Microbial rights?

Our ability to disrupt habitats and manipulate living organisms requires a discussion of the ethics of microbiology, even if we argue that microbes themselves have no rights.Synthetic biology and the increasing complexity of molecular biology have brought us to the stage at which we can synthesize new microorganisms. This has generated pressing questions about whether these new organisms have any place in our system of ethics and how we should treat them.The idea that microbes might have some moral claims on us beyond their practical uses or instrumental value is not a new question. Microbiologist Bernard Dixon (1976) presciently asked whether it was ethical to take the smallpox virus to extinction at the height of the attempts of the World Health Organization in the 1970s to eradicate it. There is no unambiguous answer. Today, we might still ask this question, but we might extend it to ask whether the destruction or extinction of a synthetic microbe that was made by humans is also ethically questionable or is such an entity—in that it is designed—more like a machine, which we have no compunction in terminating? Would two lethal pathogens, one of them synthetic and one of them natural, but otherwise identical, command the same moral claims?In a colloquial way, we might ask whether microbes have rights. In previous papers (Cockell, 2004) I have discussed the ‘rights'' of microbes and further explored some issues about the ethics we apply to them (Cockell, 2008). Julian Davies, in a recent opinion article in EMBO reports (Davies, 2010) described my assertion that they should have constitutional rights as ‘ridiculous''. Although I did suggest that environmental law could be changed to recognize the protection of microbial ecosystems—which would imply statutory rights or protection—nowhere have I claimed that microbes should have ‘constitutional'' rights. Nevertheless, this misattribution provides a useful demonstration of the confusion that exists about exactly how we should treat microbes.Few people are in any doubt that microbes should be conserved for their direct uses to humans, for example, in food and drug production, and their indirect uses such as the crucial role they have in the health of ecosystems. Indeed, these motivations can be used to prioritize microbial conservation and protection efforts (Cockell & Jones, 2009). The crucial question is whether microbes have ‘intrinsic value'' beyond their practical uses. If the answer is ‘no'', then we should have no guilt about deliberately driving microbes to extinction for our benefit. However, there are people who feel uneasy with this conclusion, a feeling that calls forth more complex ethical questions.The question is whether microbes have some sort of ‘interests'' that make demands on our treatment of them that go beyond a mere utilitarian calculation. These arguments themselves question what we define as ‘interests'' and whether interests make demands on us. A microbe has no future plans or thought processes; the sorts of interests that are accepted as being of sufficient scope to place demands on our treatment of other human beings, for instance. However, microbes do have biological interests. A halophilic microbe might eventually die if it is dropped into freshwater. Does our knowledge of what is in the biological interests of a microbe mean that we must show it any consideration beyond practical uses? The answer is not obviously negative (Taylor, 1981), but even if we decide that it is, this does not let us off the hook quite yet.There are other intrinsic value arguments that are more obscure, particularly those around the notion of ‘respect''; the idea that we should show empathy towards the trajectory, however deterministic, of other life forms. These unquantifiable and controversial arguments might, nevertheless, partly explain any unease that we have in watching a group of people smash up and destroy some exquisite microbial mats, just because they were bored.Clearly, human instrumental needs do trump microbes at some level. If they did not, we could not use bleach in our houses, an absurd end-point raised in a 1970s science fiction story that explored the futuristic ramifications of full microbial rights, in which household bleaches and deodorants are banned (Patrouch, 1977).However, we should not be so quick to ridicule ideas about microbial ethics and rights. Although it might be true that phages kill a large percentage of the bacterial population of the world every few days, as Julian Davies points out, human society has achieved an unprecedented capacity for destruction and creation. Our ability to poison and disrupt habitats has been unquantified, with respect to the loss of microbial species. Both synthetic biology and bioterrorism raise the spectre of creating new organisms, including pathogens, which we might need to control or deliberately pursue to extinction. Dixon''s dilemma about the smallpox virus, raised more than 30 years ago, has become an urgent point of discussion in the ethics of molecular biology and microbiology.     

Urban Kampongs in Ambon: Whose Domain? Whose Desa?

A devastating fire in a poor quarter of the city of Ambon, Eastern Indonesia, provided the context in which a number of the social, cultural and historical factors shaping the lives of the city's residents came to the fore. The paper argues that to comprehend the experiences of people whose lives were touched by the fire, and to appreciate its significance, the meanings ascribed to the event, it is necessary to comprehend those multiple factors in all their complexity and interpenetration. The paper argues that the symbolic construction of urban space and its constitution as ‘place’ are continuously emergent out of processes which appear in transformational moments, such as this fire. Physical changes to the quarter through time are examined to demonstrate their relevance to understanding the contemporary social processes and their local interpretations. The migratory origins of the people; continuing divisions between Christian and Muslim populations; the ongoing relevance of ancestral spirits and magic; the role of colonial and postcolonial states, and Ambon's strategic position, are all argued to be important to understanding the meaning of the place and the use of space in the city. The implications of the intersection of at least four clusters of ideas about space and place are considered critical to any adequate account of the contemporary lives of Ambonese and to explaining how it comes to be that some residents can become permanently displaced. The argument emphasises the processual nature of the understandings of space in the urban context.     

Whose genome is next?

A report from the 14th Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference, Boston, USA, 2-5 October 2002.     

Whose turtles are they,anyway?

The hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), listed since 1996 by the IUCN as Critically Endangered and by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) as an Appendix I species, has been the subject of attention and controversy during the past 10 years due to the efforts of some nations to re-open banned international trade. The most recent debate has centred on whether it is appropriate for Cuba to harvest hawksbills from shared foraging aggregations within her national waters. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Bowen et al. have used molecular genetic data to show that such harvests are likely to have deleterious effects on the health of hawksbill populations throughout the Caribbean.     

What regulates mitochondrial DNA copy number in animal cells?

The study of the control of mitochondrial DNA copy number spans several decades and has identified many factors involved in the replication of the mitochondrial genome. However, the mechanisms involved in the regulation of this process are still obscure, particularly in animal cells. During the past decade, however, the identification of human diseases associated with drastically reduced levels of mtDNA caused renewed interest in this topic. Here, I will discuss recent work that sheds some light on how animal cells might maintain and control mtDNA levels.     

Inbreeding avoidance in rhesus macaques: Whose choice?

Whether nonhuman primates avoid copulating with close kin living in their social group is controversial. If sexual aversion to relatives occurs, it should be stronger in females than in males because of females' greater investment in each offspring and hence greater costs resulting from less viable offspring. Data presented here show that adult male rhesus macaques breeding in their natal groups at Cayo Santiago experienced high copulatory success, but copulated less with females of their own matrilineages than with females of other matrilineages. Adult females were never observed to copulate with males of their own matrilineage during their fertile periods. Although natal males sometimes courted their relatives, examination of two measures of female mate choice showed that females chose unrelated natal males over male kin. Female aversion to male kin was specific to the sexual context; during the birth season, females did not discriminate against their male relatives in distributing grooming. Evolved inbreeding avoidance mechanisms probably produce different outcomes at Cayo Santiago than in wild rhesus macaque populations. Gender differences in sexual aversion to relatives may be partly responsible for differences between studies in reported frequency of copulations by related pairs. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Is the true ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to copy successful individuals?

Diversity of expertise at an individual level can increase intelligence at a collective level-a type of swarm intelligence (SI) popularly known as the 'wisdom of the crowd'. However, this requires independent estimates (rare in the real world owing to the availability of public information) and contradicts people's bias for copying successful individuals. To explain these inconsistencies, 429 people took part in a 'guess the number of sweets' exercise. Guesses made with no public information were diverse, resulting in highly accurate SI. Individuals with access to the previous guess, mean guess or a randomly chosen guess, tended to over-estimate the number of sweets and this undermined SI. However, when people were provided with the current best guess, this prevented very large (inaccurate) guesses, resulting in convergence of guesses towards the true value and accurate SI across a range of group sizes. Thus, contrary to previous work, we show that social influence need not undermine SI, especially where individual decisions are made sequentially and then aggregated. Furthermore, we offer an explanation for why people have a bias to recruit and follow experts in team settings: copying successful individuals can enable accuracy at both the individual and group level, even at small group sizes.