Quote of the Day

The semi-ancient electrophoresis power goes on the fritz, so of course we open it up to see what's what.  Lot's of discrete logic, some massive (1 milli Farad each!) capacitors, a couple of Motorola 68000s.  Nothing obviously amiss, and no hope of figuring out what has gone wrong.

But we did get this gem: "Oh, that's where the beeping noise comes from."  That's what makes it all worthwhile.

In the News

The December issue of Nature Biotechnology contains a special focus section on synthetic biology.  Here is my commentary, "The Changing Economics of DNA Synthesis".  The PDF version appears to be available for free, at least for the moment.

My interview in the Fall 2009 issue of GBN:bulletin is now available from the Global Business Network.  The issue also contains a short interview with Stewart Brand about his new book -- it is well worth reading.

Revisiting Mood Hacking with Scents

Following on my post last spring about mood hacking, October brought more hints that behavior can be explicitly modified using scents.  A variety of news outlets picked up on a press release from BYU describing a forthcoming paper in Psychological Science that demonstrates, "that clean scents not only motivate clean behavior, but also promote virtuous behavior by increasing the tendency to reciprocate trust and to offer charitable help."  Here I am quoting from a pre-print, entitled "The Smell of Virtue", cached at the University of Toronto.  The paper describes two experiments in which citrus-scented window cleaner appeared to alter behavior.  I have to say that I found the references to Proust, saints, sinners god, and cleanliness (all that in 4 pages!) to be distractions from the main ideas, not to mention the data.

Here is the ScienceDaily reporting, and here is Time's take.

(Not everyone is happy with the methodology described in the paper, the conclusions, and the way it was written.)

What makes this interesting (to me) is that the researchers don't necessarily imply a direct biological mechanism.  The induced behavior may simply be the result of a learned association.  That is, there is no suggestion that anything about the scent that serves to flip a biological switch that leads to different behavior.  Rather the lead author, Katie Liljenquist of BYU, and her colleagues had  previously demonstrated a link between transgression and a desire for cleanliness (see "Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing", Science, 313(5792), 2006).  "Out, damned spots!" and all that.

The citrus scent may simply something that Prof. Liljenquist's test subjects (probably undergraduates at US universities) have learned to associate with cleanliness.  Would students at Asian universities have the same response to the same scent?  I suppose one way to quickly address this question is to see what sort of scents Asians prefer in their window cleaners.  Here is my point: even though there may be no innate molecular pathway exploited in this "behavior reprogramming", it may still be possible to exploit culturally defined (or perhaps "contextually constructed") neural pathways (from the receptors to the brain) for the purpose of mood hacking.

I am not particularly excited about the possibility of having my own mood hacked without my knowledge.  That this might be accomplished even in the absence of genetically identifiable response pathway should give one pause.  Any molecular pathway responsible for this effect (should it prove reproducible and engineerable) is unlikely to be well understood for many years to come.  But if the results from the citrus-scent study are to be believed, then it is already possible to manipulate behavior using scents, even though we have little idea how to defend against it other than by using more scents.  Perfume warfare.  Lovely.

Can't wait until the iGEM undergraduates get a hold of this.  They have already built bugs that smell like bananas and mint.  When will they start trying to influence the judges' decisions directly using synthetic scent pathways?

US Market Value of GM Crops is Approximately $70 Billion

I have a short letter in the November 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription req.) correcting the record on US revenues from genetically modified crops.  Based on USDA data for corn, soy, and cotton, revenues from the GM versions of those crops were about US$ 65 billion in 2008, rather than the widely misreported ~$4 billion.  The latter figure is in fact just from GM seed revenue.  I would put the total from all GM crops and seeds at $75-85 billion, though it isn't yet clear where GM sugar beets are going to come in.  Assuming US revenues are representative of global averages, thentotal worldwide revenues are probably north of $150 billion for crops and seeds together.

Below is a figure showing US yearly revenues from the three big crops, as well as the US annual total.  Note that although the GM fraction of each crop continues to grow (see the ISAAA report from 2008), prices fluctuate sufficiently from year to year that total revenues declined from 2007 to 2008.  Food and crop prices have come off their 2007 highs -- which cannot last given increasing demand around the world.  I would expect revenues to resume their climb in 2010.

Carlson_US_rev_GM_crops_Nov_09.png

iGEM 2009: Got Poo?

Here are a couple of snaps of the Scatalog from E. chromi, a spin-off of this year's Cambridge University iGEM project.

Cambridge has built a set of parts that allow generation of a rainbow of color pigments in E. coli.  Designers James King and Daisy Ginsberg got creative with the application of all the hues of engineered poo as biosensors for the human GI tract.  It's all nicely packaged up in a shiny briefcase, just you would see any any tech convention.

Bet that was fun coming through airport security.

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iGEM09_cambridge_poo2.jpg