Philip Bethge

Category: Stories

  • The Second Cooing: Raising Passenger Pigeons from the Dead

    The Second Cooing: Raising Passenger Pigeons from the Dead

    The world has been without passenger pigeons since 1914. Now, scientists want to bring them back. Geneticist Ben Novak has embarked on the project and has begun collecting passenger pigeon DNA from natural history museums. His “de-extinction” efforts are not without critics.

    By Philip Bethge

    The eye sockets of the slender pigeon are filled with light-colored cotton. Its neck feathers shimmer in iridescent colors, and it has a russet chest and a slate-blue head. The yellowed paper tag attached to its left leg reads: “Coll. by Capt. Frank Goss, Neosho Falls, Kansas, July 4, 1875.”

    Ben Novak lifts up the stuffed bird to study the tag more closely. Then he returns the pigeon to a group of 11 other specimens of the same species, which are resting on their backs in a wooden drawer. “It’s easy to see just dead birds,” he says. “But imagine them alive, billions of birds. What would they look like in the sky?”

    Novak has an audacious plan. He wants to resurrect the passenger pigeon. Vast numbers of the birds once filled the skies over North America. But in 1914 Martha, the last of her species, died in a zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio.

    Novak, a researcher with the Long Now Foundation, a California think tank, wants to give the species a second chance. At the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, Novak used a scalpel to slice small tissue samples from the red-painted toes of the passenger pigeons kept there. He hopes to isolate tiny bits of DNA from the samples and use them to assemble an entire genotype. His ultimate goal is the resurrection of the passenger pigeon.

    “It should be possible to reconstruct the entire genome of the passenger pigeon,” says Novak. “The species is one of the most promising candidates for reintroducing an extinct species.”

    The art of breathing new life into long-extinct species is in vogue among biologists. The Tasmanian devil, the wooly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the dodo and the gastric-breeding frog are all on the list of candidates for revival. To recover the genetic makeup of species, experts cut pieces of tissue from stuffed zoological rarities, pulverize pieces of bone or search in the freezers of their institutions for samples of extinct animals.

    The Dream of “De-Extinction”

    The laboratory techniques to create new life with bits of genetic material were pure fantasy in the past. But now scientists believe that the vision could become reality, step by step. Experts in bioengineering, zoologists, ethicists and conservationists recently met in Washington, DC for a public forum on “de-extinction.”

    “Extinct animals are the most endangered species of them all” because “there is hardly anything left but the DNA,” says Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, which co-hosted the meeting with the National Geographic Society. The current showpiece project in bioengineering is the rebirth of the passenger pigeon.

    The story of Ectopistes migratorius is a striking example of human hubris. When the Europeans arrived, the passenger pigeon was probably the most common bird on the American continent. The birds travelled in giant flocks, sometimes several hundred kilometers long. “The air was literally filled with pigeons,” naturalist John Audubon wrote in 1831, after observing the spectacle. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.”

    During their long migrations, the pigeons devastated entire forests. They descended upon their breeding grounds in eastern North America by the millions. There are historical accounts, for example, of a breeding ground in Wisconsin the size of Tokyo, where an estimated 136 million passenger pigeons came to breed. The noise was deafening.

    Living in a flock guaranteed the pigeons safety from predators. But the behavior also sealed their fate. When hunters discovered passenger pigeons as game birds, they were able to kill them with brutal efficiency, either by catching them in nets or shooting them with birdshot. They also placed pots of burning sulfur under trees until the birds, anesthetized by the vapors, dropped to the ground like overripe fruit.

    In some breeding areas, hunters slaughtered up to 50,000 passenger pigeons a day. The birds were shipped by the ton in freight cars and sold to be grilled at a few cents a dozen.

    Sequencing the Pigeon DNA

    By the time the establishment of a closed season for the birds was proposed in the US state of Minnesota in 1897, it was already too late. The last wild passenger pigeon was shot to death in 1900. Then, Pigeon Martha — named after Martha Washington, the country’s first First Lady — finally met her end at around noon on Sept. 1, 1914. She was the last surviving specimen in an unsuccessful program to breed the birds in captivity.

    Novak’s goal is to bring back the species, and he seems perfect for the job. In elementary school, he completed a project on the dodo, the extinct bird species from Mauritius. The passenger pigeon has fascinated him for years. “We caused the extinction of the species,” says the 26-year-old. “Now we have a moral obligation to bring them back.” To that end, the genetic detective is visiting natural history museums to take tissue samples from as many of the roughly 1,500 remaining samples of the skin and bones of the bird as possible.

    The passenger pigeon’s DNA has about 1.3 billion base pairs. Their sequence describes what the bird looks like, what its call sounds like and how it behaves. However, the animal’s genetic material in the museums is shredded into miniscule pieces, degraded by bacteria and contaminated with foreign DNA. But that doesn’t deter Novak. He and Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, have begun to decode the bird’s DNA.

    The biologists have an ambitious plan. Bit by bit, they intend to match the DNA sequence of the passenger pigeon with that of its close relative, the band-tailed pigeon. Then they will essentially stamp out the divergent sequences from the band-tailed pigeon genome and replace them with synthesized passenger pigeon genetic material.

    With the help of the genome created in this fashion, the scientists will create primordial germ cells for the passenger pigeon, which will then be implanted into young embryos of an easy-to-breed pigeon species. The scientists hope that once they have grown and mated, the pigeons will lay eggs that will hatch into passenger pigeons.

    Chickens in a Duck’s Egg

    The procedure is not only complicated, but also largely untested. But, says Novak, “all the necessary steps are being studied intensively right now.” For instance, he explains, biologists have already managed to insert primordial germ cells from chickens into duck eggs. The drakes that emerged a short time later actually carried the sperm cells of chickens.

    Novak is already thinking beyond the hatching of the first passenger pigeon. Once a flock of the birds has been created, he plans to release them into the wild. “The passenger pigeon was a keystone species in the forest ecosystems,” says Novak, explaining that the destructive force of the flocks led to a radical rejuvenation of forests. Thick layers of pigeon droppings fertilized the soil, which soon led to new growth. “Passenger pigeons are the dance partners of the forest,” the scientist raves. And the “ballroom” still exists.

    But even if scientists can pull off this feat, does it really make sense to bring a long-extinct species back into the world? “Conservation biology’s priority must remain that of ensuring a future for species (currently) existing on the planet,” retired Professor Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says critically. He fears that species extinction could be trivialized in the future. “People might say: ‘Can’t we let them go extinct and bring them back later?’”

    Zoologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University also criticizes the species resurrection projects, saying that they are “extremely expensive” and, in light of a global species crisis, downright absurd. “At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African forest elephants from heavily armed poachers, and here we are talking about bringing back the wooly mammoth,” he says.

    Ehrenfeld also doesn’t believe that revived species would stand much of a chance of survival. “Who will care for the passenger pigeon chicks?” he asks, noting that parental care is “critical” for the development of young birds.

    Darkened Skies

    But Novak rejects the criticism. “Passenger pigeon parents were never incredibly involved in raising their young,” he says. He also plans to teach the chicks the basics of passenger pigeon life by dyeing carrier pigeons and essentially using them as flight controllers for the returning species.

    “We’ll ferry them with homing pigeons down to wintering grounds and back to the breeding area,” he says. “After a few years, we have passenger pigeons that fly the same (routes) as their forefathers.”

    When that happens, clouds of passenger pigeons will darken the skies once again, and another dream could be fulfilled for Novak. “Part of me would really love a passenger pigeon as a pet,” says the scientist. And perhaps, he adds, the pigeon zoo could even be expanded.

    There are 50 extinct pigeon species worldwide, says Novak. He has already earmarked three of them for resurrection: the Japanese silver-banded pigeon, the Choiseul crested pigeon and the thick-billed ground dove.

    “I am a pigeon nut,” says Novak.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

  • The Wizard of Stem Cell Science: Robert Lanza and the Dawning of a New Era of Hope

    Ethical worries have slowed medical research into applications for stem cells. But scientists like Robert Lanza have developed less controversial ways to derive stem cells from normal body cells rather than embryos and are already launching the first clinical trials.

    By Philip Bethge

    Stem cell researcher Robert Lanza hopes to save thousands of lives — and for a long time this caused him to fear for his own.

    “They bused these crazy people up from Kansas, and then they picnicked right outside our front door,” he says as he gazes out of his window at the gray winter landscape of Marlborough, Massachusetts. “The public thought we had these little buggy-eyed embryos here and were ripping apart their limbs to get these cells.”

    The physician always feared “somebody hiding in the bushes,” waiting to attack him. At the time, a doctor was threatened at a nearby fertility clinic, and a pipe bomb exploded at a bio lab in Boston.

    “Back then I thought that there was probably a 50-50 chance that I was going to get knocked off because I was so visible,” says the doctor. Then he leans back in his chair and laughs. Lanza likes to flirt with danger: “I said, okay, try to kill me — I’m still going to do what I think is right.”

    In Lanza’s case, doing what is “right” involves working with therapies based on human stem cells. The blind shall see again; the paralyzed shall walk again; the hemophiliac shall not bleed anymore. That may sound like something out of the Bible, but Lanza is no faith healer. In fact, the US business magazine Fortune called him “the standard-bearer for stem cell research.” The 57-year-old is the chief scientific officer at the US company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures in this field of research.

    Militant anti-abortionists tried to hunt Lanza down because embryos had to die for his research. Just last year, the scientific journal Nature wrote that ACT has “a history of public blunders” and a reputation for “overhyping results.”

    At the same time, however, Lanza is writing medical history. For over one year now, eye patients in the US and the UK have been treated with cells from ACT laboratories — the first clinical stem cell trial worldwide.

    And there is a world premiere in the making: Lanza’s team has cultivated blood platelets that could be tested in hospitals as early as this year. The researcher and his team didn’t harvest the cells from embryonic stem cells, but rather from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from normal body cells.

    “It took a decade,” says Lanza, “but now we are finally ready to move into the clinic with our stem cell therapies.”

    The Making of a Rebel Scientist

    Lanza is a slender man with short hair that stands on end, and he speaks so quickly that his sentences tend to be cut off. His laboratory is located in an ugly commercial building on the outskirts of Marlborough. It’s hard to imagine that a medical revolution is brewing in this dreary setting. The petri dishes, test tubes and steel containers filled with liquid nitrogen are teeming with human cells. The ACT “Master Cell Bank” cost $1 million (€770,000), says Lanza, “but these things grow like weeds once a stem cell line has been established.”

    The cell factory is currently producing batches of iPS blood platelets. Emergency wards have a huge demand for these helpers in the body’s natural clotting mechanism. Lanza explains that a lack of these elements can have dramatic consequences: His sister was seriously injured during an accident. The hospital didn’t have enough blood platelet concentrate. “She bled to death,” he says.

    Lanza wants to prevent something like that from ever happening again. His team has found ways to cultivate an “unlimited supply” of the cells. When frozen, he says, they can be kept for months. He is currently negotiating the final details of the planned study with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “We don’t need any embryos to make iPS,” Lanza says with pride. “If this type of stem cell works,” he adds, “the whole ethical controversy will be eliminated.”

    Venturing to start clinical trials now is seen as a bold step. But Lanza is used to falling out of line. Even back when he was a schoolboy — just after the genetic code had been deciphered — he decided to alter the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black. “So I went to my teacher and told him that I was going to change the genetic makeup of the birds,” Lanza recounts. “He said: ‘Lanza, you’re going to go to hell.’”

    This merely encouraged the 13-year-old. He cobbled together some laboratory equipment. To gain support for his experiment, the youngster boarded a bus in his hometown of Stoughton, close to Boston, and went “looking for a Harvard professor,” as he explains with a grin. At first, his journey appeared to end at the closed gates of Harvard Medical School. But Lanza soon saw “a short, balding guy” coming across the parking lot. “He was wearing khaki pants and had a bunch of keys,” he says. “I thought he was the janitor.” The boy had no idea that this was Stephen Kuffler, one of the most famous neurophysiologists of his time.

    Kuffler played along: He opened the door for Lanza, allowed the boy to explain to him how genetics worked, and pushed him up the stairs. This opened up a new universe for the up-and-coming scientist. He repeated his chicken experiment and landed his first publication in Nature.

    The Dawning of a New Medical Era

    Lanza likes to tell this story to visitors. It shows how zeal can overcome all obstacles. He is often compared to the main character played by Matt Damon in the film “Good Will Hunting,” a highly talented outsider who, like Lanza, comes from a humble background.

    “Right from the beginning, I probably didn’t follow the rules,” says Lanza with a certain amount of pride. He studied medicine at Harvard. In South Africa, he worked with Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967, and with Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Then, in 1996, the world’s first cloned sheep, Dolly, was born in Britain — and Lanza sensed that his hour had arrived.

    “I knew right away that cloning could revolutionize medicine,” he says. With the help of cloned stem cells, the young researcher was convinced that a wide range of top-notch replacement parts could be created for the human body.

    The physician signed up with the biotech startup ACT. Working for the company in 2000, he cloned a gaur, an endangered wild bovine native to Southeast Asia. Later, his team managed to transform the frozen skin cells of a banteng into a living sample of this Asian wild cattle. The skin cells came from an animal that had died a quarter of a century earlier in the San Diego Zoo.

    For Lanza, these were just practice exercises. The ultimate goal for him was always people — and he was at just the right place for that: In 2001, then-ACT CEO Michael West went before the press and announced that his company had cloned a human embryo for the first time. West spoke of the beginning of “a new era of medicine.” Then all hell broke loose.

    —> Read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

    Obstacles Along the Way

    When Lanza harkens back to those days, he becomes more serious. Although the ACT embryos had only grown to tiny balls consisting of six cells, for anti-abortion activists and pro-lifers the researcher was now the Antichrist incarnate.

    “I remember that I went down to Tennessee, to the Bible country, and I went to one of those churches to explain what we were really doing. As I went through the door with the minister, a guy got up and shouted “Murderer! Murderer!” Lanza hired a bodyguard.

    In the wake of the media coup, ACT started to founder. Investors withdrew from the company, and with George W. Bush in the White House, public funding for stem cell research dried up. “We went through multiple times where we lost the whole team,” says Lanza, who notes that they even had their phone disconnected for a while. “Rather than curing diseases, we were trying to resolve theological problems,” Lanza says bitterly. “And that’s not what I studied medicine for.”

    Talking about the issue has slowly made the doctor furious and, almost imperceptibly, his tone of voice is becoming shriller. Another story has to be told, that of a policeman standing in front of the door one day. Lanza was afraid that he would be arrested. But no: “He came into my office and said that he had a child who was slowly going blind,” the physician recalls. “He said that he had heard of these cells that could supposedly help, and I said: ‘Yes, I have these cells in a freezer, but I don’t have the $20,000 to test them on mice.’”

    Lanza had to turn the man away. It pains him to this day. “I don’t want to know how many people went blind because we lost our public funding,” he says angrily. “Nobody gets it; they say everything is fine; no, it’s not fine!”

    Changes in the Political Environment and Scientific Advances

    Attention shifted away from ACT. Instead, everyone started talking about Geron, another biotech company on the West Coast. Researchers there had succeeded in cultivating nerve cells from embryonic stem cells. With support from Christopher Reeve, the paralyzed “Superman,” there was renewed hope that spinal cord injuries could be healed. Three patients were treated using the therapy developed by Geron. But in November 2011, the company put the brakes on the research due to a lack of funds.

    That was the moment when Lanza realized that he once again had to play the role of stem-cell-research poster boy. But this time he had something to show for his efforts. Benefiting from progress that Geron had made, ACT had also managed to gain FDA approval for a clinical trial.

    Researchers had cultivated so-called retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, which form a thin layer over the retina and keep the photoreceptor cells nourished and healthy.

    In July 2011, doctors at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) injected the first two patients directly behind the retina, each with some 50,000 RPE cells from Lanza’s cell factory. There are now 36 patients in the US and the UK taking part in the trials. They either suffer from the hereditary Stargardt disease or age-related macular degeneration (AMD), both of which are conditions in which RPE cells slowly die, resulting in a loss of vision.

    Initial Success and Tempered Optimism

    One of the Stargardt patients is David Lee, from the northern English town of Leigh, just outside of Manchester. Following a routine eye checkup 25 years ago, Lee was told that he suffers from the disease. Over the ensuing years, he has had to idly stand by while he progressively loses his eyesight. “Watching television has become very hard, and reading is impossible without magnification,” the 47-year-old says.

    Then Lee heard about the stem cell trials and submitted an application to become a subject in the study. In late July 2012, he was operated on by a team working under surgeon James Bainbridge at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The doctors injected RPE cells in Lee’s left eye. “I was exceptionally happy about it,” he says.

    Lee regularly travels to London to have his eyes examined. His physicians are satisfied. The RPE cells from the bio lab are thriving in Lee’s retina. “I see definitely brighter on the eye that was operated on,” he says.

    He runs a bakery out of a small brick house in the center of Leigh, and he can still see just well enough to be able to sell cakes, pastries and bread. “I know that I won’t get my sight back”, Lee says. “But, for me, it would already be a big success not to lose any more of my sight.”

    Many of the patients report that the therapy is effective. “We have some surprisingly good visual outcome,” says Steven Schwartz, an eye surgeon at UCLA. He says that one of his patients can read a clock again and go shopping, while another can recognize colors again. In addition to AMD and Stargardt patients, Schwartz plans to integrate extremely nearsighted individuals into the test program soon. The FDA has already approved the clinical trials.

    Lanza is a “genius” and his work is “stellar,” Schwartz says. “The patients seem to tolerate the cells well,” he says. But the researcher warns against overly optimistic expectations, adding that it remains completely uncertain whether the innovative eye therapy will actually heal these ailments. He notes that the trials are mainly meant to test the safety of the procedure.

    Stem cells can transform into virtually any type of body cell. Once they have become differentiated, they tend not to cause any problems. But what happens if they continue to develop, and one of the RPE cells from the lab mutates in the eye and becomes malignant?

    “I worry that a single case of cancer in a stem cell model like this could set the field back enormously,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. He is concerned that ACT may be pursuing its clinical trials far too aggressively. After all, the company has to placate its investors and outdo the competition.

    Competitors and Risks

    Indeed, Lanza will have to hurry up if he wants to be the first to come up with a clinically tested application for iPS cells. His greatest rival is located in Kobe, Japan, at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology. There, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka is working on groundbreaking stem cell therapies.

    And the Japanese researcher is a very capable contender. After all, he received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine last October for his method of producing iPS cells. Like Lanza, Yamanaka is striving to use stem cells to cure blindness from macular degeneration (AMD). But, unlike Lanza, he plans to use iPS cells.

    “Lanza is under tremendous pressure to show some positive results,” Caplan warns, adding that he is without a doubt a serious researcher. “But ACT has a history of overselling. They made a lot of promises in the past that just haven’t delivered.”

    Lanza is aware of the bad press. “Mistakes have been made,” he admits. But he remains feisty. For instance, he accuses Yamanaka, his Japanese counterpart, of venturing an experiment that is particularly risky. “We still don’t entirely understand how safe iPS cells are and how they work,” says Lanza. Using them to cultivate RPE cells to treat eye diseases is dangerous, he adds, because the cells could possibly become cancerous in patients’ eyes.

    “By contrast, we picked platelets for our first clinical trial with iPS because they have no nuclei,” he says. There is no chance of them growing out of control.

    Enthusiastic about the Future

    “Come have a look, I’m going to show you something else,” Lanza says at the end of the interview, as he opens a binder and pulls out a diagram that charts age relative to degree of paralysis. It has to do with multiple sclerosis. Lanza has studied mice that suffer from this crippling neurological disorder. The curve documents the sad fate of untreated animals: At the age of two, they drag their hind legs behind them. At the age of three, they are completely paralyzed.

    But it’s a completely different story among the mice that were treated with stem cells: The curve of this group can hardly be differentiated from that of healthy animals. “One shot of these cells and they are jumping around completely normal,” Lanza says with enthusiasm. The researcher treats the animals with so-called mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which are cultivated from embryonic stem cells or iPS cells. They resemble bone marrow cells and secrete substances in the body that work like a fountain of youth.

    “That’s the future,” Lanza says. He points to an entire list of diseases that could potentially be treated with MSC cells, including chronic pain, arthritis and Parkinson’s. “The biological potency of these cells is just incredible! And we can make them by the millions,” he exclaims.

    This is what Lanza is like when he’s in the grips of enthusiasm. His eyes sparkle and his gestures underscore each word. At moments like these, one senses how far his enthusiasm can take him.

    “Before ACT hired me, they gave me a task,” he explains. “I was asked to get all the Nobel laureates in the country to sign a letter to support embryonic stem cell research.”

    Lanza put his fax machine to work. Ever since then, he has had a stack of letters in his desk drawer — with the signatures of 70 Nobel Prize laureates.

    Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

    —> Read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Interview with Edward O. Wilson on Human Evolution and the Origin of Morals

    American sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is championing a controversial new approach for explaining human evolution and the origins of virtue and sin. In an interview, the world-famous ant reseacher explains why he believes the inner struggle is the characteristic trait of human nature.

    By Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

    Edward O. Wilson doesn’t come across as the kind of man who’s looking to pick a fight. With his shoulders upright and his head tilting slightly to the side, he shuffles through the halls of Harvard University. His right eye, which has given him trouble since his childhood, is halfway closed. The other is fixed on the ground. As an ant researcher, Wilson has made a career out of things that live on the earth’s surface.

    There’s also much more to Wilson. Some consider him to be the world’s most important living biologist, with some placing him on a level with Charles Darwin.

    In addition to discovering and describing hundreds of species of ants, Wilson’s book on this incomparably successful group of insects is the only non-fiction biology tome ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Another achievement was decoding the chemical communication of ants, whose vocabulary is composed of pheromones. His study of the ant colonization of islands helped to establish one of the most fruitful branches of ecology. And when it comes to the battle against the loss of biodiversity, Wilson is one of the movement’s most eloquent voices.

    ‘Blessed with Brilliant Enemies’

    But Wilson’s fame isn’t solely the product of his scientific achievements. His enemies have also helped him to establish a name. “I have been blessed with brilliant enemies,” he says. In fact, the multitude of scholars with whom Wilson has skirmished academically is illustrious. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix in DNA is among them, as is essayist Stephen Jay Gould.

    At 83 years of age, Wilson is still at work making a few new enemies. The latest source of uproar is a book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” published last April in the United States and this month in a German-language edition. In the tome, Wilson attempts to describe the triumphal advance of humans in evolutionary terms.

    It is not uncommon for Wilson to look to ants for inspiration in his writings — and that proves true here, as well. When, for example, he recalls beholding two 90-million-year-old worker ants that were trapped in a piece of fossil metasequoia amber as being “among the most exciting moments in my life,” a discovery that “ranked in scientific importance with Archaeopteryx, the first fossil intermediary between birds and dinosaurs, and Australopithecus, the first ‘missing link’ discovered between modern humans and the ancestral apes.”

    But that’s all just foreplay to the real controversy at the book’s core. Ultimately, Wilson uses ants to explain humans’ social behavior and, by doing so, breaks with current convention. The key question is the level at which Darwinian selection of human characteristics takes place. Did individuals enter into a fight for survival against each other, or did groups battle it out against competing groups?

    Prior to this book, Wilson had been an influential champion of the theory of kin selection. He has now rejected his previous teachings, literally demolishing them. “The beautiful theory never worked well anyway, and now it has collapsed,” he writes. Today, he argues that human nature can only be understood if it is perceived as being the product of “group selection” — a view that Wilson’s fellow academics equate with sacrilege. They literally lined up to express their scientific dissent in a joint letter.

    Some of the most vociferous criticism has come from Richard Dawkins, whose bestselling 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” first introduced the theory of kin selection to a mass audience. In a withering review of Wilson’s book in Britain’s Prospect magazine, Dawkins accuses a man he describes as his “lifelong hero” of “wanton arrogance” and “perverse misunderstandings”. “To borrow from Dorothy Parker,” he writes, “this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.”

    SPIEGEL recently sat down with sociobiologist Wilson to discuss his book and the controversy surrounding it.

    —–>Read Original Interview at SPIEGEL International

    SPIEGEL: Professor Wilson, lets assume that 10 million years ago some alien spacecraft had landed on this planet. Which organisms would they find particularly intriguing?

    Wilson: Their interest, I believe, would not have been our ancestors. Primarily, they would have focused on ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Their discovery is what the aliens would report back to headquarters.

    SPIEGEL: And you think those insects would be more interesting to them than, for example, elephants, flocks of birds or intelligent primates?

    Wilson: They would be, because, at that time, ants and termites would be the most abundant creatures on the land and the most highly social creatures with very advanced division of labor and caste. We call them “eusocial,” and this phenomenon seems to be extremely rare.

    SPIEGEL: What else might the aliens consider particularly interesting about ants?

    Wilson: Ants engage in farming and animal husbandry. For example, some of them cultivate fungi. Others herd aphids and literally milk them by stroking them with their antennae. And the other thing the aliens would find extremely interesting would be the degree to which these insects organize their societies by pheromones, by chemical communication. Ants and termites have taken this form of communication to extremes.

    SPIEGEL: So the aliens would cable back home: “We have found ants. They are the most promising candidates for a future evolution towards intelligent beings on earth?”

    Wilson: No, they wouldn’t. They would see that these creatures were encased in exoskeletons and therefore had to remain very small. They would conclude that there was little chance for individual ants or termites to develop much reasoning power, nor, as a result, the capacity for culture. But at least on this planet, you have to be big in order to have sufficient cerebral cortex. And you probably have to be bipedal and develop hands with pulpy fingers, because those give you the capacity to start creating objects and to manipulate the environment.

    SPIEGEL: Would our ancestors not have caught their eye?

    Wilson: Ten million years ago, our ancestors indeed had developed a somewhat larger brain and versatile hands already. But the crucial step had yet to come.

    SPIEGEL: What do you mean?

    Wilson: Let me go back to the social insects for a moment. Why did social insects start to form colonies? Across hundreds of millions of years, insects had been proliferating as solitary forms. Some of them stayed with their young for a while, guided them and protected them. You find that widespread but far from universal in the animal kingdom. However, out of those species came a much smaller number of species who didn’t just protect their young, but started building nests that they defended …

    SPIEGEL: … similar to birds.

    Wilson: Yes. And I think that birds are right at the threshold of eusocial behaviour. But looking at the evolution of ants and termites again, there is another crucial step. In an even smaller group, the young don’t only grow up in their nest, but they also stay and care for the next generation. Now you have a group staying together with a division of labor. That is evidently the narrow channel of evolution that you have to pass through in order to become eusocial.

    SPIEGEL: And our ancestors followed the same path?

    Wilson: Yes. I argue that Homo habilis, the first humans, also went through these stages. In particular, Homo habilis was unique in that they already had shifted to eating meat.

    SPIEGEL: What difference would that make?

    Wilson: When animals start eating meat, they tend to form packs and to divide labor. We know that the immediate descendants of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, gathered around camp sites and that they actually had begun to use fire. These camp sites are equivalent to nests. That’s where they gathered in a tightly knit group, and then individuals went out searching for food.

    SPIEGEL: And this development of groups drives evolution even further?

    Wilson: Exactly. And, for example, if it now comes to staking out the hunting grounds, then group stands against group.

    SPIEGEL: Meaning that this is the origin of warfare?

    Wilson: Yes. But it doesn’t take necessarily the forming of an army or a battalion and meeting on the field and fighting. It was mostly what you call “vengeance raids”. One group attacks another, maybe captures a female or kills one or two males. The other group then counterraids, and this will go back and forth, group against group.

    ‘Kin Selection Doesn’t Explain Anything’

    SPIEGEL: You say that this so called group selection is vital for the evolution of humans. Yet traditionally, scientists explain the emergence of social behavior in humans by kin selection.

    Wilson: That, for a number of reasons, isn’t much good as an explanation.

    SPIEGEL: But you yourself have long been a proponent of this theory. Why did you change your mind?

    Wilson: You are right. During the 1970s, I was one of the main proponents of kin selection theory. And at first the idea sounds very reasonable. So for example, if I favored you because you were my brother and therefore we share one half of our genes, then I could sacrifice a lot for you. I could give up my chance to have children in order to get you through college and have a big family. The problem is: If you think it through, kin selection doesn’t explain anything. Instead, I came to the conclusion that selection operates on multiple levels. On one hand, you have normal Darwinian selection going on all the time, where individuals compete with each other. In addition, however, these individuals now form groups. They are staying together, and consequently it is group versus group.

    SPIEGEL: Turning away from kin selection provoked a rather fierce reaction from many of your colleagues.

    Wilson: No, it didn’t. The reaction was strong, but it came from a relatively small group of people whose careers are based upon studies of kin selection.

    SPIEGEL: Isn’t that too easy? After all, 137 scientists signed a response to your claims. They accuse you of a “misunderstanding of evolutionary theory”.

    Wilson: You know, most scientists are tribalists. Their lives are so tied up in certain theories that they can’t let go.

    SPIEGEL: Does it even make a substantial difference if humans evolved through kin selection or group selection?

    Wilson: Oh, it changes everything. Only the understanding of evolution offers a chance to get a real understanding of the human species. We are determined by the interplay between individual and group selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. We’re all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group selection.

    SPIEGEL: Is this Janus-faced nature of humans our greatest strength at the end of the day?

    Wilson: Exactly. This inner conflict between altruism and selfishness is the human condition. And it is very creative and probably the source of our striving, our inventiveness and imagination. It’s that eternal conflict that makes us unique.

    SPIEGEL: So how do we negotiate this conflict?

    Wilson: We don’t. We have to live with it.

    SPIEGEL: Which element of this human condition is stronger?

    Wilson: Let’s put it this way: If we would be mainly influenced by group selection, we would be living in kind of an ant society.

    SPIEGEL: … the ultimate form of communism?

    Wilson: Yes. Once in a while, humans form societies that emphasize the group, for example societies with Marxist ideology. But the opposite is also true. In other societies the individual is everything. Politically, that would be the Republican far right.

    SPIEGEL: What determines which ideology is predominant in a society?

    Wilson: If your territory is invaded, then cooperation within the group will be extreme. That’s a human instinct. If you are in a frontier area, however, then we tend to move towards the extreme individual level. That seems to be a good part of the problem still with America. We still think we’re on the frontier, so we constantly try to put forward individual initiative and individual rights and rewards based upon individual achievement.

    SPIEGEL: Earlier, you differentiated between the “virtue” of altruism and the “sin” of individualism. In your book you talk about the “poorer and the better angels” of human nature. Is it helpful to use this kind of terminology?

    Wilson: I will admit that using the terminology of “virtue” and “sin” is what poets call a “trope”. That is to say, I wanted the idea in crude form to take hold. Still, a lot of what we call “virtue” has to do with propensities to behave well toward others. What we call “sin” are things that people do mainly out of self-interest.

    SPIEGEL: However, our virtues towards others go only so far. Outside groups are mainly greeted with hostility.

    Wilson: You are right. People have to belong to a group. That’s one of the strongest propensities in the human psyche and you won’t be able to change that. However, I think we are evolving, so as to avoid war — but without giving up the joy of competition between groups. Take soccer …

    SPIEGEL: … or American football.

    Wilson: Oh, yes, American football, it’s a blood sport. And people live by team sports and national or regional pride connected with team sports. And that’s what we should be aiming for, because, again, that spirit is one of the most creative. It landed us on the moon, and people get so much pleasure from it. I don’t want to see any of that disturbed. That is a part of being human. We need our big games, our team sports, our competition, our Olympics.

    SPIEGEL: “Humans,” the saying goes, “have Paleolithic emotions” …

    Wilson: … “Medieval institutions and god-like technology”. That’s our situation, yeah. And we really have to handle that.

    SPIEGEL: How?

    Wilson: So often it happens that we don’t know how, also in situations of public policy and governance, because we don’t have enough understanding of human nature. We simply haven’t looked at human nature in the best way that science might provide. I think what we need is a new Enlightenment. During the 18th century, when the original Enlightenment took place, science wasn’t up to the job. But I think science is now up to the job. We need to be harnessing our scientific knowledge now to get a better, science-based self-understanding.

    SPIEGEL: It seems that, in this process, you would like to throw religions overboard altogether?

    Wilson: No. That’s a misunderstanding. I don’t want to see the Catholic Church with all of its magnificent art and rituals and music disappear. I just want to have them give up their creation stories, including especially the resurrection of Christ.

    SPIEGEL: That might well be a futile endeavour …

    Wilson: There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said, “I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” That’s where science comes in. Seriously, I think we’re better off with no creation stories.

    SPIEGEL: With this new Enlightenment, will we reach a higher state of humanity?

    Wilson: Do we really want to improve ourselves? Humans are a very young species, in geologic terms, and that’s probably why we’re such a mess. We’re still living with all this aggression and ability to go to war. But do we really want to change ourselves? We’re right on the edge of an era of being able to actually alter the human genome. But do we want that? Do we want to create a race that’s more rational and free of many of these emotions? My response is no, because the only thing that distinguishes us from super-intelligent robots are our imperfect, sloppy, maybe even dangerous emotions. They are what makes us human.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Wilson, we thank you for this conversation.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle

    —–>Read Original Interview at SPIEGEL International

  • SPIEGEL Blog: Surrogate Mother (Not Yet) Sought for Neanderthal

    An interview published last week by SPIEGEL with American genetic scientist George Church has sparked frenetic media speculation about a supposed plan to bring the Neanderthal back from the dead. Church feels his remarks were mistranslated, but it was other media outlets that twisted his words.

    “Wanted: Surrogate Mother For Neanderthal,” screamed an article in the Berliner Kurier tabloid in the German capital on Tuesday, complete with an image of a grinning, bearded caveman. Britain’s Independent seemed positively creeped out by a Harvard professor who wanted to bring such beings back to life as some kind of “Palaeolithic Park.” Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph implored: “Spare Neanderthals This Modern Freak Show.”

    Media and websites around the world — in Britain, Italy, Poland, Greece, Hungary, Russia, South Korea and Turkey — expressed interest in the idea of resurrecting the Neanderthal. By Wednesday morning, more than 600 sources on Google News had reported the story, with all citing SPIEGEL as their source. What happened?

    The source of the net furore was an interview SPIEGEL conducted with George Church. The Harvard University genetic researcher then provided an explanation to the Boston Herald for the sudden media fever. He blamed it on an error downstream of SPIEGEL. He said it had been incorrectly reported that he was looking for a surrogate mother to carry a Neanderthal clone.

    The sudden interest in the Neanderthal, our human cousin, may tell us a little bit about the diffuse fear of overly ambitious genetic researchers. But it tells us even more about the laws of tabloid journalism.

    In this case, the entire brouhaha arose in articles written outside of SPIEGEL’s domain. And it is important to us to communicate this because we make a significant effort to ensure that our stories are correctly translated when they appear on our English-language website. Occasionally mistakes slip through — as is inevitable with any site that relies heavily on translation — but when they do we are quick to correct them.

    In addition, we sent Church an English version of our interview the week before it went to print for authorization. This provided him with an opportunity to change any formulations that may have caused any room for misinterpretation. We did make some alterations later without checking, and have since apologized to him for introducing the word “hell,” which he did not say.

    A Storm of Coverage

    It should quickly be obvious to anyone following the hype over the Neanderthal surrogate mother closely that the storm of coverage didn’t break out until a week after the interview was published. Last Friday, we posted the interview, which we had requested from George Church because we had been fascinated by his latest book. The title alone, “Regenisis,” seemed promising.

    And Church didn’t disappoint in his interview. He laid out the great future he believes the still relatively young research field of “synthetic biology” will have. Regardless whether he was discussing the cloning of humans, the genetic optimization of Homo sapiens, the manipulation of the genetic code of all life forms or the re-creation of the Neanderthal, nothing was treated as taboo in his interview. In other words, it offered plenty of fodder for both controversy and thrilling entertainment.

    The interview first appeared in the German-language print edition of SPIEGEL on Monday, Jan. 14, and the raft of outraged reader letters reflected the intense interest the interview generated. Church has always presented himself as a bold and argumentative visionary who won’t hesitate to consider anything that might be scientifically feasible.

    Initially, few media outlets picked up the story. Nor did that change after we posted a short article focusing primarily on Church’s remarks on the potential for resurrecting the Neanderthal on SPIEGEL ONLINE in German. The hype machine got going shortly after that.

    It was only then that the story was given the decisive spin — by other media outlets. Early tweets on the interview, may have helped to set the tone, like one person who tweeted: “My life’s new ambition: Mate with a Neanderthal woman.” A short time later, the first journalist stumbled across the interview’s emotive word: “surrogate.” That’s when headlines like the one that appeared in the Daily Mail — “Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby” — were born. Subsequent tweets are already discussing the possibility of a film being made of the story.

    The question of whether a surrogate mother could be used for a possible future Neanderthal clone does in fact pop up in the interview. In the question, we cite a passage in Church’s book in which he writes that, “a whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp — or by an extremely adventurous female human.”

    No Want Ad Implied

    It would have to be clear to anyone who gives that passage in the interview a critical read — and the same applies to both the German and English versions — that it is in no way intended as some kind of want or personal ad. Church didn’t mean it that way and we didn’t understand it to mean that either. Really, what Church was explaining is that he considers the rebirth of the Neanderthal to be technically possible. He also explains the steps that would be necessary to get there. The last step, someday, would be the search for a surrogate mother. He also says that he believes the chances are good that he might experience the birth of the first Neanderthal clone within his lifetime. We thought that statement alone was a bit of a reach, particularly given that Church is 58 years old today.

    We’re sorry that Church, who provided us with such fascinating insights into his research, has now become the victim of media hype. In the course of the past two decades, he told the Boston Herald, he has done perhaps 500 interviews about his research and this is the first one to spiral out of control quite like this.

    What’s perhaps most bizarre about the entire media hysteria over Church’s interview is that potential surrogate mothers are now contacting the geneticist. His concern — at least if things get to that stage — that he will have difficulty finding potential surrogate mothers appears to be unfounded.

    *Editor’s Note: At the request of George Church, five changes have been made to the above text. In particular, he wanted to avoid the impression that he had blamed a translation error on the part of DER SPIEGEL for the confusion that ensued following the interview’s publication.

     

  • Interview with George Church: Can Neanderthals Be Brought Back from the Dead?

    In a SPIEGEL interview, synthetic biology expert George Church of Harvard University explains how DNA will become the building material of the future — one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal.

    –> Update: The Interview has sparked frenetic media speculation about a supposed plan to bring the Neanderthal back from the dead. Church feels his remarks were mistranslated, but it was other media outlets that twisted his words.

    George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome. In addition to his current work in developing accelerated procedures for sequencing and synthesizing DNA, he has also been involved in the establishing of around two dozen biotech firms. In his new book, “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves,” which he has also encoded as strands of DNA and distributed on small DNA chips, Church sketches out a story of a second, man-made Creation.

    SPIEGEL recently sat down with Church to discuss his new tome and the prospects for using synthetic biology to bring the Neanderthal back from exctinction as well as the idea of making humans resistant to all viruses.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by “soon”? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

    Church: I think so, but boy there are a lot of parts to that. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

    SPIEGEL: Perhaps because it is banned?

    Church: That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

    SPIEGEL: Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

    Church: Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

    SPIEGEL: So let’s talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.

    Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

    SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?

    Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

    SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?

    Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

    SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?

    Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

    SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.

    Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

    SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.

    Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were to realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).

    SPIEGEL: Might it one day be possible to descend even deeper into evolutionary history and recreate even older ancestors like Australopithecus or Homo erectus?

    Church: Well, you have got a shot at anything where you have the DNA. The limit for finding DNA fragments is probably around a million years.

    SPIEGEL: So we won’t be seeing the return of the caveman or dinosaurs?

    Church: Probably not. But even if you don’t have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you would first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask: “What’s the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands?” And you would try to identify the mutations and try to back engineer the dinosaur. I think this will be feasible.

    SPIEGEL: Is it also conceivable to create lifeforms that never existed before? What about, for example, rabbits with wings?

    Church: So that’s a further possibility. However, things have to be plausible from an engineering standpoint. There is a bunch of things in birds that make flying possible, not just the wings. They have very lightweight bones, feathers, strong breast muscles, and the list goes on.

    SPIEGEL: Flying rabbits and recreated dinosaurs are pure science fiction today. But on the microbe level, researchers are already creating synthetic life. New bacteria detect arsenic in drinking water. They create synthetic vaccines and diesel fuel. You call these organisms “novel machines”. How do they relate to the machines we know?

    Church: Well, all organisms are mechanical in the sense that they’re made up of moving parts that inter-digitate like gears. The only difference is that they are incredibly intricate. They are atomically precise machines.

    SPIEGEL: And what will these machines be used for?

    Church: Oh, life science will co-opt almost every other field of manufacturing. It’s not limited to agriculture and medicine. We can even use biology in ways that biology never has evolved to be used. DNA molecules for example could be used as three-dimensional scaffolding for inorganic materials, and this with atomic precision. You can design almost any structure you want with a computer, then you push a button — and there it is, built-in DNA.

    SPIEGEL: DNA as the building material of the future?

    Church: Exactly. And it’s amazing. Biology is good at making things that are really precise. Take trees for example. Trees are extremely complicated, at least on a molecular basis. However, they are so cheap, that we burn them or convert them into tables. Trees cost about $50 a ton. This means that you can make things that are nearly atomically precise for five cents a kilo.

    SPIEGEL: You are seriously proposing to build all kinds of machines — cars, computers or coffee machines — out of DNA?

    Church: I think it is very likely that this is possible. In fact, computers made of DNA will be better than the current computers, because they will have even smaller processors and be more energy efficient.

    SPIEGEL: Let’s go through a couple of different applications of synthetic biology. How long will it take, for example, until we can fill our tanks with fuel that has been produced using synthentic microbes?

    Church: The fact is that we already have organisms that can produce fuel compatible with current car engines. These organisms convert carbon dioxide and light into fuels by basically using photosynthesis.

    SPIEGEL: And they do so in an economically acceptable way?

    Church: If you consider $1.30 a gallon for fuel a good number, then yeah. And the price will go down. Most of these systems are at least a factor of five away from theoretical limits, maybe even a factor of 10.

    SPIEGEL: So we should urgently include synthetic life in our road map for the future energy supply in Germany?

    Church: Well, I don’t necessarily think it’s a mistake to go slowly. It is not like Germany is losing out to lots of other nations right now, but there should be some sort of engineering and policy planning.

    –> Read original interview at SPIEGEL Online International

    Is Church Playing God?

    SPIEGEL: Germans are traditionally scared of genetically modified organisms.

    Church: But don’t forget: The ones we are talking about won’t be farm GMOs. These will be in containers, and so if there’s a careful planning process, I would predict that Germany would be as good as any country at doing this.

    SPIEGEL: There has been a lot of fierce public opposition to genetic engineering in Germany. How do you experience this? Do you find it annoying?

    Church: Quite to the contrary. I personally think it has been fruitful. And I think there are relatively few examples in which such a debate has slowed down technology. I think we should be quite cautious, but that doesn’t mean that we should put moratoriums on new technologies. It means licensing, surveillance, doing tests. And we actually must make sure the public is educated about them. It would be great if all the politicians in the world were as technologically savvy as the average citizen is politically savvy.

    SPIEGEL: Acceptance is highest for such technology when it is first applied in the medical industry …

    Church: … yes, and the potential of synthetic life is particularly large in pharmaceuticals. The days of classic, small molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it is a miracle that they work in the first place. They kind of dose your whole body. They cross-react with other molecules. Now, we are getting better and better at programming cells. So I think cell therapies are going to be the next big thing. If you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible amount of sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example …

    SPIEGEL: … a disease you also want to beat with cell therapy?

    Church: Yes. All you have to do is take your blood cell precursors out of your body, reengineer them using gene therapy to knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can’t get AIDS any more, because the virus can’t enter your cells.

    SPIEGEL: Are we correct in assuming you wouldn’t hesitate to use germ cell therapy, as well, if you could improve humans genetically in this way?

    Church: Well, there are stem cell therapies already. There are hematopoietic stem cell transplants that are widely practiced, and skin stem cell transplants. Once you have enough experience with these techniques you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years old. What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered desirable.

    SPIEGEL: But you haven’t got any idea which genes to change in order to achieve that goal.

    Church: In order to find out, we are now involved in sequencing as many people as possible who have lived for over 110 years. There are only 60 of those people in the world that we know of.

    SPIEGEL: Do you have any results already?

    Church: It’s too early to say. But we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just beginning.

    SPIEGEL: You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees longevity?

    Church: That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have their own little advantage over everybody else. What we are looking for is protective alleles. If they each have their own answer, we can look at all of them and ask, what happens if you put them all in one person? Do they cancel each other out, or do they synergize?

    SPIEGEL: You seriously envisage a new era, in which genes are used as anti-aging-cures?

    Church: Why not? A lot of things that were once left to luck no longer have to be if we add synthetic biology into the equation. Let’s take an example: virus resistance …

    SPIEGEL: … which is also achievable using synthetic biology?

    Church: Yes, it turns out there are certain ways to make organisms of any kind resistent to any viruses. If you change the genetic code …

    SPIEGEL: … you are talking about the code that all life forms on Earth use to code their genetic information?

    Church: Exactly. You can change that code. We’re testing that out in bacteria and it might well be possible to create completely virus-resistant E. coli, for example. But we won’t know until we get there. And I am not promising anything. I am just laying out a path, so that people can see what possible futures we have.

    SPIEGEL: And if it works in bacteria, you presumably could then move on to plants, animals and even humans? Which means: no more measles, no more rabies, no more influenza?

    Church: Sure. And that would be another argument for cloning, by the way, since cloning is probably going to be recognized as the best way of building such virus resistance into humans. As long as it is safe and tested slowly, it might gain acceptance. And I’m not advocating. I’m just saying, this is the pathway that might happen.

    SPIEGEL: It all sounds so easy and straightforward. Aren’t biological processes far more complicated than you would like to lead us to believe?

    Church: Yes, biology is complicated, but it’s actually simpler than most other technologies we are dealing with. The reason is that we have received a great gift that biology has given to us. We can just take a little bit of DNA and stick it into a human stem cell, and all the rest of it is self-assembled. It just happens. It’s as if a master engineer parked a spacecraft in our back yard with not so many manuals, but lots of goodies in it that are kind of self-explanatory. You pick up something and you pretty much know what it does after a little study.

    SPIEGEL: Do you understand that there will be people who feel rather uncomfortable with the notion of changing the genome of the human species?

    Church: I think the definition of species is about to change anyway. So far, the definition of different species has been that they can’t exchange DNA. But more and more, this species barrier is falling. Humans will probably share genes with all sorts of organisms.

    SPIEGEL: First you propose to change the 3-billion-year-old genetic code. Then you explain how you want to create a new and better man. Is it any wonder to you when people accuse you of playing God?

    Church: I certainly respect other people’s faith. But, in general, in religion you wouldn’t want people to starve. We have 7 billion people living on this planet. If part of the solution to feed those people is to make their crops resistant to viruses, then you have to ask: Is there really anything in the Bible that says you shouldn’t make virus-resistant crops? I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally more religiously problematic about engineering a dog or a cow or a horse the way we have been doing it for 10,000 years versus making a virus-resistant crop.

    SPIEGEL: Virus-resistant crops is one thing. Virus-resistant humans is something altogether different.

    Church: Why? In technology, we generally don’t take leaps. It’s this very slow crawl. We are not going to be making a virus-resistant human before we make a virus-resistant cow. I don’t understand why people should be so deeply hurt by that kind of technology.

    SPIEGEL: Apart from religious opposition, biotechnology also generates very real fears. Artificial lifeforms which might turn out to be dangerous killer-bugs. Don’t we need special precautions?

    Church: We have to be very cautious, I absolutely agree. I almost never vote against caution or regulations. In fact, I requested them for licensing and surveillance of synthetic biology. Yes, I think the risks are high. The risks of doing nothing are also high, if you consider that there are 7 billion people who need food and are polluting the environment.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, do you believe in God?

    Church: I would be blind, if I didn’t see that faith in an overall plan resulted in where we are today. Faith is a very powerful force in the history of humanity. So I greatly respect different kinds of faith. Just as I think diversity is a really good thing genetically, it’s also a good thing societally.

    SPIEGEL: But you’re talking about other people’s faith. What about your own faith?

    Church: I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I’d say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, “awe” was a word that was almost invented for scientists. Not all scientists are in awe, but scientists are in a better position to be in awe than just about anybody else on the planet, because they actually can imagine all the different scales and all the complexity. A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn’t see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, we thank you for this conversation.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Johann Grolle.

    –> Read original interview at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Preservation in a Petri Dish: Scientists Hope Cloning Will Save Endangered Animals

    Biotechnicians want to use cloning to save endangered species, but they are having only limited success. Critics say that the push toward a new era of wildlife conservation trivializes extinction and funding would be better spent on preserving animal habitats.

    By Philip Bethge

    A number of times each week, Martha Gómez creates new life. Today, she has set out to produce a South African black-footed cat. Using a razor-thin hollow needle under a microscope, the veterinarian injects a body cell from the endangered species into an enucleated egg cell taken from a house cat. Then she applies an electric current.

    “Nine volts of alternating current for five microseconds, then 21 volts of direct current for 35 microseconds,” says Gómez. Zap! The egg cell rapidly flexes from the electric surges. It bubbles inside the cell. Then everything is calm.

    “I will check in half an hour if the cells have fused properly,” says the researcher from the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans. The very next day, the cloned embryos will be implanted into the uterus of a common domestic house cat, which will serve as a surrogate mother for a foreign species.

    Biotechnicians like Gómez are hoping for a new era of wildlife conservation. In a bid to save endangered species, they tear down biological barriers and create embryos that contain cell material from two different species of mammals. Iberian lynxes, tigers, Ethiopian wolves and panda bears could all soon be carried to term by related surrogate mothers, and thus saved for future generations.

    “Interspecies cloning is an amazing tool to ensure that an endangered species carries on,” says Gómez. “We can’t wait until those species have disappeared.”

    High Mortality Rate

    The world’s first surrogate mother of a cloned animal from another species had udders and was named Bessie. In early 2001, the cow delivered a gaur via cesarean section in the United States. The endangered wild ox calf, native to Southeast Asia, had been cloned by the US company Advanced Cell Technology. But the gaur lived only briefly, dying of common dysentery within 48 hours of birth.

    Since then, researchers have made dozens of attempts at interspecies cloning — but with limited success. Whenever animals were brought into the world alive, they usually died shortly thereafter.

    In 2009, for instance, biotechnicians managed to clone a Pyrenean ibex. The egg was donated by a common domesticated goat. After the birth, the kid desperately gasped for air. Seven minutes later, it was dead.

    Many cloning experiments end this way. Geneticists have so far only been able to speculate on the reasons, but the string of failures actually tends to spur researchers to continue. Gómez, for instance, has specialized in cloning wildcats — and has been quite successful. Cloned African wildcats Ditteaux, Miles and Otis are living in enclosures at the Audubon Center animal facility, and snarl at anyone who approaches them. “They are doing perfectly fine,” says Gómez.

    In addition to African wildcats, the researcher has created embryos for sand cats, black-footed cats and rusty-spotted cats. The surrogate mothers and egg cell donors are domestic house cats, which are both easy to keep and have a reproductive biology that has been thoroughly studied. The animals in Gómez’s research department come under the knife a number of times each week.

    –> Read original article at DER SPIEGEL International

    Saving Genetic Material for the Future

    Today, for example, Olivia the cat is lying on her back on the operating table with her legs spread out. Using a scalpel, research assistant Michal Soosaar makes small incisions in the anesthetized cat’s smoothly shaved abdomen, inserting operating instruments and a miniature camera.

    A monitor immediately provides a view of Olivia’s insides. Soosaar uses tiny forceps to take hold of one of her ovaries. Surgeon Earle Pope then uses a needle to puncture one of the mature follicles. A bloody liquid flows from the cat’s body through a plastic hose and into a test tube.

    The liquid contains mature egg cells from Olivia. In an adjoining room, these circular cells are fished out of the liquid. Now, cell researcher Gómez takes over. Gazing through a microscope, she draws the genetic material from the egg cell and inserts a skin cell from a wildcat. As soon as the cells have merged and embryos have started to grow, they are implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother.

    “This technology is a viable way to preserve genetic material for the future,” says Gómez. It’s very difficult to collect egg cells and sperm from rare wildcats, she explains, but much easier to obtain skin samples. She goes on to explain that embryos cloned in this manner could be stored for decades in liquid nitrogen and reactivated when needed.

    “By bringing cloning into the set of public policy instruments, we can protect more species, reduce economic costs of protection, or both,” writes US economist Casey Mulligan in a commentary in the New York Times. Mulligan argues that it’s now necessary to freeze the cell material of endangered species and develop technologies that will make it possible to bring the animals back to life after they have become extinct. “In some cases, it may be cheaper to save some DNA, and let a future, richer and perhaps more enthusiastic generation make its own copy of the species,” Mulligan writes.

    Critics Prefer Habitat Conservation

    Other researchers remain unconvinced, though. “The idea of cloning endangered species trivializes what extinction really is,” says zoologist Robert DeSalle from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He argues that the suggestion is a sign of today’s “Western throwaway society,” and says that “technology can’t solve the problem of large-scale extinction.”

    The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also opposes cloning as a quick-fix solution. “Habitats cannot be cloned,” says WWF wildlife expert Sybille Klenzendorf. She says that a species is more than just the sum of its genes. “What use is a cloned animal if we have no more space where the species can live?” asks Klenzendorf. She also argues that cloning is far too expensive. “The money would be better invested on direct aid to maintain habitats,” she says.

    The poor success rate of less than seven percent is also an indication that the Petri dish is not about to become Noah’s ark, though. It takes hundreds of egg cells and dozens of surrogate mothers to create a single viable clone.

    Gómez admits that there are problems. Fusing cells from two different species often leads to huge mix-ups. Genes are activated or deactivated at the wrong time, and developmental stages become delayed.

    In the case of the black-footed cat, for instance, Gómez has so far had no success. “We were able to insert embryos into the uterus of a house cat,” she says. “But unfortunately, they didn’t develop.”

    No Limits

    But the researcher remains optimistic. She hopes that she will soon be able to transform body cells from her wildcats into pluripotent stem cells. Cells of this type could considerably simplify the cloning process because they can be used to create any type of body cell and can be easily multiplied. Other researchers have already succeeded in producing such stem cells from snow leopards and northern white rhinoceroses, which are both endangered species.

    There are in fact virtually no limits to the creative experimentation of today’s biotechnicians. Chinese researchers have fused body cells from panda bears with eggs cells taken from rabbits. But the resulting embryos died shortly thereafter — in the uteruses of house cats. Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have implanted skin cells from an unborn baby sei whale in enucleated egg cells taken from cattle and pigs.

    Other Japanese scientists are even trying to clone the woolly mammoth. Three years ago, cell nuclei from these hairy, tusked ice-age beasts were discovered in mammoth legs that have been frozen in the permafrost of Northeast Siberia for the past 15,000 years.

    In the laboratory, a team led by geneticist Akira Iritani injected cell nuclei from the prehistoric animal into enucleated egg cells from mice. The cell constructs only survived for a few hours, but Iritani remains optimistic that an elephant surrogate mother will soon bring to term the first mammoth clone.

    “From a scientific point of view it is possible,” says geneticist Gómez. But is there any point in doing it?

    The 51-year-old professor hesitates briefly. “I wouldn’t do it,” she admits. “I would prefer spending all the money on those species that haven’t completely vanished from the earth.”

    Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

    –> Read original article at DER SPIEGEL International

  • Microsofts Craig Mundie: “Microsoft can be cool!”

    In a SPIEGEL interview, Craig Mundie, 63, Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, discusses the companies future, the mistakes of the past, computing in the 21st century, the upcoming Windows 8 Software and the Surface tablet.

    This is an extended version of an interview published at SPIEGEL Online International.

    SPIEGEL: Microsoft will presents a whole array of new products at the end of this week. Is this the beginning of a comeback to former glory?

    Mundie: I believe that Microsoft never lost it’s relevance. I always tell people we’re almost 40 years old now, fighting against every venture-funded good idea on the planet  in the world’s most competitive industry, and we’re still here, okay? So I say, „Do you think that’s just an accident?“. I don’t think so.

    SPIEGEL: Microsofts track record at anticipating technological trends hasn’t been the best in the past. With the tablet Surface and the new Windows 8 software you are now targeting in particular the mobile market. Again ten years too late?

    Mundie: My response is that we had a music player before the iPod. We had a touch device before the iPad. And we were leading in the mobile phone space. So, it wasn’t for a lack of vision or technology foresight that we lost our leadership position. The problem was that we just didn’t give enough reinforcement to those products at the time that we were leading. Unfortunately, the company had some executional missteps, which occured right at the time when Apple launched the iPhone. With that, we appeared to drop a generation behind.

    SPIEGEL: What happened?

    Mundie: During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering. The criminal activity in cyberspace was growing dramatically ten years ago, and Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target. In part because of that, Windows Vista took a long time to be born.

    SPIEGEL: Have you learned your lessons?

    Mundie: Steve (Ballmer) made many changes, starting even at the top management level of the company. For example, there’s not a single product group president here today who was here five years ago. These changes are a reflection of the fact that we gave up leadership in some categories that turned out to be very important. Today our execution is not hampered by the same errors. We have learned our lessons. That doesn’t mean we won’t make some errors someday, but we’re at least not making the same ones again.

    SPIEGEL: Which role will Microsoft play in the coming decade as an IT company?

    Mundie: I think it’s going to be an interesting next decade. This is my 20th year at Microsoft. Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold hired me to develop the company’s capability in non-PC computing. In 1992, that seemed very avant-garde, but, of course, today we all live with computing everywhere around us.

    SPIEGEL: How will the computer of the future look like and how will we interact with those devices?

    Mundie: What we’re trying to do is to make the computer more like us and as helpful as an expert. To do that, we have to teach the computer to emulate more and more of the human senses, seeing, listening, speaking, as well as the tactile senses. We believe that our motion sensor Kinect will be a big part of that. The computers and the back-end cloud services are powerful enough now that we will see more of this type of technology very soon.

    SPIEGEL: What would that mean, for example, for peoples homes or offices?

    Mundie: For example, you’ll be able to directly ask the computer to help you. In the past, to work a computer program, you had to learn how to use the tool, and the tool had rigidity. In the future, it should be more like going to an assistant and saying, „Here is a document, make it look good,“ rather than saying „well, make this paragraph this point size and fit this font.“ A big emphasis at Microsoft is machine learning. The computer should not only be able to emulate your senses, but to appear to understand things based on learning or history. For example, for Office 365 that is in testing right now, we built a machine-learning-based assistant for your Inbox. The program looks at all your historical mail handling. From that, it makes judgments about what’s most important to you and groups those things together. How does it know? Because it has observed your behavior over some period of time.

    SPIEGEL: Don’t people want to define themselves what’s important to them and what isn’t?

    Mundie: That would require that people could actually describe their own behaviors, which we’ve learned they can’t do. They can’t tell you how they think enough to be able to put it into rules. The computer on the other hand is very well capable to observe your actions and deduce from that a set of behaviors or rules.

    SPIEGEL: If you look ten years ahead, which role will the PC play?

    Mundie: I think it will be about almost like it is today. However, it will be supplemented for example with intelligent whiteboards and displays for group discussions. Eventually, you will come into a room and the whole room will be the computer. In fact, people will be thinking more about computing and not computers. So for example, when you go into a space, you might have your phone in your pocket and your tablet in your briefcase. And if you set them down, they will all work together.

    SPIEGEL: Right now, the whole industry seems to have made it the user’s problem to migrate what they care about from one device to the next.

    Mundie: Yes, and I think that Microsoft may in fact be the company best positioned to help with this cacophonous situation, simply because we have a viable position in every product category, including a robust cloud service to connect all the different devices.

    SPIEGEL: Still, the world doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to your innovations.

    Mundie: I disagree. For example, if you look at the reviews, people who have a Windows phone actually prefer it over an Apple phone or an Android phone at this point. And Surface, I think, has met very strong, positive reviews and is really resonating with people.

    SPIEGEL: Surface will be on online-sale in Germany from Friday onwards. Again, Microsoft seems to be very late with such a device. The iPad is on the market for years. Why should people care?

    Mundie: Our experience is, despite some rhetoric, that most people who want to do any serious computing don’t want to do it trying to type on a glass screen. As a consequence, they always end up having two computers, a laptop and a tablet. Our dream was that you could have a no-compromises tablet experience and a click-on, high-quality keyboard, so that you don’t really need two computers. Surface fuses two worlds, and I think when people look at the engineering and design of the device, they will have an epiphany.

    SPIEGEL: Besides the X-Box, Surface is Microsofts first in-house computer hardware. Why did you decide to go this way?

    Mundie: Our marketing for many, many years was always through our partners. You never really bought a product directly from Microsoft, but from HP, Dell, Lenovo and alike. So, in a way, Microsoft always depended on its indirect representation through those companies. Now it became clear to us that we have to speak for ourselves. We have to tell the complete Microsoft story.

    SPIEGEL: How much is industrial design part of this story? Apple for example puts a lot of emphasis on design. Does design become more important for Microsoft?

    Mundie: I think it does. Surface for example is a product that gave us an opportunity to establish a new bar in this respect. Many people had said, „Oh, Microsoft technology is too bloated, it’s too fat, you guys don’t pay attention to these things.“ We think that Surface is a place where we can prove to people that this mythology is wrong. It’s a place where we get to speak to the public with our own voice about what’s possible, at an aspirational level. In part, the reason to do Surface was also to create a benchmark for our partners, saying, „look, there’s nothing intrinsic in our technology that won’t support products that operate at the upper tier; you just have to design them“.

    SPIEGEL: By building your own computer hardware you effectively become a competitor of your own partners. Are you going to go it alone in the future, like Apple does?

    Mundie: Apple has always had the luxury of being a software and a hardware company. I do describe that as a luxury, because you only have to think about yourself. But at least in the past, when you start to fan out and want to provide products for the whole world in every country, it’s very hard to do that on your own. We still think that it’s better to have a symbiotic relationship with our worldwide community of partners. And we are not alone with this model. Googles Android for example has gotten a big share fairly quickly by allowing several companies to participate.

    SPIEGEL: There are other device categories in the making. Google presented its Google Glass-project lately. Is Microsoft interested in glasses with augmented reality?

    Mundie: None of these things are particularly new or unanticipated. At a research level, we look at everything.

    SPIEGEL: Microsoft Research has 850 Ph.D.-level researchers. The company invests hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research alone. Isn‘t there just enough innvoation for the money spent?

    Mundie: And those people just don’t know what they’re talking about. I keep score every year how many things come out of research into the product group, and these transfers are counting in the hundreds. Microsoft Research is the world’s largest computer science research operation. I have seven labs, and each of them compares well to the faculty of a pretty good-size university computer science department. What this research provides to Microsoft is long-term nourishment. We think that, unless you have the ability to play with big ideas and to do fundamental research, you eventually run out of gas.

    SPIEGEL: When Windows 95 was launched, in 1995, computer geeks lined up to buy the first copies. Bill Gates paid three million dollars to the Rolling Stones for rights to use their classic „Start Me Up“ as the softwares’ theme song. Nothing like that happens now. Has Microsoft losts its cool?

    Mundie: It’s hard to keep your cool against young companies. But I do think it’s important to be cool. And the thing that always shows me that Microsoft can be cool is the whole Xbox business. We are worldwide number one in game consoles. This shows that when we package and present ourselves right, there is no stigma associated with being Microsoft.

    SPIEGEL: The stigma seems to be more prevalent in the PC business right now. The package hasn’t been right in the past?

    Mundie: I think we are able to learn. The phones and now the Surface are showing that our ability to sprinkle the fairy dust and have the coolness is growing. However, people have to understand that we are in a dilemma. A huge part of Microsoft’s revenue is to businesses, and if you’re a business, the last thing you want is us to be cool, because we’re providing you with your mission-critical infrastructure. Guys who buy infrastructure don’t buy cool, okay? Because they want you to be reliable like a rock. It is a lot easier to have the cool part emerge when you don’t have the enterprise part. But that’s a very critical part of our business.

    SPIEGEL: Still, some industry experts predict that Microsoft will become the next big technology giant to slip into obscurity if the company can’t reinvent itself.

    Mundie: I’ve been telling people to think about it like being in the Olympics. From the very beginning, the Olympics not only had the individual events, but they had the decathlon. Why? Well, they not only wanted to not know who could win each race in track and field, but they wanted to know who was the best overall athlete. I like to think that Microsoft will come to be recognized as the best athlete in computing.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    –> Read edited interview at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Papua New Guinea’s Royal Trophy: Are Collectors Key to Saving Giant Butterfly?

    Papua New Guinea is home to the world’s largest butterfly, but oil palm plantations are threatening the rare species’ habitat. Conservationists and local residents alike would like to save the species by lifting a ban on trade in the butterfly and selling it for thousands of dollars to collectors.

    By Philip Bethge

    The butterfly’s silhouette is sharply outlined against the morning sky. It flies high up into the air, beating its wings slowly, more like a bird than a butterfly. Its long, narrow wings are reminiscent of a swallow’s wings, as they shimmer in the sunlight like iridescent sequins.

    The insect makes a wide circle around Grace Juo’s small stilt house and lands on a bright red hibiscus blossom. In Jimun, the language of the indigenous people, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly is called a dadakul. It’s the world’s largest butterfly, with females attaining wingspans in excess of 25 centimeters (10 inches). “We are proud of our butterfly, and we take good care of it,” says Juo, glancing at the insect, which has now inserted its long proboscis into the flower.

    Juo, a Melanesian, lives in Kawowoki, a small village of huts on the Managalas Plateau in eastern Papua New Guinea. The volcanic soil here is dark and heavy, and the rainforest is an exuberant shade of green. The plateau is the last remaining habitat of any significant size of the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly, one of the world’s rarest insects. Some butterfly collectors would pay thousands of dollars for a single specimen. Local residents like Juo hope that they will soon benefit from the appetites of trophy-hungry collectors.

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    But multinational corporations believe that oil and natural gas deposits lie beneath the tropical paradise and the rainforest is threatened. Prospectors have also found copper and gold, and oil palm plantations are proliferating in the region.

    The temptations of the modern age are reaching Papua New Guinea, a country divided into hundreds of ethnic groups. It has a disastrous infrastructure, is wracked by tribal feuds and is at a high risk for disease epidemics. The history of the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly isn’t just the tale of a rare species. It also revolves around the question of how to go about protecting species in a developing country that is undergoing rapid change.

    The search for answers begins behind a barbed-wire fence in Port Moresby, the capital city. Armed guards provide security against the city’s criminal gangs, known as “rascals.” A rattling air-conditioner helps to stave off the heat and humidity in the office of the organization Partners with Melanesians.

    A Conservation Plan

    Kenn Mondiai and Rufus Mahuru are sitting at a dark table, explaining their rescue plan. “For the last seven years, we’ve been discussing ways to save the Managalas Plateau together with the local people,” says Mondiai, a heavy man with a round face and a moustache. The activist wants to transform the habitat of the giant butterflies into one of the largest conservation areas in Oceania. “The butterfly helps us convince the people to support this cause,” he says. “It symbolizes the diversity and value of our nature.”

    British naturalist Albert Meek was the first European to spot the giant butterfly in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Hired by the zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild, Meek explored the region in 1906 to find fresh trophies for Rothschild’s private zoological museum in the English town of Tring.

    One day, Meek discovered a butterfly flying at a high altitude, and promptly brought it down with a shotgun. The adventurer dissected the butterfly and sent it to England. Rothschild named the animal “Ornithoptera alexandrae,” in honor of Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward VII.

    Meek’s first specimen was a female. A year later, he captured a male near Popondetta in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province. Today the town can be reached by taking a half-hour flight from the capital. This is followed by an exhausting trip by Land Cruiser on muddy trails.

    Several bridges were washed away in a recent flood, and the SUV struggles through hip-high water, even getting stuck in the sandy riverbed for a while. After a grueling, three-hour drive, we reach the Managalas Plateau, 36,000 hectares (about 140 square miles) of privately owned rainforest, populated by about 20,000 people from 10 different cultures, each with its own dialect.

    Tall trees, covered with vines and orchids, stand next to wild banana trees, coconut palms and breadfruit trees. The indigenous people grow plantains, yams, ginger, tomato and sweet potatoes on small plots of land.

    This is the realm of the giant butterfly. The male looks as if it were wearing a magnificent cloak of turquoise and green, covered with a layer of gold dust. In contrast, the wings of the larger female are a velvety black, interspersed with a few yellow and cream-colored patterns here and there.

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

    Unusual Reproductive Biology

    The threatened butterfly is vulnerable because of its unusual reproductive biology. The female lays its eggs exclusively on a poisonous vine called Aristolochia. Once the caterpillars have hatched, they ingest the plant’s toxic leaves, making them unpalatable for potential predators.

    The Aristolochia winds its way up into the crowns of jungle trees, which can grow to heights of up to 40 meters (131 feet). The butterfly would be lost without the vine, so propagating the Aristolochia is one of the main goals of conservationists.

    Conwel Nukara, 31, is the local head of the butterfly project and an expert in Aristolochia cultivation. His teeth are stained red from chewing betel nut, a stimulant commonly used by the indigenous peoples of the region. The Melanesian, walking barefoot, leads us into the garden behind his house, where he has set up a greenhouse made of green gauze.

    Aristolochia cuttings are planted in neat rows inside the greenhouse, and a number of the butterfly’s pitch-black caterpillars are already nibbling away at some of the leaves. Bright red appendages protrude from the animal’s body like poisonous barbs, while a yellow band runs around the middle of its body. “We want the animals to reproduce quickly,” says Nukara. “The larvae can develop and pupate in peace here. I release the butterflies once they’ve emerged.”

    A Threatened Habitat

    Nukara is trying to convince his entire community to raise butterflies and, as part of his campaign, he makes regular visits to schools in the area.

    A villager brings him a transparent plastic jar. Nukara carefully opens the lid, revealing a dead female butterfly.

    “We show these butterflies to our children,” he explains, spreading the insect’s wings, which have become frayed after being touched by many small hands. “We want them to discover at an early age what a treasure we have in this area.”

    He means it literally. One of the reasons local residents pay such conscientious attention to the giant butterfly is that they hope to make money with the creatures in the future. But that could prove to be difficult.

    The Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is on the red list of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and its international trade is banned. From the perspective of species conservationists, the butterfly satisfies all of the criteria to make it a critically endangered species: It lives in only one area, Oro Province, its numbers are unknown, and its habitat is increasingly disappearing.

    Farming Threatens Butterflies

    The problem is already obvious in the flatlands around the provincial capital Popondetta, which is surrounded by plantations of tightly packed oil palms. Local farmers also grow coffee and cocoa. Hardly any of the rainforest, together with the vines that the butterfly urgently needs, is still left.

    Eddie Malaisa is a wildlife officer with the Oro provincial government. He has been concerned with the giant butterfly for the last 25 years. “The butterfly population continues to drop,” he warns. “We only find two or three per month on the lowland plains.”

    On this particular day, Malaisa has an appointment with Paul Maliou, a manager with New Britain Palm Oil Limited (NBPOL). Large trucks are parked on the grounds in front of Maliou’s office, fully loaded with the red fruits of the oil palm. Across the street are long rows of the trees. When sunlight strikes the long palm fronds, they create shimmering patterns on the ground.

    NBPOL signs contracts directly with the farmers and sells their crops for them. Maliou’s job is to ensure that this is done in a sustainable way. “We assure that our operations don’t go into areas that affect the butterfly,” he asserts. But wildlife officer Malaisa begs to differ. There were once 27 butterfly reserves planned for the region, he says, and now “twenty of the areas went to palm oil.” Malaisa is left to manage only seven small reserves.

    The government employee seems helpless. His budget doesn’t even include money for a car, which he needs to patrol the reserves. Ironically, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is depicted on the flag of Oro Province.

    “The butterfly is an important part of our culture,” says Malaisa. But he too recognizes that farmers will only protect the insect if they can make some money with it.

    To address the problem, Malaisa has proposed compensating all landowners who preserve the insect’s habitat by leaving some areas unfarmed. He also favors lifting the ban on trade with the butterfly. “If the landowners don’t get anything out of protecting the butterfly, they will change the butterfly habitat to oil palm, cocoa or coffee and the butterfly will become extinct,” the wildlife officer warns.

    Could Lifting Ban on Trade Help Save Butterflies?

    A softening of the trade ban could indeed be the butterfly’s last chance. Buyers on the black market would pay up to $10,000 a specimen. If the trade were legalized, Malaisa argues, the farmers could charge several thousand dollars per insect. “What is worse?” he asks, “To legally trade a few butterflies or to watch the animal go extinct?”

    Do conservationists have to revise their thinking and accept that species like the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing can only be saved if they have a market value? Activist Kenn Mondiai of Partners with Melanesians also favors adopting a new strategy. “If we want to preserve the forest on the Managalas Plateau, and if no oil palms are to be grown there, then we have to propose alternative sources of income to local residents,” he says.

    It’s afternoon in Kawowoki by now, and half the village has gathered in front of Grace Juo’s house to look for a butterfly. The animal that was fluttering around her hut in the morning was a male. Now everyone hopes to be able to show the visitor from faraway Germany a female specimen of the royal butterfly.

    While the women roast bananas and sweet potatoes in the embers of a fire, the men dispense advice on how to stalk a butterfly. The insects are usually seen high above the treetops, but only when the sun shines. Otherwise the moisture from the forest would make their wings too heavy.

    But the weather is favorable today. Suddenly they all jump up and stare at the tops of nearby large trees. A female Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is gliding through the warm air at a surprisingly fast pace. Grace Juo excitedly lifts her arms up to the sky.

    “The world has to know about our butterfly,” she says, and with shining eyes she follows the flight of the dadakul, “and then people will come here with bundles of dollars in their hands!”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International