Whose Genes Are They Anyway? A bioethical dilemma.

In this weekend's reading in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks we read about the first legal fights over the control, and ownership, of human cellular material. Court battles like these that took place in the early 1970s must seem like old history to you. 1973? The Beatles had broken up, Richard Nixon was President, and Disco was just beginning to define the decade. These are old battles. Surely they must be over, decisions must have been made - legal precedents and business models must have been established. Don't you think?

How ironic then, to read about a case going before a federal courthouse in Washington D.C. tomorrow as in April 4, 2011 to settle the same fundamental questions as the ones we read of this weekend: are isolated human genes, and their respective sequences of bases - of As-Ts-Cs and Gs - patentable? More specifically, if a company analyzes and sequences two genes responsible for a percentage of the incidence of breast cancer in patients - and perform research to identify and analyze those genes in patients' cells - can they patent their product?

That is the central argument going before the court tomorrow in the case of Association of Molecular Pathology, et al. v United States Patent and Trademark Office. At stake is a profit potential of billions of dollars.

The company, Myriad Genetics, has sought a patent for a the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene (Breast Cancer Susceptibililty Gene 1 and 2). The BRCA genes only account for 10-15% of all instances of breast cancer, but 80-90% of those women who have this gene do go on to develop breast cancer. Myriad Genetics discovered and has patented the genes. Only now, an appeals court is asking the federal court to determine if these genes can be patently or not - based on the the argument we read about in TILOHL, that "products of nature" cannot be patented.

Now, what about a "molecular diagnostic product"? Myriad Genetics, claiming a patent on the genes, has developed a product to determine if a woman has either BRCA1 or 2. It's called BRACAnalysis. Clever, huh? Here's the pitch:

"BRACAnalysis® assesses a woman's risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer based on detection of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. This test has become the standard of care in identification of individuals with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer and is reimbursed by insurance."

Having discovered these genes, Myriad Genetics was awarded a patent on BRCA1 and 2. In 2010, a judge ruled that the BRCA 1 & 2 genes were unpatentable products of nature - and that BRACAnalysis, an offshoot of that illegal patent, resulted from exclusive research that Myriad Genetics did based on that patent. So - the product should not be allowed to be brought to market based on Myriad's "exclusive" rights to research, and develop products from, the BRCA genes.

Confusing? It is confusing to me, too - legal arguments can get pretty dense. Here's some backround.

In late 2009 a group of physicians, patients, and the ACLU, filed a lawsuit against Myriad, claiming that their exclusive patent on genomic information kept knowledge, research, and testing from populations of patients who could possibly benefit from them. In the case of the new test, women who are at a higher genetic risk of having the BRCA genes would be prohibited from testing for it unless they used the Myriad BRACAnalysis product.

The US Patent and Trademark Office countered with an argument defending its decision to award the patent, stating that Myriad had invented something truly beyond anything found as a "product of nature", and as such, was worth protecting with a patent certifying ownership.

In 2010 a judged tossed out the decision, saying that isolated, individual segments (genes) of DNA were no different - just segments - of the whole molecule found in nature. Therefore, he ruled that the patent office was wrong in their decision to award Myriad a patent in the first place.

One analyst viewed this reasoned decision as a reflection of the increasing knowledge and awareness of DNA in our society - that an isolated part is not really different from the whole. It is still a "product of nature". Looking at genes in isolation is representative of our information age. We view things in bits and bytes. Genes are bytes of genetic information.

Monday's decision will determine the availability of this test (and perhaps billions of dollars in profits) to perhaps millions of people around the globe. What do you think? Can we - should we - be able to own/patent genetic information? If not - if we remove the incentive to make a profit from such research, why should companies bother to conduct the research? Is less knowledge, less technology, fewer diagnoses, fewer treatment - the price we ultimately pay for this? Or should we allow Myriad Genomic, and others like them, the right to patent the essence of what it means to be human?

(Don't worry about either side of the argument - chances are it will go to the Supreme Court!)

The Brain - Remixed

First week of the fourth quarter - your responses have been wonderful! Let's start with a brief post, and your brief response to it. The Brain - bits and pieces from famous neurologists, scientists, and Bill Nye The Science Guy - remixed and mashed to a beat.

Watch it, and then think about the excerpt from Andrew Sullivan's political blog, The Dish that follows.



The question I want to pose is this: Do we have "free will", the ability to think for ourselves? Or does our brain make our decisions before we are consciously aware of making the decision?

"Researchers implanted electrodes in patients to track their neurons. They asked them to look at a clock and press a button, and then to tell them the exact time they decided to press the button. Daniela Schiller and David Carmel report:

[A]bout a quarter of these neurons began to change their activity before the time patients declared as the moment they felt the urge to press the button. ... So it turns out that there are neurons in your brain that know you are about to make a movement the better part of a second before you know it yourself. What does that mean?

It might be tempting to conclude that free will is an illusion.

Some have believed this since the days of (the scientist), who recorded EEG (brain waves)and found it contained a specific pattern that predicted his subjects movements before they felt the conscious will to act. EEG measures electrical activity on the surface of the head, combining information from billions of neurons; Fried and his colleagues have gone further, by finding individual neurons that do this. But before reaching any sweeping conclusions, it is important to remember that this study looked at a very rudimentary kind of action. The decision to move a finger hardly ranks as the same kind of free will we exercise when we make moral choices or major life decisions."

So - what do you think? Is free will (the ability to make up our own minds and decide for ourselves) an illusion? Or is it real? Do we consciously decide to go to the doctors, or have that ice cream cone on a hot summer's day?

Or do our neurons fire up the decision before we're even aware of asking ourselves the question?

And if you really want to take it a step further - ponder the role of the epigenetic genome on the idea of free will. (I really hope someone does that... :)

Does it have to be a complete sentience -or- How about some news to make you smile? :)

I try to take a course at the College Of The Atlantic every two years. Why not? The courses are informative, interesting, and lots of fun. And they happen to be taught on a small, but pretty, campus that is located just minutes away from one of the hidden jewels of the national park system - Acadia National Park, in spectacularly beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. I've taken courses in Tide Pool Ecology, Conservation Photography, Creative Writing in Botany, and several others. Without question, one of the most enjoyable courses was one on Biological Oceanography, taught by a fellow named Sean Todd - one of the foremost marine mammal biologists on the East coast. (I often kidded Sean, asking him if there was a family connection to Sweeney.) Come to think of it - I wrote a song about him - which I sang to the class at the end of the course - to the tune of Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid. Perhaps I'll share it with you guys and gals.

But I digress.

I learned a lot through that course with Sean. Sean is one of the biologists who is called upon to do a forensics pathology report when a marine mammal washes up on shore. (Marine mammals are protected by federal law - the Marine Mammals Act. Therefore a cause of death has to be reported for every marine mammal that appears on shore.) During one class, I asked Sean the inevitable questions: Are whales sentient creatures? Do they think? Are they self- aware? Sean, who had obviously been asked this question many times before, replied "No", and explained that he thinks of whales as "the cows of the ocean" - no smarter than livestock. They follow each other, emit sounds that allow them to locate each other, but as for true intelligence, in his estimation (which was considerable) the answer was an unequivicable "no".

I have to admit, it was a difficult answer to accept. I recognize that there was a lot of personal bias there. We want whales to be sentient, intelligent beings. We, as humans, want to believe that whales lord over the oceanic realms as we do, for better or for worse, on the terrestrial realm. We want to - if for no other reason - than to believe that on some primordial, spiritual level, we are not alone. Disney's Fantasia 2 may have been terrible (don't get me started) but no one, regardless of age, could fail to be moved at the final tableau where the whales were seen to fly balletically out from the ocean to meet their ultimate, predestined celestial destiny. Hmmm - digressing again. (I do say to you - let your mind dance, right? Well, I'm dancin', I'm dancin...)

Turns out that whales - at least sperm whales - may in fact be more than the "cows of the seas". About a week ago, biologists at Scotland's University of St. Andrew's - where golf was invented - discovered that sperm whales seem to announce their presence with "discrete personal identifiers". In other words, it appears that the whales announce their presence by stating their names.

This conclusion is preliminary - they've only studied three caribbean whales, but the data is intriguing, and in some ways, somewhat startling. The whales, which typically use clicking sounds to communicate across vast stretches of oceanic water. A kind of cetacean (whale) morse code. Whales will greet each other by attaching a distinct coda to their clicks. In music, a coda is a musical phrase that is attached to end of a piece. In this case, the coda is "created" by the individual whale to identify him or herself. Called 5R, it’s a distinct sound made up of five consecutive clicks, with varying pauses between the clicks. While it may sound identical in each whale to casual listeners, variations in click timing became apparent after careful data analysis. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R coda. In other words, each whale had an identifier - a name.

Could this be a random occurrance? A meaningless exception without importance? Perhaps. But it has been noted that dolphins have individualized whistles. And like dolphins, sperm whales maintain complex inter-relationships and social groups over long distances. Individual identification would be something that would provide a distinct benefit to the social order.

Man's history with sperm whales is fraught with confrontation and adversity. Hunted with a vengeance for the substance that fills their head. This is the "melon" used for sonar/navigation, thought to be "spermaceti" - sperm - by the ancient marriners. "spermaceti" - a waxy substance that provided light to the world before the age of petroleum, and their blubber was "rendered" or boiled down to create fuel. Man hunted whale, and occasionally the sperm whale torpedoed itself in suicdal attacks against man in his whaling ships. Such an occurence happened to the whaling ship Essex in the mid-19th century. This incident influenced Herman Melville to write Moby Dick - arguably the greatest American novel, and one which virtually no one has read. It is tough reading.

But I digress.

Whaling has not disappeared, but it has certainly narrowed in its scope and intensity. All around the globe,countries gain more income from eco-tourism - whale watching - than from killing whales. Live whales are have become an economic asset, to be both protected and cherished. They are beautiful, magnificent creatures to behold. Once seen, never forgotten. And now it seems, they do not forget each other. It seems that whales do not merely communicate with each other, but also identify each other, and themselves, with names. We have so much more to learn. What more could they possibly teach us?

Some scientists argue that whales, like primates, should be considered "non-human person" - sentient, thinking, self-aware creatures that maintain complex societies and display evidence of sophisticated thought processes. On a physical/neurological level, their brains display many similarities to those of human beings. Yet we know that despite similarities in 99.5% of our DNA, no one would ever confuse a human with a chimpanzee. One half of one percent difference is profound. But it certainly suggests a strong familial relationship.

What are the criteria we should be looking for to determine a status of "non-human personhood"? How should humans interact with these sentient beings of land and sea? Are humans the "lord of the manor", or do we need to re-examine our relationship to the rest of the world - even further than we already may have done? And once we align ourselves to the rest of the world, what then?

Perhaps that is one other "ghost in the machine" - one other singularity that we will one day attain. And perhaps, at that moment, an unforeseen destiny will have been met. And the whales will be seen emerging out of the oceans, in silent flight, towards the celestial heavens above.

Japan

It's mind-boggling. Mind numbing. Beyond one's comprehension. And impossible not to think about this weekend.

An earthquake measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale. If a 1 on the scale represents a release of 1 unit of energy measured, the exponential nature of the scale means that a 9 represents 100,000,000 units of energy. Enough energy to shift the coast of Japan 8 feet. Enough energy to shift the earth's axis 4 inches (it did). And enough to create a wall of water 30 feet (10 meters) high along miles and miles of Japan's coastline.

We see the pictures, and video, shot from helicopters and planes. The water looks stream-like - a wide swath, flooding fields and streets, yet somehow benign and harmless - as if people could somehow walk through it to shelter and safety. Then we watch newly released video taken from those trapped in building and see the wall of water for what it is. A wall of death, washing away people, cars, houses, and in one case an entire train traveling up the Japanese coast.

The next day, we read of impending nuclear catastrophe. First at one reactor. Then two reactors in one plant. Then, possible, six reactors at multiple plants. Why? Why Japan? Why the only country in the world to have already suffered the devastation of nuclear devices, during World War II?

We search for meaning, we search for hope. We think of the embedded ironies - former enemies, we dropped the bomb on Japan. Now friends, and iron-bound partners in trade, we are the first to extend aid and the hand of friendship. And we warn our citizens not to travel there. In case of nuclear meltdown, the radiation released would cause a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Yet we have just read, in The Immortal Life... of radiation being used in hope of treating Henrietta Lacks all those years ago. Henrietta is long gone from this world, but her cells live on. Some of them, I would imagine, in laboratories in Japan. I suppose one of our citizens is, in some sense, already there. Would those HeLa cells survive this new calamity? Ironies.

Is there a reason? Was there a cause? It's our nature to try to make some sense out of this. Over zealous environmentalists have already claimed that climate change and global warming may have contributed to this disaster. The melting polar ice caps, they say, is shifting the weight on the earth's oceanic plates, causing an increase in tectonic (earthquake) and volcanic activity. Doubters of climate change have fired back: “This is not the first time earthquakes have been blamed by the Shamanistic, Magical-Thinking Left on the all-purpose Zeus-substitute of global warming” said one. The other side answers back: True, Japan sits on a subduction zone, where plates move past earth other, but climate change can be shown to lead to more tsunamis (although not on Friday's scale) that could impact the United States". The argument and the fight goes on.

Economists debate the disaster's impact on the Japanese economy, as well as our own ("There may be an increase in the sale of American cars if people question the availability of Japanese cars and parts".) Some pundits predict a decrease in the price of petroleum, as declining Japanese demand leads to an increase in supply. CNBC stock market commentator Larry Kudlow actually said that ""The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that". Others have noted concern for Tokyo Disney World's safety (Disney World!!) as it is built on landfill, while other worry about............

This is madness. Insanity. Why the need to fight about causes? Why the need to over-analyze things? Why the need to focus on the material loss and cost of the disaster? Why do commentators need to compare it in magnitude to disasters of the past? "This is the worst earthquake Japan has experienced, and the fifth strongest since records were started to be kept in the 1860s...."

Somehow in our interconnected, app-driven, 4G world, we have lost sight of humanity. I saw a picture on CNN.com of a young child, of maybe 6 or 7 years. Surrounded by a team of physicians in radiation protective gear, his hands were outstretched, over his head, reaching toward the ceiling, as the well protected scientist/physician scanned his little body for exposure to radiation.

For me, it was like the moment Mary, ever stoic, viewed Henrietta Lacks in her coffin and glanced momentarily at her red painted toe nails. It was the moment I focussed on, and saw, the individual effected. I thought of the individuals standing without their homes, without drinking water, and possibly, without family members.

And I cried for the people of Japan.

(In response to ML's comment: there's no question to respond to. Respond to Japan. Respond to the ironies. Respond to the post. Anything that gets your mind making connections.)

This is the graph that goes with the post below -

It's alarming, and it's happening

Look at that beast. Its magnificent, isn't it? Virtually all muscle, it has been known to swim 2,000 miles - non-stop - to return to mating grounds. Muscle is meat. And meat is food. And this fish is hunted all over the world. It's steaks are delicacies. And its less desirable parts are chopped up and put into cans. Not surprisingly, it is a top marine predator And it's disappearing at an alarming rate throughout the world's oceans.

It's a Yellow fin Tuna. And the one being hoisted over the head of the unseen fisherman is relatively small, and unremarkable average. Tuna grow can grow up to 2 meters long or so, and weigh up to 400-425 pounds. They reach sexual maturity at around 2 years. But few hit anywhere near 400 pounds now; clearly not the one lifted up in the photo. Few even reach the age of maturity needed in order to reproduce. Tuna, like most other top ocean predators are being hunted and caught at a rate faster than they can replenish their own populations. In other words, man is eating them at unsustainable levels.

The ocean's top predators are disappearing at an alarming rate. Not only the tasty ones like tuna (especially the Blue Fin Tuna, prized by Asian cuisine) and Swordfish (which I will no longer eat) but Sailfish, Marlin, and Sharks. Fish hunted for sport. For fun. For trophies. Trophy Fish? They are all disappearing.

When I taught Marine Biology at TA, I embedded a graph into the course syllabus that I distributed on the first day of school. The graph showed the actual decline of ocean fisheries from 1950 through the present, and the projected declines through to the middle of the 21st century. (I can't embed a second picture into this entry, but I'll post the graph in another entry that will precede this one) I think the last time I showed this graph to students was in 2007 - only four years ago. Students scoffed, they questioned, they expressed incredulity. Could this really happen Mr E? Could the oceans really die? Could oceans really turn into large "dead zones"?

It sure is looking that way. Current developments do not augur well for marine life. A week or so an article appeared in the Washington Post that was titled ""Predator Fish In Oceans On Alarming Decline, Experts Say" Basically, marine scientists gathered at the American Association For The Advancement of Science analyzed current data and titled their presentation with the startling title "2050: Will There Be Fish In The Ocean?". Their startling conclusion reflects the data in the graph from 2007: more than 54 percent of the decrease in large predator fish has taken place over the past 40 years.

Removing predators - especially sharks through sport hunting - has a profound effect on the oceanic food web. With the predators gone, new, smaller predators move in and re-set the balance of life. The former prey of sharks, tuna, etc. survive in large numbers, leading to starvation the quick collapse of populations. All that us left are the smaller scavenger fish. Scientists predict that there will in fact be ocean fish in 2050, but they will be smaller, less meaty, more "oily" populations: fish like anchovies, and species used for ground fish meal to feed to our farmed salmon. Salmon that will, no doubt, be genetically improved for more muscle, and greater size

Humans have always fished. We've just become much better at it: more efficient and mechanized. We now trawl - we drop and drag 2-mile long nets and capture anything and everything that gets in the net's path. How much fish is that? Well, in 2006 that was 76 million tons of fish. That is estimated to represent the capture of 70 trillion - that's TRILLION - fish. One million million, 10 to the 12th power, 10 followed by 12 zeros. Over the course of 1 year. And many of those fish were inedible. Garbage fish they're called. So they're thrown back, dead, into the ocean. Gotta feed those scavengers.

We've been hearing a lot about "peak oil", but it seems that we have also hit "peak fish". Fish populations are already getting smaller. Much smaller. At the same time, the populations are getting increasingly stressed out by the acidification of ocean water, and climate change raising ocean water temperature. As a result, marine plant life - the base of the ocean's food web - is also disappearing. And China is getting wealthier, and much hungrier. Affluence means having more than rice on your dinner plate. Especially in new restaurants. Chinese consumption of fish has risen dramatically during the past two decades, coinciding with their population's increasing wealth. I don't mean to criticize the Chinese. They only want what we have had for decades.

Several years ago when I went down to the Florida Keys, I entered a pub that had a huge blow up of the great American author Ernest Hemingway (a former patron) with a 900 pound Marlin that he had caught off The Keys. Marlin that size haven't really been seen for decades. Soon, they will be gone, as will all the great fish. The beasts that swim across the Atlantic and the Pacific. As well as the somewhat smaller ones of 2 - 3 years, the ones that are just starting their adult sexually maturity, and capable of replenishing the individuals lost to the hooks, and the harpoons, and the trawlers' nets.

And still we eat. We want to eat. We need to eat. And there are increasing numbers of "us" on the planet. Remember: took until the 1850s to reach the first billion humans on the planet. One hundred and sixty years later, we're pushing 7 billion. And by 2050 - the projected year of the oceans' "death" - 10 billion people.

I think you're all a bit too young to remember the Charlie The Tuna ads for Sunkist tuna. Charlie was an animated hipster tuna. He wanted to be chosen by Sunkist to be put into one of their cans. He was hip, so he had "good taste". The commercials tag line was "Sorry Charlie - Sunkist doesn't want tuna with good taste - it wants tuna that tastes good". Something tells me that Sunkist isn't going to be that choosy anymore. Maybe that's why they stopped running those ads.

Sorry Charlie. Your days are numbered. Say you were sitting at a table with representatives from countries around the world. What would you say to them? How would YOU present the problem, and more importantly, what solution (or solutions) would you propose?

It's your generation's world.......I know it's depressing, but what can we do? What should we do?

Wolves 2 Whales, and Foxes 2 Dogs

Before the break we had the opportunity to see Neil Shubin for the first time, in the Great Transformations DVD. Shubin, an "Evo/Devo" bio guy, spoke about the tinkering that evolution does as it plays, not with animals' bodies, but with the underlying machinery - their genes. As we learned, their are a few "master control" genes - that control the timing, and structural development of key body parts and segments (head, thorax, abdomen, legs, antennae, etc.). There is a universal body plan - but the details can change over time to allow for evolutionary adaptation to occur in organisms. In this was Philip Gringerich showed the world that modern whales evolved from ancient wolf-like creatures. (That is a picture of Lyudmila Trut and one of her foxy dogs on top of this entry)

A famous experiment took place about 50 years ago that attempted to condense millions of years of evolution into just a few years. Scientists took a pack of wolves and bred them for temperment, their goal being to "recreate" the transition from wild wolves to domesticated dogs. Their premise was simple: breed the dogs, isolate/raise the pups that seemed must comfortalbe around humans, and repeat for multiple generations. Interesting idea, but were they successful?

I'd like you to read this short article Taming The Wild on National Geographic's website: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text


Once you read the article, I'd like you to share your thoughts - specifically citing at least two ideas directly from the article that you found interesting, enlightening, or just plain cool.

Then I'd like you to address the big idea that is implicit in this article: Is this a good (beneficial) thing? Does this type of research portend great advances? Or, like therapeutic cloning, is this opening a door that some will see as potentially benficial while others will view it as "playing God", and potentially dangerous? Or is it just good, solid scientific research?

Life Looks For Life

Last week, a student in one of my classes (I think it was Molly in advanced biology?) asked about the possibility of doing a "Science Night" project on astronomy. Unfortunately, I had to pt the kibosh on that idea. "Astronomy" I said, "is the study of space. Biology is the study of life, and living organisms".

Perhaps I was a bit rash in judgement in making that response. That thought continued to bug me during the course of the week. Thinking about the nascent field of exobiology - the study of the possible existance of extraterrestrial life - I soon remembered a public service announcement produced by NASA that I had seen recently on a website. (It's also on NASA's Facebook page, in case you would like to add a "like" to NASA). I liked this clip for several reasons, one of them being that the voiceover on the clip belonged to the great, late Cornell-based astronomer Carl Sagan.

Sagan helped fuel my love of astronomy as a younger adult (Mr. Whitaker's too) with a legendary series that aired on PBS in the 1970s called Cosmos. Starting with primitive man's quest for understanding the heavens, progressing from superstitious beliefs through scientific discoveries, Sagan presented a thoughtful, understandable, yet sophisticated way of making the unknown known. Scientific discoveries and concepts were presented in a clear and accessible manner. Sagan spoke at length about mankind's quest to gain deeper knowledge and understanding of the heavens. His narrative voice, and distinct verbal style, ("....there are mmmmmmillions and mmmmmmillions of galaxies...") became somewhat legendary - and ripe for satire on shows like Saturday Night Live.


NASA has used some of Sagan's soundtrack, and has superimposed it onto new footage to create a couple of advertisments for itself. This one is about 4 minutes long - take a look, and a listen. (Perhaps you should listen with a pencil in hand if you want to comment on a specific word or phrase used by Sagan):



As a nation we have retreated from our exploration of space. The demands here on earth seem so extreme. Poverty. Climate change. Sickness. Food shortages. And overall, the depths of a global economic recession. The needs are so many - the dollars available so few. Yet so much of the modern technology we take for granted in 2011 originated with the space program in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Our knowledge, and the tools we created to gain that knowledge, became vast and powerful. Our ability to see and better understand our universe increased exponentially. Still - the great question of all questions - "is there life out there? Or are we alone in the universe?" remains to be answered.

"Life looks for life." But the cost of looking for life is so great - and our needs on earth are so many - should we be spending the funds to search for life in the universe? Or should we be concentrating on taking care of our own - the people who inhabit this increasing crowded, and fragile, planet?

What do you think?

Humpty Dumpty & Ghosts In The Machine

Last week in class, as we viewed David Attenborough's marvelous introduction to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, I found myself thinking about his simple - yet profound - idea of natural selection. Natural selection states that "more offspring are born to a mother than can survive. Those that do survive are somehow stronger; better suited and "fit" to their environment. As the stronger survivors have offspring of their own, species will evolve, or adapt to their environment - ensuring a better "fit", and improving their chances for long term survival. Species evolve together, weaving balanced predator/prey relationships, and establishing balanced ecosystems that evolve as well, in order to maintain the balance of life within them.

The modern world has offered mankind many opportunities to alter the process of natural selection within ecosystems. Human have "unnaturally" selected to import, or remove any number of animals or plants within specific habitats. We have allowed invasive species to move into new, exotic environments. And we have cleared land for cultivation of our crops, and construction of our homes. This not only alters the long term process of natural selection, but more immediately, the natural ecological balance that exists within ecosystems and their food webs.

Philosophers and psychologists have long spoken of the "ghosts in the machine" - the ancient, ancestral remnants of brain/mind that continue to play a role in our mind/body relationship. We may no longer think like our "inner reptile" (well, most of us...) but these ancient parts of our brain give rise to some of our deepest, immediate responses to stumulii from our environment. (Goosebumps anyone?) We may respond with immediate fear when we see movement in a darkened room, but our modern brain knows to relax the body when it realizes that the movement was only our shadow on a wall.

Biologists have also spoken of a "ghost in the machine". In the biological sense, the ghosts exist following the unsuccessful introduction of a new species into an existing ecosystem. While the unsuccessful organism may disappear (go extinct) it's disapearance may leave an unseen impact - a ghost - on the ecological balance within that community. The extinction may allow opportunistic predators to move in. Predation may increase on particularly vulnerable smaller prey. In turn their numbers may go down. The ghost may have a domino effect throughout the ecosystem.

Biologists have tried to re-introduce species that disappear, in valiant attempts to restore, what had previously been, a natural ecological balance. Alas - this is known as the "Humpty Dumpty" effect, for like the eponymous egg (good SAT word! Look it up!) from the Mother Goose rhyme, all the king's men cannot put the ecosystem back together again. It is difficult, if not well neigh impossible, to restore ecological balance once it's gone.

Ecosystem experiments have proven extremely difficult to do. There are just so many variables. Noted evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson has written the following:

"For instance, suppose you’re interested in the question of whether individuals of different species can live together. (This is an important question, for it bears on how ecosystems form.) To keep things simple, you decide to investigate a mere six species. You want to be thorough, so you’re going to consider all combinations, from each species living alone, to all six together.
But that’s already 63 combinations. Worse, in order to be more confident about the results, you can’t just do each one once, you need to replicate them. So you set up each combination six times. That’s 378 microcosms. Worse still, ecosystems — even small and simple ones — don’t stabilize in an afternoon. You have to wait for several months before you can be sure the system has settled into a “final” form."

Judson goes on to note that the experiment has actually been done, with a success rate of about 12% with the simplest of combinations: two different species.

Natural selection takes time. Decades. Centuries. Millenia. Yet ecosystems can be irreparably damaged in a moments time. It is hard for me to think of the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, melting glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, deforestation in Africa, and population explosions in Asia, and development right here in the Upper Valley, wihtout thinking of their ecological impacts.

Ghosts and Humpty Dumpty. Sounds so childish, so innocent. Yet their very light names refer to very "heavy" ideas that govern the fragility of the world around us. I'll let Judson have the last word:

"How do ecosystems form? How much impact do invaders have? What are our chances of restoring damage done by fishing or farming? We are pushing our ecosystems to the brink. If we don’t understand how they work, we can’t hope to limit the damage. And we need to try: after all, this is our home."