Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined - And Redefined - Nature

Written by Beth Shapiro

Narrated by Beth Shapiro

In 2020, the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, won the Nobel Prize for medicine. It seemed like the capstone of an astounding fifty-year run: we have turned bacteria into factories for insulin, used viruses to insert genes
for pesticide resistance into plants, and now learned to rewrite our own DNA.

Once, we humans could only observe evolution. Suddenly, we had conquered it.

And yet, in Life as We Made It, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro argues that—despite how amazing our new technologies are—our ability to alter the course of evolution isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages,
from the first dogs to genetically modified Enviropigs. Indeed, she argues, resetting the course of evolution is what our species does, by domesticating, as with dogs and wheat; by hunting, as with wolves and mammoths; and by protecting, as with bison and mountain lions.

What is new is that where once we shaped evolution through brute force, we can now do it as artisans. That power comes not a moment too soon. If we are going to survive in the next few centuries, we must revise the book of life. Instead
of rehashing arguments about genetic engineering, let’s embrace the fact that we can shape evolution to create a world in which we want to live. The question isn’t should we meddle, but how? Life as We Made It is an essential book for charting a better course into a risky future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501989674

Reviews for Life as We Made It

[breic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Too many stories that I was already familiar with. > Wolbachia don’t kill the insects that they infect but they do cause fertility problems. When an uninfected female mosquito breeds with an infected male, their offspring don’t survive … it’s difficult to produce only males in a laboratory environment. Because offspring of Wolbachia-infected females survive, the accidental release of Wolbachia-infected females along with males would allow Wolbachia to spread through the population, ruining its potential as a mosquito sterilizer. Second, any reduction of the mosquito population might not last very long if, for example, mosquitoes can easily recolonize from nearby. Finally, Wolbachia are already present in some of the most important disease-vector species, meaning that this approach simply won’t work to control them.> The self-limiting aspect of the sterility gene works like this: Males that develop from OX5034 eggs have a copy of tTAV on both of their chromosomes. When they mate with wild females, all their offspring inherit one chromosome with tTAV. The female offspring will express tTAV and die, and the males will develop normally. When these males, which have one normal chromosome and one with tTAV, breed with wild females, half their offspring inherit tTAV. Of this half, the females die and the males develop normally. After ten or so generations during each of which the proportion of males in the population with tTAV is reduced by half, tTAV will disappear. Because the number of individuals carrying tTAV reduces in every generation, the population-reducing effect of self-limiting sterility declines over time. This strategy nevertheless has a much longer-term impact than one that requires repeated releases of sterile males.> The gene-edited moth competed successfully with wild-type diamondback moths, and many fewer caterpillars were produced compared to control fields. Oxitec has also developed self-limiting strains of the fall armyworm, the soybean looper moth, and several other agricultural pests. The self-limiting sterility approach to reducing populations of crop pests could save farmers billions of dollars of losses globally every year while also reducing reliance on chemical pesticides. Intriguingly, it may also help shift the conversation around genetically engineered food, since genetically engineered crop pests (which people don’t eat) could be used in place of genetically engineered, insect-resistant crops with similar gains in crop yield.