GES Center Lectures, NC State University

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

Session organized by the Genetic Engineering and Society (GES) Center

CRISPRcon is a unique forum bringing diverse voices together to discuss the future of CRISPR and related gene-editing technologies across applications in agriculture, health, conservation, and more. CRISPRcon sparks curiosity, builds understanding, and highlights societal histories and other context relevant to decisions on gene editing technologies. CRISPRcon is a program of the Keystone Policy Center.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

Or, "Things are really F$%&ed up, and they have been for a long time, has my work or field of study contributed to this sad state of affairs?"

Or, taken a step farther, "Am I an agent of oppression?"

Most cognitive psychology decision-making models recognize the dual importance of logical analysis and emotions in the decision-making process. However, there is focus in the research literature, and wider society, on the biases and heuristics associated with the overuse of emotions in how we make decisions. How does this biased conceptualization of cognitive decision-making influence how we engage with underserved communities around issues of justice? Especially from a structural perspective. This is an exploratory presentation that will engage with some of these ideas.

Dr. Louie Rivers (@lriversiii) is an assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. His research focuses on the examination of risk and decision process in minority and marginalized communities, particularly in regards to the natural environment and juvenile crime. Louie really likes comic books and running.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences as dire as death. In this talk, I’ll explore the anthropological question: what lives are possible on these farms and how do interactions with these technologies influence rural wellbeing and sustainability. By comparing the experiences of farmers engaged with these mutually exclusive visions for the future of agriculture, my research investigates the human responses to global agrarian change. It illuminates the local impact of global changes: the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide.

Links & Resources:

Dr. Andrew Flachs (@DrFlachsophone) researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes. An assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, his work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

The Pink Chicken Project is an ambiguous proposal to use a recently invented biotechnology called “Gene Drive” to genetically modify the bones and feathers of all chickens in the world to the color pink. As scientists suggest chicken bones to be a primary identifier of our time (the Anthropocene), this intervention would modify the future fossil record, coloring the geological trace of humankind, pink!

Framed as an activist campaign/startup, this speculative suggestion reveals the intimate link between social and ecological justice, and allows us to think about the impact of novel biotechnologies from multiple ethical and political perspectives: why should we seek/avoid this future? How does the violence of entire-species genetic modification compare to the violence already inflicted on billions of chickens in factory farms? How can we have ethical relationships with other species in a shifting landscape of human-nonhuman power?

Links & Resources - Pink Chicken Project: https://pinkchickenproject.com, video https://vimeo.com/277923005

Nonhuman Nonsense (@non_non_sense) is a research-driven design and art studio creating near-future fabulations and experiments somewhere between utopia and dystopia. They seek to transmute our relationship to the non-human, by embracing the contradictory and the paradoxical – telling stories that open the public imaginary to futures that currently seem impossible. Founded by Leo Fidjeland and Linnea Våglund, it is based between Berlin and Stockholm.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

The advent of CRISPR-based technologies has revolutionized our ability to manipulate the genetic content of organisms across the tree of life, and democratized genome editing across the globe. Actually, genome editing technologies have been broadly deployed in academia and industry in the past 8 years, to manipulate the genomes of organisms relevant to medicine, biotechnology and agriculture. I will look back on the historical milestones that have paved the way for the CRISPR era, and discuss the diverse applications that have impacted and continue to shape the food and Ag supply chain, encompassing food fermentation, crops, livestock and forests. Given the business potential of this disruptive technology, it is important to also account for regulatory frameworks, public engagement, investment opportunities and competitive landscape implications.

Links & Resources

CRISPR Journal https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/the-crispr-journal/642

CRISPRcon (GES-led sessions on October 13 & 15 – Equity, Environment & Agriculture) https://crisprcon.org/crisprcon-2020/

Rodolphe Barrangou Ph.D. (Twitter @CRISPRlab and @CRISPRchef) is the T. R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Professor in Probiotics Research at NC State. Barrangou is focusing on the characterization of CRISPR-Cas systems, and their applications in bacteria. Rodolphe spent 9 years in R&D and M&A at DuPont. For his CRISPR work, Rodolphe received several international awards and has been elected into the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Barrangou is also the former Chairman of the Board of Caribou Biosciences, a co-founder of Intellia Therapeutics, Locus Biosciences, TreeCo, and CRISPR biotechnologies, and the Editor in Chief of the CRISPR Journal.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

While the sections of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act governing food ingredient regulation have remained largely unchanged since the passage of the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, the FDA has shown that it is able to effectively regulate ingredients manufactured using new technologies under these existing broad statutory authorities to ensure the safety of substances added to food. As emerging technologies are adopted in food ingredient production, FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety will continue to rely on these long-standing statutory authorities in combination with policy and scientific knowledge to regulate the safe use of food ingredients. To illustrate how the agency has developed science-based policy within its authority under existing federal law as science and technology evolve, we will describe the 1992 Policy Statement: Foods derived from new plant varieties and the 2014 Guidance to Industry: Assessing the effects of significant manufacturing process changes, including emerging technologies, on the safety and regulatory status of food ingredients and food contact substances

Dr. Jeremiah Fasano is a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Food Additive Safety’s Regulatory Review Branch at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. He has worked on a variety of issues during his time at CFSAN, including premarket safety evaluation of new food ingredients, assessment of genetically engineered new plant varieties, strategies for tracking sodium reduction in the US food supply, and development of safety assessment frameworks for new food technologies and functionalities. He received his doctorate in plant cell physiology and molecular biology from the Pennsylvania State University.

Links & Resources - Office of Food Additive Safety, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the US Food and Drug Administration https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/center-food-safety-and-applied-nutrition-cfsan

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

Humans practically have been domesticating organisms since before recorded memory. Why do a job when you can just pay room and board for someone else to do it? Over hundreds and hundreds of years we have recognized the innate skills of our planetary cohabitants, and then made them offers they couldn’t refuse. The people who gave us cattle, corn, and cats worked for centuries without the title they deserve: Bioengineer. Their tool was domestication, and it was the most ambitious and successful genetic modification program in human history.

Why have we stopped this success parade at microbes? There is one bacteria safe enough for American high-schoolers to “train,” and a handful more an expert could work with, and then THOUSANDS more that we depend on for our very existence but do not grow in the laboratory - and thus cannot communicate with at all. We have an empty barn, a handful of tame to feral bacteria to press into every biomanufacturing job we dream up. We would never ask a goat to catch and eat barn mice, but we frequently ask E. coli to do all sorts of outlandish things. It is a big lift for a gut microbe with a sweet tooth. It is all too frequently an impossible lift.

A re-examination of the analogies of “synthetic biology” is in order. Question every assumption.

Dr. Sarah Richardson (@TheGermWrangler, @microbyre) - Sarah is a computationally inclined microbiologist and science communicator: she speaks charmingly to computers, bacteria, and people. She grew up in West Baltimore, and after training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she founded the biotech startup MicroByre. She leads a skilled and diverse team in the construction of genomic toolkits for non‐model prokaryotes --- MicroByre coaxes wild bacteria into becoming domesticated bacteria. Trained to straddle disciplines, she has a very unique perspective on the emerging technologies made possible by synthetic biology.

Links & Resources - Microbyre

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

Understanding the GMO food debate is complex. In the public sphere, the use of biotechnology to produce food is fueled by consumer skepticism. The views on food safety are polarizing - citizens and scientists differ. Whether science is used to close the gap between social groups has yet to be determined. Research findings and policy making pathways are almost non-existent for underrepresented groups. Among Blacks, government distrust and mistrust have historical meaning and real implications. Some Blacks remain skeptical of government and are skeptical of genetic engineering, too. Key to responsible innovation is the potential to unlock meaningful pathways into underrepresented communities.

Links & Resources - Berry-James, R. M. (2019, March). Responsible Innovation: Cultural perceptions of biotechnology in food systems. Poster session presented at the 1st NC State University Research Symposium, Raleigh, NC. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334328143_Responsible_Innovation_Cultural_Perceptions_of_Biotechnology_in_Food_Systems

Dr. RaJade M. Berry-James (@jadeberryjames) is an associate professor of public administration in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at NC State University. Dr. Berry-James' research and teaching focus on social equity, program evaluation, and research methods. Her recent book, Why Research Methods Matter (2018) focuses on evidence-based decision making in the public and nonprofit sectors. Dr. Berry-James is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a congressionally chartered non-partisan non-profit.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Colloquium - Tuesdays 12-1PM (via Zoom) NC State University | http://go.ncsu.edu/ges-colloquium

Coral reefs worldwide are suffering mass mortality due to elevated sea temperatures. Corals die from starvation after they expel their algal nutritional symbionts in a process referred to as bleaching. With evidence that the algal symbionts are more sensitive to heat than corals, we hypothesized that increasing heat tolerance in the symbionts could prevent bleaching of the coral hosts. Using assisted evolution, we artificially selected for heat tolerance over 4 years in 10 clonal strains of a common algal symbiont species. All selected strains became more heat tolerant, but only 3 conferred bleaching tolerance to their coral host in symbiosis. All selected strains also secreted less reactive oxygen species, but the 3 conferring bleaching tolerance also exhibited higher constitutive expression of genes involved in carbon fixation. The genome sequences of one heat-tolerant strain (SS08) that conferred bleaching tolerance was compared to two heat-tolerant strains (SS03, SS05) that did not, and to the heat-sensitive wild type (WT). Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were observed at 190 loci. The mutations in the heat-evolved strains were clustered into particular regions of the genome. Strains SS03 and SS05 followed very similar evolutionary trajectories, and showed low levels of within-strain polymorphism. Strain SS08 followed a very different evolutionary trajectory with much lower divergence from the wild type, and retained much more polymorphism than the other two adapted strains. These findings show that bleaching resistant coral stock can be developed through laboratory-based adaptation of their microalgal symbionts

Links & Resources - P. Buerger, C. Alvarez-Roa, C. W. Coppin, S. L. Pearce, L. J. Chakravarti, J. G. Oakeshott, O. R. Edwards and M. J. H. van Oppen. Heat-evolved microalgal symbionts increase coral bleaching tolerance. Science Advances 13 May 2020: Vol. 6, no. 20, eaba2498. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba2498. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaba2498

Dr. Owain Edwards (@CSIRO) leads the Environment & Biocontrol Domain of CSIRO’s Future Science Platform in Synthetic Biology (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia). Within this platform, Dr Edwards oversees the application of synthetic biology technologies for bioremediation, genetic control of pest and invasive species, and engineering resilience to environmental change.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

GES Center - http://go.ncsu.edu/ges](http://go.ncsu.edu/ges)

Presented by the Genetic Engineering and Society (GES) Center at NC State University and the NC State Plant Breeding Consortium

Mexico has more hectares planted to traditional landraces than to hybrid maize. The costs of hybrid seed, the diversity of environments, and the culinary traditions of Mexico are reasons small farmers continue to plant traditional native maize landraces. Most of the maize produced by these farmers never appears in formal markets, yet it provides food security for a large proportion of Mexico’s population (Bellon et al. 2018). Mexican scientists have used several selection schemes to improve yields in some of the 59 native landraces, in spite of intermittent funding. We initiated a pilot project in communities in 5 regions of the state of Oaxaca with distinct races of maize, agro-ecologies and ethnic groups. This effort was later expanded to the states of Michoacán and Mexico.

Our goal was to improve farm family livelihoods while conserving diversity, by incorporating participatory breeding with investigation of agronomic management and connection of smallholder farmers to markets. Interest by chefs in authentic Mexican cuisines opened avenues to connect small farmers to culinary markets that value diversity and flavor. A niche market for native maize grown in the traditional milpa system of intercropping through manual labor of has made possible sales of excess grain by subsistence farmers. These market possibilities require community level collective organization in order to allow very small farmers to benefit from this culinary market. To preserve this market for the traditional custodians of the native maize, we worked as a multidisciplinary group, to create a collective trademark, named MILPAIZ approved by the Mexican government for native maize and associated products of the Milpa. These efforts have increased profitability for small indigenous farmers.

Links & Resources -

Dr. Martha Cameron Willcox is the Maize Landrace Improvement Coordinator at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico (CIMMYT). Originally, from North Carolina, she received a BS in Agronomy and an MS in Crop Science from NC State University and a PhD in Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a collaborative project between corn breeding and dairy nutrition. She worked as a postdoc at CIMMYT, in the Stress Breeding Unit, on selection for host plant resistance to southwestern corn borer.

Upon finishing her post-doc she was hired as a permanent scientist at CIMMYT where she addressed biosafety issues of experimental trials of transgenic maize in collaboration with Mexican experts in genetic resources from 1995-1997. She then worked in the Corn Host Plant Resistance Research Unit of USDA-ARS in molecular mapping of resistance to aflatoxin production. She returned to CIMMYT in 2011 as the phenotyping coordinator for the Seeds of Discovery Project, which sought to identify novel alleles in the CIMMYT Maize Germplasm Bank. Since 2014, she has worked as the Maize Landrace Coordinator at CIMMYT, focusing on farmer participatory improvement of native maize landraces in the states of Oaxaca, Michoacán and Mexico in marginalized, mostly indigenous, communities. As part of this project, she has worked very hard to connect traditional farmers with culinary markets.

GES Center -  Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co