Nature Remade

Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds

Luis A. Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, Christian C. Young, Luis A. Campos, Michael R. Dietrich, Tiago Saraiva, Christian C. Young

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226783574
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

"Engineering" has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.

PART ONE

Control

1

Knowing and Controlling: Engineering Ideals and Gene Drive for Invasive Species Control in Aotearoa New Zealand

Christian H. Ross

On the islands of Aotearoa, also called New Zealand, invasive species have been a prominent and persistent concern for local ecosystems. Traditional methods of biological control, though, can be difficult to implement and often have harmful side-effects for the environment and human health. Recent developments in genetic engineering have led to the creation of a new technology called gene drive, which some have suggested may provide a safer, easier alternative way to “restore damaged ecosystems and save endangered wildlife by genetically removing invasive species.”1 While the promises of gene drive for invasive species control have attracted the attention of many in Aotearoa New Zealand interested in preserving or restoring the islands’ native environment, at the same time it has prompted calls for caution regarding their controllability and possible unintended consequences of their use.2 However, the consideration of gene drive for the control of invasive species in Aotearoa New Zealand is more than just an issue of a controversial use of emerging biotechnology. At stake also are critical questions about what it means to know and control life. What are the kinds of knowledge that enable and underwrite the notions of controlling of life? If gene drive confers the power to control invasive species, who decides whether and how that control is exercised and with what responsibilities? And, crucially, what visions of the world are embedded in the aspirations of scientifically knowing and technologically controlling life?

Controlling life has long been a central aspiration of the biological sciences. In the early twentieth century, aspirations to greater control over life manifested in rigorous laboratory experimentation, attempts to engineer organisms to be more amenable to human purposes, and explanatory commitments to a mechanistic conception of life.3 Mechanistic approaches have been ubiquitous in biological practice aimed at bringing living things and their functions into the purview of human intention and volition by isolating, manipulating, and better understanding the function of more fundamental parts.4 The widespread mechanistic approaches in biology also helped create the conditions for the rise of genetics as the preeminent field in the biological sciences.5

In the decades following the close of World War II, experimental and molecular biology grew dramatically. Molecular biology increasingly displaced other fields of biology as a more physics-like science, a resemblance that lent a sense of hardness to biological theories and explanation.6 The dominance of molecular biology laid the foundation for the epistemic status of genetics by providing a molecular articulation of fundamental processes of transcription and translation. Later, the development of recombinant DNA and similar biotechnologies further cemented genetics as the foremost scientific field for manipulating, changing, and controlling life for human uses.7 The experimental and commercial successes of genetic engineering and its products entrenched a narrative of biological control as one of having mechanistic understanding of the underlying genetic components, demonstrated through genetic isolation, replication, and rearrangement in versatile, predictable, and modular ways.8 By the close of the twentieth century, the genetic and mechanistic explanations of biology crescendoed in the promises of the Human Genome Project to provide greater control of human health through a putatively comprehensive understanding of human genetics that would provide means of intervening in fundamental biological processes.9 More than just an ideological commitment to particular scientific methodologies, life as mechanism was an animating metaphor for what it meant to both know and control living things.10 To control life was to mechanistically understand its underlying phenomena, and genetics provided the kind of causal, molecular-level explanations that mechanistic biology prized.

In the twenty-first century, aspirations to control life through genetics find new resonance in the technology of gene drive. Gene drive is a genetic engineering technology that embodies a mechanistic logic in which aspirations to control life are unified across biological scales, linking molecular genetic interventions with macroscale ecological outcomes. At its most basic level, gene drive enables the rapid spread of a desired genetic element through a species population by significantly increasing its inheritance in subsequent generations. An engineered gene drive employs genome-editing techniques and exploits innate cellular processes of genome repair to produce a self-propagating system of genetic modification such that, once introduced, the gene drive continues to spread across generations of a targeted population. The result is that the desired genetic element coupled to the gene drive is engineered into the genome of nearly every individual in a population over relatively few generations. The power and scalability of a gene drive to alter entire species populations has lent itself to many speculative ecological engineering projects ranging from the prevention of vector-borne disease to conservation efforts and invasive species control by inserting genetic elements that skew population sex ratios, cause sterility, introduce lethal mutations during development, or otherwise reduce the numbers of targeted species.11

Control over life extends beyond harvesting or harnessing of nature. It suggests a broadening of the horizon of humanity’s power to make and remake nature ever more in our own image. Accordingly, what it means to control life is necessarily intertwined also with the control of those mediating technologies and the particular visions of the material and social world that they authorize.12 Scholars studying the biosciences in society have long argued that knowledge making of biological sciences is not independent of the social and cultural worlds in which it takes place.13 Accounts of biological objects like genes, DNA, and cells are inseparable from and co-produced with normative visions of social order and structures of power.14 The entanglements of the biological and distinctive sociopolitical visions of the world become particularly evident in the ways that humans invest of themselves, their aspirations, and their ideologies in the nonhuman animals that they make and are made by.15 Divergent biological understandings of the world, then, are not merely the result of a singular nature refracted through the lens of many cultures,16 but are disparate social, political, and cultural constructions of life itself.17 Put another way, the social precedes and is embedded within every part of biological projects to engineer life.18 Therefore, at stake in questions of what it means to know and control life vis-à-vis gene drive are not only matters of technological precision, capacity, or predictability of technological outcomes but also of social order for the development and governance of science in society.

Scientific aspirations to engineer life also evoke questions about responsible science regarding a technology like gene drive. While the idea of scientific responsibility toward broader society is neither new nor unique to gene drive technology,19 what it means to do science responsibly does find distinctive resonance with notions of restraint, precaution, and deliberate action associated with metaphors of engineering life. Scientific responsibility has been understood in terms ranging from adherence to particular norms of scientific practice,20 individual “role responsibilities” of scientists so as to avoid research misconduct,21 a “collective responsibility” of science as a knowledge-making profession,22 or a “co-responsibility” between science and society.23 However, others have problematized such accounts of responsibility in science as limited to the practices of scientists qua scientists.24 Because science and society are not so neatly separable from one another, the responsibilities of science and scientists are implicated at every turn with epistemic, social, political, and moral stakes.25 Those stakes are heightened all the more in projects of engineering and controlling life on potentially global scales. Thus, notions of responsible science are inherently wrapped up with the mechanistic rationales that have dominated the life sciences for a century and underwrite scientific claims to controlling life. Questions of responsible science regarding gene drive, then, are also questions about how one knows and attempts to control life.

Gene drive promises greater control by contrasting the mechanistic precision of genetic engineering to impress human designs upon nature with an implicitly more disordered and out-of-control state of nature. In doing so, gene drive highlights the ways in which technologies of control are integral to the aims of biological engineering and how such technologies render biological processes amenable to human intention and inescapably mediate human efforts to control life. As aspirations to bring nature under human control increasingly implicate a diversity of cultures and communities, mechanistic approaches common to Western biological engineering practice encounter alternative ways of understanding the natural world and what it means to control it.

This chapter examines discourse around the use of gene drive for invasive species control in Aotearoa New Zealand as an exploratory case of what it means to control life in the twenty-first century. It follows the research and community engagement activities of one of the technology’s inventors and prominent advocates, MIT Media Lab scientist Kevin Esvelt, to trace his articulations of the function, capabilities, and stakes of gene drive technology. Analysis of the notions of control embedded in descriptions of gene drive technology itself shows how mechanistic biological control becomes intertwined with ideas of responsible scientific practice and reveals limitations of mechanistic biology in navigating social worlds and distinct practices of meaning-making. It also prompts reflective examination of the visions of remaking nature that are animated by particular approaches to knowing and controlling life.

Aotearoa New Zealand and Invasive Species Control

Introduced predatory species have been a longstanding feature of the island environments of Aotearoa New Zealand. The first such species introduced to the islands was the kiore, also known as the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), that accompanied the arrival of Māori peoples in the late thirteenth century. Other predatory rodent species came later to the islands as stowaways on the ships of European colonizers or as intentional additions to the environment to attempt to control the population of other introduced species brought by European colonists during the nineteenth century.26 Though the designation of introduced species as “native” or “invasive” is itself a thorny issue,27 by the mid-twentieth century, nearly all introduced predator species on the islands came to be widely considered a major ecological concern.28

During the second half of the twentieth century, sustained action toward invasive species control grew, especially targeting rodents. Early efforts were relatively modest removals. In 1959, a handful of volunteers began one of the first rodent removal operations on Ruapuke Island, a two-hectare islet off the eastern coast of Auckland in the Hauraki Gulf. The introduction of invasive rats in 1963 by commercial ships to Big South Cape Island, the largest island off the southern coast of New Zealand, galvanized national attention and resolve to eliminate the invasive species that had become increasingly out-of-control. Over the following decades, invasive species control in New Zealand grew as a national priority. Advances in toxin development in the late 1970s and 1980s led to increases in chemical control efforts that relied heavily on poison baiting of affected regions with poisons like Compound 1080 and brodifacoum. By the turn of the twenty-first century large-scale conservation efforts had become commonplace, with major projects declaring Campbell Island and Big South Cape Island cleared of invasive rodents in 2001 and 2006.29

Though the control of invasive species had enjoyed decades of broad public buy-in, by the early 2000s, that support began to wane. The chemicals used to eradicate invasive species were chosen because of their high toxicity. However, those toxins were also indiscriminate in what organisms they affected, which resulted in many cases of secondary poisoning of native and valued domesticated species. As a result, the chemical methods of invasive species control came under harsh criticism from environmental groups and communities that lived in areas where toxins and poison baiting were widely used. The dissonance of the broad use of toxic, nonspecific chemical controls for invasive species as part of environmental conservation became increasingly politically untenable.

One such group was the original Predator Free New Zealand (PFNZ), a grass roots movement founded by environmental activist Les Kelly in 2008. PFNZ had the ambitious aim of eliminating all invasive predatory species—including possums, stoats, feral cats, and rats—from all of New Zealand’s more than 600 islands over the course of a couple decades. Importantly, the organization emphatically rejected the use of toxins and advocated for the consideration of alternative technologies to control invasive species.30 The goals of groups like PFNZ gained support among the general public as well as the New Zealand government. In July 2016, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced the launch of Predator Free 2050, a government-supported initiative that put national resources and legitimacy behind the mission of eliminating invasive predator species from the island nation by 2050.31 The vision for invasive species control presented was one of a New Zealand entirely devoid of their existence. Control of invasive species entailed not just a modulation of their effects on native ecosystems, but their complete removal from them.

Predator Free 2050 retained many of the priorities and commitments of PFNZ, in particular an emphasis on pursuing a wide range of technologies for biological control, including renewed consideration of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering technology had been controversial in past decades, but more recently, public attitudes had become more accepting of genetic engineering technologies as a means of controlling living things, particularly in the service of environmental pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds
• Part 1: Control
• Part 2: Knowing as Making
• Part 3: Envisioning
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index