Helen Pilcher: Genetically modified wolves, fainting goats and golden gnus, how humans are shaping species
Helen Pilcher, Photo courtesy of Helen Pilcher
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From driving species to extinction to selectively breeding pets and farm animals to new technologies like genetic engineering and cloning, it’s impossible to ignore the impact that humans are having on life on the planet today. Helen Pilcher is a science writer and comedian whose latest book, Life Changing, explores how humans have shaped the evolutionary trajectories of the species living alongside us on the planet. You might think this is a relatively modern phenomenon but, as Helen discovered while writing the book, our influence on animals goes back a long way.
Helen: It goes back thirty, thirty five thousand years to the very first species where we can put our finger on it and say, yeah, we actually started changing this species. So this story has sort of very, very ancient roots and you may possibly, at some point in this interview, hear a small whimpering or yipping or growling. That's not coming from me, that's coming from my genetically modified Wolf. So I do own a genetically modified Wolf and it's the descendant of one of these very first creatures that humans modified.
Helen: So the first creature that we ever modified deliberately was the Grey Wolf, that's where it all starts, this whole story. Thirty five thousand years ago, humans domesticated the Grey Wolf, and we didn't just go out there and deliberately decide to change this animal, but that's effectively what we did. There was this tightening relationship between our ancestors and this apex predator, and as this relationship tightened, it was beneficial for both of us.
Helen: What we found was that these animals started to change. They changed in terms of their body shape, they changed in terms of their behaviour and as the relationship became even more intimate and we welcomed these Wolves into our homes and, with selective breeding of course, in the 18th century, we started to shape these animals even more profoundly. So this genetically modified Wolf who's now slumbering at my feet, is now so far removed from the Grey Wolf that he barks at bin bags and refuses to go out in the rain.
Kat: You start being like a mighty hunter through the forest, and then you ended up being a pug in a birthday hat. That's evolution for you.
Helen: That's it Isn't it? That's what we've done. We did that.
Kat: And that's maybe not what we would think of when we hear the term genetically modified, you think of all the stuff we have now, like CRISPR and cloning and all of these kinds of things. But like you say, as soon as humans can take two animals and put them together in a way that they can breed together or two animals that then can't breed together, you are starting to selectively choose what these animals are going to look like and the characteristics that you want.
Helen: I mean, that's absolutely right. So I mean, I call my dog my genetically modified Wolf, but that is exactly what he is. So he looks and acts very differently to a Wolf, but genetically he is different. So there's this tiny amount of DNA that sets him and all other dogs aside from Wolves, and yet it is enough to imbue them with this vastly different suite of characteristics. And scientists will have a very, very precise definition of what they mean by the term "genetic modification", but if you take it in the broader sense and you say this is a manipulation of DNA caused by humans over time, then dogs really are genetically modified wolves,
Helen: And I find it really, really interesting because when you talk to people about GM animals or GM food hackles raised and people have these very extreme views sometimes. And I find it really interesting because if you were to say to somebody, "look, I've got this friend who works in the lab and they've got this idea to make this animal and it's going to be a new kind of dog, it's going to be really chunky and really hefty and it's going to have a really thick neck, it's neck is probably going to be so thick that it won't be able to be born naturally, and it's going to have all these winkling folds of flesh around his face. So it'll have this really cute face with a flattened nose, but probably It'll have dreadful breathing conditions, and maybe you might need to have surgery on this dog to keep it healthy" So if I told you that a scientist was going to create this, you'd go, "Whoa, bad idea, put the brakes on now" And yet what I've just described to you is the English bulldog.
Helen: And so we have created this animal, beautiful individual dogs, lovely personalities, but hugely flawed in terms of its overall design. And that's something that we created as a species through selective breeding, through choosing the characteristics, the most extreme characteristics, that we liked the most and getting individuals with those characteristics to breed. And then we ended up with these animals that would never survive in the wild, that barely survive sometimes in a domestic setting because of the characteristics that we've given them.
Helen: So we've used this genetic modification in the form of selective breeding for good in terms of all the domestic animals that we've created that manage, just about, to feed the population. There's another suite of problems there, but that's another story. So on the one hand, many beneficial characteristics, but on the other hand, we've created this animal welfare blind spot where we're prepared to overlook some of the suffering that we cause the animals that we've altered because it suits our purpose. So it's a whole mixed bag I think.
Kat: I'll never forget going to a conference, I think it was a Genetics Society conference, where someone started their talk, talking about selective breeding and cattle with a picture of a dairy cow in the 1940s. Humans have domesticated cows for ten thousand years or more, we've had dairy farming as a species. But in the 1940s it looks like a toy cow, like a nice, neat looking cow, and then they showed a picture of today's dairy cows and there's enormous udders and it looks like this weird super cow and there's no genetic modification in the lab of any kind. This has just been achieved through selective breeding over even just decades and it is a real example of the power that we have to transform species.
Helen: Yeah. I mean, it really is. So Holstein Dairy Cows today make four times the amount of milk that they did in the 1960s and that isn't us tinkering with CRISPR or any of the other modern molecular techniques. This is pure selective breeding, with a bit of artificial insemination thrown in. This is another technique that rose to power. It's a way of flooding the genes of a few through the population of many. And because of this, we're seeing these domestic farm animals with really extreme behaviour. You also get some real quirky behaviour and quirky looks popping up as well. One of the things that some of your listeners might like to do is go on YouTube and Google something called the fainting goats. Have you come across fainting goats?
Kat: I have come across fainting goats and they are adorable.
Helen: They are, there's something quite wrong about watching them though Isn't there? It feels a bit voyeuristic. So, these goats, they were first spotted on a farm in Tennessee. I think, well, over a century ago and these goats they're going about their everyday business, they're cute and adorable, and then something, anything, spooks them and they go flat as that, they go really stiff, don't they? And then they fall over, like you're pushing over a plank of wood, and then they lay there on the ground with their four little stiff legs sticking out, and then after a minute or two, they jumped back up and they were absolutely fine.
Helen: And it turned out that randomly a mutation popped up in a gene that controls muscle contraction. And people started selectively breeding these animals together. And farmers actually found that they quite liked the animals because they didn't have to fence their enclosures as thoroughly. Because if their goats wandered off, they'd get spooked, they'd fall over and they could pick them up and bring them back again. And so if you go on YouTube and if you Google fainting goats, you've got all sorts of these wonderful goats set to music, just getting spooked and falling over. And it feels so wrong to watch them yet. They are somehow completely adorable.
Kat: Are there any other examples where human intervention in this kind of breeding has had maybe unintended consequences?
Helen: Well it's quite interesting. So, sometimes you get mutations that crop up at random and people capitalise on this. So in parts of Africa in South Africa in particular trophy hunting is big business and you have sort of the standard Gnu or Wildebeest, which is a sort of black/grey colour, but every now and then you get these weird colour morphs that crop up. So they've got different coloured hides and they're a golden gnu and they crop up at random. They have this beautiful golden hide and then people, breeders, trophy hunters, people who supply the trophy hunting business, started breeding these individuals together to create golden gnu because they thought people would pay really, really handsomely to go out and shoot them. So if you are a gnu this isn't great, right? Because any natural camouflage that you've got has disappeared. And on top of that, you've got people looking at you down the lens of a rifle taking aim.
Helen: But it's a really interesting story actually, because it was really a case of people not doing their market research in advance because all these suppliers of the trophy industry put their money on these weird colour morphs. And then all these American hunters who have no morals at all when it comes to shooting a wild animal in a reserve. went "hang on a minute, that's not natural, that's a bit weird. I'm not really sure I want to kill that. I want to kill a normal looking gnu" So they anticipated that the value of these animals would absolutely rocket and then it turned out that they'd backed a bit of a red herring, a bit of a lame duck in the end. And so now there are apparently a lot of these weird colour morphs around on reserves in South Africa and nobody really knows quite what to do with them.
Kat: Poor things, so rather than a lame duck, a golden gnu. We should start saying that.
Helen: Yeah, absolutely.
Kat: And now moving on. So we've talked about the ways that humans have just used natural breeding, selective breeding, and maybe a little helping hands in the form of artificial insemination. But what about when it does come to the genetic modification? Because this is just something that seems to have exploded in recent years, being able to genetically modify animals, clone animals, cloning pets, cloning racehorses, all these kinds of things. How is this actually shaping species and, maybe a bit more philosophically, our idea of what we can do with animals.
Helen: I think what we're seeing now, sticking within the realm of things that we are altering deliberately, so deliberate change caused by us, we're seeing tools spilling out of the lab that have been used for research purposes, spilling out into commercial application. So cloning, for example, you mentioned cloning is being used by people who want to have a copy of their pet dog mate. There are indeed cloned polo ponies thundering up and down the polo fields of Argentina, there are working dogs in South Korea, It's actually quite routine now, there are many hundreds of copies of working dogs, sniffer dogs. So if you ever find yourself having your luggage sniffed at Seoul Incheon airport, the chances are as being sniffed by a cloned animal because they perform so well.
Helen: So we're seeing cloning being used commercially and then in terms of gene editing, we're seeing all sorts of things. So you can buy pets that have been gene edited. So there are some beautiful little tropical fish that go under the trade name of glow fish, and these are classic little tropical fish like Danios and Zebrafish, but they've got genes from coral and jellyfish in them. So they glow all these amazing colours of the rainbow. So here's extreme GM where we've taken the genes from one species and put them into another.
Helen: We've had genetically modified crops for a long time, but the very first GM animal food stuff went on the market recently in the form of a transgenic salmon. So there's a salmon that's on sale in Canada that contains the added genes of not one but two different fish species. And it was created because it grows much bigger, much more quickly than the average salmon and consumes a lot less feed along the way. And lots of big issues around this, not least of all, do people want to eat this? But you've got really bizarre things, people are looking at using genetic modification to make animals that produce maybe medicines also materials. So one of my favourite examples is the spider goat, which I'm sure you've covered.
Kat: We have covered the spider goats in one of our very first episodes.
Helen: So spider goats, super briefly then, they make spider proteins in their milk. And maybe one day we could use these spider proteins to make cables for suspension bridges or panels for drones or cars, things that sound really far out and crazy. However conceptually, I don't have a huge problem with this because these goats are really, really super healthy. They're really well looked after. Compare that with the average broiler chicken. So your average chicken that's been reared for meat which has not been genetically modified in the laboratory sense of the word. It hasn't had any genes from another species added, but it's accelerated growth rate means that these adult animals, if you didn't kill them at four weeks old would struggle to stand, would probably die from some sort of organ system failure. So you've got, from an animal welfare perspective, I have huge problems with that. The spider goats, they're pretty happy from what I can see you milk them regularly. They don't ping out a parachute or anything, they don't spin a web.
Kat: We should stress that these are not spider goats flying out webs out of there udders, it's just the protein in the milk.
Helen: Yeah. So, you know, It's quite phenomenal really, when you think about the scope of GM. But you can pull out these examples and they are quite niche and they make headlines because they're so exciting, and so super interesting, but they're a drop in the ocean. One of the things that interested me in the book massively is, we so far have been talking about the modifications that we've made deliberately, be it through domestication or through CRISPR, but one of the things that I realised in the course of researching the book is actually what we're doing now is we're altering all life on earth. So we currently now through our action as a species collectively on the planet, we are altering the evolution. We are genetically modifying, if you like, pretty much every single living thing on earth, everything is changing because of our actions.
Helen: And there may be some microbe deep down under the ice in Antarctica is blissfully unaware of our actions, but I don't think this innocence will last. And so what I'm talking about here is things like climate change, and habitat loss, and pollution, and poaching it's changing evolution. And one of the fascinating things is that when Darwin thought about evolution all those years ago, he imagined it was this really slow process that it happened over millennia or tens of millennia or much bigger sort of geological timeframes, and that you couldn't see it happening within the human lifetime. And we realise now that that is true sometimes. But when you go through these periods of intense global change, like we are going through now, evolution speeds up. So we're beginning to see changes to the animal world around us that are happening within human lifespans. They're happening quickly.
Helen: So many examples, I'm sitting here looking out in my garden and I've got a bird feeder outside of my window and it's visited by great tits and there was a study that showed that great tits are evolving longer beaks in the UK because of their preference for feeding from bird feeders. So we're altering their evolution when we feed them. In America, we're seeing cliff swallows are evolving shorter wings in response to building their nests next to busy roads and the ones that can survive dodging in and out of the traffic whilst they're feeding are the ones that get to pass their genes on the ones that do that best are the ones with slightly shorter wings. And the more you look around, you can pick out so many of these examples that are out there and you realise that we're seeing change right in front of our eyes and evolution is speeding up.
Helen: So I think when I started the book, I was imagining that there would be this very precise "We've done this and this and this." But what I realise now is that there's this massive, widespread global change. And we need to be really, really aware of that because it means we're going to have winners and losers. We're losing species, they're falling through our fingers like sand, but the species that can evolve quickly, that can adapt, are changing. So the world will look very, very different in five or ten thousand years time. And it's the scale and the pace of that change I think that I wasn't really aware of until I sat down and thought about it. I thought that the birds that came to my feeder now were pretty much identical to the ones that used to come to the feeder when I was a kid, but they've already changed. You know, it's phenomenal the rate of change that we're seeing.
Kat: Helen Pilcher, and her book Life Changing: How humans are altering life on earth is out now.
