Gene-Editing Technology Is About To Affect Your Shopping Cart
Thanks to selective gene editing, scientists figured out how to grow a strain of rice with a significantly-enhanced yield without sacrificing the plant’s ability to survive. In two separate tests, the researchers found that the genetically-altered crops produced 25 percent and 31 percent more grain than a naturally-bred strain of rice.
In order to create the new mutant strain of rice, horticulturalists and molecular biologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Purdue University used CRISPR/Cas-9 gene editing techniques to remove specific genes known to suppress growth. They published their work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) which sometimes accepts subpar research from NAS members’ friends or lab members, but in this case the research underwent the peer review process and stood up to academic scrutiny.
What remains unclear about this research is whether it will be used to help combat global hunger, which affects roughly one-ninth of the people on Earth, or if it will just lead to, you know, more rice. The next step for the researchers is to see if the same technique translates to the strains of rice that farmers actually grow.
If the same boost to crop yield happens, then the mutant strains could give rise to a new abundance of food that could potentially help a lot of people in need.
Whether or not it’s used to help the needy, that rice could just as readily end up on your plate. In late March, the US Department of Agriculture announced that it would not place additional regulations on plants that had been altered by selective gene editing techniques like Crispr/Cas-9 as long as those same mutations could hypothetically have occurred in nature. So while a bioluminescent rice/firefly hybrid would probably raise an eyebrow, this high-abundance rice is just fine as far as the USDA is concerned.
While the researchers who found the right combination of genes to edit out argue that expecting their new strain to emerge on its own is not feasible, that’s because of the highly-specific mutations that would need to randomly occur, not because they introduced any non-rice DNA or anything like that.
“It would have taken millions of plants. … This is a real accomplishment that could not have been done without CRISPR,” horticulturalist Ray Bressen of Purdue University said in a press release.
Police Surveillance Is Getting a Helping Hand from…Amazon!
Amazon! They market things they want you to buy, like books, Prime subscriptions, and sauté pans. They do this well, because you probably buy things from Amazon, or know someone who does. They also now actively market their artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition software, Rekognition, for use in police surveillance. And yes, they also this well, too.
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Amazon has been working with governments and police departments to build up advanced surveillance systems in a number of counties and states.
While Rekognition has been used by police in Washington County, Oregon to search for suspects for the past year and a half, according to Amazon, the newly-released documents reveal the extent to which mass surveillance programs are being developed with Amazon’s cooperation.
These programs can include using all the cameras already found around a city to give police information on the activity of any “person of interest” as they appear on screen. They could even involve building Rekognition software into the body cameras that police allegedly wear to increase transparency and public accountability (even though the cameras tend to mysteriously malfunction at inopportune moments).
Amazon Rekognition is capable of scanning video feeds and images for up to a hundred faces at once. Rekognition can find, identify, and track people in real time, and was recently used for a cute-yet-ethically-dubious“who’s who?” broadcast of the recent royal wedding.
As the ACLU argued today in their letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who touts his company as being exceptionally “customer-centric,” encouraging and even allowing police to use such advanced surveillance technology undermines people’s rights and primes police-work for abuse. In particular, the ACLU is concerned that police would use these tools to target political groups or people who are otherwise vulnerable.
Some of the documents obtained by the ACLU show the user interface for the facial recognition software. Police will be able to upload any headshot and quickly receive likely matches along with biographic information including the person’s name, race, date of birth, and information on their criminal record.
Amazon brags that Rekognition’s facial database includes tens of millions of faces, though it remains unclear how that came to be the case. Whatever the reason may be, the result translates to police, using Amazon’s AI-powered facial recognition system, to potentially track anyone — not just the suspects in a particular criminal case.
Some might label that kind of fear of these kinds of developments as deeply (if not suspiciously!) paranoid of police!
