Codon News: Cloned Mongolian Horses
Codon News: Cloned Mongolian Horses
Plus: More problems for lab-grown meat.
Hey there.
Tap tap tap.
Today, we’ve got news about AI mind readers, a child who underwent brain surgery while in the womb, and (another) problem with lab-grown meat. Scroll to the end for a beautiful chart about the Anthropocene & some details on insect engineering companies. Fun.
Also. news items are now sent on Thursdays. Research roundups are sent on Sundays. Essays in-between (sometimes).
Let’s dive in.
🔥 Picks of the Week
News highlights in 3 minutes.
1/ The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat
Back in April, a little-known paper appeared on the bioRxiv preprint server and proclaimed from the mountain top: “Hear ye, hear ye, those of you who spend restless nights dwelling upon the inefficiencies and cruelties of our modern agricultural system. I bring bad tidings! Cultured meat, grown in the lab, could release between 4 and 25-times more emissions than the global beef industry! If it ever scales commercially, anyway.”
The proclamation is troubling; the preprint even more-so. It suggests that each kilogram of lab-grown meat would produce somewhere between 246 and 1,508 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions (a wide estimate, I know) with current technologies. This will fall over time.
But even before this preprint, it was unclear whether cultivated meat would ever be produced cheaply enough, and at a high enough scale, to compete with the normal stuff. Consider the cost: You need to “feed” the cells with protein building blocks, and amino acids alone account for $7 to $8 per pound of cultivated meat, according to some experts.
Or consider the scale: We need to grow these cells in massive bioreactors (and keep them completely sterile). But where are these bioreactors going to come from? The waiting list to rent out a large bioreactor, last I heard, was something like 4 years.
Despite the trouble, there is hope. The first lab-grown burger was made for $330,000 back in 2013. Now, it costs about $9. I agree that cultivated meat is a bet worth taking, because we’ll learn a lot, even if it fails. Consider it our moonshot for food.
Read more in IFL Science & Asterisk Magazine
2/ Little Cloned Horse
Wild Mongolian horses, called takhi, once roamed the mighty Asian steppes. There are just 1,900 left today, and “nearly all of them are descended from just 12 animals captured from native habitats between 1910 and 1960,” according to reporting by Emily Mullin in WIRED.
A company called ViaGen has now cloned these horses (and they’ll do the same for your dog for about $50k). Seven embryos, made from skin cells collected from a museum-preserved stallion, were implanted into 7 mares. Three miscarried, but the other four advanced into the first trimester. In February, the second cloned takhi was born.
“The scientists behind the effort say this second birth is evidence that cloning could be a viable strategy for saving endangered species.” Just don’t hold your breath for woolly mammoths!
Read more in WIRED.
3/ A Vaccine for RSV
A vaccine called Arexvy, and marketed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been approved by the FDA for adults aged 60 and older. It is used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which causes about 60,000 hospitalizations in this age group each year.
The vaccine was 82.6 percent effective in preventing lower respiratory tract illness this age group in a randomized, controlled trial with 250,000 participants. Those data were published in The New England Journal of Medicine in February. The vaccine also reduced the risk of developing severe RSV infections by 94.1 percent.
Scientists have been trying to make a vaccine against RSV since the 1960s, and this is the first success story. There’s a nice account of that history in Nature.
Read more in The New York Times & Ars Technica
4/ AI: Mind Reader
If you stick some people in an fMRI machine, and have them listen to a podcast, you can use AI to decode some of the words and phrases that they are hearing. Non-invasive brain decoding! Now everyone can hear me obsessing over whether or not I turned off the oven!
For a recent study in Nature Neuroscience, researchers first trained an AI model (GPT-1 from OpenAI) on:
English sentences scraped from Reddit,
240 stories from TheMoth Radio Hour,
and transcriptions from the Modern Love podcast.
Then, three participants visited a laboratory in Austin, Texas and spent 16 hours over several days listening to the podcasts while in an fMRI scanner, according to reporting in The New York Times. “The researchers then used a large language model to match patterns in the brain activity to the words and phrases that the participants had heard.”
The model worked even when people listened to new podcast episodes; those that weren’t part of the training data. In one instance, “a user heard the words ‘I don’t have my driver’s license yet.’ The decoder returned the sentence ‘She has not even started to learn to drive yet,’” according to reporting in MIT Technology Review.
When a person “resisted” listening by counting to sevens, or by naming different animals, the AI model’s accuracy plummeted. In the future, maybe the best way to defend our thoughts will be to think about dogs.
(This paper was submitted to the journal more than a year ago, in April 2022. What might be possible today?)
Read more in MIT Technology Review & The New York Times
📤 In the News
Other quick-hit news items you might have missed.
Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug, donanemab, slowed mental decline by 35% for a fraction of the 1,736 people who enrolled in a clinical trial. But full results have not yet been published. Remember that “the press release is all any of us have to go on, which means that we are surely looking at the most optimistic take possible,” writes Derek Lowe. (link)
A child successfully underwent brain surgery — while in the womb! — and is now 7 weeks old. (link)
Of the 22 people on Neuralink’s animal research oversight board, 19 were employees of the company, according to reporting in Reuters. (link)
A more representative human genome sequence, based on DNA from 47 ethnically diverse people, was published yesterday. (link)
After growing yeast for 3,000 generations, the organisms clump together and change “from a soft, squishy substance to something with the toughness of wood.” The dawn of multicellularity was…wood? (link)
“Less than five” children in the U.K. have been born using mitochondrial replacement, in which a mother’s defective mitochondria are replaced with healthy ones from a donor. Also referred to as three-person in vitro fertilization. The first “three-person IVF” happened in the U.S. in 2016. (link)
Moderna made $680 million more than expected in the first quarter of 2023, but the company still intends to hike its COVID-19 vaccine price by 400%. (link)
Emily Whitehead was the first child to receive a CAR-T cell therapy. It cured her of cancer nearly 11 years ago, and she graduates from high school in two weeks. (link)
The top private raises in biotech from April; Orbital Therapeutics tops the list at $270M. A woman’s health company, called Antiva Biosciences, also made the list at $53M (they’re making therapies to treat HPV infections.) (link)
This is interesting; Genemod just raised $4.5M in seed funding to make, basically, a high-powered electronic lab notebook that tracks everything “from data acquisition and project documentation to inventory management and reporting.” (link)
Lots of scientists are talking about how CRISPR-based gene therapies will be too expensive (an estimated $2M for Vertex’s sickle-cell disease treatment), but few are actually proposing solutions. (link)
🧠 Musings
Fun stuff that has little to do with biotech.
Romans lost a lot of jewelry in their bathhouses. People 2,000 years ago == people today. (link)
We finally figured out how smell receptors, in our noses, capture scent molecules in the air. Beautiful stuff. (link)
Theodor Diener, the first person to discover viroids (an infectious agent that is 1/80th the size of a typical virus) has died at 102. (link)
Da Vinci’s notebooks are blotched with black stains. Now we know why: Mercury sulphide in the protective paper. (link)
Those who are “awed” more often “are kinder, more environmentally friendly, and better connected to others.” Another excuse to read this newsletter? (link)
Italian scientists made a fully rechargeable battery using entirely edible components. Most of the batteries used in ingestible cameras (like for colonoscopies) are super toxic. Perhaps this could replace those someday. (link)
A perusal of 5,000 papers suggests that up to 24% (in medicine) could be “made up or plagiarized.” Prior studies had suggested 2%. The real number is probably somewhere in-between. (link)
OpenAI is building a tool to identify which parts of an LLM are responsible for a given behavior. They’re staring with GPT-2. The code is currently open-sourced on GitHub. (link)
The U.S. is running out of monkeys for biomedical research. (link)
📈 Data Brief
One chart about biology and our world.
Abundance vs. Biomass
There are an estimated one ninillion bacteria on planet Earth. Or, put another way, there are one billion microbes on Earth for every star in the observable Universe.
But the biomass of bacteria is relatively small — about 100 billion metric tons in total. There are far fewer trees, but their total mass is much greater — about 450 billion metric tons. Plants alone account for 80 percent of all biomass on Earth. This planet is so beautiful, and so diverse. But now, most of it is concrete (4,000 pounds are made each year for every man, woman, and child.)
⚒️ Note of the Week
On companies and underrated ideas.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how gene-editing gets used in the real world. An application that I’ve heard very little about is engineered mosquitoes, and how they can be used to curb diseases. I’m familiar with Oxitec, sure, but they’re really just a big fish in a small pond. There are many other up-and-coming insect engineering startups. Here are a few:
Algenex is using engineered insects to mass-produce proteins (and Ynsect uses mealworms to do the same.) Synvect has made a CRISPR-based tool to control insect populations, be they mosquitoes or flies or anything else. Their technology has already been licensed to Agragene, a pest control company specializing in agriculture. (FMC is another company that specializes in killing off insects that damage crops, but they do it by spraying pheromones on the plants.) Entocycle makes insect farms. Protix and Hexafly use insects to make food ingredients.
See you next week! In the meantime, find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
— Niko McCarty
Disclosure: The views expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not represent the views of any company or university with which I am affiliated.