Conservationists Endorse the Age of Synthetic Biology

From restoring coral reefs and increasing frogs’ pathogen resistance, to reviving extinct species of wolves and engineering microbes to gobble up industrial pollution, synthetic biology offers novel ways to rewrite natural history. At the same time, it is threatening to erode some of the foundational principles of conservation. The growing divide over the future of biotech was on full display during this month’s World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, the quadrennial conference of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

One question loomed over the summit: Should genetically modified organisms be released into the wild? Debates once limited to genetically modified seeds — which threaten to choke out wild species or float across national borders — have widened to include much larger swaths of the natural world. Rabbits, wasps and mosquitoes can be sterilized and eradicated within a few generations by selective breeding. Molecular scientists are tinkering with insect immune systems to combat malaria. In New Zealand’s ongoing war on possums, gene drives are deployed to protect endangered birds and the domestic cattle industry. Honeybee colonies are of especially high interest, as researchers look to induce pesticide resistance among contracting bee populations. 

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the science of rewriting animal and insect DNA. And with this acceleration comes heightened risks that are dividing IUCN members, a number of whom continue to hold deep reservations about the safety and wisdom of releasing modified DNA into the wild. But these members are in the minority. In an 88% majority vote, delegates adopted a moderate policy of case-by-case evaluation. This vote passed after members had rejected a motion for a “precautionary pause” — essentially a moratorium — by one vote. 

“IUCN members have chosen to engage with these tools thoughtfully and responsibly, rather than turn away from them,” said Dr. Susan Lieberman, WCS vice president of International Policy who voted against the moratorium. “[The proposed blanket pause] would prevent us from using tools that could safeguard both people and wildlife.” 

Revive & Restore, a California-based conservation nonprofit, meanwhile, was more pointed. The group issued a statement calling the moratorium the “latest attempt to halt innovation in conservation” by a “small group of anti-GMO activists.”

But support for the moratorium was broader than just a small group of activists, and included leading genetic researchers and conservation scientists. Following the vote, more than 100 international scientists and biosafety and policy experts published an open letter explaining why a moratorium was needed. “No robust framework exists to guarantee that the release of genetic biotechnologies and associated risk mitigation strategies would not cause ecological harm,” it read.

The IUCN has decided to ignore the need for adequate safeguards against irreversible harm to nature … We are losing invaluable legacies from millenaries of evolution and plant-insect interactions, overall genetic diversity is impoverished, entire food webs are endangered as key species disappear and ecosystems might lose the fragile balance of which we know very little.

The letter specifically targeted the dangers of editing the genomic traits of bees to make them more tolerant of pesticides. The newest and most experimental forms of genetic engineering use gene drives to suppress certain genetic traits during pollination, potentially introducing undesirable molecules into the DNA of other species. Gene drives introduce or remove certain traits by damaging a target sequence in a chromosome and potentially introducing a new gene into the break. While gene drives are usually tested in lab animals, the inherited traits can be spread into the wild upon release.  

Genetic modification is billed as precision technology, but evidence shows that when the lab hits the ground, life chooses its own way. Jonathan Latham, virologist and founder of the biochemical whistleblowing project The Poison Papers, points to the case of Recombinetics, a Minnesota-based company (now in bankruptcy proceedings) that used CRISPR editing on cows to cut into a DNA sequence, and ended up introducing unintended traits like antibiotic resistance genes. CRISPR editing for HIV-resistance in humans by Chinese scientist He Jiankui also infamously glitched, when modifications of embryonic genes turned out to be inconsistent, with unpredictable consequences on other proteins and heritable traits innewborns’ DNA. Jiankui was imprisoned in 2019 for skirting scientific regulations, but his research is now being revisited by a private startup known as the Manhattan Project.  

Synthetic biologists with IUCN have also warned of the potential lethality of “mirror bacteria,” a phenomenon where DNA and RNA molecules are reconstructed in a way that flips their asymmetrical structure, or “chirality,” like a mirror image. Because they are unnatural, mirror bacteria can evade natural immune systems, setting the stage for possible global public health disasters. “[T]he only safe mirror bacterium is one that doesn’t exist,” the immunobiologist Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov told the Yale School of Medicine in an interview. 

The synthetic biology frontier is not entirely lawless. Since 2000, 173 nations have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international agreement under the Convention on Biodiversity that lays out a regulatory and risk assessment framework for GMOs. The agreement also protects countries’ right to adopt sovereign policies on scientific risk as well as ethical, cultural or socioeconomic considerations. Citing this right, Peru extended a moratorium on the import and production of GMOs meant for wild release in 2021. Mexico in turn banned GMO maize cultivation to protect native species. 

But, say experts, the Cartagena Protocol is neither universally respected — 25 nations have yet to ratify it — nor keeping pace with rapid developments in synthetic biology.

“Unfortunately, its enforcement mechanisms are weak and there is reluctance among biotech developers to further develop the protocol,” said Franziska Achterberg, head of policy at the nonprofit Save Our Seeds. “The CBD has repeatedly emphasized the need for precaution regarding the environmental release of synthetic biology applications, [but] biotech developers have fought that process long and hard.”

National laws, meanwhile, continue to regress. Although members signed off on risk assessment guidance for gene drives at last year’s U.N.’s biodiversity summit, the final guidelines were deemed “hollowed out” by biotech policy watchdogs. Even Europe, which once boasted of the world’s strictest biotech regulations, is moving toward deregulating new variants of GMOs.

“Because many of these proposals have not yet reached large-scale or commercial deployment, decision makers often treat synthetic biology as a future issue rather than an immediate threat,” said Joann Sy, a biopolicy and epidemiology expert who advises the pollinator conservation group Pollinis.

But amid the pace of change, the central question — should we be redesigning nature at all? — is being lost. 

“Once we accept genetic engineering as a normal part of managing wild ecosystems,” she says, “we fundamentally alter the ethos of conservation.”