Lecture on molecular evolution
Transcript of statement ProScience Theatre with the participation of the biologist, the Deputy Director of the Institute of information transmission problems RAS Mikhail Gelfand on the topic of "Molecular evolution", which took place on may 25 in the Central House of journalists.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Dear friends, my name is Nikita Belogolovtsev. I am glad to welcome You to another view ProScience Theatre. Thank you so much today, and, of course, so many people today not just because we have a terrific main character. In fact, I will not take your time and ask you to welcome Mikhail Gelfand, doctor of biological Sciences, Professor, Deputy Director of the Institute of information transmission problems, Russian Academy of Sciences.Mikhail Sergeyevich, thank you very much that you agreed to become a hero today ProScience Theater, and you will also say thank you as the audience that today we have gathered the audience. I'm starting the list of your regalia, partly begun to take away the bread from colleagues, because, first, as always some information about our main character.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Mikhail Gelfand, a grandson of the famous mathematician Israel Moiseevich Gelfand and the son of the mathematician Sergei I. Gelfand. The scientist considers himself a representative of the extreme biological flank bioinformatics. He's not involved with the development of methods, write programs, and trying to understand the biology with the help of the computer. In his opinion, if it is biology in Russia is going through hard times, bioinformatics lives until the scientist is a computer and the Internet. Mikhail Gelfand came to bioinformatics in the 80-ies, when she began to emerge as a full-fledged science. Says the scientist himself, then it is possible to read only a few articles in journals and immediately begin to do research. Today, bioinformatics is a big science data which appear very quickly, and scientists immediately taken for treatment and find a lot of interesting directions of research, facts, solutions to longstanding problems. Gelfand known to many of its civil activity, participation in the organization of science. He was one of the founders and activists of the network Discerned involved in the identification of abuse in the protection of dissertations in Russia. Today scientists tell us, what social issues are important to him in this moment.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Here, look, this phrase, I think, many it immediately caught – "bioinformatics is possible if there is a scientist and he has a computer." What is in this phrase, the proportion of metaphors and even a slight exaggeration, or is it really so serious technology development?
Mikhail Gelfand: Bioinformatics is the science which deals with the biology with the use of a computer and the data that produced the experimenters, so in this sense, all true.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: No, I mean, how serious this is should be on the equipment, because when you hear the phrase "man and computer", do you imagine a scientist who can go out to the Park with my laptop to do.
Mikhail Gelfand: All exactly. This is despite the fact that I was sitting with some other scientists and generate the data that we analyzed, and it may be scientists, it could be technology, it could be now robots can be factory, but this data is taken from somewhere, of course.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Molecular evolution: why have You decided to choose and so to formulate the topic today?
Mikhail Gelfand: Because, first, I think it's interesting, and this is an area in which I'm trying to work and about which something you know enough to tell. And on the other hand, that you asked about bioinformatics, and I barely told a lie, because I said that bioinformatics is a science, but in fact it is not. Bioinformatics is rather a set of techniques, as well as microscopy is not a science, and is a service discipline. And bioinformatics exactly Yes, we work with experimental biologists, together with them to plan the experiments, and make some predictions that they check, or, conversely, treat the data they receive. It's all such activities with the expectation to be an average writer from 50 authors that are actually very honorable and good, and extremely popular, but it is also a good way engineering activities. A substantial part of bioinformatics, really where it becomes the wisdom that we already do for yourself and for me is already a molecular evolution, so I'll tell you about the most intimate and intimate.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Wow! Then take a look before we get to the first portion of the most intimate and secret move, a little bit more about you. Your phrase, a little at ease quoting that "the choice of bioinformatics is largely a result of inability or unwillingness to do the math in its purest form"...
Mikhail Gelfand: It is true, in General, bioinformatics has emerged as "the science of losers" in the 80-ies, when I came to her. Among the first bioinformatics, of course, was a great biologists, Alexey Kondrashov Simonovic, which, fortunately, is quite alive and very well science does, he was a good evolutionary biologist, he just increased the capabilities of these techniques. But many of bioinformatics is either a failed biologists or failed mathematics. A clear example of a failed math, that's me.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: who has more?
Mikhail Gelfand: Right in half. I at some point I realized that I can't do math well enough to justify its name. There is actually another amendment, the famous mathematician, Sergei I., and Israel is the great mathematician. So, just for the record. Against this background, I suddenly realized that there is a science, young, fresh, which do not need to learn, and you can just pick up and do. And the same story happened with the biologists. That is absolutely fantastic bioinformatic Eugene koonin, he lives in America now, but watching what goes on in here. I know, because I from time to time from him some letters get. Now he's wrote a book "the Logic of chance", a little hard to read but very good. And there he confessed (he's in a very good experimental laboratory worked before that, he was the winner of the all-Union competitions, but with the same Kondrashov they competed is the previous generation, they are both older than me) that the experimental biologist, and it was not very wonderful. He is a man of absolutely fantastic performance, depth and, apparently, the owner of the longest Hirsch of all living scientists. Just in case I will explain that this is a perfectly decent thing – it's just as I quote your work. I have this 46 that, in General, not bad, it's more than the average American Professor, probably, and the average Soviet academician. And Zhenya – 130, well, something beyond.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: I really like this bozo question. Know about how a scientist can begin to engage the adjacent areas, for example, a psychologist philosophy, relatively speaking, or psychologist sociology. But the mathematician biology?
Mikhail Gelfand: I still experimental biology is not doing. In this sense, good hands, the ability to keep the pipette that it will not slip out, so I didn't study and I don't need it. And about related specialties – in mathematics, in fact, the place is quite useful because experience shows that after it you can do anything. I really wanted to do these statistics, but I do not, will not reach your hands. Count the people who have master's and doctoral theses are protected by different Sciences. Here I am – candidate of physico-matematicheskih Sciences, but also, in General, bioinformatics, and Dr. biology. There are many such people. But on the contrary examples, I do not know.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: look at the technology level is that? Books, articles, seminars?
Mikhail Gelfand: It's workshops, this regular reading articles, and again as a young science is easy to do, because the articles are not so much. I just once a week, went to the library and read everything that is written on bioinformatics, or almost everything. And then you come up with a problem, you begin to do it and read the biology that you need. And now, in our laboratory, a lot of folks from the faculty of bioengineering and bioinformatics, Moscow state University. In addition, a lot of people either too after the Department of mechanics and mathematics, or after BF with purely experimental departments, if any, from the Institute of chemical technology. In general, people come in very different ways.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Then, with everyone's permission and even satisfying everyone's desire, I will proceed to the first lecture fragment "Ancient DNA. Technical capabilities and methods of studying data in the scientific community". While we are looking for him, I wanted to tell you this micro-safely. Actually about this fragment, about the "failed math" – I had a metaphor. I was thinking how appropriate it is to use it – about the fact that any biathlete, for example, at least before, it was some deep loser in skiing, at least in the Soviet Union. I thought: I will offend, I will not offend. But you said about the mathematician, and I realized that the metaphor somehow had the right to life.
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, yes. I will also take a commercial break for now, among a large number of my regalia there is still the fact that I am the deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Troitsky Variant. Science". This is a publication that is half popular science, half scientific and political, that is, there is a policy that is related to science. There are two numbers: one is a lot, the other is not enough, one is more about politics, the other is more about science, and accordingly, after all this wonderful event, you can come up and take it. And then decide what to do with it.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: A very important phrase that I didn't read at the very beginning is "member of the European Academy", and the second is an even more important part of the important phrase "member of the Public Council of the Ministry of Education and Science".
Mikhail Gelfand: Both are true.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: But actually about membership in the Public Council, how do you like it there?
Mikhail Gelfand: In different ways, I was chosen there by voting on the Echo of Moscow. Some of the members of the Public Council were administratively introduced there. But Livanov, when he first became a minister, said that the Council was public, so let's let society choose, and a vote was arranged at Echo of Moscow, and I was chosen there by the scientific curia.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: But is your membership there real?
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, actually, I go to meetings from time to time, arrange some kind of happenings there, from time to time I have a point of view there and express it. In this sense, real.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Is it useful, from your point of view, for you, for science?
Mikhail Gelfand: It's definitely not useful for me. For the ministry, I think it is rather useful. For science, I hope it's useful, but who knows. In fact, if you look at the composition of the Public Council, you will see that there are a lot of decent people there and this, in general, is not a meaningless body. He is more involved in educational matters than scientific ones, because there is also a separate Science Council that deals with science itself. And the Public Council is engaged in what society is interested in. And science, as we know, is less interesting to society than school education, it's just an experimental fact. For example, the last statement of the Public Council was about the inadmissibility of the introduction of unified textbooks on history and literature, what these most wonderful guys offered. It was published on the ministry's website last week.
Let's move smoothly to the main topic. The story is about this: people have learned to determine the sequences of ancient DNA. Moreover, the ancient ones are maybe several tens of thousands of years, and maybe even several hundred thousand years. I'll tell you a little bit about what came out of it. I don't really understand the experimental side of this – what were the experimental breakthroughs, purely technological. And we are dealing with the data that the experimenters received. First, we started with a mammoth and determined the sequence of its genome. It was easier to do this because the DNA itself is better preserved in the permafrost, that is, you just have more material to work with. And secondly, you are dealing with a whole carcass and therefore you can avoid contamination, you can take a piece from somewhere in the middle of the flesh, muscle. And most likely it will not be contaminated with the researcher's DNA.
In general, people who work with DNA have two main problems. The first is the degradation of the oldest DNA. And the second is pollution. You never know if you're sequencing a Neanderthal, or if you're sequencing a lab technician who held this bone in his hands, or an archaeologist who pulled it out of the ground. So, we started with mammoths, and it turned out not to be insanely exciting, it was rather a technical opportunity to work with ancient DNA. They immediately found out that mammoths are the closest relatives of Asian elephants, and African elephants are already cousins to them, and the mastodon is already very far away. The sequence of the mammoth genome has been determined, and in this regard, they are very fond of asking if it is now possible to clone a mammoth. The answer is no, you can't. Knowledge of the genome is absolutely not enough to clone a living being – a completely different procedure. But here's what people have just done, articles were published just last week. They took the cells of the Indian elephant and replaced several genes, namely those genes that are responsible for cold resistance, hairiness, fat layer – they were replaced with mammoth genes, and everything worked. Which, apparently, technically cannot be done right now, but it does not contradict the laws of science and someday it will be possible to do - it will be possible to take an elephant and gradually turn it into a mammoth, changing one gene like this. Here it will be, I do not know why it is interesting, but, in any case, it is technically possible. This is actually about cloning. And it was an introduction to run away.
And wonderful results began to come when they learned to work with DNA not from permafrost, but from bones that lay in caves. And read the genome sequence of the Neanderthal. It turned out to be what is drawn in this picture. Namely, that here is our evolutionary tree, there are different scenarios, but the right scenario is this one. Look: everyone lived in Africa, then about half a million years ago the Neanderthals left Africa and settled in Europe, in Eurasia, more precisely. African civilizations gradually diverged, the pygmies were the first to separate from the rest. And quite a large diversity of humanity has been formed in Africa. And then one of the branches of this humanity from Africa about 50 thousand years ago, a little more, also went to Europe and these are the ancestors of us sitting here, because there are no Africans in the hall. So, the ancestors of Europeans and Asians interbred with a Neanderthal. In the genome of each of us there is about 2% of Neanderthal DNA. That in itself is wonderful. And then there was this, here's a slide of Denisova Cave in Altai, these are pictures like "Misha was here" – they are purely tourist. I wasn't there for science, but just went to see. A wonderful place indeed, this very cave is an excavation, and this, on the contrary, is a view from the cave, the Black Anui River flows there, and therefore it is more or less protected. Here the slope is quite steep, you can go along it, but still the slope, and there is a river with clean running water, and there are also natural chimneys in the cave vault, and who just did not live there. Cave bears lived there, Neanderthals lived there, Cro-Magnons lived there, that is, our ancestors. There they found a bone – the phalanx of the little finger, and then another tooth – and it turned out that it was some other completely separate person. But these are Cro–Magnons - Africans, Africans and Euro-Asians. These are different Neanderthals from different places from Croatia and from the Caucasus, in this case. And this is Denisovets. And he is a distant relative of the Neanderthals, but very distant, so they separated a long time ago, too. And we don't know anything about it at all except the genome, because no classical anthropology can be done on it. There is no skull, there are no long bones, there is no spine, there is a phalanx of the little finger and a tooth – that's it. And all we know about him is actually what we were able to read in his genome.
I said that each of us is 2% Neanderthal, but since we have different fragments, we can take a lot of modern people, identify their own Neanderthal fragments from each of them, and then add it all up, and in this way we get about 20% of the genome of that Neanderthal or Neanderthal who, um, hybridized with our ancestors. Our chromosomes are drawn here, this one is the longest, but the painted stripes are those pieces of Neanderthal origin that someone found. Asians have red, and Europeans have blue. So we can actually construct our Neanderthal great-grandfather or great-grandmother in this way.
And the overall picture now looks like this: the details will change, apparently, but the main part is already installed. Here our branch and the Neanderthal branch diverged more than half a million years ago. Approximately 500-600 thousand years. Then the Denisovans and Neanderthals dispersed quite quickly. There was also some unknown person, a separate one, who separated from our branch a million years ago. And the red arrows draw borrowings, that is, a Denisovan has a large piece from this unknown person, Euro–Asians – Europeans and Asians, Africans do not, - a large piece from a Neanderthal, each has about 2%, and in addition there is a flow of Denisovan genes to people from Austronesia, i.e. Papuans and Australian Aborigines. They hybridized with Neanderthals like all Euroasians, and then also independently hybridized with Denisovans. And, in general, 50 thousand years ago, somewhere in Eurasia, in particular in Altai, three completely independent branches of humanity wandered, which entered into various relationships with each other. From "centropupism" this awareness is very healing, in my opinion. In addition, it's a pretty flat joke, but nevertheless, if by chance there are white supremacists in the hall, then they are willing to go and kill themselves against the wall, because just people with "pure blood" are just Africans, but white ancestors with Neanderthals are the same.
Denisovets, yes. ...And this one? Who was it? There's an interesting thing there, it's a bit technical, I didn't want to talk about it. It seems that the closest relative of this unknown, who is now known, of those whose genome we determined, is a man from the cave of Hima de los Huesos in Spain, where they determined the mitochondrial genome is not the same as the nuclear one, a slightly different thing. It is transmitted strictly through the maternal line, this, I do not remember, 300 or 400 thousand years. This is an age record for human DNA. And now he is the closest relative of the Denisovan on the maternal side. And surely there was someone else there, surely a distant relative. There must be some other intermediate links.This is not our main science, we do it a little and from the side, but even just to follow it is interesting, because technology is improving all the time, and new data are coming in that make this picture richer and richer.
What do we know about them, about Neanderthals and Denisovans. Denisovans lived in small groups, genetically quite dissimilar, and those Neanderthals who lived in Europe about 50-60 thousand years ago experienced a very large population decline, that is, most of these groups apparently died out, and then the remaining ones were repopulated. This is due to the movement of the glacier. And they had closely related marriages. Everything can be read in the genome, I will not delve into technical things, in general, it is visible. They had light skin, light hair, light eyes, that is, they were about like us. And Denisovans were more like Africans. They did not have inbreeding, the population was also small, and the skin and hair were dark. I won't have time to tell you the rest. I won't tell you about it.
But there is such a recent story, absolutely wonderful. I love her because she brings the history of science back. One of the sources, reasons to start thinking about evolution for Darwin were the bones of giant mammals that he found in Patagonia when traveling on the ship "Beagle". And so, he found the bones, but they didn't understand who they were, because they were like rodents by the structure of their teeth, by the structure of their bodies, someone else, and so on. Here is one – such a wonderful creature, and the second – such a wonderful creature. But this is a reconstruction. But the skeletons were found almost complete. And then Darwin began to think. You can watch "Journey on the ship "Beagle", there you can see how he began to think about how the fauna changes each other. Recently, this spring, published articles about these bones. There is no longer DNA, DNA has not been preserved, bones lay in poor conditions, collagen – a protein of connective tissue - has been preserved there. And when the sequence of this collagen was determined, it became clear who these wonderful little animals were. Nothing is visible here, but they turned out to be the closest relatives of ungulates, that is, horses, rhinoceroses. And this is the kind of thing that Darwin would be interested in. Because it was impossible to understand it from the bones. And according to the sequences, it turned out here by molecular methods. I think he would be pleased.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Look, dear guests, we will give everyone the opportunity to ask questions, we have a separate, special block for this, so don't worry.
Mikhail Gelfand: Let's do it a little differently: it's better to ask questions for understanding right away. Questions on expansion and deepening are probably better later. Or ask. And then I'll either answer right away, or I'll promise.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: I will say right away that we have one fragment for those who constantly attend our performances, which we do not want to give up today. This is the so-called "skeptical question", which maybe I don't need to ask in order not to disrupt the chemistry that we have, but they should sound. I guess what the "skeptic's question" will be after the first lecture block, but let's voice it through the mouth of our "traditional doubter".
Mikhail Gelfand: and who is the "traditional doubter"?
Listener: "The traditional doubter" is me, I wanted to ask about one thing, I'll have to ask about another. I wanted to ask about an unknown person, practically Chekhov, "A story about an unknown person." I have a little question aside, but it seems to me very consonant with the second, and the first, and the third of your part. What can (should not) the state do in order to support domestic bioinformatics. The clear answer is that it should not interfere, yes it is better not to do anything, but nevertheless…
Mikhail Gelfand: Wait, nothing can be done, because fundamental science in Russia, as in all countries, is mainly supported by the state; more precisely, it is supported by taxpayers, whose agent is the state. For some reason I don't hear the laughter in the audience... now I hear it.
Listener: Haha.
Mikhail Gelfand: Thank you. But in theory it should be arranged like this. The same rules apply in bioinformatics, in mathematics, in biology, well, slightly different, maybe in physics. There should be a normal competitive system, respectively, there should be a reasonable examination with reasonable regulations. There must be honest competent experts who do not have a conflict of interest. The problem is that there are few working groups, so they cannot do expertise on each other's projects, because they are in competition. For small grants, this is not so significant, no one will sell their soul for half a million, almost no one. And for large grants, we need a normal international expertise.
Listener: In general, this is approximately what I wanted to hear. And actually the question is this: we know that in our traditional old sciences, especially in the humanities, there is practically no scientific community. The community is not folded. Does a new science like yours presuppose the existence of a healthy scientific community?
Mikhail Gelfand: It's quite difficult for me to judge the humanities. I think the situation there is also quite different, because, apparently, in ancient history or in linguistics, the community is quite complicated. In the natural sciences, there is a bioinformatic community, it is quite alive, now it has grown, so it has become more atomized, large independent groups have become. But we have been holding a citywide bioinformatics seminar since '93, and in general, in the '90s and '00s, really different groups communicated very closely, and there was a Hamburg account and all other things. Again, this is bad for the examination, because if there is one community where everyone knows everyone, then it is difficult to independently assess, abstracting from all these relations, it would be better if they were foreigners. In experimental biology, too, everyone understands perfectly well who is worth what, there are just few strong groups. Here I was a member of the panel that distributed grants in Finland. One year as a member, one year as chairman. This is the main Finnish grant agency for biology, in particular. In this panel, there were a dozen and a half experts, we decided which of the Finnish scientists would receive funding under this program for the next three years. The Finns in this panel were only technical workers. It works fine. Russian biology is no bigger than Finnish biology.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Going back to the course of our lecture, if I didn't have this paper in my hands, which is something like a script for our event, many might think …
Mikhail Gelfand: Wow, "something like a script", it's written in seconds.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: We have already deviated a lot from the second-by-second plan. So it doesn't really make sense... so, if there was no paper, many would think that you and I sort of understand each other. Because my partly preliminary, partly summarizing question sounds like this: everything that you have just told me, it looks like such pleasant mind games. That is, scientists are interested in understanding exactly how it was. We are interested to hear about the ancient ancestors of man, but this part has …
Mikhail Gelfand: Yes.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Does it make practical sense too?
Mikhail Gelfand: There is one too. Yes, you smoothly lead me to the second story.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: If possible.
Mikhail Gelfand: We can already charge the next presentation for now. In fact, even the first part has some kind of applied aspect. Because what I didn't have time to tell you is that the gene that allows Tibetans to live at high altitude is borrowed from a Denisovan. And Europeans, but not Asians, have a lot of Neanderthal genes in the fat metabolism system, this is our work, together with Philip Haitovich. And besides, there are variants of the immune system genes that we also have from Neanderthals, and it is not very clear why they have been preserved and fixed for a long time, it is already possible to build some selection models there and understand why. There is one of the variants of the genes predisposing to diabetes, it is also of Neanderthal origin. So please, if you want medical genetics, here is medical genetics. And about the benefits of all this science, why it is useful to study evolutionary biology at all, this is actually the second piece that I wanted to tell.
There is such a wonderful saying by Theodosius Dobzhansky that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, there is the same thing on the slide, only in the form of a mosaic on the floor at the University of Notre Dame. And it's actually true. Because it is becoming more and more clear that if we want to understand biology, we must look at it from an evolutionary point of view. I want to show two concrete examples. The first example is cancer. This is a thing that has an important application value. It should be understood that the development of a cancerous tumor is described very well if you think about it in evolutionary terms. There are different clones that compete with each other. When we take a medicine, we create a new selection factor, and the clones that are resistant to this medicine begin to defeat the neighbors. Here is just an illustration, I borrowed it from F.A. Kondrashev, he allowed me to use it: absolutely two identical pictures, completely independently published, this just shows the clonal development of organisms. Only on the left is an absolutely theoretical picture of the year 65, and on the right is a picture from a modern review about cancer. They are purely visually exactly the same.
And to understand the effects of drug resistance, it is necessary to look at it from an evolutionary point of view. And drug resistance is an absolutely terrible thing. In the case of tuberculosis, Russian prisons are the breeding ground for this, because people there do not undergo a full cycle of treatment, and they develop a stable flora, which then spreads all over the world. In the case of tuberculosis, in fact, God forbid anyone to get sick, because with a high probability we find ourselves in the situation of Anton Chekhov, when there are no antibiotics, but there is koumiss and mountain air. I don't have a slide with me, but some tens of percent of tuberculosis are not treated with anything. The same is true with other infectious diseases of bacterial origin.
And there are no new classes of antibiotics, because it is very unprofitable, the production of antibiotics is unprofitable for pharmaceutical companies, due to the fact that resistance quickly arises. You spend a lot of time developing, and then the medicine burns out in 10 years, ceases to be used. This picture is the same as the number of antibiotics administered is drawn as falling. I'm sorry, here and there the pictures are taken from English reviews, English-speaking.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: That is, I understand correctly that it drops to 5 pieces.
Mikhail Gelfand: Yes, but in 2007. There have been no new classes of antibiotics for the last 17 years.
On the left is a theoretical picture and also from a very old article of 73. And on the right is a modern picture that shows how to find the gene for this very resistance, the fact is, when you conduct a powerful selection for some gene, and an antibiotic is a very powerful selection factor for bacteria, of course, then the diversity of the population next to this gene falls. Therefore, if you sequence a lot of strains, and then find where there is little diversity, then most likely the resistance gene is located somewhere there. True, this is not about bacteria, but about a malaria parasite, but the same thing.
To understand how this happens and play a little, there is such a wonderful game "rock, scissors, paper" – everyone played in kindergarten. We take three strains of E. coli, this is experimental work, that is, we don't take it, but Mary Riley did it. We take three strains of E. coli. E. coli produce an antibiotic with which different strains poison each other, there are also competitions there. We take the wild type ordinary, sensitive to colicin, this antibiotic is called colicin. We take colicin producers, respectively, if we put a wild type and a producer in one test tube, then the producer will quickly kill the wild type with an antibiotic. And we take the third strain, which, on the contrary, is resistant to colicin. If we put colicin producers and a stable strain in one test tube, then a stable strain will gradually displace the producer, because when you produce poison, it is, firstly, a kind of waste of a resource, you are a little teasing yourself at the same time. And in the competition of the sustainable and the producer, the sustainable wins. Now, if you put a sensitive and a stable one in one test tube, then the sensitive one will win, because stability is also not given for free. If there is no antibiotic, then a normal cell without any replacements defeats a resistant one. That is, we got the same situation in a circle. The first experience is this: we take a Petri dish and plant these three strains randomly on the surface in a hexagonal grid, the colonies grow, touch and then for several days you can see how the borders move. The borders move exactly as predicted, that is, two strains meet at each border, and the one who should win according to this very scheme wins. Everything is very similar to old school atlases on history, here is one of the maps on the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, when the borders are always creeping. This is what we see here, these are the boundaries. For example, here I singled out a producer. Here was a small producer, and here he is no longer left. And the yellow border is, on the contrary, the producer presses the sensitive. And now the exercise, what happens if we pour all 3 strains into one jar? I'll give you half a minute to think, and then I'll tell you the answer.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Shall we pour in equal proportions?
Mikhail Gelfand: As equals, yes. Got an idea? ...No, the sensitive one will not remain, because, look: we quickly poured all three strains into one jar. The producer produces colicin and immediately kills the sensitive. The producer and the steady remain, and the steady wins in a pair. And this picture is the same, only now instead of a Petri dish, they just put mice in a cage. Three mice were put in a cage and each mouse was infected with its own strain. And it can be seen too, such changes are cyclical. I must say that they remain either sensitive or stable. And the producers are eventually washed out from everywhere. Apparently, some kind of moral can be seen behind this if desired.
So, and this picture illustrates that when we take an antibiotic, we introduce a new selection factor. We have a population of bacteria, it has some kind of diversity. If we didn't finish the course to the end, we killed all the sensitive ones, we still have a little bit of resistant ones, this is the new main strain. Again, he lives on, the interval in which all this works is expanding. Someone else also started a course of antibiotics. I didn't finish it to the end, I quit. Again, he killed the more sensitive ones, left the more stable ones. And so the bacterial population gradually develops these very changes that make it resistant to the antibiotic. There are other mechanisms there, this is one of them.
All sorts of strategies immediately follow from this: that you need to drink cocktails, you need to change antibiotics. That there should always be antibiotics of the last reserve, which are not given to anyone so that resistance to it is not developed. The most reasonable medical recommendations follow from this. One of them is that it is not necessary to feed cattle with small doses of antibiotics, which is done on livestock farms. This is also a powerful source of drug resistance, and the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry has now been banned in Europe. It says here, this is the slogan that medicine needs evolution, and this is an article in the journal "Science", which is one of the two most important scientific journals, where it is written that doctors should be taught evolution. Not biologists, but doctors. I started with Dobzhansky, and I will finish with another of our outstanding compatriots.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Another authority. Mikhail Sergeyevich, I wanted to clarify not with the last slide, it's difficult to clarify anything here, but with the penultimate one.
Mikhail Gelfand: The main thing is, it's scary.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Regarding the attention to evolution: what, in fact, is the time period of the appearance of this thesis about the need for more and more attention to evolution, not only biologists, but also physicians? When did this happen in science?
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, in recent years, apparently. When there were glimpses that we understand how the progression of a cancerous tumor occurs, how these changes accumulate that make the cell more and more malignant, how clones appear there that can metastasize, and so on. Now it became clear that this should be described at the level of a typical Darwinian struggle for existence, only not between organisms, but between these independent cells inside our body. That is, we are an external environment for them, they have the same classic struggle for existence. When biology came to this, then it became clear.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Then, in fact, I will give the Skeptic the opportunity to ask a question if he stayed after this part.
Skeptic: The skeptic is kind today, so the question is this: you said about pharmaceutical companies, but in the inflamed imagination of an average educated person, a pharmaceutical company is a kind of monster that produces something there, deceives us all and it is unclear what it does. Question: bioinformatics in relation to pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical companies, what position (if there is a holistic position) does it take? And what could you tell us about it?
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, again, firstly, I am not authorized to speak on behalf of bioinformatics, and on the other hand, I do not understand how bioinformatics differs from biology in any way traditional, molecular biology. Look: pharmaceutical companies are undoubtedly monsters, it's true. The fact that they deceive everyone, I think, is not true, at least to a greater extent than all the others, big companies, or, say, governments, but on the other hand, the rules for conducting clinical trials are very strict. And there's not much to cheat. There you can then try to deceive at the sales stage, when you get into it through doctors, but this is already a kind of zoology.
They spend a lot of money on developing new drugs. Medicines are so expensive, in particular, not because they are so expensive to make (it's not insanely expensive to make them), but every medicine that went to the clinic should pay for dozens of medicines that did not reach the clinic, for the development of which funds were spent. In this sense, they live very hard, and all sorts of interesting situations arise from this. The situation with antibiotics: it is unprofitable to develop an antibiotic, because it will take a lot of money, and the time of its clinical life is small. And besides, the antibiotic is taken in courses. It's good to develop a statin. They prescribed a statin, and he will drink it for twenty years until he accidentally gets hit by a bus. And this is such a good client, steady. "Viagra" was probably good to develop. Antibiotics are everything, the course was drunk, it either helped or did not help. A person will not drink an antibiotic all his life, in this sense it is an unprofitable medicine.
I am very interested in what will happen with anti-cancer drugs now, because progress in biology, in particular, consists in making more and more subtle differential diagnoses. I want to warn you right away, I always make a reservation. I'm not a medic by any means, and I don't want to encourage anyone, even if by chance I say something encouraging. And I practically can't give any advice, except for the dorm. Well, whenever I talk about it, then they write to me about difficult situations and you feel very bad about it.
So, nevertheless, at first there was cancer in the place. Stomach cancer, bowel cancer, rectal cancer, lung cancer. And then histological diagnoses began, when they looked at how the cells had changed. Small cell carcinoma of something or something else. And now we are gradually understanding the molecular mechanisms of cancer degeneration, and what we previously perceived as something homogeneous is also being split into many, many small, already molecular diagnoses, they often do not even have separate names. But it seems that they need to be treated differently, and about the medicine that, say, we knew that it was effective in 20% of cases, we will know in advance who these 20% are. That is, we will not give it to all people with some kind of diagnosis in the hope that some percent of them will be cured, and the rest, so to speak, "could not." We will allocate in advance, based on molecular and molecular genetic analyses, the 20% that this should help. There are several such beautiful examples, there are not insanely many of them, but it is clear that there will be more and more of them. As a result, the market is splitting, and pharmaceutical companies have sailed in again. Because instead of a magic bullet, they have narrow local segments, and in fact cancers will become such orphan diseases. This is a kind of prediction, I'm not an economist, but it really is something that will be interesting to watch in the near future. It's about big and terrible monsters, scary evil pharmacists.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: I propose now to recharge the batteries a little, we have a rubric for this in the form of additional facts about you, accordingly, I will ask you to voice them, well, we will comment on it if necessary. Ask you.
Fact 1. In one of the summer schools where Mikhail Gelfand taught, they wanted to dress him up as a Gandalf, so that he would give difficult tasks and say "You will not pass."
Mikhail Gelfand: It was, yes, I will tell you about this school at the end. Actually, I have a T-shirt from this school.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: So, actually, tell me.
Mikhail Gelfand: There will be a case. Check the box.
Fact 2. Mikhail Gelfand believes that an active civic position is one of his main duties as a citizen. In October 2012, he was elected to the coordinating council for the opposition on the general civil list. In February 2013, he recorded a video message in support of the LGBT community for the project "Against Homophobia". He actively spoke during the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2014.
Mikhail Gelfand: It's all true. Then they adopted this disgusting law on propaganda, more precisely, on the prohibition of propaganda. And I spoke about it, there were quite a lot of people who spoke about it, and then, apparently, some kind person wrote this phrase to all these people in Wikipedia. Therefore, everyone who lit up there, they all have this phrase. I'm not deleting it because I don't understand why. She is, so to speak, a fact, yes.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Then we can ask a small clarifying question like this: tell me, please, actually, do you perceive the manifestation, in fact, of a civic position, I don't know, as a hobby (I couldn't find another word), or as a continuation of scientific activity?
Mikhail Gelfand: No, this is by no means a continuation of scientific activity, it is, so to speak, rather a question of temperament. For example, I accidentally met Churov on Friday and called him a "scoundrel." He tried to shake my hand, but I took it away and explained why. I also think that this is quite a manifestation of a civic position, although a little quarrelsome. I don't know, it really depends on the temperament. This is my duty not as a scientist, as a citizen, anyone. And the specific manifestations really depend on who knows what. It happens in different ways.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Thank you very much, and the third fact.
Fact 3. Mikhail Gelfand calls evolutionary biologist Evgeny Kunin and virologist Alexander Gorbalenya the fathers of Russian bioinformatics. The first now lives and works in the USA, and the second – in the Netherlands. Of the scientists working half the time in the USA, half the time in Russia – the famous Russian bioinformatics Alexey. Kondrashov and Pavel Pevsner. And among the bioinformatics remaining in Russia, Gelfand singles out Mikhail Mironov and Mikhail Roitberg.
Mikhail Gelfand: Everything is true, from my words it is written down correctly.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Is it a coincidence that they both left?
Mikhail Gelfand: No, they left, of course, independently. Again, going back to the days of Russian bioinformatics, I have a rather funny situation, because I am probably the only, almost the only representative of the second generation of bioinformatics. Here was the first generation, these are people who came from different sciences, and, in fact, the first bioinformatics seminars began to be done, in Novosibirsk – this is the school of Vadim Andreevich Ratner, and in Moscow it was several groups at once, in particular, the Kondrashov group, in which Mikhail Abramovich Roitberg worked, in fact, he now stayed. This is Andrey Mironov, who is now my closest co-author, we have the same laboratory for two, but then no, it was completely independent. These are Kunin, Gorbalenya, who were doing the first work on protein analysis at that time, and somehow there were people around them who came two or three years later, this is the second generation. When I came, I was, not to learn from someone, but, in any case, I really heard some first words from them. Kunin and Kondrashov left, Kunin and Gorbalenya left completely independently, and I don't even really know the trajectory of Gorbalenya, he is now at Leiden University. There is a joint program of our faculty and Leiden University, and some of our students are doing a diploma in Leiden. Here I have a graduate student who did most of the work in Leiden to defend himself on Friday. And with Zhenya Kunin, we again worked quite a lot in the 2000s, we have several joint works with him and Andrei Mironov, with whom we went to work with Kunin together. Pasha Pevsner, he won a mega-grant, he has a laboratory in St. Petersburg, Lesha Kondrashov has a laboratory at Moscow State University, absolutely fantastically successful.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Encouraging words. I will ask you then to move on to the third part of the lecture.
Mikhail Gelfand: It will be pure, unclouded propaganda.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Will GMO even sound?
Mikhail Gelfand: Yes, the terrible word GMO will sound, I warn you in advance that it has not been proven that pronouncing this word or, say, perceiving it by ear does not lead to fatal consequences for the body. Let's do a survey as a preliminary measure. Let's do this: if the store sells two products of some kind there: sausage. One is more expensive, but it has a label that does not contain GMOs, and the other is cheaper, but there is no such label. They look exactly the same, they are called the same, and, in general, you don't know anything else about them. That's who will buy, which is expensive, but without GMOs? And who will buy cheaper, but without a label? Well, roughly in half, this ascertainmentbias is called in our science, those present at a popular lecture are not a statistical sample. Good. And who thinks that GMOs are dangerous when eaten? And I forgot the third question, I had a third one, but God be with him. A! Vo,t there is a point of view that plants without GMOs do not contain genes, and products with GMOs contain genes. Who is inclined to agree with this point of view? Okay, now you'll see.
So, this girl here, as you can see, is blind. She is blind because the basis of her diet is rice. Rice is low in vitamin A, and people whose food is low in vitamin A go blind, and there are about half a million of them a year in developing countries, and half of them do not just go blind, but will die after a while. You can fight this.
On the right – ordinary rice, and on the left – golden rice, it is made like this: a gene (more precisely, not one, but several genes) from sunflower is planted in it, responsible for the synthesis of vitamin A, more precisely, its predecessor - carotene (yellow sunflower flowers are the same carotene, pigment). And these sunflower genes were transplanted to rice, it became like this, and if you eat golden rice (it is no different anymore), then there will be no blindness.
And this is the Filipinos protesting against this very golden rice. Well, it can be seen that they overcame some fences for this purpose, in general, indeed, the average man in the street treats GMOs, to put it mildly, very cautiously.
This is the second piece of propaganda. I am sure that purely statistically, most of those present either have acquaintances, or a relative, or, God forbid, you yourself, have diabetes. Well, accordingly, insulin injections are given. It is important to understand that almost all the insulin that is available on the market is genetically engineered. It is made by specially designed bacteria, into which the human insulin gene is inserted, and now they produce it. Actually, it is quite such a genetically modified product.
It was two pieces of propaganda, then a piece of educational program, then another joke.
Where do new varieties come from in general? There is a traditional selection: you plant a plant for years, choose the best offspring, plant its seeds, again choose the best, and so on. Okay, but for a very long time. There is hybridization: you cross two species and hope that some good signs will combine in the offspring. It is useful to understand that since about the middle of the last century, the main mechanism for the appearance of varieties in the so-called traditional breeding is random mutogenesis. That is, the seeds are either poisoned with a strong poison, and a lot of random changes in the genome are obtained, or they are treated with strong radioactive radiation, and again a lot of random changes in the genome are obtained. Then they are planted, most of these seeds will never germinate, because you actually killed them. But those that germinate are very different, and perhaps among them there will be a sign that you need. For example, the fetus will become twice as large, because some mechanism that determined the size of the fetus in the ancestor has deteriorated there. Most of the varieties we are dealing with now are the result of mutagenesis first, and then directed selection. And there is genetic engineering, in which there are two main approaches. Firstly, it can be a random insertion, when you take the gene that you need and insert it into a random place in the genome of the plant to which you want to bring it. But then, however, you can always determine in which place you have it inserted. And now there are techniques that allow you to directly insert it into the place you want. That is, instead of a large number of random changes, you make one, but at the same time the one that you need.
This is how breeding works.
This is corn, this is the ancestor of corn, theosint. On the right, by the way, is a normal variety, it is not mutant at all, but absolutely traditional, it has a black color, apparently, just inherited from theosint. And yellow corn, on the contrary, lost it. So, and so, so to speak, for many years: first they made an ear, then they made a big one. Now the exercise. Do you think this corn was obtained by traditional breeding or genetically modified? Well, let's go again: who thinks it's genetically modified corn? Who thinks that this is a common selection? Well, you're right. This is a variety of "glassgem" Glass Gem) 2012, very young, can be ordered in America by mail. This is the result of ordinary breeding: just crossing.
Who thinks it's a genetically modified cow? Already less, that's right. This is a breed from 1800, called "Belgian blue". She knows what happened: when molecular methods appeared, it became clear what happened: there is a protein called myostatin, which, even by name, clearly limits muscle growth. Well, accordingly, the gene of this protein is corrupted. He has a lot of muscles, that's what he is.
Well, now the results of the polls. We had about half. If you ask on the street, it will be three to one. Those who believe that they are harming are four to one, and, accordingly, support the ban also four to one. And this is the question I just asked. Those who say yes, and those who say "I don't know", in total, it's just the same 75-80%. These are two different polls, so we don't know if these are the same people, but in general, the coincidence of the numbers is very, I must say, it actually coincides with many numbers, but that's a separate question.
These are some facts. There are articles written at the bottom from which I took these facts, partly me, partly Sasha Punchin, who also allowed me to use them.The first fact is that there is not a single study that has shown the medical harm of GMOs when ingested, including in several generations. Accordingly, in particular, in the USA, the feed used in animal husbandry is mainly genetically modified, soy, corn. Accordingly, if there was any harm, it would be visible on these unfortunate cows, and they are not getting worse. On the other hand, they like to say that "this is every kind of genetic modification, all this chemistry is terrible, here, I'd rather buy apples from my grandmother at the market." It is useful to understand two things: first, that you never know what grandma watered her apples on the market, and, on the other hand, just when using genetically modified plants, the use of pesticides decreases by about a third. They are resistant to pests, respectively, it is simply not necessary to water with pesticides. Well, accordingly, it is also economically profitable, because you do not need to buy these pesticides. Well, farmers' crops are growing, farmers' profits are growing, this is not the result of one job, this is a review in which many works were analyzed at once.
Also a favorite argument: "There used to be strawberries, like strawberries! And now, no matter how you go into the store, everything is plastic." Plastic strawberries in the store are the result of traditional breeding. There are exactly no varieties of genetically modified strawberries. And it's even clear why this happens, because they are selected for industrial production and for keeping. Strawberries taste best the day before they rot. Now industrial production cannot afford such a thing. Plastic apples are the same. There are only two varieties of genetically modified apples, both approved only in 2015 in the USA. Tomatoes – there is one old variety.
Bottom green is something that contains GMOs or does not contain GMOs. And on top – whether it is necessary to label the product containing DNA. 80% answered that it was necessary, the same 80% and 82% – almost the same. It would also be very interesting for social psychologists to study, because there really may be some such psychological roots, fear of interference in life, something of this sort, it's Frankenstein. But to a large extent, this is based on the fact that biology is allotted one hour a week in high school. And people simply do not understand what it is about.
About the labeling is wonderful. On the left is non-GMO water, and on the right is non-GMO salt. I downloaded it on the Internet, I also saw it myself, but I didn't think to take a picture. In fact, this labeling "Does not contain GMOs" is a little crafty, because it is such a way of competition. Here in America, for example, it is simply impossible to glue such a sticker legally precisely because you are communicating something superfluous to the consumer, pretending that it is essential. It is believed that this is an element of unfair competition.
And if you want to write everything, please. If someone thinks that labeling is necessary, great. But then he favors marking the apple too. It contains dyes, preservatives, emulsifiers, flavor and odor enhancers, a bunch of all these substances with the terrible letter "E". Each apple can be wrapped in a piece of paper on which all this will be printed.The only article there is, terribly advertised, is experiments, I forgot his name, Seralini. Three years ago, an article was published that rats were fed genetically modified soy, and they became so terrible. It's true. However, it is useful to understand several things: the first is that this breed of rats (line, more precisely) is specially bred in order to study cancer, they are all sick. They just have a very strong predisposition to cancer, they are specially bred in order to use them in experiments. And the article was wonderful. It was presented right under the cinema, that is, the presentation of the article was accompanied by a screening of a propaganda film, and all journalists were required to sign a confidentiality agreement. This is normal, because when an article is shown to a journalist before publication in a scientific journal, there is the concept of an embargo: a journalist can prepare his material in advance, but he must publish it after the initial article is published. This is absolutely reasonable. But what is not reasonable is that there was a clause about a ban on quoting other scientists. There was a wild uproar, of course, it reached Russia immediately, these unfortunate rats were shown on TV, Onishchenko said something about it. The article was withdrawn because fifteen letters came criticizing various specific points of this article. Several French academies of sciences have spoken about this, agronomic, agricultural and some others, I don't remember. In general, the article was withdrawn a year later, but it is still mentioned in all anti-FRAUD lectures all its life. Therefore, if you see such a white unfortunate rat, then keep in mind that this is the only article that has been written on this topic, this is an unscrupulous, substandard article more precisely.
In Russia last year there was an open letter in support of the development of genetic engineering, when the movements also began on this occasion, there were three hundred signatures, one hundred and fifty doctors and candidates of sciences, mostly doctors and biologists. There was a very good response from the Ministry of Education and Science. The Ministry wrote that it supports the development of genetic engineering technologies, has always given negative feedback on such bills in the State Duma. It happened on August 1 last year. And bang, on January 30, the same Ministry of Education and Science submitted a bill to the government banning GMOs, the State Duma promised to promptly consider it the next day (not the next, four days later). That's where the deputy chairman of the Committee on Agrarian Issues, Nadezhda Shkolkina, is mentioned in this regard.
Here she is, the wonderful Nadezhda Shkolkina, her dissertation. Colored squares are those pages on which there are undocumented borrowings. These are the people who decide whether to have genetic engineering technology in Russia or not.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Look, the second question is related, in fact, to GMOs: propaganda is anti–propaganda. A lot of non-GMO lovers like to say that there may be any changes, including in the human body, but it's too early to talk about them, because GMOs have not been used for so long.Mikhail Gelfand: Yes.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: And the changes provoked in a person, we just can't physically see yet.
Mikhail Gelfand: I know, I have heard such an argument, he is treated in the following ways. Firstly, there is a reference to direct experimental data that I mentioned when experimental animals were led for several generations. There is an example of animal husbandry, a person biochemically differs from a cow very slightly, in fact, thanks to this we can eat a cow and not get poisoned. And there is no evidence that this affects anything. The third consideration is that, in general, there are no biological reasons why the GMOs eaten should affect something… What happens when you eat, roughly speaking, a tomato that has, say, a cod gene inserted into it for frost resistance? It's the same as eating cod under marinade. What enters your body at the same time, it is no different.
And wonderful anti-fraudsters who like to say it... there was some kind of TV show, a chant where it was necessary to wet, and I asked the girl if she had a cell phone. And she's not a biologist, she's a PR person by origin, she's so a little bit flustered, says: "Why do you need?". I say, "Come here." She frowned even more, said, "Why?". I say, "I'm going to throw it out and crush it." She says, "Well, how is that?". I say: "Look, because cell phones use much less time than GMOs. You keep a radiation source at your head, no one has guaranteed that your children, grandchildren will not have early Alzheimer's from this, or maybe even you have already started. We are afraid of new technologies, let's throw it out immediately." This is, in fact, a serious problem, because when we weigh the risks of new technologies, we also need to weigh the risks from the fact that we have not introduced them. Every new technology, indeed, is associated with the appearance of risk. I'm not talking about new drugs, everyone knows the classic stories with thalidomide and everything else (by the way, there was a good medicine, and it is now gradually returning to clinical practice, you just need to understand when it can be used when not). A new wallpaper dye, that's how you know it's harmless? Right now, houses in which asbestos was used during construction are being actively broken down precisely because they have shown that, yes, asbestos microparticles provoke lung cancer. And this was a standard building material. Some kind of glass wool that lies in old houses in balcony doors – I strongly suspect that this is a very harmful thing, in fact, exactly by the same mechanism, just small brittle particles that irritate when inhaled.
In this sense, GMOs, apparently, are the safest of modern technologies precisely because (well, maybe medicines are still) such colossal attention has been attracted to them that they are being checked just very much. Well, again, here's the standard favorite propaganda trick. There are a lot of women here, they probably use mascara. But do you know what is included in their composition, and how it was tested? Firstly, you do not know, and secondly, you are not interested. In fact, it's the same story. And then the effect of information noise is obtained. If you are afraid of everything together, then you will miss the real danger, because it will be buried under a layer of some small local senseless horrors. It's the same story with labeling. There are things that really need to be labeled. There are people who do not tolerate gluten, it is necessary to label. And if you write all the warnings, then every loaf of bread will be accompanied by such a disclaimer for a page and a half.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Then I will allow myself to move on to the third misconception, this is such a case with a performance with your participation "master hev". If the word "evolution" sounded, I must say about evolutionary myths. Look, I'm going to try to start a little bit from afar. Throughout the XX century, well, at least, as it seems from the outside, the church has taken some steps, at least the Christian one, towards, let's say, if not reconciliation, then free coexistence with the evolutionary theory that "God did not create man, but the soul of man...".
Mikhail Gelfand: Wait, it depends on what…
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Catholic. Let's take her as probably the most tolerant in this situation. This allows us to somehow exist in this situation, if not to reconcile. Or is there an insurmountable gap in relations with traditional religions anyway?
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, you know, I don't have any relationship with traditional religions, so it's hard for me to judge whether there is a gap there or not. Religion and science are just completely different ways of dealing with reality. In this sense, they do not have a common field for activity. There is a wonderful saying, I don't remember whose, about teaching theology at universities, that "don't go to my university to preach, and I won't go to your church to lecture on evolutionary biology." Indeed, the Catholic Church has completely reconciled with the evolutionary idea, has also reconciled with the common ancestor of man and chimpanzees, and all this is normal. Many currents of Judaism are calm about this movement. Protestant religions are very tough in this sense. Well, the variants of American Protestantism, what is flourishing in America, are pretty tough. With Orthodoxy, the situation is a little different, because the ROC, it's like gas, it's generally trying to fill all the cracks with itself. And there are some more enlightened people there who recognize evolution, and if they are pestered for a very long time, then the origin of man from the monkey will also eventually be recognized. And there is "Shestodnev", which is completely obscurantism. As far as I understand, the position of the Patriarchate has not been clearly expressed on this issue, but maybe it's for the best, because the positions that have been expressed do not leave hope. On the other hand, there are, say, wonderful biologists who are practicing Christians at the same time.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Thank you for the answer, actually, we have no secret about what the so-called fourth lecture block will be about.
Mikhail Gelfand: Yes, it has already been shown in every possible way.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Everyone has already seen it, well, I suggest that its contents should not be kept secret.
Mikhail Gelfand: I planned to tell about the story of stolen dissertations at this place, but an event happened, in my opinion, very important, and I will tell a piece of propaganda about it. To begin with, there is the Dynasty Foundation, this fund was created by Dmitry Zimin, the creator of the Vimpelcom company, which is now Beeline. At some point, he retired from active work in the company, and gave a significant part of his personal money to a charitable foundation that supports a bunch of everything.
Here is a list of programs of the Dynasty Foundation, these are individual grants to young scientists, these are various kinds of schools, a lot of popularization of science. Here I promised a story about summer school, and here I am on purpose, if you can see it written on my back that it is "Dynasty". This is a school that takes place in Pushchino, this year it will be the fourth, it's two weeks, students who are interested in biology, in general, from all over Russia, there is the easternmost that was, Krasnoyarsk was definitely there, I don't remember if Vladivostok was. They come to Pushchino for two weeks, they have lectures and seminars in the morning, and after lunch they spend four hours in the laboratory. It can be an experimental laboratory, it can be a laboratory like ours. Here I have a joint scientific article in a good magazine with a schoolgirl.
Well, this is one of the projects of the Dynasty Foundation, here it is. And at the bottom, by the way, this is Fedya Kondrashov, I mentioned him several times, I had several slides of him. He is the son of Alexey Simonovich, he now has a laboratory in Barcelona. He was taken to America when he was very young, for some reason he has such a strange thing that someone taught his parents, his parents taught him, and now he has to pay off his debts. Here he goes here every year to pay off debts to Russian education. So he invented and organized these schools. Popularization of science, the library of the Dynasty Foundation – it's several dozen books, I think it's more than half of the popular science books that are published in Russia - they are published with the support of the Dynasty, and, more importantly, the Dynasty at some point started this trend. After a long break and failure, they began to publish popular science literature, both translated and Russian authors. In particular, Alexander Markov's books about evolution are absolutely wonderful, they were just published with the support of the "Dynasty". There is the "Enlightener" award, which the same Markov received.
For all this wonderful activity, Zimin received the award of the Ministry of Education and Science "For Loyalty to Science" in February. On May 7, it turned out that the fund was declared a foreign agent. Why is it bad? For two reasons. First: Dynasty has an absolutely wonderful internal logistics system. This is a small organization, there are very few employees of the Dynasty proper. There, all the money really goes to scientists, teachers and all this educational activity. Accordingly, the number of reports increases significantly. This small office has to become a big one by necessity. And besides, "Dynasty" sends its books to school libraries, holds science festivals in different cities. But here again – I was in Kaliningrad in April at such a science festival, to the East is Petropavlovsk–Kamchatsky. That is, Russia from Kaliningrad to Petropavlovsk is covered with this. Now imagine the mayor of the city, to whom people come and say that we want to hold a science festival here, only it will be supported by a foreign agent. Oops.
Many different wonderful organizations have written indignant letters about this, here they are all listed here, official, public, "Polit.ru", in particular. On "Polit.<url>" signatures were being collected. Our "Trinity variant" followed this and also collected signatures. It was sent to the Ministry of Justice, and then a wonderful thing happened, they said: "Look at the register, there is no "Dynasty" there," but at the same time a notice was sent to the foundation about the need to include itself in this register. That is, this situation is a bit Jesuitical and suspended, and it is in such a suspended state now. Well, the last thing that happened, it was an article in "Nature", this is the second main scientific journal, where the same thing was discussed. In general, the situation is suspended and, in my opinion, this is an absolute disgrace. In general, this, in my opinion, is an absolute abomination, because this is really an example of how a rich person should behave. Here are not yachts and not football teams, but the support of education and the support of science. This is Zimin's own money, which was just lying in foreign banks, because we know what happens to money that is in Russian banks, and there was no political activity there, the list is given, you can see on the website. We'll have to do something about it.Nikita Belogolovtsev: Thank you very much for this fragment, for the sincerity and emotionality. Another person who, as a matter of fact, like Boris Zimin, decided to spend some of his money on science is Alfred Nobel. One of the traditional fragments in the Russian Theater (those who come to us all the time know), we ask our guests, our heroes to tell who they would award the Nobel Prize to if there was such an opportunity, a million, medals and everything else. Accordingly, in your case, I would like to say just a few more words about, in fact, the fresh 2014 prize, for what and why.
Mikhail Gelfand: To be honest, I don't remember why I was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize. I generally think that Nobel Prizes, at least in biology, should not be awarded. For two reasons: the first is because science is already a very competitive thing. And to introduce an element of public excitement into this psychologically, in my opinion, is not very good. I understand the positive aspects of this, the whole public follows what is happening in biology one day a year, this can be used as an excuse for enlightenment, reading popular books and so on. But, in my opinion, the harm caused by the sports attitude to science outweighs. This is common. The particularity is that modern biology is very incremental, gradual, and most of the prizes that have been given in biology in recent years have always been accompanied by conversations that they were given the wrong one, or this one, of course, they were given correctly, but it was necessary, of course, to this one and this one, because they we have also done a lot. In modern biology, it is very difficult to isolate the contribution of a separate laboratory, it has really become a collective science. Someone spun something, but on a small sample and with a not very convincing experiment, then someone set up a more convincing experiment, someone else advanced a little more. Which one of them is good, this is, in fact, a very arbitrary decision. And, indeed, I am not a historian of science, I do not know, but I have a feeling that the number of controversial awards, which are accompanied by such letters in "Nature" that someone has been forgotten, has been increasing in recent years, and this is not that people have become more quarrelsome, but that science has changed. Therefore, the award tool does not seem to me very adequate right now.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Well, then another mini-award from you, you, in fact, have already said about it, literally our last section before the questions from the audience: what to read, what to see?
Mikhail Gelfand: I said, I mentioned these people, there are very good biology books published by the same "Dynasty". There is a book "The Parasite is the king of nature", in my opinion, it is called a translation. There is an absolutely amazing book called "Each creature – a pair." I strongly advise everyone to buy it and read it, you will be the king of all parties, because there are an infinite number of stories about how different animals have sex. It is very wittily written, and there are absolutely unimaginable stories. My favorite is this: there are such sea worms, at the larval stage, they are asexual. That is, they can become both a boy and a girl. When it's time for them to choose, they fall. And then you have to choose: if the larva falls to the bottom, it will become a girl. If the larva falls on a girl, she will become a boy. Over a beer or over a glass of wine to tell it – everyone will listen to you and ask for more. Of the serious ones, there are very good books by Alexander Markov about evolution, this is what is closer to me. He is a professional biologist, he writes very well, and he really follows what is being done. He has been on the website "Elements for many years.ru" (which, by the way, is also supported by "Dynasty", I don't specifically, I don't select) conducts reviews of scientific news. They are also very good because they are fresh.
And Zhenya Kunin's book, which I mentioned, is a work comparable in fundamental nature to Darwin's "Origin of Species", according to the application that was made, anyway.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Friends, who wants to write down the names, everything will be on "Polit.ru", actually, the list of references can be viewed, photographed. Mikhail Sergeyevich, the most recent part of our conversation from me, it is also traditional, we ask all our main characters to go through a small blitz at the end of the speech, questions with the simplest binary oppositions, some will seem silly and frivolous to you, but for some reason it seems to us that a person can open up in such things. Tea or coffee?
Mikhail Gelfand: Tea.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Water or wine?
Mikhail Gelfand: Depending on the situation.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Soup or borscht?
Mikhail Gelfand: That's a good question. Apparently, borscht, but most likely kharcho.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Stirlitz or James Bond?
Mikhail Gelfand: Neither one nor the other.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
Mikhail Gelfand: Neither one nor the other.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Theater or cinema?
Mikhail Gelfand: It's more of a theater, but an opera.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Theater or books?
Mikhail Gelfand: Books.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Justice or mercy?
Mikhail Gelfand: It depends on the situation.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Thank you very much, friends, it was Mikhail Gelfand at the ProScience Theater! Well, and now, in fact, the promised time for your questions, many, I know, have been waiting for this moment with special zeal. Look, we will have a microphone walking around the hall, just by raising our hands we will single you out and provide you.
Question from the audience: Hello, my name is Alexander, I once worked with you in a nearby laboratory. The question is this: flanking anti–GMO people still come in like this - that the GMO industry has a very strong influence and can affect biological diversity.
Mikhail Gelfand: This is the ecological aspect of GMOs. Actually, there are two aspects there. The first is that the genes will escape. This is only real in relation to rapeseed, because rapeseed, indeed, can interbreed with some wild relatives. Everything else is, say, genetically modified corn, it is unclear with whom it would crossbreed so that its genes would escape there; other plants also have wild ancestors living somewhere far away. The second aspect is the effect on other organisms. We are afraid that the butterflies will die or someone else. There are also two answers here. The first answer is that there were several stories about the fact that butterflies, brooks, who lived near fields with genetically modified corn, lived poorly, and some even died. We passed these articles with great noise, for example, there were articles that monarch butterflies die in terrible agony. Then there were several articles about the fact that nothing like this is happening, but they are no longer interesting to anyone, because this is no longer a sensation. So there are no documented examples of this. Theoretically, such a thing is generally possible, and the ecological aspect of GMOs can be considered. It could be discussed, but it should, first of all, be discussed in correct terms, based on what is known, and not on what is invented. Secondly, it should be compared with conventional intensive agriculture, where pesticides pour very significantly. And then it is necessary to compare the industrial field with GM corn and the industrial field with ordinary corn, where there are more people. It is shown that the diversity of predatory insects in fields with genetically modified plants is higher. Exactly because there are fewer pesticides. So, generally speaking, this is a subject under discussion, but so far no horror is visible.
Question from the audience: My name is Mikhail. Tell me, please, how do you combine biology and genetic engineering – two sciences, growth and biology?
Mikhail Gelfand: I didn't really understand the question. I can answer the part of the question that I am competent to answer. This will not be an answer to the question as it is asked, because I A. did not really understand it, B. even if I understood it, most likely, this is not my area, I would not be able to say something reasonable.
What will happen in biology in the near future. It will be very interesting. People have learned quite a long time ago how intensively genes work in different tissues. You can take a tissue sample and measure how intensively each gene out of the 25 thousand that we have works in this tissue. You can compare different tissues, you can compare a tumor and normal tissue, and a lot of interesting and useful things have resulted from this. In recent years, we have learned to determine the intensity with which genes work in individual cells. And I expect very noticeable progress in several areas at once from this. This is, firstly, developmental biology, because we will be able to see how the work of genes changes at different stages of embryogenesis or at different stages of differentiation. This is undoubtedly immunology, and such works are being done, and they are being done in Russia. There is a laboratory of Mitya Chudakov at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, they are studying how lymphocytes are arranged at the level of individual cells. And this is neuroscience, because it looks like neurons are pretty much different.
If we talk about stem cells and their movement back and forth, in fact, this is a change in the program of genes. What is the difference between a stem cell and a differentiated one? Different genes work in them, the genomes are the same in them. Different genes work in them, because they are regulated, DNA is packed into cells in different ways, this is also a thing that we have learned to look at, again, there is a laboratory in Russia that does this, and we are trying to look at it a little bit with them. If you return the genome to the state before the cell is differentiated, the genes are switched on, the genes that worked at this stage. Here is a wonderful story, I read and we have a similar result: if you look at how genes work in the drosophila development cycle, it turns out that approximately the same genes work at the egg stage and at the pupal stage. That is, it goes through one development program from egg to larva, then at the pupal stage it returns to the egg stage to some extent, and then goes the other way, already into an adult fly. This sort of thing, apparently, will appear more and more often, and we can expect some further progress in understanding the relationship between molecular evolution and morphological evolution, that is, visible, at the level of large traits, by analyzing the work of genes in the early stages of development. This is the thing that, apparently, will have to be monitored, it will be interesting.
Question from the audience: Hello. Vladimir. I wanted to ask if there are any ideas to overcome the idea of the degradation of antibiotics that you talked about?
Mikhail Gelfand: Well, there are no lungs. Apparently, it is necessary to use more carefully those new antibiotics that we are trying to make, well, at least not new classes, but new versions of old classes. This year there was a very beautiful article where people seemed to have found several new classes of antibiotics in marine bacteria. I won't be able to tell you very well, there's something like this idea... How to find a new antibiotic: we take a lawn of cells, some kind of medium, water it with a solution, say, from the soil, look at where the bacteria died and try to find out who did it. This is a very simplified condor view of how new antibiotics are being sought. And it critically depends on which producers we can grow to make a colony, so that they do something, and which ones we can't. Many antibiotic producers cannot grow in isolation, they need a whole bacterial community of other species. And now we have learned to do the same experience, but not in an artificial environment, so as not to depend on whether we can cultivate or not, but in a natural one. That is, they take the boxes, bury them in the mud, then look at what happened in these boxes. And it seems that in these experiments some new classes of antibiotics have appeared, and everything is not insanely hopeless. But, in general, nevertheless, it is quite gloomy. Thanks.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: Once again, many thanks to everyone who came today. Come to us again, ProScience Theater will be at least one more time this season. And many thanks to Mikhail Gelfand. In conclusion, when you leave the hall, I traditionally say something like a summary.
Mikhail Gelfand: Colleagues, take newspapers under your resume. Thanks.
Nikita Belogolovtsev: First of all, Mikhail Sergeyevich, don't leave. We have a traditional gift, the theater begins with a hanger, ProScience is also a theater, it also begins with a hanger. And secondly, we traditionally say something, I wanted to thank you for your sense of humor, which, it turns out, complements the civic position. It's from me. Once again, many thanks to everyone who came!
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17.06.2015