Life As We Made It review – can Beth Shapiro save us all from extinction?
“Perhaps we can engineer our way out of our own extinction,” that is the startling prospect at the core of Beth Shapiro’s unmissable book, Life As We Made It. No fanfare. The sentence is buried away on page 260.
Shapiro’s rhetorical rumination encapsulates an aspiration as towering as the eleven words it takes to express it are prosaic. She is standing firm in the face of three million years of evolutionary evidence to the contrary.
Alexa reminded me to wake up this morning. I slipped on my spiffy new Bolt Threads suit – spider silk proteins spun into multi-coloured fabric.
I scoffed a yummy breakfast of an Impossible Burger – a meaty-tasting plant substitute that gets its flavour from heme. Yup, that’s as in haemoglobin. Yuck! Dracula, eat your burgers up. I grabbed my Modern Meadow laptop bag – made from collagen sheets replacing cowhides yet retaining the stretchy skin thing.
I ordered a bouquet of extinct flower fragrances from Gingko Bioworks – they extract DNA from long gone plant species and recreate the odours of the palaeolithic steppes – for my wife’s birthday.
I cast a glance tank-wards, to admire my thoughtful present of the yellow (favourite custom-colour ordered from a palette) glowing Danios tropical fish – created by the enterprising Yorktown Enterprises GloFish company, already accounting for 15 per cent of US aquarium sales.
Finally, patted Ruppy, our red-glowing Beagle pup, genetically engineered in, the irony of ironies, South Korea where they used to eat them, and headed for my conference on how to bio-erase The Galactic Garbage Patch – a floating dump of plastic in the Pacific three times the size of France – using microbial self-degrading PHAs (polyhydroxyalkanoates).
Welcome to the potentially brave new world Shapiro passionately believes we need to confront if extinction is not to be the fate we share with the four billion species which have preceded us on the planet. To gain some context, we are part of the 1 per cent remaining.
Eat your heart out Glasgow COP 26, where hot air will proliferate as Boris flexes newly acquired green muscles and poor wee Nicola Sturgeon chaps on the window, trying to get a look in.
My advice is not to waste time on Cop 26, and read this book instead. My sci-fi start to the morning is anything but; nothing in my morning routine is science fiction.
Shapiro keeps a complex theme simple – The Way It Is in Part I, then The Way It Could Be in Part II. Part I is a bit of a misnomer, as it covers the way it was; the story of DNA discovery from bone mining on melting Arctic tundra, moving on to an excellent description of life’s origin story, and an idiot-proof guide as to why variations in inherited DNA explains phenomena like Lactese Persistence experienced by only some populations.
The Chapter, Lake Cow Bacon, sets out initially stumbling attempts in the 20th century, starting with President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 Wildlife importation legislation, to redress the frightening rate of species elimination in the USA – Bison, Florida Panthers, Passenger Pigeons (from billions to zero in a generation).
The story of DNA discovery and the ability to engineer the genome through the techniques of CRISPR 9, the breakthrough pioneered by Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her gene-editing technique, is covered at a quick clip, but insufficient depth and clarity to make it accessible to the lay reader.
Shapiro’s writing eschews the language of the ivory towers of academe and remains rooted in the culture of informed, comprehensible, cafeteria chit chat. The 33 pages of Lake Cow Bacon cover the history of genetic engineering in crops and animals, from the selection of mutations through natural breeding up to present-day sci-fi scary stuff – like Ruppy, the glowing Beagle. The need for regulation that protects but does not strangle initiatives is well made.
Here are some “for instances” where the book shines a light on important topics, about which this reviewer was woefully unaware. Page176 explains the distinction between cisgenic (sexually compatible) and transgenic (sexually incompatible) DNA manipulation techniques. New cisgenic techniques do not incorporate genes from other organisms, and a big concern of the anti-genetic modification lobby can be laid to rest.
Ignore political posturing. When filling our morally superior trolleys, the bright green non-GMO labels that we look out for on supermarket shelves mean little.
Ms Shapiro points out they are to be found on salt. No one has yet argued that the mineral boasts any DNA at all. Beware politicos bearing labels.
There is a fundamental, troubling transatlantic divide on the approach to legislation on genetic engineering. The EU regulates the process, and the US focuses on regulating the end products that emerge from the research. This reflects the European preoccupation with codification. The tendrils of Napoleon’s Code Civil run deep.
Shapiro strikes a poser for legislators; “What will happen when a plant developed in the USA using gene editing is released onto a European farm? Does it suddenly become a GMO? Since the product is unrecognisable as a GMO, how can anyone tell? More importantly, does it really matter?” It’s a problem legislators need to get to grips with urgently.
Beth Shapiro’s earlier book in 2015 – How to Clone a Mammoth – brought the author Jurassic Park notoriety. The chimaera of species revival. She is a thoughtful academic, and I bet she regrets acceding to her publisher’s sharp eye for a selling title. She is also an accomplished lecturer. A recent Royal Institution lecture – available here is well worth watching. Not least, to quell any anxieties that we might be taken unawares by a tusky mammoth in Regents Park anytime soon.
This book brings readers up to date, assessing the impact on research of the Covid-19 event and the appetite for adopting riskier technologies more quickly – vide vaccine development in record timescales.
Shapiro’s prediction, “we will turn our technologies to overrule evolution”, is pure Ernst Stavro Blofeld, from the upcoming Bond movie, No Time to Evolve. Greta Thunberg will assume the iconic role of “OO8, Licenced to Legislate”.
Life As We Made It turns a potentially chilling threat into a promise – so long as those charged with the process are as far-seeing and practical as its author. That’s the challenge upon which readers will be left reflecting.