National Science Week was a successful week of cutting-edge science and old hands-on favourites enjoyed by thousands of local families across the Hunter.
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I tip my lid to the many volunteers who helped out. The message from last week was as ever has been, that science is our future.
Three discoveries that highlight this message are technologies that are changing genetics and, therefore, the direction of evolution forever. It used to be that nature, through the wonder of sexual reproduction and mutation, served up a diversity of individuals in each species and those individuals that survived to sexual maturity provided more of their genes into the species for the next generation and so on.
Now, we have the capacity to change the genes of an individual in the laboratory. The buzz words for these new techniques are PCR to allow the amplifying of a single gene, and the more recent and more powerful CRISPR and TALEN to alter DNA sequences and gene function. Genetic defects can be corrected, crops improved and diseases prevented. Genetically unique, new individuals can be created. Thus, the business of evolution is being rapidly accelerated. Conventional plant and animal breeders select individuals with the right character traits through breeding trials over many generations and slowly are able to achieve the desired traits - such as more productive, more nutritious, fatter, and less fat.
The first genetically modified organisms were created some 40 years ago using crude non-specific methods to add in extra DNA to the genes already present. Now, PCR, CRISPR and TALEN offer the genetic manipulators much more precise and convenient ways of adding in or taking out genes.
China is leading in this field, aiming to transform its food supply by gene editing to create new species. These technologies offer the chance to have the highest yield of production with the least input on the land from fertilizers and pesticides, breeding super varieties that are pest and disease resistant as well as drought and salt tolerant.
This alphabet soup of lab language is not only transforming plants and animals but will soon transform our species as well.
Emeritus Professor Tim Roberts is from the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle.
