Atlantic Salmon enhanced for faster growth with genes from Chinook Salmon and Ocean Pout finally wins FDA approval 17 years after AquaBounty Technologies began the process of seeking regulatory approval.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it could not find any valid scientific reasons to ban the production of GM Atlantic salmon engineered with extra genes from two other fish species – a decision that could soon lead to its commercial production.

The salmon will be sterilized females and will be grown in land-based containers at lower cost than catching wild salmon. The wild Atlantic salmon are overfished (see page 12 of that NOAA report) like many other fish species around the world.

Given trends in world population growth (and not much being done about it) we need ways to feed ourselves that cause less ecological damage. Our living standards are based on unsustainable uses of natural resources. The demands on those resources are growing and wild habitats are shrinking. We need ways to create what we need in dense land areas. So I genetic engineering of fish as a necessary response to our living beyond our means.

The first attempts at human gene therapy were made in 1990. The excitement around gene therapy was high in the 1990s. Yet not till 22 years later in 2012 the first gene therapy drug, Glybera for a rare genetic disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency, was approved for clinical use in Europe. That same treatment might become the first gene therapy to get regulatory approval in the US in 2013. The great promise of gene therapy remains just that, a promise.

Use of cell therapies has expanded more rapidly. However, the only stem cell therapy in use is for bone marrow transplant in cancer treatments. Cell therapy usage still remains rare as compared to the number of diseases and disorders potentially treatable with cell therapies. In a nutshell, the biotech revolution so far has been a bust for curing diseases.

A look at the orders of magnitude drops in DNA sequencing costs shows at least some biotechnologies racing ahead faster than Moore's Law advances in computer processing power. But a much higher critical mass of biotechnologies is needed to easily make lots of stem cell therapies and gene therapies. We also need many more biotechnologies to be able to do the tissue engineering needed to grow replacements for most types of internal organs.

On the bright side the rate at which new drugs have been getting thru regulatory pipelines has increased. But the drugs have less financial impact. That suggests these drugs are aimed at narrower niches with smaller benefits.

In total, the world's 12 top pharmaceutical companies had 41 new drugs approved, with combined forecast revenues of $211 billion, while the year-earlier tally was 32 products with expected revenues of $309 billion.

My suspicion: most of the remaining problems that chemical drugs haven't cured or slowed down are problems that chemical drugs can't fix. For most of what goes wrong as we age we need gene therapies, cell therapies, and other techniques that are powerful enough to repair or replace aged tissue. Chemical drugs are just too simple in structure and in potential effects. They can't do much tissue repair. Though chemical drugs might at least be able to kill off a lot more damaged and dangerous cells. That leads us to a hopeful report.

An article in the New York Times about the attempts by Merck, Roche and Sanofi to make wide spectrum anti-cancer drugs against proteins made by mutated genes p53 and MDM2 suggests a big step toward a real biotech revolution might be within reach using only conventional chemical drugs. Imagine a drug that can wipe out half of all cancers.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Read the whole thing. Very exciting. Imagine a small number of chemical compounds killing half of all cancers. Might be possible. Though I fear the slow rate at which drugs get tested will make this attempt take many more years.

Roche was the first to start testing a p53 drug in patients. The company began, as required, with an attempt to establish a dose strong enough to be effective but not too toxic. It took a surprisingly long time — three years — because Roche was cautious, starting with a tiny dose and gradually escalating it.

The slow rate of cancer drug testing and the regulatory environment that causes the snail's pace is tragic. In America alone about 600 thousand people per year die of cancer. So while Roche was doing toxicity studies almost 2 million people died of cancer in the US and millions more elsewhere.

If I was dying of cancer and had months to live I'd volunteer to take a large dose of an experimental drug to find out its toxicity. If I was really lucky I'd be cured. If I was only moderately lucky the drug would kill me quickly so I wouldn't have to spend months in pain slowly dying. I bet if dying cancer patients were given the choice of whether to risk a fast death due to aggressive testing of new drugs enough would say yes that drug testing could be sped up substantially.

The regulators who create this slow drug development environment also place high hurdles in the way of trying stem cell therapies and gene therapies for fatal illnesses. The US FDA has won a court case that gives it broad power to regulate stem cell therapies. Well, FDA regulation basically means "spend hundreds of millions of dollars and spend a decade getting approval". Got a disease that'll kill you 5 or even 10 years from now? Time to get a passport if you don't already have one. When the biotech revolution finally starts arriving with great clinical treatments you'll have to go abroad to get the latest treatments.

We need a faster rate of progress in biotechnology.

Update: It says something about how much faster cancer research could advance that when researcher Ralph Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer he experimented on himself and extended his life.

In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body’s own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him.

He did things to himself much faster than he could have gotten permission to experiment on others who had similar very short life expectancies. Why not let people with very short life expectancies more easily get access to experimental treatments?

Seeing that there's a big zombie apocalypse fiction genre I decided to read one the zombie novels and I'm part way thru Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End. I've also managed to get thru the first episode of The Walking Dead TV show. Still reading and watching. But I've got an initial reaction: a bioengineered zombie-causing virus seems pretty easy to stop.

The human race doesn't seem lame enough to allow zombies to totally overrun civilization. Why would most people let themselves get bitten by slow-moving zombies? In both zombie stories I'm following one has to shoot the zombies in the head to stop them. Well, how hard is that? Really easy. Would we have a sufficient supply of guns? Yes, at least in America where there are about as many gun as there are people. That's without even bringing military guns into the count. My guess is there's some high ratio of bullets to guns. But for a substantial fraction of the zombies one wouldn't even need to use guns. Beheading would work. We wouldn't even need many people to operate the guns. A single sharp shooter could shoot a lot of zombies in the head. Plus, police and other people could wear gear that would make bites hard to deliver. In the Apocalypse Z story the main character (in Spain, so fewer guns available) dons a diving wet suit to make bites harder to deliver when he goes out to get a gun from a zombie soldier. Just locking your car door would hold them off.

A zombie virus infection would need to be able to travel airborne in order to infect a lot of people. Airborne zombie virus is harder to stop. But not impossible. We would just have to stay away from zombies. The key is to increase the distance between uninfected and zombies. First, lock all doors of all buildings. Second, erect lots of barriers that break cities and regions up into zones and make the barriers so formidable (with kill zone layers and sharp shooters who can kill zombies at a distance) that zombies can not get thru them. Third, require air filtration mask wearing.

In order for a zombie virus to spread widely it would need at least one of the following attributes:

• Faster, smarter zombies. Far greater retention of cognitive ability and speed of movement among the infected. Otherwise they can't compete with the non-infected.
• Really long incubation period. Probably measured in weeks.
• Airborne transmission.

I do not think airborne transmission would be sufficient. I'm not sure about whether faster and smarter zombies would be sufficient. Probably in the most early infected communities this would work. But as the threat became more widely understood the smartness of the less numerous zombies would not be enough to allow them to succeed. We'd have a pretty brutal global civil war though.

Update: We'll be able to use UAVs to kill the zombies.

As Tyler Cowen has pointed out, atttributes of autistic minds have some economic advantages. Some companies are systematically utilizing these advantages to improve quality and enhance profits. A Jason Lisk essay about Adderall in the National Football League makes the point that Adderall causes mental hyperfocusing. The tendency hyperfocus is one of the advantages that autistics bring to many mental tasks. So you can buy a bottle of autism?

Of course, it’s not all positives. It can be abused. It can be addictive. You have to get a cardiac workup, and players that are sharing it without prescriptions could lead us to a Len Bias situation for Adderall. For me, I had a hard time sleeping at night. I was still on. That’s why you hear stories like Garrett Hartley, who claimed to have taken it to stay awake for a long drive. I would get so focused on things that I could not let go. I could always “hyper-focus” on things I enjoyed, but it intensified even more on Adderall. Staying up to play Civilization to wind down turned into six hours at the computer, and no sleep before returning to work.

Hyperfocusing is not the only attribute of the autistic mind. How many of the autistic attributes can be enhanced by drugs? The opposite effect is possible: Oxytocin enhances the ability of autistics to recognize emotions in the faces of others.

There's no mental state that is ideal for all situations. What we need: mental switches that will make it fast and easy to switch our minds into different modes. Shift into a socialization mode. Then switch on hyperfocusing to work on an intellectually demanding task without getting distracted. Get creative when you need to be. Then shift into a mode where you can analyze numbers and write up reports when that's what's needed.

We need cognitive state management technologies. Some already exist and not all of them are drugs. For example, bright lights will lessen the kind of depression called seasonal affective disorder (SAD). You can also use white noise and noise suppressing materials and other changes in your environment to decrease mental distractions.

Which cognitive state management techniques do you use? Got any useful tips?

Ever wanted to travel to Africa to see lions in the wild? Don't wait too long. Lion habitats and lion populations are in sharp decline/

DURHAM, NC – About 75 percent of Africa’s savannahs and more than two-thirds of the lion population once estimated to live there have disappeared in the last 50 years, according to a study published this week in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation.

The study, led by Duke University researchers, estimates the number of lions now living on the savannahs to be as low as 32,000, down from nearly 100,000 in 1960. Lion populations in West Africa have experienced the greatest declines.

Since the last 50 years of population growth has been far smaller than the next 50 years of population growth the next 25% of savannah will probably go much faster.

Will the national park strongholds survive?

Pimm and his colleagues used high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth, coupled with human population density data and estimates of local lion populations, to map areas still favorable to the big cats’ survival.

They identified only 67 isolated areas of savannah across the continent with suitably low human impacts and densities.

Of these, only 10 spots were deemed to be “strongholds” where lions have an excellent chance of survival. Many of the strongholds are located within national parks.

The long term survival of wild lion populations seems very unlikely. One projection from the UN Population Division has Africa's population more than tripling by the end of the 21st century to over 3.5 billion people. Apparently that was a revision upward because Africa's fertility rates aren't declining as much as previously predicted. Africa's still in a Malthusian Trap where more resources translate into more babies. So high fertility rates shouldn't be too surprising.

Population growth and resource depletion get tragically little attention in discussions about what is going wrong in the world.

In Denmark Thorkil Sonne, who has an autistic son, founded a company, called Specialisterne, which supplies autistic consultants to companies for tasks where autistic minds perform better than normal minds (which are now referred to as neurotypicals).

Christian Andersen, another Specialisterne consultant, works at Lundbeck, a large pharmaceutical company. He compares records of patients who have experienced reactions to Lundbeck’s drugs, making sure the paper records match the digital ones. Errors can creep in when the reports are entered into the company’s database, and tiny mistakes could mean that potential health hazards would go undetected. So Andersen searches for anomalies, computer entry against written report, over and over, hour after hour, day after day.

Before Andersen arrived, his boss, Janne Kampmann, had a hard time finding employees who could do the job well. Most people’s minds wander as they go back and forth between documents, their eyes skimming the typos lurking there. Andersen, however, worked without interruption the morning I visited, attentive and silent until he lifted his head and, pointing to a sheet of paper, said to Kampmann, “Why do we have a 57 instead of 30 milligrams?” Kampmann told me Andersen is one of the best quality-control people she’s ever seen.

The article provides other examples of autistics outperforming neurotypicals in tasks that involve many precise steps and repetition. Relentlessness, hyperfocus, and a great memory for detail are required to excel at some tasks,

People who feel most comfortable communicating thru subtle social cues can feel frustrated dealing with autistics and can attribute malicious intent when none is present. Mutual misunderstandings are a big problem between autistics and neurotypicals. More managers should learn how to spot and deal with autistics because many autistics can excel if matched up to appropriate tasks and co-workers who know how to deal with them.

Looking back at a piece Kevin Bullis did on A123's failure in the electric vehicle battery market place a statement by one of the A123 founders gives an insight into a recurring debate that has raged off and on in the comments of FuturePundit posts: electric vehicle battery costs are now at $500 per kilowatt-hour.

Battery makers have driven costs down over the last several years, from about $1,000 per kilowatt-hour to $500 per kilowatt-hour, says Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials scientist at MIT and one of the founders of A123. And those costs are likely to be cut in half again over the next decade, he says. If startups are to succeed, they’ll need to offer something far cheaper and higher performing.

But $250 per kilowatt-hour is still too much to allow EVs to succeed in the mass market. Yet with current trends in lithium ion batteries that's where we'll end up. So it is not surprising that Jim Lentz of Toyota says lithium ion batteries are a transitional technology. The start-ups that claim they can get down to $150 per kilowatt-hour or even less are the ones to pay attention to. For example, Alveo Energy claim they can hit $100 per kilowatt-hour. If they can pull that off many of us will be driving around on electric power.

Kevin Bullis, a very good energy writer at Technology Review, has the details.

GE hopes to make wind turbines far cheaper, and open up new ways to design them, by ditching the stiff fiberglass blades they use now in favor of turbine blades made out of fabric.

The fiberglass blades are becoming too heavy as blades get bigger. A different approach is needed.

In North America cheap shale natural gas has driven down the cost of gas-fired electric power so far that wind, solar, coal, and nuclear can't compete. Larger blades reduce costs in part by reaching higher up into the air where wind is stronger. Wind blade size needs to grow much more to compete.

It’s estimated that to achieve the national goal of 20% wind power in the U.S., wind blades would need to grow by 50% -- a figure that would be virtually impossible to realize given the size constraints imposed by current technology. Lighter fabric blades could make this goal attainable.

This project is still at a research stage.

What I wonder: When will new large wind turbines start getting used to replace existing smaller wind turbines at old wind sites? A lot of the best sites were developed first and have higher quality wind. With turbines 2 or 3 times bigger a lot more power could be harvested from these sites.