Dot Earth: Will Synthetic Biology Benefit or Threaten Wild Things?

Please look below for a ?Your Dot? missive on an emerging force that will, in ways both direct and indirect, shape the face of what we used to call ?nature? or ?wildlife.? The post was sent by?Cristi?n T. Samper, the president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, from a meeting held this week at Cambridge University to examine this question: ?How will Synthetic Biology and Conservation Shape the Future of Nature??

There?s a superb and detailed framing paper for the meeting posted here.

Here?s the note from Samper, which accurately notes that this meeting was the beginning of a long and important conversation, in which more questions were raised than answered:

Will synthetic biology help or hinder conservation efforts?

This was the question asked at a symposium organized by the Wildlife Conservation Society at Cambridge University this week, attended by about 80 synthetic biologists and conservationists. ?These are two communities that have never come together and, like a first date, we were examining each other and building some trust.

It was clear that synthetic biology ? which involves the engineering of life ? was advancing rapidly and inevitably could impact the world?s biodiversity ? and could be either a positive or negative. ?The conservationists from WCS, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, Fauna & Flora International, and other leading groups and academic institutions, all wanted to know more.

There were a lot of questions flying: Could genetic manipulation allow species to adapt to climate change or control an invasive species? Could scientists change the biology of an organism to be more productive or enable it to grow in new environments? Could we manufacture wildlife products like ivory in a lab? Could this emerging science bring back species that have gone extinct like the passenger pigeon?

When the synthetic biology experts spoke, they focused on how their field is currently addressing the potential needs for food, energy and medicine. These could all have major impacts on conservation, improving agricultural yields or reducing the demand for wood, thus reducing deforestation. None of that has a direct impact on conservation but all could have an indirect effect. For example, what if there was an unintentional release of a synthetic organism and it destroyed all the fauna in an ecosystem? The scenarios are endless.

As a tropical biologist, the symposium became my first lesson in synthetic biology. The field was not around when I was a graduate student, and engineers approach the world very differently from scientists. I could easily see how the current focus of the synthetic biologists will affect our lives as humans very directly, but how will it evolve and affect the rest of the species on our planet?

When the conservationists left the meeting, we could see the potential of synthetic biology to help conservation. We left, however, with questions and hopes that this new science might ultimately be another one of the tools that we could use to save our threatened natural world ? which some surmise is approaching its sixth episode of extinction. Could we pool our intelligence with this new group of colleagues to finally turn back the clock on the demise of Earth?s great diversity of life?

Ed Yong, who blogs on science for National Geographic, has filed ?Can We Save the World by Remixing Life?? ? a great post surveying this nascent field and offering insights from those who attended the meeting.

The meeting was largely conceived by Kent Redford, a biologist who until recently was at the?Wildlife Conservation Society?and now is an independent consultant on conservation strategies.?Redford was the lead author of a new paper in?PLoS Biology?that laid the groundwork for the meeting, which ended Thursday. [Here's a link to the open-access paper:?Synthetic Biology and Conservation of Nature: Wicked Problems and Wicked Solutions,?Kent H. Redford, William Adams, and Georgina M. Mace].

You can learn more from him in a fascinating podcast (part 1,?part 2) posted earlier this month by Scientific American.

There?s much more on synthetic biology here on Dot Earth and over at The Loom, the National Geographic blog of science writer Carl Zimmer.

11:43 a.m. | Addendum | Just one of the many secondary issues in this arena is ?de-extinction? ? the prospect of bringing vanished species ? say, the passenger pigeon ? back to life now that we know better. A recent Nature news article provides a good start.

And don?t miss Stewart Brand?s TED talk from earlier this year, titled, ?The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready??

Are you?

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/will-synthetic-biology-benefit-or-threaten-wild-things/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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