{"id":6076,"date":"2016-04-12T14:30:57","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T19:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6076"},"modified":"2016-04-18T19:03:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T00:03:54","slug":"xna-the-x-factor-in-humanitys-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6076","title":{"rendered":"XNA — the “X-Factor” in Humanity’s Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I regularly peruse the Real Clear Science<\/a> web site and usually open up two or three articles from their latest daily list of interesting science articles. A frequent theme of the articles that the RCS editors select for their list regards “how the world could\/might\/will end”. If you are in a gloomy mood, then you can find examples of such articles here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A few days ago, the RCS daily list included an article from the Science20 web site entitled “Could Anything Make Humans Extinct In the Near Future<\/a>?” The author (Robert Walker, an inventor and computer geek) reviews more than fifteen possible candidates, including climate change, a comet or asteroid strike, pandemics, overpopulation, runaway nanotechnology, nuclear war, etc. According to Walker, the human race is pretty hard to kill. Many of the candidate “extinction events” could severely reduce our numbers and would probably end civilization as we now know it; but somewhere on the planet, a band of humans would mostly likely live on despite all the calamity. <\/p>\n

(FOOTNOTE, strangely enough, Walker did not consider an H-Bomb “Doomsday Machine<\/a>” like the one in the movie Doctor Strangelove<\/a>. But then again, in that movie, the good Doctor himself came up with a way to save humankind with a scheme to send small groups to live in caves for the next 25 years. So perhaps Dr. Strangelove was just another example of how hard it is to totally eradicate the human species.)<\/p>\n

Overall, Walker seems pretty optimistic that the homo sapiens species is quite robust and thus is not headed for extinction in the foreseeable future. However, there is one thing that does seem to scare him. And if this thing spooks a sunny Pollyanna like Walker, then it is probably worth learning about. To be honest, I have heard or read next to nothing on this particular topic thus far. Thus it’s time to find out more.<\/p>\n

This threat is something of a hybrid between a pandemic and an evil “gray goo<\/a>” nanobot invasion. It is called “xenobiology<\/a>“, i.e. life forms that do not rely on the DNA molecules that every living thing here on earth depend upon; instead, these life forms have a different kind of directive mechanism and protein-building scheme at their core, something that is being called “XNA<\/a>“. As you know, with CRISPR and other amazing technology advances in gene editing, bio-scientists can now do amazing things in terms of rearranging the DNA for most any microbe, plant, animal, whatever. We can now custom-design most any form of life. <\/p>\n

But not content with that, science is now trying to kick it up a notch. Why be stuck with the standard 4-base \/ double-helix replicating mechanism for biological beings, i.e. DNA and RNA? Why not come up with a better, more streamlined, more efficient molecular arrangement to take the place of DNA? Perhaps a whole new cellular controlling and reproducing mechanism could do a lot more than DNA is presently capable of, things that evolution just hasn’t gotten around yet to shaping DNA for. <\/p>\n

Given these possibilities, science is definitely interested and is devoting more and more resources into developing XNA life. A research group in California has already come up with an “alien DNA” which retains the basics of the DNA helix but uses un-natural enzyme elements in place of the familiar adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine elements. Eventually, the whole structure of DNA could be re-done, as to make it more simple and efficient. (DNA is now seen to be something of a clunky, cobbled-together-over-time mechanism rather typical of evolution, something akin to the various Microsoft Office products like Word and Excel; it was pieced together over many years, not designed from scratch to be the most simple and elegant way of accomplishing what it does).<\/p>\n

The problem is this: we will soon be experimenting with new forms of super-life that might do all kinds of wondrous things, like grow wheat and carrots and peaches with only a fraction of the water, soil nutrients and warm temperatures now required, or produce re-grown arms or knee joints that are better than the ones that went bad on us. However, in perfecting xenobiology techniques, we will also introducing the ability to release new forms of life into the eco-system that our own bodies (and every other living thing’s body) will not recognize. Wallace says that XNA “could well be invisible to Earth life, not perceived as a threat because it doesn’t produce any of the carbohydrates and peptides that our and cells defenses respond to.”<\/p>\n

So, put on your Doctor Evil cap . . . take a common infectious virus or bacteria, and replace the DNA with XNA. You now have something that can cause the same grief and damage to humans as the old-fashioned bugs, but will be invisible to all of their internal defense mechanisms. There will be no immunity whatsoever to an XNA germ. <\/p>\n

Now we’ve entered the big leagues of evil. Now we have something that might truly wipe human-kind off the map, for good. You might ask, could humans re-design themselves with XNA genes that would recognize the new bugs and activate the immune system against them? I’m not an expert on this, but my rough sense is that it would take a whole lot longer to come up with an XNA version of a human than an XNA version of a virus, given how much more complex a human is compared to a virus. It’s akin to one of those cheap-offense \/ expensive defense war scenarios, where a new weapon can be countered, but it costs a lot more to stop it than to use it. Basic economics thus gives the offense the advantage in such a situation, and basic laws of complexity and chaos would probably give an XNA bug the advantage over a complex thing like a human being. We wouldn’t have enough time to engineer a cure.<\/p>\n

Wallace explores another evil XNA scheme. Come up with a simple XNA life form, perhaps a modified bacteria that could live on human tissue (plenty of bacteria that can now do that), and design it to produce a poisonous substance. So you could then pick up a seemingly harmless bacteria, perhaps a gut bacteria (like the infamous H Pylori which causes ulcers in some people, but modified with XNA), and it could slowly poison you to death. There are probably plenty of other imaginative ways to stamp human-kind out using XNA technology. Wallace says that at least in theory, this all might become possible in 10 years. <\/p>\n

About the only optimism that Wallace can muster in regard to the XNA threat is that scientists and their governmental and institutional overseers will probably “take great care”. I hate to be cynical, but didn’t the 19th Century inventors of dynamite (Alfred Nobel<\/a>, founder of the Nobel Peace Prize) and the machine gun say something like that? We now have CRISPR technology<\/a> for DNA editing, a technology that is rapidly getting cheaper and easier to use; it’s starting to occur to government security people that terrorists could get their hands on this technique and come up with some nasty stuff (U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently called genome editing techniques like CRISPR a potential weapon of mass destruction<\/a>). If Wallace is right, then XNA is to CRISPR what the hydrogen bomb was to the early nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. <\/p>\n

Of course, perhaps Wallace is wrong, perhaps XNA life can still be stopped somehow by the body’s natural defenses. Maybe it won’t be any worse than whatever mischief we can now do with CRISPR. But maybe it will be (Wikipedia says<\/a> that a hypothetical XNA organism will have “different base pairs and polymerases and has an altered genetic code [that] will hardly be able to interact with natural forms of life on the genetic level. Thus, these xenobiological organisms represent a genetic enclave that cannot exchange information with natural cells.”) Bottom line for now, keep your eyes out for more about XNA in the coming years. Civilization has had the power to end itself for many years now, and is possibly already on the path to doing so (e.g., climate change). It might soon be able to take down the entire human race as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I regularly peruse the Real Clear Science web site and usually open up two or three articles from their latest daily list of interesting science articles. A frequent theme of the articles that the RCS editors select for their list regards “how the world could\/might\/will end”. If you are in a gloomy mood, then you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6076"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6076"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6099,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6076\/revisions\/6099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}