CRISPR Gene Editing & Neuroscience Technology with Stanford Law Ethicist Hank Greely

welcome to mind and machine where we explore ideas on the future I'm Auguste Bradley my guest today is Hank really a Stanford Law School professor specializing in the ethical legal and social implications of new biomedical technologies particularly those related to genetics in neuroscience Hank frequently serves as an advisor on policy issues he's the chair of California's human stem cell research advisory committee a member of the Advisory Council on the NIH s National Institute for General Medical Sciences a member of the Committee on the science technology and law of the National Academies and a member of the neuroscience forum at the Institute of Medicine he chairs the steering committee for the Stanford center for biomedical ethics and directs both the Stanford Law School Center for Law and Biosciences in the Stanford program on neuroscience and society his book the end of sex and the future of Human Reproduction gives us a look into the future of making babies through new technologies we explore CRISPR and gene editing embryo selection versus embryo editing parental versus societal needs emerging mind-reading technologies and the ethics surrounding all of these issues the podcast is available on all podcasting platforms with the video edition on YouTube it's all accessible from mind and machine I oh now let's dive in [Music] Hank I am excited to have you on the show thank you for joining us oh it's my pleasure I'm excited to get a chance to talk with you I've read a lot of fascinating things that you've been covering you cover program I can tell the entire ethical range of biotechnology today which is a vast you know jurisdiction well I'm basically a simple Hobbit I cover things that I think are really interesting so I don't cover everything but the things like pepper I really like well I share your interest in these topics and so we're gonna focus first on genomics and then we're gonna talk a little bit about neuroscience and there's a lot happening in both of these fields but I definitely won't dive in the genomics first because that's been a hot topic lately and I have a feeling it's going to get increasingly hot as we go forward we recently saw the first CRISPR babies born in China and that was a very controversial event I definitely get your take on that if you could first just sort of set up what CRISPR is for people new to the topic and then dive into what's happening there sure although a caveat we've recently seen claims that the first CRISPR babies were born CRISPR is clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats which is why everybody calls it CRISPR it was named by a Spanish scientist about 17 16 17 years ago it was nice of him to pick a good acronym a good English acronym because CRISPR lends itself to be an a noun a verb and adjective you can do all sorts of things with CRISPR right and in fact with the technology you can do all sorts of things with CRISPR CRISPR is well they're there a lot of metaphors CRISPR is like the cut and replace function in your word processor so CRISPR tells a protein to go to a particular place in your genome your genome is all the DNA made up of words that are spelled with four letters AC G and T and so you can tell CRISPR go find the place in August's genome that is ttat CAG Etac GGG TAC GT and I'll do it and if I hit string together 15 or 20 of those letters there's probably only one spot in your entire genome that has that string of letters so one thing CRISPR is is sort of a homing missile that goes directly for that spot and clamps on to it and its associated proteins then cut your DNA right there and cut through both strands of it so it it ultimately it was invented billions of years ago by bacteria to destroy viral genes when viruses infect bacteria viruses are equal-opportunity bastards in fact you and me plants bacteria everything bacteria they don't have white cells they don't have an immune system CRISPR is a functioning kind of immune system for them so it cut up viral DNA so it finds that spot it cuts it just like if you use word you see you go find really cut but you can do an add-on with CRISPR where in addition to cutting along with the guide RNA and along with The Associated protein that does the cutting you can add a chunk of DNA and the DNA if you get lucky will usually go into the hole that you've made in the DNA by cutting out one piece so my name is often misspelled you got it right but it's GRE e ly but sometimes people do GRE e l ey if there's a word document that has my name misspelled I can go find a GRE ele why cut it and replace it with GRE e ly if in your genome there's a place where you've got a T and it's supposed to be a G and as a result you've got a disease we could in theory tell CRISPR to go to your genome find the place for this @t instead of a G cut out the chunk with the T and replace it with a chunk with the G well and that's why it's so exciting people have been able to do this before but it's been difficult expensive time-consuming and not very accurate so for another analogy crispers not just like Microsoft words cut and replace it's like the Model T there were cars before Model T's but very few people had them because they were expensive and you needed the full-time chauffeur mechanic to make it the Christmas master neither crisper is like the Model T it's faster and easier and it's not cars that changed the world it was accessible cars that changed the world crisper makes will lead to gene-editing changing the world much much faster than it otherwise would have we don't use Model T's anymore and in 10 or 20 years we won't use we may well not use crisper but we will use something like and better than crisper crisper is the inflection point hmm so now crisper is actually happening with newborn children presumably now it has happened previously with adults it was little biohacking kits right what's the difference between an infant in a and a do-it-yourselfer at home okay so first we don't know whether it actually worked with the do-it-yourselfers Josiah's aid or mister DIY crisper really interesting guy I like him but it's not clear that it was actually working or not we could use CRISPR on you to try to change some of your cells let's say you've got blood disease and we're gonna change your your blood-forming stem cells it's to avoid you having sickle-cell or beta thalassemia or something else nasty so we used CRISPR on those cells it works your better it doesn't get passed on to your kids because only your blood forming cells have changed not your sperm the only thing you can pass on to your kids or things that are in your sperm or in your eggs if you do this in an embryo all of the cells of the resulting child are changed including the eggs in the sperm Wow so one big difference is doing it through embryos you pass it on to potentially all future generations the other difference of course is you appear to be a you appear to be a confident adult if you decide to do this people have told you about the risks and the benefits and you say yeah sign me up embryos don't have that choice so I think that the fact that you you're not doing it with consent from somebody who's able to give this consent to have their change ups the ante emergency had to be more careful about safety issues which is one of the reasons I thought that the crisper babies in China yeah that was just an awful experiment I condemn it unequivocally and that's that would be true even if it had not been about germline gene editing if it hadn't been about babies if it had been if it hadn't been about changing an embryo if it had been say gene therapy and as in a two-year-old it still would have been awful because the potential risks were enormous the potential benefits were somewhere between zero and damn close to zero he hid it he concealed it he lied to the authorities about it it was a disaster I could only hope that it wasn't a disaster for the babies let's hope for sure meaning now that just shows how easy it is however for rogue scientists to do their own on their own program yes and no so he needed an IVF clinic you know you could change bacteria you could change yeast you could change mosquitoes changing babies you need human embryos and human embryos are not easy to come by so he had to have cooperation from an IVF clinic that turned out to be possible in China in part he lied to some of the authorities about what he was doing at least that's what the authorities are now saying after the Chinese reaction after the government reaction to what he did I think IVF clinics are not gonna they're gonna be a lot more careful right China about who they were government was as concerned and alarmed as the rest of the world ultimately so I thought a really interesting moment in this whole unfolding story early on and I thought China could go two ways the first Chinese news story about it was another great advance for Chinese science China seems to be almost as nationalistic as the United States almost as chauvinistic in some ways and I thought they could play this as you know our science is great and in fact China has invested boatloads of money in genetics in the last 15 years and they've become the second or third most important country in the world in genetics they have a lot to brag about shortly after that first news story a group of a hundred and twenty two Chinese scientists and ethicist signed an open letter saying this is terrible this is unethical and they have embarrassed China in front of the world and it was after that that the Chinese government decided this was a terrible thing so I think him I think it could have gone either way I'm glad that the Chinese government decided to condemn it and one of the things that means you know who the junk way did this in order to be famous and rich and be a pioneer having seen what's happening to him nobody else is gonna think hey I'm gonna be a hero by doing this so I think it is it is likely to have a deterrent effect certainly on the IVF clinics you would need for this but also on rogue scientists who typically don't want to end up in Chinese prisons or anybody's prisons essentially what we're talking about when we're looking at the embryonic stage CRISPR is controlling and expediting evolution right I mean when you can shape what otherwise would have taken random mutations and who knows how many hundreds or thousands of years is that ultimately what we're looking at the ability to sort of guide our species destiny and expedite oh this is this would be one way to guide us or speed to increase the changes that would come about through evolution I hesitate to say expedite because it's not necessarily going to go in the same direction mmm it's not like there is one predestined path that evolution wants us to go on evolution doesn't want anything there's no agency and natural selection it's just what happens to happen in response to which variations give rise to more people who give rise to more kids who are healthier and have more kids but yes this is one way in which we could try to push our genetic evolution in a particular direction we've been doing that though pretty much ever since we've been a species but without thinking about it so agriculture has changed our genes you and I probably have three to five more copies of genes that help us digest starch that hunter-gatherer ancestors did I'm lactose tolerant I can drink milk as an adult most humans can't almost no mammals can in five or six different places around the world different populations develop this mutation and started doing dairy farming and the people who could digest milk products as adults had more kids who were healthier so you had more dairy farming which could produce more competitive advantage for the people who were lactose tolerant medicine there are their genes that predispose people to type 1 diabetes so-called juvenile onset diabetes till 90 years ago everybody with juvenile onset diabetes died before they could have kids because this is the type where you need to inject insulin once we learned about that those people live longer they live long enough to have kids so more copies of the genes that predispose you to type 1 diabetes are around because the environment has changed doctors came up with insulin that can be injected to keep you alive so our culture shapes our environment our environment shapes our genes we've been shaping our destiny but this allows us to do it more directly what's the proper way to shape it then if we don't want scientists just going off on their own who oversees this how do you put the guardrails in place what's the the mechanism by with you which you make this a proper ethical yeah so I think for one thing you think about it if you think about it in advance you don't do it secretly transparently in a hidden way the way the Chinese researcher did there's just there's nothing right about what he did but just have to ask so what do we want to avoid and what do we want to have I think we probably want to have fewer people with really terrible diseases we may want to have more people who are protected against diseases do we want to have people who are smarter faster better violin players maybe make genetically change that maybe we do maybe we don't should we worry about rich people and poor people rich countries in poor countries yeah we should worry about that should we worry about safety very much I think it's it's complicated there are some uses that I think will be widely approved reducing human disease and human suffering once it's proven safe and effective until it's proven safe and effective it's all you shouldn't especially with making babies but even with adults you shouldn't it's unethical to do things to people that are unsafe and ineffective but if it's proven safe and effective I think different countries and different cultures will make different choices one way you can think about it so if you try to change a disease you're actually changing somebody from a gene variation that's found in let's say the Huntington's disease gene found in one person in 50,000 and you're changing their genes to make it the same as the other 49,999 that doesn't seem like such a big change in the human genome if on the other hand you try what the junk we did which was to take a gene that is found in 99% of the population 99.9 percent of the population and change it to one found in one in a thousand that's a little stranger and if instead you try to take it a human gene and substituted chimp chain or substituted gene that you've made up because you hope that it will do something wonderful that's both riskier and stranger as well and I think different places and different people will make different decisions about what they want and what they don't want personally I think a key decision-maker will be the parents parents shouldn't be forced to use this but also parents should be given fairly broad latitude and what they choose some countries will go that way some countries law when this kid's arts getting us into the topic that you go even deeper in your book your book is the end of sex in the future of human reproduction which you have certainly a dramatic title what comes after sex and then let's get into parental choices versus societal concerns yes I have to say that the title was picked for its shock appeal the strongest prediction the book is that people will still have sex ah they just won't have sex to make babies for the most part so the books prediction is that in twenty to forty years most babies born to people with good healthcare anywhere in the world will not be conceived by sexual intercourse will not be conceived in bed or in the backseat of a car but will be conceived in a lab parents will make about a hundred embryos each of those embryos will have its DNA sequenced the parents will be told whatever it is they want to know that the DNA can tell them and ask so which of the embryos do you want to try to make into a baby now this is embryo selection what CRISPR does is embryo editing they're importantly different in that embryo selection only can do what the parents have it can pick one out of a hundred of what the parents have if you get the parents right if you've got two parents who have type O blood you're not gonna get a type A blood baby they just don't have the things to contribute there if you've got two parents with red hair you're gonna get a redheaded kid probably every oh editing you can make changes and so you could take two Type O people and have and give them a Type A baby almost everything you'd want to do by embryo editing you can actually do by embryo selection and what I'm turning here embryo selection has a has a more technical name pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that is PGD because everything in this field has to have an acronym and PGD has actually been around for almost 30 years this is a well-understood known to be relatively safe and effective clinical intervention that's been around so I think embryo selection is likely to become much sooner much faster and much fuller than embryo editing will because it's a proven intervention the tricky part in what I envision is the future you you know where do you get a hundred embryos well to get a hundred ever is you need a hundred eggs getting a hundred sperm is easy any any sample of ejaculate usually has a hundred million sperm but eggs are hard to get eggs for the rate limiting factor in IVF you pump women full of really powerful nasty hormones in order to get 10 eggs for 15 eggs into the normal one or two per cycle per month but we'll be able to take skin cells and turn those into what are called induced pluripotent stem cells this has been doable for over ten years Shinya Yamanaka the Japanese scientist who discovered it when the Nobel Prize in five years and then we'll take this induced pluripotent stem cells and make them into other cell types hair cells heart cells liver cells brain cells people are spending billions of dollars on this research in order to try to help make new kidney cells or heart cells or brain cells eggs and sperm are just another type of cells really so you can make potentially make an egg out of skin samples yep I could do that for you right now if a you were female and bu or a mouse yeah it's been it's been done in mice healthy Mouse pups have been born from this both making eggs from it and making sperm from it no one has yet made human eggs and sperm but people are working on it and they're getting close the last publication which was I think in October had was like two steps before mature mature eggs so cells go through lots of different differentiations and lots of different steps they're getting closer and I think this is gonna happen it's mainly not gonna happen for the genetic selection I mean this allows you to make a hundred embryos or a thousand embryos or a million embryos the rate limiting factor there is going to be the cost inexpensive in time of doing the whole genome sequencing on each of those embryos right which is getting easier and faster as well yep yep and so I think a hundred is plausible in twenty years a thousand or a million maybe not but a hundred certainly is plausible No what's typically done with a normal traditional IVF these days isn't ten years you get around ten okay and normally you'll retrieve somewhere between 0 and 25 eggs and maybe three-quarters of them will fertilize not for a relatively young woman ten embryos would be a kind of median number the difference betwee ten and a hundred a significant in terms of your selective capabilities okay you're kind of still at the luck luck of the draw at a hundred you pretty much have what you want for sure what it depends on how many different things you're looking at okay so if you're looking at one thing by a hundred euro and and both parents can contribute to it if it's something that takes this particular version of given gene from each parent you should on average get 25 of them if you've got a hundred if you've got ten you should get 2.5 but there's a non-trivial chance you'll get zero right if you're looking at 10 things a hundred isn't really enough ah to get all 10 different genes the way you want so it gives you a selection that doesn't let you design it lets you select and you're not gonna get the best of each of the 23,000 genes even if we knew what the best was if we knew there was a difference you'd need editing to do that but but here's what I really think is what I like about the story I tell I don't think this is going to be driven by the genetic and reproductive kinds of well the genetic issues what's going to drive making eggs and sperm from stem cells and the crypto Orwellian acronym for that is ivg in-vitro gamete of Genesis what's going to drive ivg is the hundreds of thousands or millions of couples in the u.s. who want to have genetic babies but they can't because one of them doesn't make sperm or one of them doesn't make eggs maybe because of the mumps in childhood that will make book that can make boys sterile maybe it's an accident maybe it's a congenital problem with women it can be all three of those plus age so a 45 year old who may not have any viable eggs left take skin cells turn them into ie PSCs turn those into eggs the biological clock may have disappeared needs work to be sure that's true one other it but that's what's going to drive it it's going to be the people who are infertile because they don't make eggs or sperm some of whom desperately want to have genetic children and that's a source of again human distress and suffering for them and putting on my Silicon Valley hat that's a that's a market to write nothing so there's a method breakthrough for sure and yep and and there there would be a lot of money to be made as well as a lot of babies and a lot of happy parents so I think that's what's gonna drive that and what I like about my book other than the fact that it's done that's good is it's taken two things from two different parts of bioscience the improvement in whole genome sequencing coming from one set of things that's being done for reasons having nothing to do with reproduction and making eggs and sperm from stem cells which is coming out of this IPSC stem cell research which is mainly not about reproduction it's mainly about heart disease brain diseases and so on and saying hey there these two things coming from different directions they're gonna combine here and the world's gonna change that's amazing so in the key to this is just having a large enough sample set to draw from that's that's what changes everything from what we have today what does this timeframe you anticipate before that's realistically possible so I think we could see people trying to make babies from stem-cell generated eggs and sperm in five to ten years I would not be in favor that I think it'd take at least 10 years of safety testing because if it turns out that say oh yeah these were pretty well but 10 percent of the babies have serious disabilities that's awful and you really need to test with human materials in the lab you need to test with non-human animals you need to then start with a few humans and a small phase one trial before you decide to go forward I think responsibly it could start in 10 or 15 years and catch on in a significant way in 20 years Wow and do you anticipate that being broadly available to society or a pretty expensive and elite option well so that that's interesting I actually think it will be free oh now no nothing's free right so there there will be costs and in the book I do the completely insane thing I've tried health care costs 20 years from now first technology that hasn't been invented but I do it anyway and I think it'll be you know maybe $10,000 per baby to make them this way that's I think a plausible number my guess is it would actually be lower but somewhere in that range hundred babies is a million dollars right now 1 to 2% of babies born have a serious genetic disease that could be predicted doing whole genome sequencing on the embryos how many babies with a serious genetic disease births do have to prevent to save a million dollars about 0.3 hmm so if it's saving if it's preventing one or two children with serious diseases from being born out of a hundred Wow not only do you prevent a lot of human suffering which is a very good thing but to appeal to the less egalitarian and idealistic part of society you save money too so I think health care systems will want people to do this that's incredible way to look at it although you're going the money that's saved isn't necessarily allocated one-to-one to the money that would the cut in later cost doesn't matter the same people and the same entities as the upfront cost so it's kind of hard to reallocate in our economic system in our economic system or but in the civilized ways health care systems are more rational right so in say a UK the National Health Service pays for everything and it either pays for the pregnancy and the easy Pete what I call easy PGD easy pre-implantation genetic diagnosis today where it pays for the kids illness right actually even in the u.s. if it's an early disease if it's an early onset disease the same insurers usually going to pay for the pregnancy and pay for the first few years of life of the kid but it is true that in our fragmented quote system close quote of healthcare the incentives are not all that well aligned my guess is sometime in the next twenty to forty years our system will get more rational and better although I share that hope yes recent the events in the last two years have not encouraging well I do think the tide is actually building for a more equitable health care system we'll see and and grab something like this will help influence that because the the net benefit the society is clear and if we're saving this this money and in not to mention the suffering that goes along with that right in just reallocating a portion of it to you know better early my hope would be we don't have to wait twenty to forty years for a better health care system by the way a hint to all authors out there with bold predictions I said it at forty years in part because it means I I'll never be proven wrong to myself set your bold predictions end date past your life expectance I do see a lot of 40 year predictions in the future in space it seems to be a sense if you're 50 or 60 or above a 40-year prediction is say Ray Kurzweil that has a lot of these 40-year predictions I've noticed Chris he expects to live forever in a well in an uploaded form so we'll see how that works out so whether we're using selective methods or editing methods increasingly we don't have more choice over our children over future generations now there are there scenarios that you see that there's a conflict between what individual parents might want and what is actually good for society sure it's several settings like that and some of them may involve what seemed like unreasonable parents and some of them may seem involved what seem like unreasonable societies so I can imagine a society that says everybody who does this you can only transfer embryos that predict to be in the top half of intelligence or the top half of military ability or the top half of love for the Dear Leader now there won't be a gene for love for the dear leader but the Dear Leader will quite likely think there is you could have societies imposing against parents will requirements that the society that those people running the society think is better but the parents may not on the other hand you may have parents making choices that society would frown on so maybe the most interesting example is couples some of whom would like to have deaf children there have been a few cases where deaf couples have used assisted reproduction in the hopes sometimes successful of conceiving a deaf child deafness is actually from a socio economic status aspect it's a really serious disability it really cuts into deaf people have a very hard time doing well in society and yet too many deaf people it's more a culture than a disability and they view things aimed at ending deafness is almost genocide 'el should we allow deaf parents to have deaf kids kids if a parent had a hearing kid and stuck you know needles into tears to try to definite we'd put the parent we'd take the kid away and we put the parent in jail is it different if they're picking embryos I think that's an interesting and difficult question so I think for the most part parents will do what they think is best for their kids including deaf parents who think what's best for the kids maybe to be deaf but they're seven and a half billion people in this world and some of them are crazy and some of them are parents who are crazy so if you give if you love currents do anything you want you will get some crazy results if you don't let parents do anything you want you've got the government saying or maybe doctors and maybe somebody else saying what they can and can't do and if you let governments do what they want sometimes you get crazy results so I think it is a tension I think different societies will resolve it in different ways some countries will say you can only use this for the following list of 137 serious diseases others will say you can use it for any diseases others will say parents can use it for anything they want except picking for children with disabilities others will say they can do it for anything where you come down there will vary a lot depending on who you are and what you believe and at a cultural level will vary depending on the country country to country I do think that the u.s. is likely to be on the more libertarian side of it but we'll see do you can you envision the pressures for well either for governments or fridge' societal norms to channel decision making into a narrower and narrower range or do you think the freedom to choose will cause more diversification in the kinds of yeah that's right that's a really interesting question well we let a hundred flowers bloom or will we decide that the California golden poppy is the only flower that should be allowed or the only flower anybody wants that's a really interesting question that's ultimately an empirical question counterfactual right now because we don't know I think the answer will be some of both I think some things like really nasty diseases will become much less common will everybody want their kids to be you know look exactly like the most famous actors or actresses will they want them to be Andrew Luck great quarterback and will all parents converge on the same genotype I doubt it there's seven and a half billion of us but it is likely that this would be a force for reducing diversity and that's somewhat worrisome it may be that some of these things we think of as disease genes also have some good sides so sickle cell bad disease if you get two copies of a particular version of the globin gene and hemoglobin you get sickle-cell disease if you're not in a place with advanced medicine you die young if you are severity varies but it can be a very hard and painful life and the shortened life if you've got one good copy and one bad copy you're pretty much immune from dying from malaria which is why sickle cell is found in places with a lot of malaria historically take away the risk of malaria and sickle cells a complete loser that's it's not something you want in a world with malaria it is something you want maybe taking away some of the the some of the genes some of the genetic variations that cause some traits we perceive today as bad will take away some protection from something else so for example what her drunk we tried to do in China was to change the very very common version of the gene called ccr5 - a version that doesn't work and when the version doesn't work it looks very likely that you cannot get infected with HIV or at least your t-cells can't so you're safe from AIDS but we don't know what else that what other changes that causes we know there are 50 year olds and six year olds who have this mutation but seem fine but nobody's looked at a thousand babies born with us and see what happens through their lifespan there's a little bit of evidence that needs to be replicated that people without a functioning ccr5 gene are more likely to get West Nile virus and more likely to get more severe cases and die from influenza so genes are complicated they do a lot of things the common sense would suggest there's an interconnectivity and a domino effect when you start clicking yep and reducing diversity is probably a bad thing in the abstract though in any individual case maybe it's a good thing getting rid of tay-sachs disease a terrible genetic disease hard for me to see a downside to that but I think what this would call for is monitoring to both see are the frequencies of very particular variations changing do we see any bad effects from it and one of the somewhat saving graces of this technology is if you've made a mistake with the baby you may be able to fix it in the child or the adult because what CRISPR can do to embryos CRISPR may also be able to do to live in people doing somatic stuff so early on I was changing your blood cells to secure you from a disease so if I gave you what turned out to be what I thought at the time was a good gene in your blood cells when you were an embryo and 20 years later we decided oh no that was a mistake we might be able to fix it it seemed inevitable you'd start out with the safer bets the diseases we all agree should be eradicated and then you creep down the line of the more debatable issues as I imagine some of that's just done outside of the regulatory regulatory jurisdiction and then right gets tested that way and then becomes more mainstream right so that will be done by parental choices doctor choices and so on and note this applies both to embryo selection what my book is about PGD and to embryo editing CRISPR and what a junk we did the history is so interesting on so many levels when they're really troubling things about it is he picked HIV in part because we knew about this gene but at us it turns out that HIV is still very stigmatized in China that people men who have HIV do risk and women parents who have HIV risk passing it on to their children if you go through a fertility clinic you can eliminate that risk at least for the man you can wash the sperm so no no virus gets into the you know can infect the the egg so it wasn't even uh fair in that case because it was the father who had HIV that's right it wasn't necessary except that apparently in China hiv-positive people are not allowed to use IVF oh thanks and so what what who was offering these parents wasn't just the prospect of having babies who could never get HIV but the prospect of using IVF to have babies who wouldn't be infected by their father's seminal fluid that wasn't otherwise legal in China it's really coercive it was the only way for that father to have children in China unless he was willing to take the risk of having his baby infected with HIV at conception or had enough money to go to Hong Kong or Taiwan or Japan or someplace else to have it done okay but I mean it doesn't seem that it's also a one-off case it's less representative of the potential for the future but lots to wrestle with what a fascinating realm of choices that we as you know a species will will have to make well and biology is is infinitely weird much weirder than we realize and it's moving forward in so many different areas the movies we've just been talking about you headaches and mainly Inhumans but Christopher could be used to try to bring back wooly mammoths hmm neuroscience we've got brain control mind reading right but you think I wanted to switch other north side of the edge let's get into your were conscious stuff going on that's gonna do work on neuroscience you've been talking a bit on mind-reading technology is is this sounds like science fiction is this a real technology you definitely and sort of so definitely I'm mind reading right now I'm trying to figure out what you're thinking and your mind reading as well we mind read all the time it's a really important survival skill and people who aren't good at mind-reading have significant social disabilities I mean it's viewed as one of the problems with some people on with autism is that they don't read other people's emotions and minds very well so we might read all the time we just know we're not really good at it largely based in this hast you're reading it's listening there's an implication of mind reading that goes beyond that well but what you're doing they're looking at the face is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind what we would what people are beginning to now mainly through technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging which is just your basic MRI machine have you been in an MRI for anything yes yeah I think like when I asked this question in crowds three-quarters of people raise their hand at the standard medical in the u.s. like nothing for theatres at least in the u.s. overseas much less common fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging it is looking at the picture but it's also looking at blood flow which it measures through how differences in the level of oxygen in your blood and the idea behind it is when an area of your brain has worked working is really expensive for your brain cells for your neurons and so your brain floods that area with fresh blood which is higher in oxygen so two to six seconds after you're at the campus works it gets flooded with fresh oxygen so we put you in the scanner we we give you some sort of stimulus we play a the stones and to the six seconds later we see where there's more blood flow and where there's less blood flow and we aha we have found the site of Rolling Stones in your brand and in fact there were a lot of silly and non reproducible results along these wet lines finding sites of different things people are now able to use it and particularly there's a guy named Jack gallant at UC Berkeley has done some amazing stuff was being able to recreate what you're seeing by looking at your MRI results so he shows people trailers to movies looks at their results and recreates what they're seen it's not great but it's kind of impressive pretty impressive and now he's working more on semantics so he has people think about words and he tries to figure out what words they're thinking of and maybe he doesn't you know it's not always great if you're thinking about a cat maybe he knows you're thinking about a pet but isn't sure whether it's a dog or a cat but to get back to your your your qualification about face reading as mind reading is that really reading your mind he's reading blood flow to parts of your brain by metrics he's using is using something physical to infer something something objective and physical to to infer something subjective and mental and that's what neuroscience is able to do now our minds you can't you can't touch the mind the mind is constructed but it's constructed by a physical object a physical organ there are mechanics and yeah yes and as we become better able to see what's happening in that physical organ we're better able to predict what that organ status means in terms of mental construct so I could already if I asked you too thin a scanner and I said okay in five seconds I want you to move either your left hand or right hand beside which one you're gonna move I could tell you with 95% accuracy which one you're gonna move because if you're thinking about moving the left-hand part of your brain on the right side the spike of some thought gets ready if you're thinking about the other one part and and gets a spike works and so more blood flows into a fresh blood flows into it so is there we can do we've been able to do that for a while have they mapped then they in watching what happens in the brain it sounds like to do this they would need to have people lie to them when they know there was a lie being told and then see what activity is happening in the brain and they in that is that a consistent pattern when they do that well it's interesting you bring up lie detection there about 30 or 40 peer-reviewed published articles claiming to find some significant correlations with lie detection they almost it and there's probably something there the tricky thing is different papers find different locations okay that's a little worrisome but the deeper thing is these are all research subjects typically undergraduate psych majors we're being told they're in an experiment and they're being told that you're supposed to lie about this okay is that the same as saying on the witness stand no I didn't try to buy coke from that officer right or saying to your mother no the turkey was fine mom it wasn't too dry it's a very different technological and anything so there's some things in the brain that are very specific and some that are very broad there's an area in your brain called the fusiform face area if you see a face that lights up and so going back 15 years Nancy kanwisher dem IT has been able with great success you should put somebody in the scanner you show them randomly ordered photos of places or faces and she can tell whether you're looking at a place or whether you're looking in the face she can't tell what face and it may not even be a real face it may be a full moon where you're seeing the man in the moon face but that activates the part of your brain that recognizes faces face recognition involves more than just that area but that area is necessary they're not sufficient things like memories seem to be scattered all over the brain oh and and then and then this there's an area of the brain called the amygdala that's famous for a fight-or-flight it's our fear response but it also lights up when people are feeling lusty or when they're feeling hungry or so some brain areas do only one thing some brain areas do a lot of things some things are found only in one place some things are found in a lot places and it's gonna take a long time for us to figure it all out but we are making progress it's it's almost like you've discovered the Western Hemisphere and right now you're along the eastern seaboard of half of it but you have no idea that the Rocky Mountains are in there and there's a there's a lot that needs to be done you're a law professor at a prominent law law school at Stanford so how do what implications do this technology as it becomes better have on law enforcement on courtroom proceedings I mean it seems like this to the extent it works it will change things radically it could be enormous depends on how well it works and on how likely people are to accept it if in fact we had a good way of lie detection which we might or might not I'm kind of agnostic at a 10 or 20 year time frame whether we will but if we did well that's the cases would settle but we'd have to answer we'd have to answer questions about do we let people use it do we can we force people to use it do if somebody refuses to use it can the opposing counsel say to the jury you know he could have taken the lie-detector test that the brain lie-detector test on this but he didn't draw your own inference that's what I've done right I mean isn't that the way it works with current lie detectors as imperfect as they are well lie detectors are almost lie detectors are never allowed in trials except when they are okay everything in law like everything in biology has exceptions but for the most part polygraphs are not admissible incorrect which i think is appropriate yeah and I do too and it's appropriate right now for this brain why detection because it's not there yet and it may never be there but if it is there things change but I think an example where it is going to happen sooner and should is pain detection so that hurt it hurts here it hurts here but it mainly hurts here pain is in your brain it usually is not just in your brain and with that without a brain you don't feel pain and there are people who have brain defects that caused them not to ever feel pain which sounds like a great thing except their constant it's a very bad condition because they're constantly hurting themselves and they don't know it Wow yes there's no function yeah so scientists around the world are seen not just one spot that a network of spots that activate when people have the subjective sensation of being in pain there are hundreds of thousands of cases every year in the United States where whether somebody is in pain or not and how much pain is important some of those are car crashes personal injury suits most of them are Social Security disability cases where somebody says I can't work anymore because my lower back pain is too bad we don't have any good way to test that Wow I think most of those people are telling the truth many of them are exaggerating their symptoms and some of them are just making it up and we don't have good ways to tell if you had a good way to tell that would save a lot of wasted court time right and also mean that the people who do who needed the disability got it and the ones who didn't didn't we tend to focus on keeping the frauds out which would be a good thing the less it means the people who don't get believed will now have believed the people who actually are in pain who aren't believed who lived another way of proving it just Astin yeah yes so and I and I think that's likely to get the courts an administrative agency's the next decade or two but again that the form of lie detection it is although it is in that context if you're trying to figure out if a baby has pain ah or if somebody who's unconscious has pain or if a fetus has been interesting so it may be a way now we don't know whether you know it's hard to know what fetal pain reaction if the brain is showing wedding in a in a conscious person is pain was perceived we don't know how same salable set to its draw from it's a piece of it is a piece of some evidence of unclear of significance in fact these issues are getting into court already in ways that I think are often not very useful my friend need a Farah Hani from Duke keeps a database of all court cases are reported court cases where a criminal defendant wants to introduce a brain scan of his own brain or yeah and their more than a thousand a year mm-hmm now those were reported cases reported cases of the tip of the iceberg maybe one in a hundred cases actually leads to a reported opinion so there are a lot of these going on sometimes are things like on a Pete you've lost you've been convicted at trial on appeal you say I had ineffective assistance of counsel because my idiot lawyer didn't put in a brain scan which the jury might have found but some of them some of them are capital sentencing cases okay where you tell the jury look this guy's brain is weird and snow you found him guilty but you shouldn't execute him it's not his fault interesting and some of them are is this guy competent to stand trial or not you can see brain changes consistent with they're not always determinative of Alzheimer's disease if somebody says he can't stand trial because he has Alzheimer's disease and he can't remember enough well maybe he's telling the truth or maybe like what was his name Joey bananas she got a a mob boss he faked Alzheimer's disease for seven or eight years to avoid going to trial this could arguably you know whether he's telling it's a form of lie detection in that country right so it brings a lot more nuance into really important decision-making that's so so you know the problem is right now it's such early days we don't really know what we're doing we need to know more but it is going to have a substantial effect on law but that's it you know do you want a former do you want to sign a contract with this guy do you want to go into a partnership with this woman hmm you want to go to a romantic partnership with this person right who else the other privacy standpoint has some some risks and perhaps some scary elements as well and indeed but part of that depends on how you do it if you need somebody to stand still to lie still in an MRI machine for an hour you know you're not going to sneak up on them with that right and you can screw that up just by moving your tongue around in your mouth you need to really be still though you can pressure plate it into complying sure but if you can come up with a surreptitious way of doing something that's as good and people are working on less invasive less intrusive easier ways to do brain scanning if this start working then the privacy issues become even bigger right absolutely absolutely fascinating so how does a law professor become an an ethics expert in the biotech area what was your evolution to becoming one of the leading spokespeople on bioethics it doesn't seem like a natural connection but it's funny I don't think of myself as a buyer that says I think of myself as a law professor who works on law and Biosciences issues including bioethics if you look at the people who are generally thought of as doing bioethics we come from a lot of places some from loss and from medicines and philosophies some from theologies some from anthropology some from basic science there are a lot of different routes and none of which has a high likelihood of getting you there for me it was a fascination with the science and where it's gonna lead us at you know probably started with reading a lot of science fiction as a kid right actually started with reading the Oz books which got me into fantasy which led made a science fiction but in my own case marrying a doctor okay I started teaching health law which got me into this and then as chance would have it Stanford had a big symposium on the human genome project at the time it was taking off they wonder the law professor and the planning committee hmm if they hadn't asked me I might be doing something entirely different right now little bit it's it's yeah it's it's a bit underlying disposition I like science and it interested in it and and of course like most of life it's a lot chance to but I love what I get to do and I just the great thing about doing it as a law professor his I don't need to get grants I don't have a lab to run and I have to worry about hiring and firing I can do our we do a lot of teaching that pays our salary so I can work on anything I want to just because it's bright and shiny and I think it's cool well you've stuck with it you know what I do dug deep into this and is it most of the ethicists and technology that I run across come from a philosophy background but there is a very direct connection between philosophy and law I mean laws based on philosophical underpinnings right or the the Philosopher's would like you to believe that I think laws a lot more like biology oh it's based on history and chance and evolution but we like to put a philosophical gloss on it I actually do think that law and biology have a lot in common you know the law isn't intelligently designed usually yes what's happened over time it's that it's that just like our bodies are not honed into perfection anytime your lower back hurts or anytime somebody gets pregnant and has to go into labor and delivery you know that we are not intelligently designed the laws got a bunch of stuff that's ham around forever just because it hasn't caused so many problems and it hasn't caused enough problems to lead anybody to kill it off just like you can have kind of slightly negative genes as long as you continue to have kids it's not a problem so I think they're similar I do think that bioethics in particular maybe a little broader than a lot of ethics areas because there are so many different technical fields like medicine and science Biosciences of various sorts that feed into it yeah I'm sure they're computer scientists who are interested in computer ethics I know there are but I think there may be more doctors and scientists who are interested in bioethics so I think I think we are a broader field that some of the technical ethics folks well I think it's fascinating and this is ethics in general should be approached from many different sides so it's it's great to see you approaching it with your expertise as so the others are from other angles but I have really appreciate you sharing these thoughts and insights really important topics to be discussing the deeper we dig into these and the more we proactively address it before we actively have to deal with it I think better we all are so definitely appreciate your thoughts instead that's that's my hope I mean if I needed a rationalization for why I do what I do it's in the hopes that by thinking about this more we used to say will maximize the benefits and minimize the harms and I realize it's way too optimistic or eucharistic maybe we can avoid some catastrophes and avoiding a few catastrophes would be a good thing there really is a rationalization the reason I do what I do is because I really enjoy it this is cool stuff well you that's that motivation will produce more hard work more commitment to it than really anything so I mean it's the best motivation regardless of the outcome agreed terrific well where can people learn more about your work find your teachings how do people track you down so the law school has a website for me Stanford Law School will link to that Cambodian I tweet I will spend way too much time on Twitter so you've got my Twitter handle there and that's an easy way to see what I'm thinking about and stick me into Google and you won't find this you know things I wish were there about my great sports career etc but I which never existed but you will find a bunch of my stuff and of course the book the end of sex in the future of humanity review and reproduction and the next book will be playing with life I mean sometime in the next 20 to 40 years well we can before that I hope the next I hope the next one to two years but we'll see fantastic all right well all the stuff that's available now will link to in the show notes great you think Thanks and thank you guys for tuning in if you're watching on YouTube leave any thoughts or comments below if you're listening to the podcast ratings and reviews are super helpful helps other people find the show and until next time thank you [Music]

Channel: MIND & MACHINE

Views: 1,725

Rating: 4.8139534 out of 5

Keywords: crispr, gene editing, ethics, tech ethics, technology ethics, hank greely, august bradley, mind reading, mind reading technology, embryo editing, future of sex, future, futurist, futurism, mind and machine, mind & machine, interview, genome editing, stanford law school, genome editing with crispr-cas9, genome editing crispr, genome editing ethics

Id: OvmrYrqUh7s

Length: 59min 5sec (3545 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019