Kent H. Redford is a conservation practitioner and Principal at Archipelago Consulting established in 2012 and based in Portland, Maine, USA. Archipelago Consulting was designed to help individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation. Prior to Archipelago Consulting Kent spent 10 years on the faculty of University of Florida and 19 years in conservation NGOs with five years as Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Parks in Peril program and 14 years as Vice President for Conservation Science and Strategy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. For six years he was Chair of IUCN’s Task Force on Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation. In June 2021 Yale University Press published Kent’s book with W.M. Adams: Strange Natures. Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about your book Strange Natures and the field of synthetic biology.

KENT REDFORD

The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it - amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.

This book that Bill and I wrote is about the impending intersection between synthetic biology and the field of nature conservation, not an examination of the technologies per se, but an examination of the way that we are going to end up needing to think about the intersection between our ability to change DNA, and what it means to be natural, and what it means to conserve things and whether or not we want to conserve things that we have altered.

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So probably because of the way that these technologies were first introduced to people, that is through Monsanto's application relating to creating herbicide-resistant crops and the inability of farmers to save seeds for patented reasons, this objection to the application of genetic technologies is often co-assocated with regenerative agriculture and with the organic food movement, but there is no reason that that should be the case. And in fact, there is a strong argument to be made that if we are going to be able to continue to feed people, we must be able to alter the genomes of the major agricultural crops as well as significant minor crops for continents like Africa. If we're going be able to keep up with the changes in the climate, the increasing number of people, and the increasing demands of society for certain kinds of food over others. So, whereas I certainly am all in favor of regenerative agriculture and organic, it doesn't mean that you have to be against the potential application of these other technologies.

My favorite example has to do with the reef-building corals. So coral reefs, as most people know, are a tremendously important part of biodiversity. They support hundreds, if not thousands of species of fish and plants and microbes and invertebrates. They also are critical sources of profitable fishing. There is work going on now on a variety of different fronts to try to see whether there are ways to modify genetically, both the genomes of the coral organisms themselves, as well as these microbes, the algae that live inside them, and photosynthesize in order to try to allow these corals to survive the warming oceans.

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Non-germline modification is the place where much of the work is being done. For example, they've already in an experiment were able to return limited sightedness to a person who was basically blind as a result of modifying the genes in the eye. There is a lot of work going on associated with cancers. There is very good evidence that there is a strong connection between the metabolism of the microbes that live in and around the human body and things that we have always thought of as entirely human physiologically. For example, autism. t's really exciting and interesting - still really early stages - there is evidence that autism is a result of a particular kind of interaction between the microbes that live in people who suffer from autism and the physiology of the human body itself. A lot of people who have suffered from illnesses that have never had a solution with great hope that these approaches may help them.

A friend of mine who taught medical students used to tell her class, "You are all being taught human physiology. In 10 years' time, all the students in your medical school program are going to be being taught microbiology because you have to understand microbiology and its relationship to understand humans and what goes on."

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So there are lots of different indigenous peoples who have their own world views and experiences. One of the most impressive people I know is Aroha Mead. She's a Maori, and she's a lawyer, and she has been active in this conservation organization IUCN for decades.

New Zealand as a nation and the Maori as a people have engaged in very careful and systematic discussions amongst themselves about what they think about synthetic biology, and its potential use on the islands of New Zealand and in some of the areas that are sacred to them. People can read. They have written and published on some of this work. And again, the first thing to say is there is no such thing as a Maori position. There are some people who felt very strongly that this was a terrible idea, and there were other people who felt it was an essential thing to do because New Zealand has a tremendous problem with invasive species.

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So there seems to be a desire to believe that, at a scale that we can't see, our impacts have not been felt. And that therefore, when I come along or people like me come along and say, you know, there are people who are talking about making modifications at this scale, which you thought was untouched because you can't see it.

It's sort of aghast and horror. Oh, my god. How could you possibly do that? That's untouched. But of course, you have only to think about that to realize that that is not, shall we say, an evidence-based position because any modification that you've seen the fish becoming smaller because of overfishing or certain kinds of deer no longer have as big antlers because the hunters shot all the males that had big antlers. Those changes are, in fact, a result of changes to the genomes, to the genes of those species, which have then become manifest in things that we can see.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Abigail Gray with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Abigail Gray. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).