after field of their crop — altogether an $11-million dollar industry. The culprit was an incurable virus called Papaya Ring Spot Virus (PRSV).

In 1992, Dennis Gonsalves, a plant pathologist at Cornell University who grew up in the region most acutely affected by the virus, came up with a wild idea to stop it. He wanted to vaccinate the papaya crop from the virus using genetic engineering. To do it, Gonsalves and two other scientists (his wife Carol Gonsalves and David R. Lee) opened up the papaya genome and carefully inserted a gene from the ring spot virus into its genetic code.

After nearly a decade of work, Gonsalves and his team created a papaya plant that was genetically resistant to ring spot. The Gonsalves' crops blossomed across farms that had been decimated by the virus. Today, their fruit, which they named the Rainbow papaya, dominates Hawaii's papaya exports.

"We saved the papaya industry," Gonsalves says in a new film narrated by Neil de Grasse Tyson called "Food Evolution", which is set to premier on June 23. "That's it."

This wasn't the first time scientists tried to improve a fruit by tweaking its DNA — in 1994, the FDA approved the Flavr Savr brand of tomato, which scientists had genetically engineered to last longer by using a backwards copy of a ripening gene. But the Rainbow papaya represented the first time the technique was widely successful.

Yet instead of ending a storm, as the crop's name might suggest, the Rainbow papaya unleashed its own tempest.

"Food Evolution" dives into the controversy surrounding genetic modification, and opens with a 2013 scene of the Maui County Council floor. At the time, council member Margaret Wille was introducing a bill to ban GMOs from the Big Island.

Ground zero for genetically modified foods

"We are at a pivotal time in the history of this island," Wille told the Maui County Council in September 2013. "We have an opportunity to act, to do something. We would make history on this island. Let's make this island a model for the rest of the world."

Wille's proposed ban received more vocal support than any bill the council had previously considered — even more than its "perennially popular bids to decriminalize marijuana," according to a 2014 New York Times story by Amy Harmon.

Anti-GMO activists from around the world were video-conferenced in to the hearing to speak in support of the ban. Scientists, on the other hand, were not given as much time to speak. 

Papaya farmers voiced staunch opposition to the bill, which forced Wille to amend it to "grandfather in" the fruit. Essentially, that meant the Rainbow papaya was exempted from the ban, so long as farmers registered with the county and paid a $100 yearly fee.

"They're treating us like we’re criminals,” Ross Sibucao, the chair of the growers' association, told the Times in 2013.

The ban was approved and signed into law in 2014 but subsequently entered a kind of legislative limbo. In 2015, the federal government suggested it might overturn the ban, and sent to the US Court of Appeals for further debate. The following year, a federal judge killed the legislation, ruling that Hawaiian counties could not enact their own GMO bans.

But the GMO debate in Hawaii unleashed a cascade of bills around the country that aimed to limit or ban foods made with genetically modified ingredients. More than 20 other states, including California, Florida, and New York, have active anti-GMO campaigns; activists in many of them have pushed for legislation banning the products or requiring them to be labeled. Last year, Barack Obama signed the first national GMO labeling law, which requires food makers to list any genetically-modified ingredients in their products.

What scientists think of GMOs

A majority of scientific groups support genetically modified foods, citing dozens of studies that suggest the crops are safe for human consumption.

Organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the European Commission have publicly proclaimed GMO foods to be safe to eat. A large 2013 study on GMOs also found no "significant hazards directly connected with the use of genetically engineered crops." Last summer, Soylent, the producer of Silicon Valley's favorite meal-replacement drink, announced that it made its drinks with GMO ingredients.

Several scientists have also argued that nearly all the food we eat today has been genetically modified in some way. Over thousands of years, farmers have hand-picked the traits they want to see in their crops, breeding and cross-breeding plants with the sweetest flesh and the smallest seeds until they arrived at many of the fruits and veggies we eat today.

According to the USDA, the following American-grown products are genetically modified:

• 94% of soybeans
• 92% of corn
• 94% of cotton
• 95% of sugar beets, one of our main sources of sugar
• 90% of canola oil, commonly used in prepared foods and to deep-fry things like french fries
• 77% of Hawaiian papayas

"I hope people wake up one day and realize, 'Hey, almost everything is GM' — it's in the air, on our bodies, in our medicine. Maybe we can get over the GM foods controversy," Harvard geneticist George Church told Business Insider last year.

Gonsalves agrees. "We did the research and I stand by it," he said.

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For the first time, scientists have recorded DNA replication in real time. The scientists extracted DNA from E. coli bacteria, dyed it, and then watched the DNA replicate itself. The footage, alone, is fascinating. But the real shocker comes with what scientists discovered from the footage. They document their findings in the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

Footage courtesy of UC Davis.

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Woolly mammoths could be coming to a park near you sometime before 2027, thanks to funding from PayPal founder and tech luminary Peter Thiel.

That's according to a new book by Ben Mezrich called "Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures."

As the MIT Tech Review reported, Thiel made a quiet donation of $100,000 to a de-extinction organization called "Revive & Restore" in 2015.

The project to revive woolly mammoths has been going on for several years, but it gained new attention in February when a team of Harvard scientists said they intend to resurrect the furry creature within a decade.

The woolly mammoth went extinct 10,000 years ago, and in reality, the scientists wouldn't actually be bringing it back. Instead, they aim to create a hybrid animal using genetic material from an elephant and a woolly mammoth. To do that, they'd carefully combine a selection of DNA from both creatures using gene-editing technology Crispr, put the fetus into an artificial embryo, and accio! Woolly elephant. Elephammoth. Mammophant. 

Regardless of its name, the resulting animal would essentially be an elephant with mammoth features like long, shaggy hair, subcutaneous fat, and blood uniquely adapted for frigid temperatures.

Mammoths aren't the only animals that people want to resurrect — now-extinct or threatened species of reindeer, bison, wolves, tigers, and horses are also on the list of potential candidates. The movement to "resurrect" these creatures isn't limited to scientists, either; it's become a pet project of people across the globe, including a Russian father and son whose Kickstarter-funded "Pleistocene Park" aims to recreate a "vanished ice-age ecosystem."

Ethical debates about de-extinction projects are intense, with some scientists saying the animals could could help preserve endangered or threatened species and others saying it would destroy existing ecosystems.

Proponents say the project and others could help restore ecosystems and help fight climate change by bringing back plants like grasses and trees that suck up pollution. Other supporters say iconic resurrected animals could serve as a sort of "flagship species" which is used to encourage the public to protect the regions they represent. 

But some scientists disagree. Tori Herridge, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum of London, is one of the scientists who examined the 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth uncovered in Siberia in 2014. She wrote in The Guardian that "cloning [a woolly mammoth] would be ethically flawed," since we still don’t fully understand the role that many of these now-extinct animals once played in the wider ecosystem. 

The problem she raises, which has been pointed out by several other researchers as well, is that we don't know how these creatures' modern incarnations would affect other animals, plants, and the planet as a whole. 

"It is unclear still whether the mammoth steppe disappeared as a result of the loss of the mammoth or whether the mammoth disappeared because its habitat was lost, along with its ice age world," Herridge wrote. "It’s a big gamble to put your climate-change mitigation hopes on a herd of woolly mammoths."

SEE ALSO: Some of the scientists aiming to 'bring back' the woolly mammoth originally wanted to do it using 28,000-year-old cells

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NOW WATCH: Scientists have almost discovered how to resurrect a woolly mammoth

The human body is a remarkably complex machine, so it would make sense that it houses an abundance of DNA – the blueprints that help guide the body's growth and repair. But how much DNA do our bodies contain, exactly?

Produced by Alex Kuzoian

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The promise of using DNA as storage means you could conceivably save every photo you've ever taken, your entire iTunes library, and all 839 episodes of Doctor Who in a tiny molecule invisible to the naked eye—with plenty of room to spare.

But what if you could keep all that digital information on you at all times, even embedded in your skin? Harvard University geneticist George Church and his team think it might be possible one day.

They've used the gene-editing system CRISPR to insert a short animated image, or GIF, into the genomes of living Escherichia colibacteria. The researchers converted the individual pixels of each image into nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA.

They delivered the GIF into the living bacteria in the form of five frames: images of a galloping horse and rider, taken by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who produced the first stop-motion photographs in the 1870s. The researchers were then able to retrieve the data by sequencing the bacterial DNA. They reconstructed the movie with 90 percent accuracy by reading the pixel nucleotide code.

The method, detailed today in Nature, is specific to bacteria, but Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist and biologist at Columbia University who was not involved in the study, says it represents a scalable way to host information in living cells that could eventually be used in human cells.

The modern world is increasingly generating massive amounts of digital data, and scientists see DNA as a compact and enduring way of storing that information. After all, DNA from thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago can still be extracted and sequenced in a lab.

So far, much of the research into using DNA for storage has involved synthetic DNA made by scientists. And this GIF—only 36 by 26 pixels in size—represents a relatively small amount of information compared to what scientists have so far been able to encode in synthetic DNA. It's more challenging to upload information into living cells than synthesized DNA, though, because live cells are constantly moving, changing, dividing, and dying off.

Erlich says one benefit of hosting data in living cells like bacteria is better protection. For example, some bacteria still thrive after nuclear explosions, radiation exposure, or extremely high temperatures.

Beyond just storing data, Seth Shipman, a scientist working in Church's lab at Harvard who led the study, says he wants to use the technique to make "living sensors" that can record what is happening inside a cell or in its environment.

"What we really want to make are cells that encode biological or environmental information about what's going on within them and around them," Shipman says.

Though this technique won't be used anytime soon to load large quantities of data into your body, it could prove to be a valuable research tool. One possible use would be to record the molecular events that drive the evolution of cell types, such as the formation of neurons during brain development.

Shipman says you could deposit these bacterial hard drives in the body or anywhere in the world, record something you might be interested in, collect the bacteria, and sequence the DNA to see what information has been picked up along the way.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft wants to store data in DNA

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NOW WATCH: Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain in the world

DNA testing startup Helix has launched an "app store" for your genetic code with a number of partners offering tests on its new platform.

The company and its launch partners are coming out with 20 tests that are powered by Helix's DNA-sequencing technology.

The tests explore everything from your ancestry to nutrition to some health tests that will require a doctor's prescriptions, including one that tells you about your inherited cholesterol and diabetes risks. 

Changing the DNA-testing game

Every time you do a DNA test and send in a sample of spit, parts of your same genes are just getting sequenced again and again. Helix wants to cut out that physical step.

Instead of sending your spit 10 different places for 10 different tests, you could just let companies access your genetic code. Say you want to learn about your ancestry. You can pay for National Geographic's Geno 2.0 test and send in your tube of spit to Helix. Your results would come back through National Geographic's system, and you wouldn't necessarily have to do anything with Helix ever again once it's done sequencing your DNA.

But say you want to try Vinome, a test that uses insights from your DNA to determine your taste in wine. Since you've already had your spit analyzed, all you have to do is let Vinome access that information, and your results will come back to you in a matter of days, much faster than the six to eight weeks you might otherwise wait with a physical sample. It also cuts down on some of the cost.

It can also introduce more companies to the DNA-testing space. Instead of having to invest in physical labs and sequencing machines, all companies have to do is focus on the software that turns the analyzed DNA into useful reports. Kao said about a third of the tests coming out on the marketplace on Monday are from existing companies that haven't been in the DNA-testing space, such as Lose It!, a company that makes a weight-loss app.  

That could change the way we think about DNA. Helix cofounder Justin Kao told Business Insider that the hope is to make DNA as seamlessly integrated into people's lives as GPS has become. Through apps like Lyft or Yelp, we don't exactly think of ourselves as using GPS, since it's just something that powers the app.

"That's where we're going with genomics," Kao said. Instead of actively thinking about our DNA, it could just be integrated into an app that tells us about a certain fitness plan.

The tests range in cost from around $20 to the hundreds of dollars. 

SEE ALSO: I took a $30 test that told me if I had 'superhero' genes — and it was by far the most fun test I've taken

DON'T MISS: A genetics company that wants to sequence and analyze your entire genome for $999 just raised another $30 million

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NOW WATCH: A 45-year-long study discovered trends in successful hyper-intelligent children

In a step that some of the nation’s leading scientists have long warned against and that has never before been accomplished, biologists in Oregon have edited the DNA of viable human embryos efficiently and apparently with few mistakes, according to a report in Technology Review.

The experiment, using the revolutionary genome-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, was led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University. It went beyond previous experiments using CRISPR to alter the DNA of human embryos, all of which were conducted in China, in that it edited the genomes of many more embryos and targeted a gene associated with a significant human disease.

“This is the kind of research that is essential if we are to know if it’s possible to safely and precisely make corrections” in embryos’ DNA to repair disease-causing genes,” legal scholar and bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told STAT. “While there will be time for the public to decide if they want to get rid of regulatory obstacles to these studies, I do not find them inherently unethical.” Those regulatory barriers include a ban on using National Institutes of Health funding for experiments that use genome-editing technologies in human embryos.

The first experiment using CRISPR to alter the DNA of human embryos, in 2015, used embryos obtained from fertility clinics that had such serious genetic defects they could never have developed. In the new work, Technology Review reported, Mitalipov and his colleagues created human embryos using sperm donated by men with the genetic mutation that they planned to try to repair with CRISPR. The embryos are described as “clinical quality.” A 2017 experiment, also in China, used CRISPR to edit DNA in normal, presumably viable fertilized eggs, or one-cell human embryos.

Also in contrast to the experiments in China, those led by Mitalipov reportedly produced very few “off-target” effects, or editing of genes that CRISPR was supposed to leave alone. And the experiment avoided what is called “mosaicism,” in which only some cells of an embryo have the intended DNA changes. The embryos were not allowed to develop beyond a very early stage.

Because changing the DNA of an early embryo results in changes to cells that will eventually produce sperm and eggs, if the embryo is born and grows to adulthood, any children he or she has will inherit the genetic alteration, which is called germline editing. That has led to fears that such manipulations could alter the course of human evolution.

It has also triggered warnings about “designer babies,” in which parents customize their IVF embryos by adding, removing, or changing genes for certain traits.

A recent report on genome editing from the National Academies did not call for a moratorium on research into germline editing, arguing that it might one day be a way for some parents to have healthy, biological children, such as when both mother and father carry genetic mutations that cause severe diseases.

“But we anticipated that there would need to be a lot of research to see if you could make these changes without any unintentional effects,”said Charo, who co-chaired the Academies committee. Mitalipov, who did not respond to requests for comment, has now shown that the answer to that might be yes.

Some scholars questioned how important the new study is, however. Stanford University law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely tweeted that “the key point” is that no one has tried to implant any edited embryos. “Research embryos” that are “not to be transferred for possible implantation” are “not a big deal,” he argued.

This story has been updated with additional comments by experts and details of similar experiments.

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Why do we age? It’s a seemingly simple question that nonetheless scientists don’t have a great answer to. Some amount of aging seems to be controlled by our genetic makeup, while other evidence shows that our cells have an upper limit to how many times they can divide.

But a new study points to a different player: a special population of cells in a tiny region of the brain. Middle-aged mice that got an infusion of stem cells to the hypothalamus — the hormone-releasing center of the brain — had less memory loss and longer lives than normal mice, indicating that the hypothalamus plays a role in whole-body aging.

The findings open the tantalizing — though far off — possibility that these same changes could one day be slowed in humans.

“This is a really important study … in the field of aging research,” said Dr. Shin-Ichiro Imai, professor of developmental biology at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study. “It’s getting clearer that a very tiny part of our brain — the hypothalamus — is playing a very important role in controlling age and longevity in mammals.”

The brain’s aging center

The main job of the hypothalamus has long been thought to be secreting hormones that govern our most basic desires: water, food, sleep, sex.

But in 2013, Imai and others came upon a surprising discovery: The hypothalamus plays a major role in controlling aging. Mice that lived longer also had unusually high levels of activity in their hypothalamus.

The finding led to an obvious follow-up question: How does it work?

The current study by Dongsheng Cai and colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine provides an answer to that question: stem cells. Stem cells are found in certain regions of the adult brain, including the hypothalamus, where they replace cells that die off.

To determine the role of the stem cells, researchers did two parallel experiments: killing off hypothalamic stem cells in one group of middle-aged mice, and adding more stem cells to another.

Three months later, behavioral tests showed that mice with depleted stem cells had poorer memory, slower learning, and died sooner. The mice also had issues that went beyond their brains — like poor muscle endurance on a treadmill.

ut those mice that got a boost to stem cells in the hypothalamus showed an opposite, rejuvenating effect. They were more curious, ran farther, and lived about 15 percent longer than normal mice.

But how exactly that was happening was still puzzling, since the effects were too quick to be the result of the stem cells transforming into new neurons. So Cai’s team tested the fluid around the stem cells, and found that the cells released tiny packets loaded with RNA, known as exosomes. So they isolated those exosomes and injected just those into a group of mice — and lo and behold, those mice also lived longer and showed better memory retention, indicating that some signal stem cells are releasing appears to be governing aging writ large. The results were published Wednesday in Nature.

A route to the clinic?

So, could such a finding point a way toward a human fountain of youth?

Grigori Enikolopov, professor of developmental genetics at Stony Brook University, said that they could — though any leap from mouse studies to human therapies comes with, “many, many disclaimers.”

Still, “if you take neural stem cells from a particular person … in principle, you could get them to secrete [exosomes], collect them, and introduce them back into the brain,” he said.

New methods make it possible for researchers to grow brain stem cells from a skin biopsy. Exosomes from these cells could then be administered to a patient. But Imai noted that it is unclear whether the exosomes could pass the blood-brain barrier — a barrier that protects the brain from infection, but also makes it difficult to get drugs into the brain. If the exosomes cross the barrier, scientists may be able to deliver them through a simple intravenous injection — instead of boring into the brain.

Cai’s group is now sifting through the dozens of RNAs released by hypothalamic stem cells to identify which have the strongest anti-aging effects. And they are also trying to figure out where these RNAs end up — in the hypothalamus, other parts of the brain, or far-flung regions of the body.

“[During] the next few years, we still want to understand the whole picture as completely as we can,” said Cai. “Then we can more seriously get to the therapeutic stage.”

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The announcement by researchers in Portland, Oregon that they’ve successfully modified the genetic material of a human embryo took some people by surprise.

With headlines referring to “groundbreaking” research and “designer babies,” you might wonder what the scientists actually accomplished. This was a big step forward, but hardly unexpected. As this kind of work proceeds, it continues to raise questions about ethical issues and how we should we react.

What did researchers actually do?

For a number of years now we have had the ability to alter genetic material in a cell, using a technique called CRISPR.

The DNA that makes up our genome comprises long sequences of base pairs, each base indicated by one of four letters. These letters form a genetic alphabet, and the “words” or “sentences” created from a particular order of letters are the genes that determine our characteristics.

Sometimes words can be “misspelled” or sentences slightly garbled, resulting in a disease or disorder. Genetic engineering is designed to correct those mistakes. CRISPR is a tool that enables scientists to target a specific area of a gene, working like the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word, to remove a section and insert the “correct” sequence.

In the last decade, CRISPR has been the primary tool for those seeking to modify genes – human and otherwise. Among other things, it has been used in experiments to make mosquitoes resistant to malaria, genetically modify plants to be resistant to disease, explore the possibility of engineered pets and livestock, and potentially treat some human diseases (including HIV, hemophilia and leukemia).

Up until recently, the focus in humans has been on changing the cells of a single individual, and not changing eggs, sperm and early embryos – what are called the “germline” cells that pass traits along to offspring. The theory is that focusing on non-germline cells would limit any unexpected long-term impact of genetic changes on descendants. At the same time, this limitation means that we would have to use the technique in every generation, which affects its potential therapeutic benefit.

Earlier this year, an international committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that, while highlighting the concerns with human germline genetic engineering, laid out a series of safeguards and recommended oversight. The report was widely regarded as opening the door to embryo-editing research.

That is exactly what happened in Oregon. Although this is the first study reported in the United States, similar research has been conducted in China. This new study, however, apparently avoided previous errors we’ve seen with CRISPR – such as changes in other, untargeted parts of the genome, or the desired change not occurring in all cells. Both of these problems had made scientists wary of using CRISPR to make changes in embryos that might eventually be used in a human pregnancy. Evidence of more successful (and thus safer) CRISPR use may lead to additional studies involving human embryos.

What didn’t happen in Oregon?

First, this study did not entail the creation of “designer babies,” despite some news headlines. The research involved only early stage embryos, outside the womb, none of which was allowed to develop beyond a few days.

In fact, there are a number of existing limits – both policy-based and scientific – that will create barriers to implanting an edited embryo to achieve the birth of a child. There is a federal ban on funding gene editing research in embryos; in some states, there are also total bans on embryo research, regardless of how funded. In addition, the implantation of an edited human embryos would be regulated under the federal human research regulations, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and potentially the federal rules regarding clinical laboratory testing.

Beyond the regulatory barriers, we are a long way from having the scientific knowledge necessary to design our children. While the Oregon experiment focused on a single gene correction to inherited diseases, there are few human traits that are controlled by one gene. Anything that involves multiple genes or a gene/environment interaction will be less amenable to this type of engineering. Most characteristics we might be interested in designing – such as intelligence, personality, athletic or artistic or musical ability – are much more complex.

Second, while this is a significant step forward in the science regarding the use of the CRISPR technique, it is only one step. There is a long way to go between this and a cure for various disease and disorders. This is not to say that there aren’t concerns. But we have some time to consider the issues before the use of the technique becomes a mainstream medical practice.

So what should we be concerned about?

Taking into account the cautions above, we do need to decide when and how we should use this technique.

Should there be limits on the types of things you can edit in an embryo? If so, what should they entail? These questions also involve deciding who gets to set the limits and control access to the technology.

We may also be concerned about who gets to control the subsequent research using this technology. Should there be state or federal oversight? Keep in mind that we cannot control what happens in other countries. Even in this country it can be difficult to craft guidelines that restrict only the research someone finds objectionable, while allowing other important research to continue. Additionally, the use of assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, for example) is largely unregulated in the U.S., and the decision to put in place restrictions will certainly raise objections from both potential parents and IVF providers.

Moreover, there are important questions about cost and access. Right now most assisted reproductive technologies are available only to higher-income individuals. A handful of states mandate infertility treatment coverage, but it is very limited. How should we regulate access to embryo editing for serious diseases? We are in the midst of a widespread debate about health care, access and cost. If it becomes established and safe, should this technique be part of a basic package of health care services when used to help create a child who does not suffer from a specific genetic problem? What about editing for non-health issues or less serious problems – are there fairness concerns if only people with sufficient wealth can access?

So far the promise of genetic engineering for disease eradication has not lived up to its hype. Nor have many other milestones, like the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep, resulted in the feared apocalypse. The announcement of the Oregon study is only the next step in a long line of research. Nonetheless, it is sure to bring many of the issues about embryos, stem cell research, genetic engineering and reproductive technologies back into the spotlight. Now is the time to figure out how we want to see this gene-editing path unfold.

Jessica Berg, Law Dean; Professor of Law; and Professor of Bioethics & Public Health, Case Western Reserve University

SEE ALSO: In a first, scientists have edited the DNA of human embryos that could turn into people using CRISPR

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NOW WATCH: First ever close-up footage of DNA replication will have experts rewriting science textbooks

• A team of scientists from the US, China, and South Korea successfully altered the DNA of human embryos that could theoretically become people for the first time in history.
• They successfully altered a mutated gene linked with a heart disease that can cause sudden cardiac arrest.
• The new study is a significant advancement from the first experiments on human embryos using gene-modifying technique CRISPR-Cas9.
• Because their changes were geared toward fixing a problematic gene rather than swapping genes or creating an unnatural one, they see their work as fundamentally different from quests to create so-called "designer babies."

Tweaking the genes of human embryos that could theoretically be brought to term and grown to adulthood is a feat that sounded like science fiction — until this week.

In a historical first, an international team of scientists from the US, China, and South Korea successfully altered the DNA of viable human embryos, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

Using the cutting-edge genome-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on multiple embryos, the researchers corrected a gene known to cause a type of heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that can cause sudden cardiac arrest.

Despite the team's stated goal of working towards disease eradication, much of the attention around CRISPR has focused on the potential for using the technique to create so-called "designer babies"— humans with higher-than normal levels of intelligence or athletic abilities.

But on a call with reporters on Tuesday, the authors of the study firmly distanced themselves from that idea.

Because he and his team simply corrected mutated genes, they don't consider their work in line with efforts to create super-humans.

"We don’t like the word editing because we didn’t edit anything. All we did was modify a mutant gene back to the norm," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a biologist who heads the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University and was the leading author on the paper, on the call.

Mitalipov added that he believes it's "unlikely" that the technique would be used for genetic modification.

"Our program is toward correcting mutant [i.e. diseased] genes," said Mitalipov. "We have to draw a line and the regulatory agencies have to decide what is it that we have to treat and if it’s something that’s not disease. I think it will be up to them to decide where to draw the line."

The new study is a significant advancement from the first experiments on human embryos using CRISPR. The first, done in China in 2015, involved embryos with serious genetic defects that prevented them from being brought to term. Mitalipov's work, by contrast, involved human embryos that he and his team created with sperm donated by men who had the genetic mutation leading to the heart disease they were trying to edit out of the embryos.

“This is the kind of research that is essential if we are to know if it’s possible to safely and precisely make corrections” in embryos’ DNA to repair disease-causing genes,” R. Alta Charo, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told STAT News on Monday when word of the forthcoming study leaked.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the disease caused by the genetic mutation that Mitalipov and his colleagues successfully edited out of the human embryos, affects about 1 in every 500 people and involves a thickening of the heart muscle that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood. It can cause shortness of breath, chest pain, and in some cases cardiac arrest, which can be fatal.

The scientists on the call said that while they targeted this particular disease in the experiment, they hope to carry out similar future experiments on other genetic diseases. Unlike other approaches to treating or preventing disease, CRISPR involves permanent changes to cells that will eventually turn into people and produce their own sperm, eggs, and, possibly, children.

Because those children would inherit the same altered genes — a biologic process known as germline editing — some bioethicists have raised questions about its effects on human evolution more broadly.

"None of the embryos we generated in this study were for reproductive purposes but if they were, the idea is that they wouldn’t carry this mutation so the parents wouldn’t have to worry about transferring this to their children, said Mitalipov. "More importantly, the children wouldn’t transmit it further either. This would completely eradicate this disease in this lineage for this family."

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NEW YORK — While President Donald Trump has thrust transgender people back into the conflict between conservative and liberal values in the United States, geneticists are quietly working on a major research effort to unlock the secrets of gender identity.

A consortium of five research institutions in Europe and the United States, including Vanderbilt University Medical Center, George Washington University and Boston Children's Hospital, is looking to the genome, a person's complete set of DNA, for clues about whether transgender people are born that way.

Two decades of brain research have provided hints of a biological origin to being transgender, but no irrefutable conclusions.

Now scientists in the consortium have embarked on what they call the largest-ever study of its kind, searching for a genetic component to explain why people assigned one gender at birth so persistently identify as the other, often from very early childhood.

Researchers have extracted DNA from the blood samples of 10,000 people, 3,000 of them transgender and the rest non-transgender, or cisgender. The project is awaiting grant funding to begin the next phase: testing about 3 million markers, or variations, across the genome for all of the samples.

Searching for genetic links

Knowing what variations transgender people have in common, and comparing those patterns to those of cisgender people in the study, may help investigators understand what role the genome plays in everyone's gender identity.

"If the trait is strongly genetic, then people who identify as trans will share more of their genome, not because they are related in nuclear families but because they are more anciently related," said Lea Davis, leader of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute.

The search for the biological underpinnings is taking on new relevance as the battle for transgender rights plays out in the US political arena.

One of the first acts of the new Trump administration was to revoke Obama-era guidelines directing public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice. Last week, the president announced on Twitter he intends to ban transgender people from serving in the military.

Texas lawmakers are debating a bathroom bill that would require people to use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate. North Carolina in March repealed a similar law after a national boycott cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business.

Currently, the only way to determine whether people are transgender is for them to self-identify as such. While civil rights activists contend that should be sufficient, scientists have taken their search to the lab.

That quest has made some transgender people nervous. If a "cause" is found it could posit a "cure," potentially opening the door to so-called reparative therapies similar to those that attempt to turn gay people straight, advocates say. Others raise concerns about the rights of those who may identify as trans but lack biological "proof."

Davis stressed that her study does not seek to produce a genetic test for being transgender, nor would it be able to.

Instead, she said, she hopes the data will lead to better care for transgender people, who experience wide health disparities compared to the general population.

One-third of transgender people reported a negative healthcare experience in the previous year such as verbal harassment, refusal of treatment or the need to teach their doctors about transgender care, according to a landmark survey of nearly 28,000 people released last year by the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Some 40 percent have attempted suicide, almost nine times the rate for the general population.

"We can use this information to help train doctors and nurses to provide better care to trans patients and to also develop amicus briefs to support equal rights legislation," said Davis, who is also director of research for Vanderbilt's gender health clinic.

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee has one of the world's largest DNA databanks. It also has emerged as a leader in transgender healthcare with initiatives such as the Trans Buddy Program, which pairs every transgender patient with a volunteer to help guide them through their healthcare visits.

The study has applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health and is exploring other financial sources to provide the $1 million needed to complete the genotyping, expected to take a year to 18 months. Analysis of the data would take about another six months and require more funding, Davis said.

The other consortium members are Vrije University in Amsterdam and the FIMABIS institute in Malaga, Spain.

Probing the brain

Until now, the bulk of research into the origins of being transgender has looked at the brain.

Neurologists have spotted clues in the brain structure and activity of transgender people that distinguish them from cisgender subjects.

A seminal 1995 study was led by Dutch neurobiologist Dick Swaab, who was also among the first scientists to discover structural differences between male and female brains. Looking at postmortem brain tissue of transgender subjects, he found that male-to-female transsexuals had clusters of cells, or nuclei, that more closely resembled those of a typical female brain, and vice versa.

Swaab's body of work on postmortem samples was based on just 12 transgender brains that he spent 25 years collecting. But it gave rise to a whole new field of inquiry that today is being explored with advanced brain scan technology on living transgender volunteers.

Among the leaders in brain scan research is Ivanka Savic, a professor of neurology with Sweden's Karolinska Institute and visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Her studies suggest that transgender men have a weakened connection between the two areas of the brain that process the perception of self and one's own body. Savic said those connections seem to improve after the person receives cross-hormone treatment.

Her work has been published more than 100 times on various topics in peer-reviewed journals, but she still cannot conclude whether people are born transgender.

"I think that, but I have to prove that," Savic said.

A number of other researchers, including both geneticists and neurologists, presume a biological component that is also influenced by upbringing.

But Paul McHugh, a university professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has emerged as the leading voice challenging the "born-this-way" hypothesis.

He encourages psychiatric therapy for transgender people, especially children, so that they accept the gender assigned to them at birth.

McHugh has gained a following among social conservatives, while incensing LGBT advocates with comments such as calling transgender people "counterfeit."

Last year he co-authored a review of the scientific literature published in The New Atlantis journal, asserting there was scant evidence to suggest sexual orientation and gender identity were biologically determined.

The article drew a rebuke from nearly 600 academics and clinicians who called it misleading.

McHugh told Reuters he was "unmoved" by his critics and says he doubts additional research will reveal a biological cause.

"If it were obvious," he said, "they would have found it long ago."

Editing by Marla Dickerson

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The New York-based doctor who helped a couple have a child using DNA from three people has been told by the US Food and Drug Administration that he can't go ahead with clinical trials meant to test the technique.

Last year, John Zhang, the founder of New Hope Fertility Center, pioneered a new type of in-vitro fertilization that involves transferring DNA from the mother's egg into a hollowed-out egg donated by a younger woman.

But the work violates federal legislation that forbids implanting genetically modified embryos, so after fertilizing the egg with the father's sperm, Zhang went to Mexico, where he inserted the embryo into the mother's womb.

A healthy baby boy was born in April 2016.

On Friday, the FDA sent Zhang a strongly worded letter saying he must stop marketing the technique in the US The move is a sign that the federal government is taking a hard line against the development of technologies to make genetically modified babies, even in cases where doing so would prevent severe disease.

According to the FDA, Zhang then requested a meeting with the agency to ask permission to carry out a clinical trial using the technique in the US The agency subsequently denied the meeting. Zhang has since been marketing his fertility procedure to women with certain genetic diseases and older women having trouble conceiving through a new company called Darwin Life. The creation of the company was first reported by MIT Technology Review.

Modifying embryos for research is not illegal under US law as long as federal funds are not used to carry out the work. But implanting one in a woman's womb so that a baby can develop is prohibited. The FDA letter also says Zhang did not have permission to export the modified embryos. New Hope Fertility Center did not respond to a request for comment. 

Zhang's technology, called "spindle nuclear transfer," was initially performed on the eggs of a Jordanian woman to prevent her from passing on a serious neurological disease to her children. The woman and her husband previously had two children who died from the condition, called Leigh syndrome, which is caused by faulty mitochondria.

As a result of the procedure, the woman gave birth to a child that technically has three genetic parents, since healthy mitochondria in the hollowed-out donor egg has its own DNA.

The baby wasn't the first to be born with three genetic parents—more than a dozen babies were born with an older three-person IVF technique in the 1990s before the FDA intervened and decided to regulate the procedure like a new drug. The treatment was never approved.  

Some evidence suggests that malfunctioning mitochondria are one reason why older women can't easily produce eggs, which is why Zhang thinks using a young egg will help. The idea is controversial, though, since it's unknown whether children born using this method will have long-term side effects.

Zhang told MIT Technology Review in June that he was in the process of assessing a handful of women over 40 who may be able to benefit, but that he would have to go outside the US to do the procedure.

A similar treatment was approved in the UK late last year, but only when a couple is at very high risk of having a child with a life-threatening genetic disease. Clinics wishing to perform the procedure must first obtain a license from the UK government.  

Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who first called attention to the FDA letter to Zhang, says prohibitions on this kind of research encourage rogue scientists to "look for settings with lower regulatory standards."

"The US ban on genetically modifying embryos merits reassessment," he says. "There will always be countries with lax laws, or an inability to enforce regulations, and some entrepreneurs will flock to such jurisdictions and try to take advantage of them."

Naomi Kahn, a professor at the George Washington University Law School who specializes in reproductive technology, says she isn't surprised by the FDA's reaction to Zhang's company, Darwin Life. But she worries that by restricting the FDA from even considering applications for clinical trials that involve modifying embryos, the US will lose its edge in science and medical research.

"Other countries are ahead of us on this," she says. "We need to be more sensitive to what's going on internationally with this technology."

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VENTURA, Calif. (AP) — Investigators say a suspect accused of burglarizing a Southern California home took a bathroom break and left DNA evidence in the toilet that led to his arrest.

Detective Tim Lohman of the Ventura County Sheriff's Office says the suspect did not flush during the October break-in in the city of Thousand Oaks.

He says that allowed investigators to collect evidence to conduct a DNA profile.

That profile matched another DNA profile in a national database and detectives tracked down the suspect at his home.

Andrew David Jensen was arrested July 28 on suspicion of burglary.

Lohman did not know Tuesday if Jensen has an attorney.

Jensen is scheduled to make his first court appearance Wednesday.

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It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86% European, and … 14% Sub-Saharan African.”

The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100% white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk — some 48 hours after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — was coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window into how these extremist groups think about their genes.

Reckoning with results

Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in 1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of deep archive of online hate.

To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000 members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry — specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.

And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used similar data to better understand how populations move and change.

“There is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests — geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these results,” said Panofsky.

A community’s genetic rules

Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.

“When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,” explained Jhulianna Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes outliers whose genetic data don’t seem to match with what they wrote on their survey.

But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’ ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more “white” result.

J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though, is another story. “The science is often murky in those areas and gives ambiguous information,” he said. “They try to give specific percentages from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is an artificially precise estimate.”

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

That’s a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry testing companies hope to promote.

“Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” the talk show host Trisha Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn’t stop him from redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse the data until it matched his racist worldview.

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