When I was about 8 years old, my grandmother took me to a local fabric store to pick out a pattern for a dress we could sew together. Piecing together the brown pattern paper, cutting out fabric, and learning to pin and hem, I felt like I was solving the ultimate wearable puzzle.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was also preparing for my PhD in cell biophysics—the study of how cells, and the structures within them, move and grow. Cells form, and interact with, the squishy, stretchy template of our tissues, where they are always jostling and vying for space. When one cell contracts and gets smaller, its neighbors get pulled along, expanding to fill the space.

Life, it turns out, is another spatial puzzle to solve.

My thesis research rests on understanding how chromosomes, our coiled and packaged DNA, stretch and fold in the cell and what those shape changes tell us about the forces acting on them. On the surface, it is completely unrelated to the crafting I do to unwind—knitting scarves and hats, sewing crescent bags and pajama sets. But research shows expertise in fiber arts—like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and even fabric dyeing—may help build the spatial intuition I’ve needed for my research.

The study of how we perceive objects in the physical world and infer details about their relationship to other objects in space is called spatial cognition or spatial reasoning. The most well-studied of these skills are rigid mental rotations, which involve identifying a single object rotated in space. Mental rotations come in handy for architects, engineers, and plumbers, who need a good grasp on how parts fit together or how pieces will round a tight corner. They’re also valuable for chemists, who often have to visualize molecules too small to see from various angles to understand their structure.

Being good at rigid spatial reasoning doesn’t necessarily translate to success in other spatial tasks, many of which are less well-studied. The non-rigid spatial reasoning skills of mental bending and folding ask us to imagine how an object would look after being deformed. This is important for understanding fluid dynamics—how liquids and gases move in space—which atmospheric scientists and oceanographers use to study how wind or water flow. Cell biophysicists like the scientists I work with measure the effects of similar flows. They ask how fluid moves through cells to create currents, how proteins bend, fold, and fit together to create a functional cellular machine, or in my case, how chromosome stretching and folding signals to the cell whether it is correctly attached to the cell division machinery, which ensures future generations of cells will inherit all the right DNA.

I use some of the same science and engineering principles at my sewing table, to help visualize how swatches of fabric fit together to form a three-dimensional garment. Unlike simply slotting flat panels together to build a box, sewing a garment requires an understanding of how fabric drapes to fit around a body, how the shape of a pocket changes the way it bears weight, and how folding fabric before sewing can affect the final fit. Researchers have seen that students who performed better in apparel design courses also tended to score higher on some general spatial visualization tests.

Knitting, too, is a remarkable mechanical process. Taking a one-dimensional yarn that has little stretch or give on its own and winding it into a series of knots that can create a stretchy surface or even a three-dimensional tube is a feat of engineering. And the pliancy of the final product can change based on the pattern of stitches you use. Because of its flexibility and the versatility of patterns, knitting is perfect for crafting handheld versions of abstract math concepts, like Klein bottles and other manifolds, and it helps students reason through tough geometry and calculus problems.

Mathematician and crafter Dr. Daina Taimina turned to another yarn-based craft, crocheting, to create the first physical model of a hyperbolic plane. Inspired by this breakthrough, the Crochet Coral Reef is an ongoing community art project that reflects on climate change and honors female labor and applied mathematics. By developing patterns that riff on Taimina’s original hyperbolic plane, crocheters collectively create a rich marine ecosystem and explore non-Euclidean geometric space in the process. Multiple studies have shown how incorporating crocheting programs improved students’ STEM learning and math achievements.

Continued practice of fiber arts staves off age-related decline in spatial reasoning. In knitting hats, crocheting amigurumi, and sewing jackets, artists gain an understanding of the world around them—and manage to keep it. Perhaps this understanding of the physical world is woven into textiles of all kinds. Spiders, master weavers, are thought by some to have “extended cognition” because of the way their webs help them understand the world. They are known to reinforce areas that are particularly rich with prey, expand sections that haven’t been so fruitful, and adapt their web’s shape to its build site—essentially storing their life’s experience in the webs they weave.

Humans, too, have long stored memory in our fiber creations. The Inca and other ancient Andean cultures used quipus, fiber strings tied in a detailed knotting system, to record dates, census information, and even oral texts. Women in the ancient world wove classic Greek and Roman tales into tapestries, their creation a collective, social form of storytelling. A few years ago, a friend and I were inspired by the story quilts of Faith Ringgold to collaborate on one of our own. These textiles act as a physical representation of abstract knowledge, both in terms of the skill required to craft them and the cultural stories they record.

Why do we persist in building walls or imagining chasms between art and science, instead of weaving them closer together? The ageism and sexism are hard to ignore. You won’t see fiber arts as a rich source for building spatial reasoning skills if you’re convinced crafting is mainly a light activity for elderly women. Especially given the common perception that men excel at both spatial reasoning and math, while women are not naturally skilled. Data suggest men do outperform women at some rigid spatial reasoning, but that idea doesn’t hold for many non-rigid tasks. Maybe a first step toward equity in STEM is to stop viewing spatial reasoning as an innate gift granted only to a select few and instead as a skill we can all learn like any other.

For me, craft has been a critical part of moving my research along. Even when I tired of the lab and retreated to my hobbies, my brain was hard at work building the intuition to confidently analyze and interpret the movies I took of living cells dividing themselves in two. The art of crafting connects the abstract, twisting ideas in my head to a concrete reality I can hold, and untangles some of the thornier ideas in the process.

The post Can Knitting Help Teach Science? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even science has carried this idea to extremes. Genes, for example, are said to account for the difference between people who are perpetual cheaters and those in a lifelong committed relationship. Genes are said to be the reason why some people vote conservative while others vote liberal and why some don’t vote at all. Genes supposedly determine our ability to get through those last years of college, to keep ourselves out of credit card debt, or to invest in the stock market in order to plan for our retirement. And on and on.

If you take this narrative literally, you might think that humans have little free will or sense of right and wrong, and that our environments, educations, and societies play a minor role in how we act or the choices we make. We are, in this version, fleshy computers running hardware provided by our genes.

Why are genes so popular now? Why do they seem to explain everything so perfectly? And how did we come to want to know ourselves through our DNA?

These questions first came to me as I was wrapping up a book on the Human Genome Project and ideas about race. Looking at the state of genetic science, I noticed a push toward investigating the genetics of social phenomena arising in my own field of sociology. I decided to talk to scientists, experts, and everyday people to get a sense of why so many things previously understood in terms of social relations and environmental conditions were coming to be explained in terms of our genomes.

What I discovered is that science and pop culture each spin a narrow version of what genes are and how they impact us, together professing that genes are the deepest essence of ourselves. These two strands combine and reinforce each other.

Recently, researchers, even social scientists, have been focused on finding genetic causes for things in ways that leave out the environment, culture, and social upbringing. Pop culture has seized on these scientific reports, relaying findings as the ultimate truth. And as public interest in genetics and genetic testing has grown, the organizations that fund scientific research have begun putting a premium on studies that seek answers in the genes, closing a feedback loop.

Looking at phenomena beyond disease has become the newest trend, and there is a great deal of energy being spent on opening up opportunities for it. Scientists who are willing to risk their reputations on the new arena of social behavior are being rewarded by the biggest funders and health organizations out there. The National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, for example, are eager supporters of studies as well as efforts to build out a new field of science wholly focused on the genetics of social phenomena.

The space opened up is now being populated by social scientists who are new to genetics, but who believe that they will be able to revolutionize the hunt for genetic associations. This is most striking in the spate of new gene-focused fields, fields like “genopolitics” and “genoeconomics,” that creatively mash up natural and social science methods to apply genetics to new arenas of life, such as political participation and financial decision-making.

A prominent example of the kind of research that these fields are doing is the ongoing search for genes associated with educational attainment. A consortium of political scientists, economists, and sociologists have been mining the human genome for genetic culprits that have an impact on how far people make it through school. Another example is the hunt for rage genes. Scientists have linked the MAOA gene to violent behavior, rape, and even gang participation.

Despite arising from complex interdisciplinary approaches, these hybrid sciences all too often promote genetic determinism. Though they aim to characterize the special way that genes and environments interact to make us who we are, most often they use methods common to genetic science that analyze only the DNA portion of the gene-environment equation. It is expensive and challenging enough to tackle genes alone, and funders do not require that genetic studies pay detailed attention to the environment, so scientists leave the environment out of the picture. Instead of showing us how nature and nurture work together, they reinforce a nature versus nurture way of thinking. This isn’t the fault of individual scientists, but rather is built into the way things are done when hunting for genes. Even the most seasoned social scientists end up checking deep environmental analysis at the door.

For the general public, an even more reductive sense of how genes work and what they mean reigns supreme. TV shows like CSI convince viewers that genes are entities that trump all else. Cultural analysts who have studied the rise of genes in pop culture say that DNA has a certain mystique, seeming indivisible and irreducible, like atoms. And in a world where everyday people are increasingly being asked to manage their own health, to optimize it in any way possible, genetic susceptibilities seem to be one bit of outside reassurance for an uncertain future.

This potent combination of data and cultural resonance gives relatively flimsy scientific conclusions tremendous potency. When I spoke with experts across society—teachers, attorneys, prison wardens, and more—about genetic tests, I learned that they believed that genes had a uniquely predictive power. Many were concerned that tests could be misused by non-experts, but they nevertheless believed that knowing about someone’s DNA would help in working with them. IQ tests could be used to track kids into different types of schools. Criminality tests could determine how to handle repeat offenders. Moreover, tests could be given in infancy, or even administered prenatally.

The belief that nature is really what’s driving us is not new. It’s an idea that can be traced to the earliest thinking about genes and evolution, back to Darwin—and also to his infamous cousin, the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton. Darwin allowed for nurture to kick in as soon as individuals were born, but Galton popularized the idea that the transfer of traits via DNA was all that mattered. In his version, nature and nurture were at odds, with nature winning every time. Francis Galton’s vision went beyond the notion that nature determined the essence of humanity; he believed that the only way to rid humanity of undesired traits was to rid it of the people with those traits.

Though most people today would not want to live in a eugenic society, where DNA decides everyone’s fate, it could be a real possibility if we don’t change the way we think about genes. Our increasing belief in genetic determinism, in an era in which tests are proliferating like mad, threatens to bring us to a world in which people will be slated for totally different experiences, relationships, and life outcomes based on their genes. This will be nothing less than a high-tech eugenic social order, even though people will feel they’ve bought into it voluntarily—through dating apps and hobby tests.

In fact, if you take our current cultural attitudes to their likely conclusion, eventually, there could be two genetic classes. The haves will be able to test their embryos and use IVF to select for things like high intelligence and bullish fiscal attitudes. The have-nots will be tested in infancy or as they enter school, where they will be tracked for certain classrooms and educational and fitness programs, or given no school at all. Educational institutions will become closed-off places where like meets like, as will the labor programs and trade schools offered to those who have “less fit” DNA. If we don’t develop a more critical approach to the information offered by DNA testing, a social order built from the most insidious inequality truly could be our future.

The post Do Genes Really Determine Your Hobbies, Relationships, and Voting Habits? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some say the gap—between nerve cells and life, the brain and the mind, objective reality and the subjective—will never be understood, because such understanding is beyond our human capacity. But I think it is possible to answer the question of how the brain becomes the mind. We just need to change our thinking.

Right now, we are stuck—at a place and time in human history—where scientists and other serious people accept that the physical brain, following all the laws of mother nature, gins up this wonderful thing called consciousness and its particular brand of sweetness in humans. Scientists also realize the brain has evolved over eons to have a gazillion parts, intricately organized to manage certain capacities of life, from seeking food, drink, and shelter, to eating, drinking, and reproducing, which we share with other animals. In addition, humanity has more elaborate thinking and talking capacities. Each process by itself—seeking, eating, reproducing—has been dubbed instinct, because it is in some ways unlearned. And as the great American philosopher and psychologist William James famously observed, humans have more instincts than any other animal.

But none of this actually answers the question of brain-to-mind. In our era, we have the work of the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who famously showed in the 1990s that language was not the mere product of our brain or our human societies. Language was an instinct, literally a piece of our brains, and thus part of the very human machine itself.

It is time to think of consciousness as another instinct. We know that, literally, consciousness comes from physical places in our brain. Think about it: Consciousness comes with each capacity we have as humans and it is the state we feel about the capacities we possess. When we lose a capacity, we also lose its felt state. Consciousness is not an added-on capacity that enlivens another one of our capacities.

To my way of thinking, each of our sub-systems, modules, or capacities is real and alive because of the particular way that life works. And here I appeal and defer to the lifelong work of an extraordinary scientist little known to neuroscientists and psychologists, Howard Pattee. While Pattee was trained as a physicist at Stanford, he has spent his academic life at State University of New York, Binghamton as a theoretical biologist. Pattee proposes a different way to think about that pesky gap between neurons and mind. And to do it, he takes us all the way back to a prior question: How does life arise from non-life? Hold your hat. The next bit requires more thinking.

Pattee’s original insight began when thinking about the gap between non-living stuff and living stuff. How did one become the other? Living stuff replicates and evolves over time. To replicate, this living stuff has to build a copy of itself. That requires instructions on how to build a copy and construction of the copy. It also requires the newly minted stuff to have its own copy of instructions, so those, too, have to be copied.

But life has gone a step beyond simple replication; it is evolvable. And the mathematician and physicist John von Newmann understood that to evolve, the process has to introduce variation so that natural selection can begin its work, and variation had to come from a code, an abstract, reliable representation of the instructions.

Right there is where Pattee stumbles upon a brilliant truth. While the substrate of the code is a physical structure, the code itself is made up of abstract symbols that have been selected for their reliability (and can change if a more reliable one pops up). Symbols are subjective, and as such, follow no physical laws; they follow rules. Thus, the gap between non-life and life is bridged by an abstract but physical code, a substance. There is no spook or magic in the system; it is simply that every code requires a complementarity between its two aspects: the physical and the symbolic.

While the original substance that seeded life is unknown, we now think of it as DNA. And DNA is a perfect example of the phenomenon that Pattee describes: DNA follows the laws of physics and generates proteins by following the coded recipe—and DNA exists physically. Yet the code for the recipe, though conserved and stable, is abstract and not subject to physical laws.

Likewise, the gap between neurons and mind is bridged by a symbolic neural code and that code also requires a complementarity between its two aspects: the physical and the symbolic. Subjective consciousness is not a “thing,” though physical neurons produce it. It is the result of a process embedded in an architecture, just as a democracy is not a thing but the result of a process.

What we call consciousness arises through the moment-to-moment expression of brain modules with hyper-specific functions that are scattered through the brain. As those modules each come forward through time, they create the “flow” of consciousness, which is both a process and a sensation.

It is a rich story and the details are absorbing and mind-bending. It’s a thrilling journey to look back on the history of the human struggle with the question of consciousness and see the modern battle lines about the brain-versus-mind. But the act of observing that consciousness is an instinct—that it comes with life—is easy. Appreciating that consciousness is just that is the hard part.

The post Consciousness Isn’t About the Mind, It’s About the Body appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Reading the article, you might be left with the impression that even thinking about designer babies would be alarmist, unscientific, or just silly.

As public interest advocates who are focused on the social implications of human biotechnologies, my colleagues and I see how often the term “designer babies” serves as a distraction in these discussions—and we usually avoid using it ourselves. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s not the idea itself, but the way we’ve been talking about it, that’s the problem.

What if we could use discussion of designer babies productively, to unpack some of the complex issues surrounding gene editing? Actually talking about such imaginary babies—however far-fetched their existence seems—could help us start that discussion. Only by acknowledging that a future defined by designer DNA is possible can we decide whether we are comfortable with the risks, or even aspire to that future.

First of all, just thinking about designer babies could help people understand important aspects of new gene editing technologies, including the difference between two distinct applications that often get conflated. Both involve CRISPR, a relatively easy-to-use gene editing tool that has revolutionized genetic research. Using CRISPR, scientists can make pinpoint changes in the genes of many kinds of cells, from bacteria to plants to animals to humans. There is both great hope and great hype surrounding CRISPR, because it might prove useful for medical purposes. For example, editing the DNA of human blood cells could treat or even cure diseases like sickle cell or beta-thalessemia—providing tremendous relief to people who are sick.

Editing specialized cells in existing people is called somatic editing, and these kinds of genetic changes would not be passed on to the next generation. A very different application of CRISPR is required to make a designer baby: a scientist has to alter the genes in eggs, sperm, or early embryos, making changes that shape the human germline—the DNA passed down from one generation to the next.

Widespread media coverage has made this kind of gene editing experiment using human embryos seem ubiquitous. In fact, only a handful of researchers around the world have done this research and none have attempted to start a pregnancy using a genetically altered human embryo. Still, some of these researchers do hope to use germline gene editing for reproduction, and this is a disturbing prospect because it risks unintended permanent consequences, not only in terms of its safety, but also in its impact on society.

That’s why, before we decide whether to go forward with germline editing, we need to have a much broader society-wide conversation about what its risks are, technologically, socially, and morally. The way we talk about CRISPR makes that hard to do. For example, calling CRISPR a “gene editor” and comparing it to a word processor for DNA makes the technology seem relatively minor and familiar, when in fact it is neither. And vague terms like “genome surgery” conflate somatic gene therapies with embryo or germline editing. A more serious dialogue about designer babies could begin to change the conversation.

It also could help us unpack why “designer babies” come up in the media at all. Frequently, we find, proponents start talking about designer babies when they want to stop real discussion about the risks of gene editing. Hoover Fellow Henry I. Miller, for instance, dismisses concerns over genetically enhanced embryos as downright sinister—“excessive introspection” that will “cause patients to suffer and even die needlessly,” or, as prominent bioethicists Peter Sykora and Arthur Caplan recently charged, hold patients “hostage” to “fears of a distant dystopian future.”

In fact, there are no desperate patients who will suffer without germline gene editing, because by definition it will be done on people who don’t exist yet. Though some proponents claim that editing the genes of embryos is the best or only way to prevent the birth of children with inherited genetic diseases, another technology already exists that accomplishes the same thing. For decades, people who want children but carry genes known to cause disease have used pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to test embryos created via in vitro fertilization. With PGD, a few cells of a days-old embryo are tested for specific genetic conditions, allowing parents to identify and implant only those that are unaffected.

PGD carries its own ethical concerns: It prompts difficult decisions about what kind of children will be welcomed into the world and how those choices might stigmatize individuals already living with inherited conditions. But gene-editing human embryos raises such concerns to an even greater degree, by allowing parents to alter genes or even introduce new traits, and carries additional societal risks of increased inequality.

This brings up a third issue worth discussing: What makes a baby a designer baby in the first place? Some try to make a tricky distinction between “bad” reasons for germline gene editing, like enhancing appearance or talent, and “good” reasons for germline gene editing, like preventing serious diseases. Children who resulted from embryos edited for looks or smarts would be the “designer babies;” those created from embryos edited for disease prevention would be … something else.

But in fact such distinctions are difficult to parse in real life. Configuring the genetic makeup and traits of future children is a way of designing them—even if the choices seem unambiguously good, as when choosing to remove a genetic variant that causes serious disease. Any child born from an engineered embryo is, in a sense, a designer baby. Only considering the products of the most frivolous choices to be “designer babies” makes it seem as if there is a clear and easily enforceable line between acceptable and unacceptable uses of germline editing.

But we really don’t have a consensus about which inherited traits are desirable or undesirable. What counts as disease? What conditions are “serious” enough to correct? Who gets to decide? Beliefs can change over time in ways that underscore how problematic it would be to alter future generations. Up until 1973, to cite one example, homosexuality could be diagnosed as a psychological illness; we think about it much differently now.

Decisions to edit out diseases impose present-day values on future generations. Autism has been proposed as one of the serious diseases that might be prevented through embryo editing—but the definition of autism has changed radically over the past few decades. Would editing autism out of people’s genes really be a social good? Many people—advocates, authors, and even employers—argue that we should value the neurodiversity that the autism spectrum represents.

Already, a few scientists are drawing up lists of genes to target for enhancement, and transhumanist proponents of gene editing advocate that we should go beyond preventing disease. Some, including Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu, argue that it would be unethical for parents not to try to enhance their children if the technology were safe and available. But that oversteps another important issue: If it were possible, who would provide consent? We don’t know the long-term health risks of germline gene editing for a future child or adult, nor for future generations as edited genomes are passed down. Would designer babies feel a loss of autonomy or individuality if they found out their DNA had been changed before they were born? Arguing that there is an ethical obligation to enhance children treats them like commodities—rather than people.

Finally, talking about designer babies can help us understand how germline gene editing would affect social inequality. Another meaning of “designer” is expensive or exclusive. It’s easy to imagine that if designer babies became possible, only the very wealthy would be able to access whatever real or perceived biological “improvements” the edits offered. The advantages that children of the wealthy already have would be reproduced in biology—or would at least be perceived as biological. But the problem is not just who has access: The idea that some genes are better than others has been the basis of dangerous social divisions and injustice, from racism to eugenics. Editing the genes of future generations could exacerbate the inequalities that already exist, and even introduce new forms.

Before we decide whether to go ahead with embryo or germline editing we need a broad societal consensus, and to gain that, the discussion must go beyond the experts and their issues, to a debate by the public at large.

When you dig deeply instead of dismissing concerns about designer babies, you can see what a complicated thicket of issues it presents. Human gene editing is complex—technically, socially, morally—and our discussion of this powerful emerging technology ought to involve everyone. Designer babies provide a figure around which people’s fears, hopes, and questions coalesce. We’re missing a chance to engage when we won’t talk about them.

The post Designer DNA Isn’t Just for ‘Designer Babies’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Unspool them in ribbons and splice
the shredded places with golden
genomic scrap, and if we are lucky
they’ll rise again, more substantial
than alchemy, more solid than ghosts.

Maybe a crooked wing, a halt
in the step, one blue eye where once
both were brown, but all the pieces,
new and old, must fit–no gaps, no holes,
no places we could slip through
like smoke and disappear inside
their baffled resurrected memory.

For who said the dead regret us, our messy
lusts, the bloody coup d’etat,
or even the unweeded garden,
the dog unfed on the porch?

We wander through bedrooms slamming
empty drawers, through kitchens
to bang the utensils,
all the while wailing, Tell us,
tell us you love us!

We want what we want.
We search for it in anything we find:
a sock, a poem, a bone, a tooth,
a strand of DNA like spider’s gossamer
twisted at the bottom
of a glass pipette.

The post Resurrection Biology appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.