Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Author:Elizabeth Kolbert [Kolbert, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Nonfiction, Climate Crisis
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-02-09T07:00:00+00:00

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The Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in the city of Geelong, is one of the most advanced high-containment laboratories in the world. It sits behind two sets of gates, the second of which is intended to foil truck bombers, and its poured-concrete walls are thick enough, I was told, to withstand a plane crash. There are five hundred and twenty air-lock doors at the facility and four levels of security. “It’s where you’d want to be in the zombie apocalypse,” a staff member told me. At the highest security level—Biosafety Level 4—are vials of some of the nastiest animal-borne pathogens on the planet, including Ebola. (The laboratory gets a shout-out in the movie Contagion.) Staff members who work in BSL-4 units can’t wear their own clothes into the lab and have to shower for at least three minutes before heading home. For their part, the animals at the facility can’t leave at all. “Their only way out is through the incinerator,” is how one employee put it to me.

Geelong is about an hour southwest of Melbourne. On the same trip that I met with Van Oppen, I paid a visit to the laboratory, which goes by the acronym AAHL (rhymes with “maul”). I’d heard about a gene-editing experiment going on there that intrigued me. As a result of yet another biocontrol effort gone awry, Australia is besieged by a species of giant toad known familiarly as the cane toad. In keeping with the recursive logic of the Anthropocene, researchers at AAHL were hoping to address this disaster with a further round of biocontrol. The plan involved editing the toad’s genome using CRISPR.

A biochemist named Mark Tizard, who was in charge of the project, had agreed to show me around. Tizard is a slight man with a fringe of white hair and twinkling blue eyes. Like many of the scientists I met in Australia, he’s from somewhere else, in his case London.

Before getting into amphibians, Tizard worked mostly on poultry. Several years ago, he and some colleagues at AAHL inserted a jellyfish gene into a hen. This gene, similar to the one I was planning to plug into my yeast, encodes a fluorescent protein. A chicken in possession of it will, as a consequence, give off an eerie glow under UV light. Next, Tizard figured out a way to insert the fluorescence gene so that it would be passed down to male offspring only. The result is a hen whose chicks can be sexed while they’re still in their shells.

Tizard knows that a lot of people are freaked out by genetically modified organisms. They find the idea of eating them repugnant and of releasing them into the world anathema. Though he’s no provocateur, he believes, like Zayner, that such people are looking at things all wrong.

“We have chickens that glow green,” Tizard told me. “And so we have school groups that come, and when they see the green chicken, you know, some of the kids go, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.

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