This Frankenstein Folly Would Be a Trail of Tears for Elephants

A recent interview with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro is an interview that may deserve some careful scrutiny given its controversial subject.  The interview is entitled "What ‘de-extinction’ of woolly mammoths can teach us: a Q&A with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro."  Shapiro is the chief science officer of a company that claims that it will attempt to revive from extinction some extinct species such as the wooly mammoth and the dodo. 

Early on Shapiro makes this strange statement: "I’ve really begun to appreciate how the technologies one would need in order to bring back something similar to a mammoth are exactly the types of technologies we need to be able to protect and preserve species that are still alive today but in danger of becoming extinct like the mammoth did."  No, preventing an endangered species from going extinct requires mainly low-tech methods such as stopping hunting of the species and carefully preserving existing members of the species, not high tech methods such as gene-splicing.  Shapiro here is trying to give a benevolent sound to an ethically troubling program of gene-fiddling that will probably be a trail of tears for elephants, for reasons I will explain later in this post. 

In the interview Shapiro eventually gives us a quote that lets us know that when scientists talk about performing a "de-extinction" of the wholly mammoth, they're not really talking about any such thing. She says this:

"What we actually mean when we talk about de-extinction now is using the tools of genome engineering to resurrect the core traits of these species that used to be there. We’re not creating a mammoth. We’re taking an Asian elephant and helping it to become something that is more similar to a mammoth by resurrecting the capacity to live in colder climates."

So evolutionary biologists such as Shapiro are using the word "de-extinction" in a misleading way. When they refer to "de-extinction" they are talking about something that isn't actually de-extinction, but instead the hubris of massive experimental gene fiddling. Getting an elephant to look more like a wooly mammoth sure isn't causing the de-extinction of the wooly mammoth. I guess such language abuse is just what we should expect from evolutionary biologists, who have a long history of using language in misleading ways. One of their main abuses of languages has been to use the phrase "natural selection" to refer to something that is not actually selection. Selection means a choice by a conscious agent. So-called "natural selection" is no such thing, but merely a kind of survival-of-the-fittest effect.  The people who have long been referring to selection that isn't really selection are now referring to a de-extinction that isn't really de-extinction.  I guess that's why the title of the interview uses "de-extinction" in quotation marks, as if trying to say, "Don't take me literally."

A bit later in the interview Shapiro seems to change her story, telling us, "Eriona [Hysolli]’s team — the mammoth team — they understand that we have all of the core technologies that we would need to create a mammoth, but what we need to do is, tune them, tweak them, and make them all apply to elephant cells." Huh? Previously Shapiro said, "we're not creating a mammoth" but now she says "we have all of the core technologies that we would need to create a mammoth." It sounds like she is having trouble getting her story straight. Similarly, Shapiro wrote a book entitled "How to Clone a Mammoth," but in the preface of the book she says "here's the truth, it is not possible to clone a mammoth." Wow, that sure sounds like a very glaring case of failing to get your story straight. 

In the recent interview Shapiro then mentions some work her company is doing on stem cells.  We should not be very impressed here, and we should remember that for twenty-five years we have been promised that some great bonanza of treatments would arise from work with stem cells, a bonanza that never appeared. A story last year in the MIT Technology Review describes 25 years of hype about stem cells, and tells us, "Yet today, more than two decades later, there are no treatments on the market based on these cells. Not one."  

Shapiro sounds as is she has not pondered the paltry results of stem-cell research on humans, because she tries to sell us on the idea  that stem cells are going to be some health bonanza for elephants. She states this:

" Elephant iPSCs [induced pluripotent stem cells] are not only good for mammoth de-extinction, they’re also good for work that people want to do with elephants. We want to be able to help elephants thrive in habitats of today and tomorrow, including habitats that include diseases that have been introduced by people. This provides the capacity to do that."

Despite 25 years of hype about stem cells, scientists have delivered almost nothing in the way of FDA-approved stem cell treatments for humans. The idea that stem cell treatments might play some substantial role in helping to preserve elephants from extinction is laughable. Doing stem-cell treatments on elephants is as impractical an idea as the idea of doing surgery on a great white shark. A visual depiction of the idea may cause you to giggle.  

Later on Shapiro states this:

"There are millions of evolutionary differences between an Asian elephant and a mammoth, and it’s unlikely that making one or two small changes is going to create the mammoth phenotype in an Asian elephant’s genetic background. We need tools for multiplex genome editing, for introducing large fragments of DNA, all of which will have application to using CRISPR gene editing technologies in humans and other species."

The use of "unlikely" here rather than "impossible" is strange, rather like saying, "My novel has a million text differences from yours, so it is unlikely that changing one sentence in my novel will make it into your novel." The quotation above seems to suggest that evolutionary biologists want to "play Frankenstein" doing massive gene-splicing with elephants so that they can get skills that may allow them to "play Frankenstein" doing massive gene-splicing with humans.  We get an ominous "eugenics" kind of vibe here, which has the sound of reckless hubris.  Until the origin of COVID has been proven to be natural, we should be very afraid of such gene-fiddling hubris.  

Shapiro then proceeds to teach one of the most outrageous myths of evolutionary biologists, what I call the Great DNA Myth. This is the false teaching that DNA is a specification for making a human body. For many decades following about 1950 evolutionary biologists have taught this false teaching, which is taught in various different ways:

There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

The Genetic Code

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Shapiro uses this language to teach the Great DNA Myth:

"One of the hardest problems in biology right now is understanding how the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts, and that includes disease manifestations. We have hundreds of thousands of human genomes, and we still can’t pinpoint with precision what gene means what phenotype. One of the ways that we’re going to get there is through comparative genomics, and that includes species outside of our own. So if we are building these resources where we have genomes from across the tree of life, and more complete understanding of how DNA translates into the way something looks or acts, we will be able to apply this to making more informed decisions or hypotheses that will drive future experiments to understand the link between genotype and disease."

We have here a statement that teaches the false doctrine that phenotypes (the appearance and behavior of an organism) are specified by DNA (the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome).  This myth that "DNA translates into the way something looks or acts" is the untruth that many evolutionary biologists have been teaching for seventy years. We also have a little bit of excuse-making for why no one has been able to find any specification of the human body or any of its cells in DNA.

The excuse does not hold water. If DNA contained a specification for how to build a body or if "DNA translates into the way something looks or acts," how that worked would have been discovered by about the year 2003, when the Human Genome Project was completed, and very probably long before that year.  The reason why no such thing was discovered is because genotypes do not map to phenotypes,  DNA does not specify how to make an organism or any of its cells, and DNA does not determine how something looks or acts, but merely influences such things. Containing only low-level chemical information and no high-level anatomy information, DNA merely influences how an organism looks or acts. Consequently all talk of "de-extinction" by fiddling with the genomes of existing species is nonsense. 

The promise in Shapiro's statement that we are going to get to some point where we understand "what gene means what phenotype" suggests a nonsensical assumption that there is a one-to-one relation between a gene and an observable characteristic of an organism.  Humans have something like 20,000 genes, and the observable characteristics of an organism are influenced by thousands of genes. But such genes don't specify how you get protein complexes made from combinations of different proteins, nor do they specify how you get the organelles of cells, nor do they specify how you get cells, nor do they specify how you get tissues, nor do they specify how you get organs, nor do they specify how you get organ systems, nor do they specify how you get the overall organization of an organism. 

A fact will help you realize how implausible is the idea expressed in the Shapiro quote above, the idea that we will somehow discover "how the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts" and "how DNA translates into the way something looks or acts" once we have cataloged more genomes "across the tree of life."  The fact is that the genomes of more than 3000 species have already been sequenced. This includes species of every major type, including humans, African elephants, Asian elephants and a vast variety of different species across many different phyla. You can see the full list here. If there was such a mapping between DNA and  "the way something looks or acts," it would have been discovered long ago, and we would know how it worked. 

Below are some quotes from biology authorities and scientists who told us the truth on this matter, contrary to what Shapiro stated:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore, says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.” 
• In an essay pointing out the vast complexities and interlocking dependencies of even simpler aspects of biology such as angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels),  Jonathan Bard of Oxford University states, "It is pushing the boundaries of belief too far to believe that it is helpful to see the genome as holding a program." 
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation for it, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins.
• Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

  
  

  "The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full sequence of genes would reveal the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of life. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover that precisely the reverse is the case. Contrary to all expectations, there is a near equivalence of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was no less disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of both the mouse and our primate cousins...There is in short nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly has six legs, a pair of wings and a dot-sized brain and that we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of comprehending the history of our universe."

The lie that evolutionary biologists have repeatedly told us about DNA (that it is some specification for making a human) is one of the most appalling lies humans have ever been told.  Once we recognize the truth about how limited is the information in DNA, and that DNA contains only low-level chemical information and not high-level anatomical information, we can start to realize the incredibly important truth that biologists do not understand and cannot credibly explain how any adult human body originates. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the heads of biologists.

In the light of the reality that biologists do not understand the origin of any human adult body, and also the reality that biologists have no credible explanation for the origin of any adult human mind  (because brains are not a credible explanation for human minds and human memory), we can see what a groundless boast it is when evolutionary biologists claim to understand the origin of the human species. The lack of a DNA or genomic specification for how to make an organism or any of its cells or organs is something that short-circuits the main boasts of evolutionary biologists, showing that they do not have any credible story to tell of how macroevolution could occur.  If DNA does not even give you 20% of the information needed to make a human (and it certainly does not), then all claims that humans evolved from ape-like or chimp-like ancestors mainly by a gradual change in DNA are claims that must be untrue. "DNA as body blueprint" is the lie that evolutionary biologists keep telling because it is very much the lie they needed to tell. 

The diagram below tells us the truth about the level of organization in the human body, and what DNA specifies. Even protein molecules are not fully specified by DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up particular proteins, not the complex three-dimensional shapes of such protein molecules. You can't gene-splice your way to de-extinction, because DNA and its genes don't even take you halfway through this organization pyramid. 

By claiming "the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts," Shapiro seems to have taught the Great DNA Myth in its most extreme and erroneous form, a belief that DNA gives rise not to just the physical body of an organism but also its behavior.  Nothing has come from attempts to explain human behavior by analyzing DNA, nor has anyone explained animal instincts by analyzing DNA. The A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome merely translate into low-level chemicals such as amino acids, not cells or the organelles that make up them, and not organs and not body structures and not behavior. The 20,000 genes in human DNA are each complex inventions mostly consisting of thousands of well-arranged atoms,  but evolutionary biologists have no credible explanation for most of them, because such genes consist of too many well-arranged parts and are only functional when most of those parts are in place and well-arranged.  Evolution does not explain DNA; DNA does not explain bodies; and bodies do not explain minds. 

The Great DNA Myth has also been repeatedly taught by George M.  Church, a founder of Shapiro's company (Colossus Biosciences). In a book he wrote (Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves), Church taught that myth when he incorrectly stated that DNA contains "recipes for making human beings."  On page 4 of the same book, Church taught the erroneous idea that living organisms are "governed by a program" in the genome, the untrue claim that "biological organisms are programmable manufacturing systems," and that "with appropriate changes in their genetic programming, they could be made to produce practically any imaginable artifact." Elsewhere Church referred erroneously to  "the entire instruction book for making and maintaining a human being contained within our DNA." No such instruction book exists in DNA, which contains no anatomy information and does not even have instructions on how to build cells. 

Some of the odd statements Shapiro has made can be understood as PR spin trying to make experimental gene fiddling seem noble. Shapiro has tried to give some benevolent sound to the senseless project of fiddling with the genes of elephants to try to make them more like the wooly mammoth.  Such a project will probably be a nightmare for most elephants involved in it.  This is because the process of experimental gene fiddling will probably produce far more birth defects and monstrosities than anything that might be an improvement. 

As I document in the "Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here, genes and proteins are incredibly sensitive to small changes, a reality that evolutionary biologists like to ignore because it tends to discredit their boasts of understanding biological origins.  The more sensitive genes and proteins are to small changes, the less credible are claims of the accidental origins of genes and proteins. The biochemistry in organisms is fantastically complex and fine-tuned, a reality that evolutionary biologists avoid discussing because the more you learn about such precise fine-tuning, the less likely you will be to believe the claims of evolutionary biologists. Because biochemistry is fantastically fine-tuned everywhere and biological systems are super-abundant in subtle interdependencies and because biological systems everywhere display the most stratospheric levels of fine-tuned organization and precise functional complexity (which makes gene-splicing enormously risky and hard to get right), the hubris vanity project of trying to fiddle with elephant genes so you can then lie about having reversed the extinction of wooly mammoths is a project that would almost certainly be a "trail of tears" for most of the elephants involved in it. There will probably be very many needless cases of sick elephants or elephants with birth defects.

But we won't hear about such horrors and misery from the spokespeople of the Frankenstein projects, who will always use their PR skills to make the work of their company sound benevolent, no matter how sinister its work may be.  Previously we got from one corporation or one of its chief investors the inaccurate claim that no monkey had died from one of its brain chip implants. The claim was not correct.  Those in charge of the Frankenstein follies will have various ways to keep their very dirty linen hidden from the public, like the imaginary way depicted below:

Shapiro's company Colossal has a plan for making these not-really-mammoths, one that is science fiction nonsense. In a previous interview, Shapiro says, "Colossal’s idea is that they will build an artificial womb that will be capable of growing a mammoth for the two years of gestation."  This is "beam me up, Scotty" fantasy. In the next 50 years  it will be impossible to build a machine that will recreate the miracle of mammalian body construction. There are nations or corporations that know how to make an aircraft carrier, but there is not a nation or corporation that could create a human or mammoth body from a cell or raw materials, without a mother -- because the bodies of mammals are so vastly organized and dynamically complex that the organizational complexity of creating a living body of a large mammal far surpasses the organizational complexity of creating an aircraft carrier and all its jets. 

We do not need evolutionary biologists to be fiddling with the genes of elephants, trying to make them look more like wooly mammoths. We do need evolutionary biologists to start being rigorously honest and candid and consistent in their speech, speaking with only the most stringent accuracy about things such as what is in DNA, and the vast levels of hierarchical organizational and fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence in large organisms.  

Oops, he didn't get his story straight

Rationalization is when someone gives some noble reasons for his actions that are not the real reasons. At the Colossal Biosciences website, we get what sounds like some very glaring examples of rationalization.  We are told some ludicrous story that the company wants to de-extinct wooly mammoths because it will be good for global warming. As part of their explanation of this, we are told that mammoths are good at knocking down trees and shrubs.  The story told is groundless speculation, but I guess it sounds better than saying, "We want to do this gene-splicing because it's fun to play God." 

The project of trying to bring back to life extinct wooly mammoths by gene-fiddling with elephants is as goofy as a plan to try to bring back to life George Washington by digging up his buried corpse and jolting it with electricity, Frankenstein-style.

Will Rocket Builders Risk a Million Lives for the Tiny Few Interested in Uranus?

An interesting recent scientific paper examined the willingness of scientists to risk the death of very many people (or possibly even the destruction of the entire planet) to satisfy the curiosity of specialists about topics that are of no interest to 99% of humans. The paper ("Agencies and Science Experiment Risk") by Eric E. Johnson looked at two cases:

(1) the hazardous Cassini mission, which risked a disastrous plutonium release event that could have given cancer to millions;

(2) the Brookhaven laboratory's experiments involving so-called strange matter, which some thought might result in a physics disaster destroying all life on Earth. 

The paper by Johnson starts out by describing a case of scientist recklessness that I have described before:

"When getting ready to test the first atomic bomb, scientists of the Manhattan Project considered the possibility that detonating the device might ignite a runaway chain reaction in the atmosphere, engulfing the world in a fireball that would kill all plant and animal life. They wagered it would not and threw the switch."

It is often claimed that scientists did calculations beforehand proving to them an atmosphere-destroying chain reaction would not occur from the detonation of the first atomic bomb, but that is not correct. At the beginning of the post here, you can read some quotes I make from a book dealing with the topic, quotes indicating that when the first atomic bomb was exploded, the worry of a runaway reaction detonating the entire atmosphere was not at all anything that had been disproven. According to one source, before the first nuclear weapon was ignited the leading nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi said this:

"It would be a miracle if the atmosphere were ignited. I reckon the chance of a miracle to be about ten percent."

Apparently the atomic bomb scientists gambled with the destruction of all of humanity. Decades later another great gamble was taken by NASA, when it launched a Cassini spacecraft that was powered by plutonium-238. Being incredibly radioactive, plutonium-238 is one of the most deadly substances ever created.  

The Cassini mission sent a spacecraft including plutonium towards Venus. The mission plan was to leverage what are called gravitational slingshots. When a spacecraft flies by a planet, the spacecraft's speed can be greatly increased. The Cassini plan was to send the spacecraft to fly by Venus,  and to then have the spacecraft turn around and fly by Earth to increase the spacecraft's speed even further, with the spacecraft eventually going into orbit around Saturn.  With this plan there were two opportunities for disaster:

(1) The Cassini spacecraft could have blown up during its liftoff from Earth, just as the Challenger space shuttle did.

(2) The Cassini spacecraft could have burned up in Earth's atmosphere or crashed on Earth while the attempt was being made for the spacecraft to do a flyby of Earth. 

In either case, the result would have been catastrophic. On page 539 Johnson quotes a NASA estimate that 5000 people might die because of contamination from the Cassini probe's plutonium-238. On page page 540 Johnson says this:

" One critic was Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City University of New York and author of several popular science books. He said, 'I find that NASA bureaucrats in some sense are living in Fantasyland . . . . Pure guesswork has replaced rigorous physics. Many of these numbers are simply made up.'  Kaku thought 200,000 deaths was a fairer estimate. Other estimates were even higher. John Gofman, an emeritus professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated up to 1 million deaths would result from a Cassini swing-by burn-up.  And Ernest J. Sternglass, an emeritus professor of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, suggested 40 million deaths could result."

On the same page we are given a reason why NASA's risk assessment was almost certainly very flawed.  NASA's risk assessment was based mainly on an estimate of a tiny micrometeorite hitting its Cassini spacecraft. NASA estimated almost no chance that a software error could cause the spacecraft to fail and release plutonium.  But the paper tells us a reason why it made no sense to estimate such a low chance of failure by software error:

"Just weeks after Cassini flew by Earth without incident, NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. A subsequent investigation determined that the spacecraft burned up in the Martian atmosphere. The reason the Mars Climate Orbiter came in too low was that some of its software code used English unit measurements instead of the metric system —the kind of failure that NASA thought so improbable for Cassini as to be statistically insignificant."

Almost every software developer knows that software errors (called bugs) usually end up in the final releases of software, no matter how carefully the software has been tested. And you can never do all the required software tests before introducing a novel type of spacecraft, which requires the mission itself to do the bug testing. It seemed that an overconfident NASA played "megadeath Russian roulette," risking the life of millions for its Cassini mission to Saturn. And it may do the same thing again, to investigate a planet much less interesting than Saturn: the deadly dull planet Uranus. Uranus is a lifeless ball of ice and frozen gas, about the dullest planet imaginable. No one thinks there is any life on Uranus or any of its moons, because it's too cold where Uranus is. 

Here is a photo of the extremely boring, featureless planet that is Uranus. Can anyone imagine a less interesting-looking planet?

Dull as dishwater: Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 (Credit: NASA)

I was very surprised last year to read a baffling headline of "Probing Uranus is Top Priority, US Science Advisors Say." Apparently there's some limited launch window which might lead to a rushed hurry-up Uranus mission. A white paper by a Uranus enthusiast (Mark Hofstadter) who attempts to make "The Case for a Uranus Orbiter." The case is very weak.  There is no mention of life or biology. The biggest points the author makes seem to be these:

(1) Uranus "is the only giant planet whose gravity data cannot be fit by a simple 3-component model, with separate layers of rock, ice, and gas. Instead, it requires more realistic mixed-density regions (Podolak et al. 1995)." So the planet would be kind of interesting to planetary gravity modeling specialists. 

(2) Composition-wise, the "ice giants" such as Uranus and Neptune are different kind of planets from the "gas giants" such as Jupiter and Saturn, so let's study them for kind of "variety" reasons (a weak point).  

(3) It's easier to get to Uranus than Neptune. 

Reading the paper confirms my suspicion that Uranus is of zero interest to anyone who is not a scientist specializing in the planets of our solar system.  How would a Uranus mission work? It would apparently involve a plutonium gamble like the Cassini probe used: what could well be another case of "megadeath Russian roulette." 

We read in the rather recent article here that new plutonium-238 is being created to meet NASA's space travel needs, an indication that the Cassini "megadeath Russian roulette" approach may be repeated. Besides the risk of vast numbers getting cancer from a spacecraft disaster, the very production of additional plutonium-238 puts the public at danger.  Being the perfect weapon for a "dirty bomb," plutonium is a tempting target for theft by terrorists.  A dirty bomb combining plutonium-238 and conventional explosives might be enough to render the downtown part of a major city effectively uninhabitable. 

A disaster like the one imagined above may already have occurred. A 1990's article in the Christian Science monitor states this:

"Three out of the 26 earlier US nuclear space missions have involved mishaps. The worst: In 1964 a satellite with a SNAP 9-A plutonium system aboard fell to earth, disintegrating and dispersing its 2.1 pounds of plutonium. Gofman has long linked that accident to a rise in lung cancer on earth."

According to the source here, plutonium 238 was used for a variety of space missions. We read this:

"Pu-238 fueled the first RTG used in space, launched aboard the Navy TRANSIT 4A Navigational Satellite in 1961. Since then, the fuel has been used in nearly every National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission that required an RTG, including several Apollo flights (1969–1972), the Viking 1 and 2 Mars landers (1976–1982), Voyager 1 and 2 space probes to the outer planets of our solar system (launched in 1977) and the New Horizons mission to Pluto (launched in 2006)."

Every one of these missions risked huge number of earthly deaths from a launch failure that would have released plutonium into the atmosphere. Risking such loss of life for a mission to the boring site of Pluto is particularly objectionable. 

The paper I quoted from above (by Eric E. Johnson) also discusses how scientists may have risked the destruction of the entire Earth by doing experiments at Brookhaven Laboratory. We read this about that laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC):

"Some expressed concern, however, about the RHIC’s venture into unknown realms of physics—particularly a question of whether the experiment might create a 'strangelet,' a tiny particle of exotic strange matter.  Creating a strangelet would be a triumph of modern physics. In an unlikely scenario, however, it might also be unbelievably dangerous— unstoppably transforming and absorbing all normal matter it touches. After a latency of many years, the concern is, the accreting mass of strange matter within the Earth would overtake the whole planet. In the words of one eminent scientist, the Earth would be left 'an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.' ”

We read that one pair of physicists described the following possible scenario:

"[G]ravity and thermal motion may then sustain the accreting chain reaction until, perhaps, the whole planet is digested, leaving behind a strangelet with roughly the mass of the Earth and ~ 100 m radius. The release of energy per nucleon should be of the order of several MeV and, if the process is a run-away one, the planet would end in a supernova-like catastrophe."

Referring to two leading physicists, we read that "far from characterizing the issue as absurd, Glashow and Wilson wrote, 'It is a fair concern: one that must be raised.' " We then read of an analysis by Cambridge University theoretical physicist Kent of the likelihood of this strangelet catastrophe:

"Kent explained that the 'probability bound'—meaning the maximum-possible risk—implied by Busza’s analysis was ...no more than a one-in-10,000 chance that the RHIC would destroy the Earth.  It was this result the Busza report deemed “comfortable.' "

We read on page 551-552 of Johnson's paper that this Busza report was produced by scientists who had financial and career interests in letting the strangelet research proceed, which is a reason for doubting their probability estimates. On page 552 we read that these concerns about the Earth being destroyed have had no effect on the research program, which is intensifying:

"These criticisms have not had a perceivable impact at Brookhaven, which has continued to run its experiments. In fact, the RHIC program has expanded and evolved since the strangelet controversy was aired. Originally, the RHIC was scheduled to collide gold ions over a 10- year-long program. Program extensions, however, have kept the RHIC going, and it is now in its 15th year. The program has also changed in ways unanticipated by the Busza team’s report. Brookhaven has moved beyond gold nuclei to begin experimenting with copper and uranium ions. The RHIC has also been upgraded to achieve many times more collisions than it was able to make under its original design."

These examples are part of a pattern of scientists putting the public at risk for the sake of research that is of no interest to anyone but a small clique of specialists. Such a thing has long gone on in the field of experimental neuroscience (not to be confused with physician-controlled neurology, which involves medical treatments and diagnostics rather than experimentation). Many healthy subjects without brain problems are put through long brain scans with 3T scanners, typically for the sake of poorly designed experiments that do nothing to advance human knowledge because they commit multiple examples of Questionable Research Practices (QRP). The issue is discussed in my post here.  We have no idea of how many of these people will end up with cancer because of the long unnecessary scans they received. Following a "scan them and forget them" policy, our scientists are failing to make the long-term tracking of health results of brain scan subjects that would allow them to reliably judge whether long 3T brain scans increase a risk of cancer. 

In the field of virology, there is occurring reckless "gain of function" research that creates risks of some new pandemic arising from a lab leak. A recent article in The Atlantic states, "The 1977 flu pandemic, which killed roughly 700,000 people, may well have started in a laboratory." It has a link to the paper "The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate." That paper states, "The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains. " 

Scientists have a poor record of alerting us to grave risks. The paper by Eric E. Johnson reminds us of how physicists were so often wrong about alerting people to the threat of nuclear weapons. We read this:

"In the early 1930s, scientists dismissed the possibility of nuclear fission. When, in 1934, chemist Ida Noddack wrote a paper arguing that the uranium nucleus might be capable of fission, her paper was poorly received. In fact, famed physicist Enrico Fermi dismissed her work as having no possibility of being correct....Likewise, physicist Otto Frisch considered fission of uranium to be 'impossible,' and he initially refused to believe the compelling (and correct) arguments made by his aunt, Lise Meitner. Robert Oppenheimer also flatly rejected the possibility of uranium fission, and he offered a number of theoretical reasons why fission could not happen."

Biologists in particular often sound like they are bad at estimating probabilities. Committed to the dogmas of Darwinism entangled with socially constructed 19th century triumphal legends, the modern biologist repeatedly asserts that there occurred by chance things that we have every reason to believe could not possibly have occurred by chance -- things such as the origin of vastly impressive fine-tuned molecular machinery involving novel protein molecules and protein complexes that require many thousands of well-arranged atomic parts to do their incredibly complex metabolic missions. Such claims are like a claim that very many five-page grammatical, correctly spelled and well-reasoned essays were produced by typing monkeys. How should we judge the probability calculation skills of people who make such claims? Borrowing a phrase from the title of a children's book, we might say that  biologists making such claims are sometimes "very bad, no good, horrible" at realistically estimating probabilities. But now our lives are in the hands of gene-splicers who assure us that the risks of their genetic tinkering activity are small. We should be very concerned after realizing that modern biologists have repeatedly acted as if they were incompetent at realistically estimating probabilities. 

An example of the molecular machinery I refer to above is the spliceosome, pictured below:

Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

At the site here, we read this about the human spliceosome: 

"The spliceosome is a complicated and formidable example of a multi-subunit molecular machine, with the pre-catalytic form being the largest spliceosomal complex, containing 5 RNA molecules and 65 proteins, in addition to a substrate mRNA precursor. The arrangement and activities of all of these has to be intricately coordinated, paradoxically to catalyse a rather simple chemical reaction."

The structure shown above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above (only a small part of what is needed to make the shown structure) is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across 46 different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 65 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. I am in the middle of analyzing the spliceosome components for a future post, and my preliminary work suggests that the spliceosome structure requires accessing at least these human chromosomes: Number 1 (SF3A3 and PRPF3), Number 5 (SLU7 and RBM22), Number 9 (PRP4), Number 17 (PRP8 and U5S1), Number 19 (SF3A2 and PRP31) , and Number 22 (SF3A1). 

"God Complex" Gene Splicers Say, "Full Speed Ahead!" (Like the Titanic Captain)

The Wiktionary defines a "God complex" as "an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility." It seems that virologists favoring "gain-of-function" pathogen research may suffer from such a "God complex" (like some other types of biologists).  

An article in USA Today is entitled "As COVID turns 3, experts worry where the next pandemic will come from – and if we'll be ready." We read some very scary stuff:

"Now, in addition to worrying about a virus that might jump from animals to humans, experts are concerned about research accidents and – what should be unthinkable – the possibility of someone intentionally unleashing a highly contagious and lethal pathogen. 

A pandemic has long been known to be far riskier for global security than conventional, nuclear or chemical warfare, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University and a leading expert in global health."

What? The risk of a man-made pandemic is "far riskier" than the risk of nuclear warfare?  How could so terrifying a thing be "long known" without such a risk being known to the average man?

Next in the USA Today article we read these very troubling claims:

"The idea of engineering a deadly pathogen that sickens the world sounds like the stuff of science fiction or superhero movies. But it's no longer a fantasy.

Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist, said people in his own lab could theoretically assemble a dangerous virus from DNA ordered on the internet for under $1,000.

Once pandemic-capable viruses are identified, thousands of people worldwide have the scientific training to make them from mail-ordered synthetic DNA.

'Imagine a world where you can order weapons-grade plutonium in the mail,' he said, 'and there are thousands of engineers who have the skills to put together something that might be a bomb.' "

Then we read about virologists defending reckless "gain of function" research in which gene-splicing is done so that pathogens become more deadly:

"In 2012, the scientific community and others debated research in the U.S. and the Netherlands that explored five mutations making avian influenza more contagious to humans. Some in the virology community defended that research as essential for understanding naturally emerging risks. Yassif and others worry it made creating a global hazard one step easier."

Seeming to have quite a "God complex," many virologists are turning a blind eye to such risks. Two virologists have authored a "let's keep going full blast" editorial in which they claim,  "Science is society’s best defense against the existential threats we face."  No, the actual truth is that science gave us the hydrogen bomb, which has presented the most existential threat humans have ever faced. 

The editorial refers us to a paper in which 100+ virologists recklessly argue for a "full speed ahead" approach in regard gain-of-function research. We might call it a "full Frankenstein" approach, referencing the fictional scientist Frankenstein who tried "gain of function" research by electrifying a body built from a patchwork of corpses.  The virologists are urging us not to worry about all the Pandora's boxes they are opening. 

Concerning the origin of COVID-19, the virologist authors tell us that there are "two major camps arguing that the virus either originated from animal-to-human transmission (zoonosis) or by a laboratory leak "  The virologists say, "each of these possibilities is plausible." That doesn't make any sense, since "plausible" is a word meaning "likely."  You can't have two mutually exclusive explanations both be "plausible." The authors totally fail to see the implications of it being "plausible" that a global pandemic was caused by blundering gene-splicing scientists. The implications are that gene-splicing should be much more carefully regulated, and that laboratory safeguards should be greatly increased. Very lamely, the authors resort to a "we already have some regulations and safeguards" reasoning. 

The author's "full speed ahead" reasoning reminds you of the "full speed ahead" policy of the captain of the Titanic. But it's even worse. In the days before the Titanic sunk, there was no recent reason for suspecting that very many people had died because ocean liner captains were traveling too fast. 

A three-part series at TheIntercept.com highlights the grave risks of pathogen tinkering. In Part 3, we read about scientists seeming to sweep under the rug accounts of lab accidents, as efficiently as scientists sweep under the rug evidence for the paranormal that scientists should be diligently studying.  The links to the series have these headlines:

• Student Infected With Debilitating Virus in Undisclosed Biolab Accident

• Accident With 1918 Pandemic Virus Raises Questions About Pathogen Research

• Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols

Some government board recently released a report entitled "PROPOSED BIOSECURITY OVERSIGHT FRAMEWORK FOR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE." It's pretty much a joke. We have some "weak tea" recommendations that fail to include the type of physical safeguards needed to make a major improvement in security.  There's lots of bureaucratic shuffling and semantic fiddling that doesn't add up to  recommendations for major biosafety improvements. There's no mention of quarantines of researchers who fiddled with deadly pathogens, one of the needed improvements in biosafety. 

One day most of us may end up dead because our "God complex" gene splicers want to keep up their perilous fiddling without being inconvenienced by burdensome safety protocols. In a similar vein of "going full Frankenstein," a recent Daily Mail article is entitled, "Human CLONES purposely grown to give people 'spare parts' like hearts, lungs and livers could be the key to living forever, expert claims." We read of a nutty scheme proposing that people arrange for the appearance of full-grown but unconscious clones of themselves, to be used only for organ transplanting. Under this evil scheme, a "clone parent" person might keep down in his basement (or in some "warehouse of the damned") an unconscious clone of himself, fed through tubes for maybe 30 years, until one of the organs of the "clone parent" failed, at which point the clone would be robbed of an organ so that the "clone parent" could have his old failing organ replaced.  And when this cloned  human being was robbed of its brain early in its life, and later robbed of an organ without permission of the donor, would that be legally classified as murder? I guess those running this sinister scheme would have to arrange for the murder laws to be rewritten to tidy up this little difficulty.