Does Genetic Editing Have A Dark Side? | Answers With Joe

as we get older we spend a lot of time looking at our parents you know seeing how they turned out what problems they ran into in their lives their health we spend a lot of time looking at their health and we do it because we care about them obviously but it's also a little selfish let's face it we share jeans with these people you know we want to have an idea what to look out for what kind of problems that we might expect in the future what to worry about and few people have more to worry about than those who have parents with huntington's disease huntington's disease is like getting alzheimer's and parkinson's at the same time it affects both your motor control and your cognitive abilities that decline over time it's like this perfect storm of neurodegenerative conditions it's it's pervasive it's deadly and there's no cure and it's genetic so if one of your parents has huntington's you got a 50 chance of getting it yourself so yeah if you're in your mid-20s and you're watching your mom your dad just fall apart because this disease and you know that it's literally just a flip of the coin whether or not that same thing's going to happen to you that's horrifying of course thanks to technology you can get your gene sequenced and find out for sure but for a lot of people in that position they decide not to get tested you know since there's nothing you can really do about it it's just better not to know that calculus changes though when you decide to have a kid i mean maybe you don't want to flip a coin with your own life but you certainly don't want to flip a coin with somebody else's life and if it's an unplanned pregnancy and you get it tested and you find out that the fetus has hunting as a disease then now you're faced with this ethical quandary of is it better to terminate the pregnancy or doom this person to a nightmare scenario later on in their lives a nightmare scenario that oh by the way you're going to be facing yourself ah this is dark guys it's a terrible position to be in and genetic editing technology is working to change that obviously that's a good thing but there are some people that think that genetic editing could lead to something even worse is there a dark side to genetic editing [Music] consider the noble wolf intelligent cunning loyal the alpha predator of the american west it's very image a symbol of strength and fearlessness many tens of thousands of years ago a pack of wolves started following around the tribe of humans because they could pick off of the scraps and the leftovers from the hunt that the humans were doing and it was a great situation for them you know they didn't have to hunt themselves it was easy food and then somewhere along the way one of those wolves decided hey what if i just made friends with these people what's the worst that could happen this this is what could happen the domestication of wolves and their selective breeding into the countless numbers of dog breeds that we have today is just one example of genetic engineering that we've been doing for thousands of years now yeah we didn't know what we were doing back then we just knew that if we had an animal that had traits that we liked we would breed that with another animal that had traits that we liked and just kind of kept going that direction and it wasn't just animals pretty much every food crop that we have today is a wild bastardization of what they actually were thousands of years ago like this is what corn looked like before we got a hold of it this was just kind of something we did just accidentally over thousands of years there wasn't like a science behind it or anything until gregor johann mendel entered the chat in 1822. not to be confused with sir gregor a different guy sir gregor mendel was an austrian monk who forever changed the game he grew up working at his family farm but due to his scholastic aptitude he got sent away to pursue an education fun fact while studying mathematics at the university of austria he was actually taught by christian doppler the guy who discovered the doppler effect and how weird is that that the thing that he found just happened to have the same name oh esculey excelled in math and physics and after that he joined the augustine monks at the saint thomas monastery in brno where he had access to its extensive library and experimental facilities monasteries were kind of the repository of information at the time they were the libraries of their day and while there he took a special interest in plants in the inheritance of physical traits between 1856 and 1863 he conducted studies on tens of thousands of plants and in his studies he discovered dominant and recessive traits which he referred to as particle inheritance because they didn't really you know know what genes were back then and the reason this is such a big deal is because before this people thought that the offspring was basically just a mix of your parents genes you know with some genes a little bit more dominant than others you know if if your mom is a lemonade and your dad has a nice tea then your kids are going to be arnold palmer's but mendel showed that it doesn't really work that way you know you might get a straight up iced tea you might get a straight up lemonade and then another couple of arnold palmer's mixed in with them you know man i'm thirsty sadly mendel didn't really promote his work and most of it was lost for the next century before he was finally you know credited for all the work that he did but you know today that's the first thing that kids learn when they study genetics in school so sir gregor good show old chap flash forward to today and we have crispr which i've talked about on this channel before crispr gives us the ability to edit genes in ways that mendel couldn't have ever even imagined crispr by the way was a total surprise we didn't see this coming we thought that it would be decades before we could edit this precision but here we just find this naturally occurring enzyme that bacteria use to repair their dna after viral attacks and it's basically control f control r you know find and replace and the headlines around crispr kind of heralded it as the moment that mankind took the wheel from mother nature we're not quite there yet you know we're still adjusting our mirrors and putting our hands on ten and two but it proliferated quickly like it became so ubiquitous that you can you can now do crispr experiments with home crisper kits and there's a good reason for all this hope it's already helped treat some diseases like sickle cell anemia and beta thalamesia by altering bone marrow and stem cells the only downside in those instances is that the original marrow needs to be destroyed by chemotherapy so it does carry some risks and there's a long list of conditions already under trial so if these work out obviously that's a huge deal in fact crispr technology is already evolving into newer more precise things like cast 3 and cast 12. but despite its obvious benefit for a whole host of painful and debilitating conditions the concern around genetic editing still seems to kind of dominate the conversation with some with a lot of people worried that you know altered dna is going to filter into the population at large and cause genetic chaos in the future so yeah this is where we need to talk about somatic versus germline dna editing all the clinical trials at least the legal ones that we know of are what's known as somatic editing which only affects the person being treated it doesn't affect their offspring and before we start quoting dr malcolm from jurassic park just know that the only way that genes can be passed from parent to offspring is if you alter the germ line which is basically altering the egg sperm of the embryo so yeah somatic editing is the introduction of a genetic variant at the gamete that carries a mutation throughout the entire now altered organism germline editing is introduced at or before the embryo level and if it's successful it would be in every cell of the individual and it could be passed on to their offspring and if there were concerns germline patients can have their offspring screened to make sure there's nothing out of the ordinary going on now it's worth noting that random germline variations happen naturally all the time so if you have a problem with germline editing then by all means take it up with mother nature and by the way just to address how insanely fast this technology is progressing we need to take a step back and look at the thing that made this all possible in the first place which was the human genome project the year was 1990. germany reunited sinead o'connor had a number one song and the simpsons made their first appearance on tv and scientists decided it was time to finally understand the human genome ever since watson and craig discovered the structure of dna in 1953 our understanding of it had you know grown by leaps and bounds but we were still hamstrung because we didn't we didn't have a road map you know we knew certain locations on certain chromosomes were connected to certain diseases but there wasn't really anything we could do about it because those regions it was still way too vague those regions still were like tens of millions of base pairs long our drug development and our testing was limited because what we really needed to do was to step back and take a look at the big picture but the problem there is that the big picture is over three billion base pairs so in 1990 the human genome project was born it would take 13 years and 2.7 billion dollars to do it almost a dollar per base pair but when it was done they didn't license it they didn't sell it they just released it publicly for all the world to have communists but by doing so they gave research labs and private companies that that road map that we needed and our understanding has skyrocketed and the price of this has plummeted if you want to get your genome sequence today that same thing that would cost 2.7 billion dollars in the 90s now it's like a thousand dollars now of course with this genie out of the bottle came a whole host of ethical concerns you know how do we make sure this is only used in a beneficial way get it genie genie out of bottle genes well part of the human genome project was a program called elsi which stood for ethical legal and social implications they were created to establish a protocol for how we should engage with the human genome once it was sequenced and they focused on four areas privacy and fairness in the use of genetic information including the potential for genetic discrimination and employment and insurance the integration of new genetic technologies such as genetic testing and the practice of clinical medicine ethical issues surrounding the design and conduct of genetic research with people including the process of informed consent and the education of health care professionals policy makers students and the public about genetics and the complex issues that result from genomic research this work led to a piece of legislation called gina which passed in 2008 and its goal was to prevent people from being discriminated against based on their genetic information and some of this did get rolled over into the aca to prevent people from getting discriminated against for pre-existing conditions like let's say i'm an employer and i get access to your genetic information and i see that you might have a a pretty election towards depression or heart conditions or even add i might be less likely to hire you because that even if you don't actually display any of those symptoms that's a violation of privacy and that's why gina was passed to protect people against discrimination based off of employers or health insurance and that's great that that passed but hey who needs a law when people will just willingly hand over their genetic information and broadcast it publicly from home genetic sequencing services now to be clear 23andme states clearly in their privacy policies they don't sell individual information but they do sell aggregate data about the population as a whole if you opt into it also if you have a rare condition that might make your genome helpful to specific research projects they might you know seek out further consent from you this is part of their business model that's why it doesn't cost a thousand dollars to get your genetic testing done through them they make up the back end by selling the data and some people are uncomfortable with this but you do have the right to opt out if you want to but many people freely share this information on ancestry boards and that's fair game it's it's broadcast it's out there and you don't have to have done it yourself for this to affect you just a couple of years ago this exact thing resulted in the identification of the golden state killer joseph james d'angelo 34 years after his last crime but yeah investigators were able to make genetic matches between the dna that was found the scene of the crime with like a cousin or an ant who had publicly put their genetic information out there on on on the internet and they cooperated with the authorities and they will narrow it down to a specific list of subjects and yeah boom so yeah i mean i guess the lesson to be learned here is you know don't rape and murder a whole bunch of people and piss off pat and oswald's wife but no there was an awesome hbo documentary series called i will be gone in the dark that was that was based off of the book of the same name that was written by michelle mcnamara who was an absolute badass and patton oswalt is a national treasure just go watch it if you haven't seen it but anyway yeah it's a tricky situation you know on one hand gathering this data even for a price you know gives us a better sense of the overall health of our society and in this case brought justice to dozens of you know victims but in use the wrong way it could be a catalyst for discrimination now in fairness i only say that because you know we've been doing that for a long long time it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for imbecility society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind three generations of imbeciles is enough you can be forgiven for thinking that was pulled from mineconf or something like that but that was actually written by supreme court justice oliver wendell holmes writing the majority opinion on buck v bell which basically okayed for sterilization so yeah this was sort of the prevailing wisdom at the time and it was informed by eugenics eugenics is defined as the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable this was developed in the 1880s and it's mostly credited to francis galton and like most terrible things it started out as a good idea or at least it had good intentions anyway the goal was to improve the human race by propagating good genes and getting rid of bad ones i mean if we could do that with sheep and corn why not do it with ourselves it was an incredibly popular idea for a while i mean who doesn't want to improve the human race of course the nazis got a hold of it and ran with it and just basically used it as an excuse to exterminate anyone they found undesirable and this is ultimately what led eugenics to fall out of favor but it didn't come up out of nowhere the nazis didn't invent eugenics it was actually around for a while and it was deeply ingrained in american thought yeah i did a video previously about john harvey kellogg and some of the you know wacky health ideas that he had but he was big into eugenics in fact he was pushing for a national pedigree registry that would basically dictate who could mate with who based on their genetic traits in 1912 the international conference of eugenics was held in london where 58 papers were presented of those 58 papers 42 were written in the united states now before people start calling me an america hater in the comments let's let's get a little bit more specific shall we this this is going to hurt a little notable figures like alexander graham bell who promoted eugenics as a way to prevent deafness teddy roosevelt who wanted to sterilize criminals as well helen keller of all people argued for eugenics margaret sanger used the popularity of eugenics to advocate for birth control winston churchill pushed for forced labor camps along with sterilization for mental defectives civil rights pioneer w e b dubois advocated splitting blacks into four categories to breed out the lowest group george bernard shaw wrote about it even jacques cousteau though to be fair he was more worried about overpopulation in general yeah this was mainstream thought for several decades you know darwin's theory of evolution was still pretty new and the idea of survival of the fittest was you know big in people's consciousness and francis galton who was credited for kind of coming up with eugenics he was charles darwin's cousin so yeah the idea of making sure that the fittest survive and that the least fit don't survive or the least don't you know spread their genes onto the next generation it wasn't that much of a stretch at the time and this is what the proponents of eugenics were worried about but yeah you know people going to people we're a tribal species and this was coming off of hundreds of years of european colonialism where you know they kind of walked into it this idea that some races were superior to others and total coincidence they came to the scientific conclusion that the superior race is the one that just happened to look like them of course there's a lot of things from that period of time that we now find abhorrent and it's really easy to just you know think of it as some relic from the past but unfortunately these things that we think are so far in the past aren't as past as we would like for them to be yeah that virginia law that was at the heart of the buck b bell supreme court case that allowed four sterilizations yeah that wasn't overturned till the 70s also in the 1970s under the family planning services and population research act of 1970 an estimated 25 percent of native american women were sterilized the beegees were on the radio when this was happening but still that was 50 years ago that could never happen in this in this day and age so with a history and present like this these new cheap efficient genetic editing tools have got a lot of people concerned that they could be used in a similar way but what made eugenics evil wasn't the genetics part it was the involuntary part the force sterilization of races and classes and just up genocide all that went on way before we knew anything about genetics genetics just became the new excuse to do this to other people and you know just wrapped up in the guise of science you know preventing somebody from living with a debilitating disease is not the same as wiping out an entire race of people based on skull shape the point is to maximize reproductive options and put the power in people's hands there's actually an argument that some people could make that that by removing this ability by preventing people from having this option it's still forcing humanity in a certain you know genetic direction so doing it as eugenics and not doing it is eugenics yeah it gets confusing so look the fear is understandable but we can't let that fear get in the way of treatments that could actually help people you know it's kind of like the talk that we hear about you know neurolink and brain implants you know on one side you have people who are talking about uh being able to download information from the internet or or you know telepathic communication and the privacy issues that come up around that but way before something like that happens we're going to be giving paralyzed and disabled people the ability to walk again if they choose to we're going to be giving voice to the non-verbal there's nothing bad about this same situation here i mean yes of course in the future people are going to be talking about using genetic editing to to you know make themselves look better give themselves physical attributes like removing myostatin so that you have big huge muscles i mean of course this could be abused but that same technology that could you know give a baby blonde hair could also be used to prevent dozens of congenital defects that cause incalculable human suffering and in fact why not let people alter their genes for cosmetic reasons people get cosmetic surgery all the time we don't consider that unethical you know we we tolerate a little bit of superficiality because that same technology can go towards burn victims and injuries you know it's a little weird when you think about it nobody bats an eye at correcting a cleft palate or a cleft lip with surgery but if you fix the gene that would prevent that in the first place then that's unethical and it's two steps away from gattaca i mean long term imagine a future where there are no degenerative diseases anymore imagine longer life spans no cancer risk at all and no drug side effects anymore you know we might even alter our bodies to better handle the extreme environment of space so we can shuffle off this planet in fact we may find that that's the only way that we can do so i guess i'm coming down on the side of let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater which is actually an app description because we are still in the baby stage of this this is very very early going on there's still a long way to go in fact going back to the beginning of this video huntington's disease there have been some experiments recently where they've been able to reverse huntington's disease in a lab with human cells but yeah considering the advancements we've seen in the last 15 years since the human genome project wrapped up i mean it actually gives me a lot of optimism for the future all right so let's get serious for a second we need to talk about your underwear no amount of genetic editing is going to fix that you need to step up your underwear game bro look in times like this you got to find enjoyment wherever you can so you might as well start downstairs so i've talked about mac weldon before mac weldon makes the single most comfortable underwear you are ever going to wear and i feel comfortable saying this because they actually designed their own fabric to be the most comfortable thing in the world they created a few different types of fabric actually you've got your dry net your air in it your warm knit they even have one called the silver series it's actually treated with silver so it's antimicrobial which means they remain odor free forever i bought some mac weldon boxer brace a couple years ago and it immediately became my 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 398,005

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: wecFFui6T54

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020