Gene Editing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[Music] science essentially math disguised as dinosaurs and outer space to try and seem interesting specifically the story concerns gene-editing it's a topic you may have heard about given it's now a plot point in action movies like rampage what's happening to my friend are you familiar with genetic editing changes will be incredibly unpredictable is he the only one oh you didn't know about the 30-foot wall [Music] wait a second wait just a second let me get this straight this is a movie about aerial military equipment being harnessed to fight a 30-foot wolf and it is not called Wolf Blitzer that is a huge boost opportunity that's movie malpractice there look gene-editing isn't only showing up in movie starring rock the Dwayne Johnson no it's also now constantly brought up on TV with with varying degrees of excitement or extreme alarm a stunning and controversial breakthrough in science has arrived gene-editing this is a milestone that could one day erase hereditary conditions some fear the technology could be used to create designer babies these technology has the potential to change our DNA and the DNA of all organisms alive and extinct could that lead to eugenics could that lead to new divides in humanity I don't know that stuff is that's just scary exactly it seems gene editing is either going to cure all disease or kill every last one of us and the truth is anytime there is a bold new technology people do tend to go nuts I'm guessing after the invention of the refrigerator there were a rash of headlines like can meat be too cold and what about the milkman America's friendly neighborhood we're done so tonight we thought we'd take some time to talk about gene editing what it is what its potential could be and what the chances are that we're all going to be killed by a 30-foot wolf and let's start with the fact that gene noticing actually isn't new there have been technologies like these around for years what is new and what is driving a lot of recent coverage is something called CRISPR which stands for crunchy rectums in sassy pink ray bats except it doesn't it stands for this but you won't remember that and you actually don't need to so let's go back to the crunchy wrexham thing CRISPR is very complicated but but one of the key scientists who unlocked its potential Jennifer Doudna has a simple way of explaining how it works I like to use the analogy of word processing because it's very analogous to that you think of the DNA code like the text of a document this is the scissors that allows you to cut out text change it the cell takes over after this after the DNA is broken and makes a precise change at the site of the repair right that is very basically it it's like cut and paste in Microsoft Word if there's something that you want to fix on a strand of DNA with CRISPR you could theoretically find it cut it out and paste in a fix at which point presumably Clippy shows up and says hi it looks like you're trying to play God and alter the basic building blocks of life these sapele Crispus potential is huge there are hopes that they might eventually be applied to more than 10,000 conditions from sickle cell anemia to cystic fibrosis to some cases of early onset Alzheimer's but gene editing is wildly difficult diseases typically have multiple genes that contribute to them and human trials have been extremely rare although there have been some promising results just months ago baby Layla was dying of acute lymphoblastic leukemia so doctors agreed to try out an experimental immuno cell therapy which had never been used outside the lab the result astounded her parents I took the gamble and this is her today standing laughing giggling and I'm the fact with a miracle that's fantastic and he's right it is a miracle except really think about it it's actually not it's science which I'd argue is actually better and more convenient than a miracle because you don't have to spend the next two thousand years worshiping the scientist you can just be like thanks amazing story for the most part applications of Gina acing have been confined to experiments on plants and animals where the results have been striking if often a little weird researchers at this lab used CRISPR to isolate and manipulate the beagles muscle or myostatin gene making these the most muscular beagles in the world okay okay all right so you might think it's strange that scientists mage act sexy beagles but did you ever even consider that the scientists were lady beetles change your preconceptions about what a scientist can be hashtag beagle feminism hashtag science it's not it's not just we've paid because scientists are researching ways to fight human diseases using mice and while scientists know how painstakingly slow this kind of research is it is tempting for the rest of us to start racing ahead and wildly speculating about where this is all going could CRISPR give us unicorns so there are examples of animals that have single horns in the middle so like the rhinoceros has one and its nose but there are other ancient rhinoceros I have it in the middle of the head so anyway I think that you could get a single horn on a horse by looking at horns and other species so it's in the realm of possibility yes okay so so I've gotta say judging by all the hedging he just did in that answer even if we do one day career at a unicorn it's clearly not going to be this majestic creature who wants you to follow it into a magic waterfall it'll be more like this a monster that would beg please kill me and this and this madness now in fact in fact for a good sense of the mismatch between expectation and current capabilities just look at a project that that scientist is working on right now bringing back the woolly mammoth it has been hyped in headlines all over the world but they are nowhere close to creating a living animal yet and even computer simulations are underwhelming in the lab they've edited about 35 functioning woolly mammoth genes into the Asian elephant genome this is a good start for making a semi woolly mammoth yeah that's not a woolly mammoth oh that's just a wrong elephant it's not so much Jurassic Park as an off-brand $3.00 petting zoo cause pet or whatever but if you watch the news you may have noticed that you're not just seeing professional scientists and that's because the underlying technology of CRISPR is so cheap and widely available almost anyone can use it so gene editing stories almost always feature a detour to meet bio hackers like Josiah Zana here in the Bay Area where visiting a bio hacker in his garage he's selling CRISPR kids DIY CRISPR kids for a couple of hundred dollars you can buy this cutting edge kit that allows you to use this technology and you don't need anything else you don't need a PhD and you could do experiments with CRISPR like that I think is really cool okay well sounds revolutionary but to be fair selling strangers things covered in unfamiliar DNA out of your garage already has a name and it's every single garage sale in human history I would like to buy your lamp please and then I'm going to take it home and wash it and look he's basically selling chemistry sets in the extent that they get people excited about science that's a good thing but you can see why scientists get frustrated when biohackers like designer hog all the media attention especially because he makes some pretty wild statements like I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos they're like I'm drunk I'm going to crispr myself which is a terrible idea honestly you shouldn't even get drunk and tattoo yourself however cool Robert Duvall's face covering your midriff seems at the time I'm just saying I have some regrets last October Xena even publicly injected himself with DNA that had been modified using CRISPR to try and give himself bigger muscles which did not work but in that same video he argued that using CRISPR should ideally be like downloading an app you don't have to know what the app does how to program it works anything like that and I think that's the way it should be with genetic engineering synthetic biology why can't people use this technology without necessarily completely knowing how it works oh I can answer that one for you because it could be dangerous and someone could get hurt also I refuse to take scientific insight from someone shooting vertical footage on an iPhone that is unforgivable that is disqualifying immediately and now says he regrets that experiment that kind of behavior is a real worry for serious scientists not just that a biohacker will hurt themselves but that doctors or scientists might rush a human application before it's ready things go wrong and the whole field is then set back yes that is exactly what happened to the field of gene therapy when a patient named Jesse Gail singer died during a poorly designed trial and that's not the only thing that scientists worry about because the benefits and the drawbacks of gene editing can extend well beyond one person and to understand why it helps to be familiar with a key distinction somatic cells are most of the cells in the body blood brain skin cells where the DNA doesn't get passed down to offspring germline edits involve sperm eggs or embryos basically changing the DNA of future generations exactly somatic cells die with you germline cells get passed down through generations so much of what you've seen so far tonight like baby Layla or Xena's muscle experiment involved somatic cells while germline cells are how my great-grandfather passed this nose down to me when he this bird great grandma feathers she loved bells germline editing could potentially do incredible things take malaria nearly half a million people each year die from it and it's spread by mosquitoes but gene editing could help stop that through something called a gene Drive scientists do this by inserting an artificial gene into the DNA of mosquito embryos that will make an increasing proportion of female offspring sterile the gene drive is embedded in the DNA to ensure the changes are inherited unlike natural evolution where chance is involved that's brilliant and it's honestly much simpler than my idea to fight malaria by just fitting millions of mosquitoes with tiny condoms but but the moment you cross into germline editing the ramifications can seriously increase because messing with any ecosystem can have unintended consequences this has always been true even before gene editing and my favorite example of this comes from Australia we're about a hundred cane toads were introduced in the 1930s to control the cane beetle for the record they didn't do that what they did do was multiply to hundreds of millions of cane toads and wreak absolute havoc Australians hate these things there was even a documentary made about them featuring a guy who made it his life's work to run over as many as he could well line them up with the driver's side front wheel but I seem to be able to get most of the ones I line up on the right hand side of the road well I really go out of my way to run over cane toads basically because I have a very profound love of the wildlife that occurs here naturally if it was possible to remove them and totally eradicate in Australia and I was capable of doing it I would spend a lifetime doing exactly there Wow that guy is in for an unpleasant surprise when he gets to the pearly gates and finds out that God is an Australian Kato so you'd like to get into heaven huh why don't we go ahead and take a look at the types the point is ecosystems are very delicate which is why you need to be extremely careful and a good example of someone taking that sort of care with gene-editing can be seen in a project being considered on Nantucket Island as a way to fight Lyme disease you see Lyme disease is passed from ticks to humans but before that can happen it goes from mice to ticks now typically the way that works is like this and mouse goes through a tough breakup it was a relationship the mouse didn't want to end and leaves it seriously questioning itself worth the mouse mouse goes on a series of rebound dates that only deepen the disillusionment could anyone love me the mouse wanders despondent the mouse turns to alcohol to numb the pain while drunk it comes across a tinder profile of a tick first then the mouse is disgusted but then it's actually intrigued oh god it thinks am I really going to a tick the mouse goes on the date thinking it's just a date we're just talking but the mouse is lying to itself because as soon as the tick says maybe we should go someplace quiet where we can talk BAM they're banging in the shower I dunno afterwards the mouse feels strangely satisfied it feels desirable again as for the ticket can't wait to brag to its friends that it just a mouse and they both forget all about the encounter until eight months later when the tick gets a call bad news you got Lyme disease and that is how Lyme disease spreads from mice to ticks sometimes other times the tick bites the mouse anyway the point it took to prevent the spread of lung disease a biologist named Kevin s belt is considering introducing genetically edited mice that cannot pass the disease to ticks and he would do this with a ton of caution testing it on an uninhabited island where the experiment will be contained and it would only go forward on Nantucket if he got the buy-in of the local community and even with all those safeguards he's aware of the uncertainty although Kevin s Pelt is confident his engineered mice will only reduce Lyme disease and not bring harm to Nantucket's ecosystem he also knows that absolute certainty and genetic engineering do not go together I worry every day that I might be missing something profound about the consequences of what we're developing good I'm glad you do because that is the kind of caution that you want from someone in his position he clearly doesn't want to end up in a limerick that goes there once was a man from Nantucket who gathered some mice in the bucket he altered those mice engineered with a splice and now all of the seagulls are dead and look there are just practical considerations to germline editing there are huge moral questions too particularly when it comes to humans because it raises the possibility that gene editing could one day be used not just to fight disease but for so-called enhancement which sells you into some pretty dicey territory even Jennifer Doudna one of the pioneers of CRISPR sees the danger of this here she is telling the story of a dream that she once had that was pretty on the nose I walked into a room and a colleague of mine said to me Jennifer I'd like you to explain the CRISPR technology to a friend and he brought me into a room and the person was sitting with their back to me and as they turned around I realized was sort of a horror horror that it was it was Hitler and it was actually Hitler with a sort of a pig nose and it almost looked like a chimeric pig human sort of sort of creature it's true she had a dream about pink Hitler wanting to learn more about CRISPR an ethical reservations aside she might also want to examine why her subconscious thinks that one of her colleagues is just casually friends with Hitler and look clearly the more control people have over the ability to design their children the bigger the moral questions that raises up to and including who decides what constitutes a genetic problem that needs to be fixed is deafness and disease many in the deaf community would say it is not is dwarfism a disease and he would say not the idea that we're all sick that we're suffering that I suffer from dwarfism no I live with dwarfism I've lived with dwarfism for 39 years I'm proud to be a second-generation raising a third generation of people living with dwarfism I don't suffer I suffer from how society treats me exactly and there are many groups who could justifiably worry that the thing that makes them unique or different could come to be seen as flaws to be corrected and eugenics is a word that rightly terrifies people it's why it was such a mistake for Eugene Levy to make that the title of his autobiography it's a shame it's a shame it was a lovely book as some great Catherine O'Hara anecdotes were that that title really dusted you off now here here is the thing germline edited designer CRISPR babies are still a distant hypothetical no human has been born that has had its germline edited yet and many countries have bans or restrictions on that but one place with very few restrictions is China which in general seems eager to push the limits of gene editing and one of the scientists working at that jack'd beagle lab seems to brush off certain ethical issues the CRISPR allows humans it puts so much power into our hands it allows us to shape our world in ways never before imagined and there are many people in the US who think well that's no that's not for us to do that's that's for a higher power that's for God alright so the idea that we could the role of God makes a lot of people nervous mmm okay well that guy seems a little bit blase about gene-editing technology which is kind of surprising in a country whose president as you may remember from our show about China is a honey eating talking bear that's the resemblance is frightened I can't I don't know which is which and look and look my point here in showing you all of this isn't to frighten you that there is a lot to be legitimately excited about here gene-editing has the potential to alleviate a great deal of human suffering but reaching that potential will require careful time-consuming research the science involved is much more complicated than we've had time to get into tonight mainly because we needed to make space for that long story about a tick your mouse and I emphatically stand by that decision but but well but while that research is progressing we need to figure out how to balance the risks and potential rewards of gene editing which is going to be tricky because everything that's being done tends to get mixed together a meticulous professional scientists with freewheeling biohackers like this guy practical applications with wild theories best-case scenarios like ending malaria with catastrophic prophecies of 30-foot wolves but but we are going to need to sort out at some point where lines should be drawn because while Gina doesn't could do incredible things for our health let's at the very least in future try and avoid a future where we end up swerving all over the road try to run over all of the pig Hitler's that we accidentally created

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 9,306,930

Rating: 4.8407164 out of 5

Keywords: last week tonight gene editing, john oliver gene editing

Id: AJm8PeWkiEU

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/haidere36]

Unicorns? Designer babies? Nobody's talking about the most radical possibility yet...

Human-corns

[u/Khenshin]

Anyone kind of annoyed by the woman with dwarfism? I understand trying to not let your disability define you, but as a person with muscular dystrophy, I wouldn't hesitate in being able to remove my disability, and especially if I had any children. My particular disability is a relatively simple thing to live with compared to others, but even I would jump at the chance of not having to live with it, perhaps I am missing something or being ignorant regarding this, but to me it would be such an obvious good for people not to have to live with these types of problems throughout their lives.

[u/BillDStrong]

I would like to point out, the Chinese guy could just as easily be laughing about the notion of God, not the seriousness. Keep in mind the Chinese Government is bent on eliminating religions of any sort on the grounds they are a destabalising factor for society. And other religious figures such as Buddha wouldn't really have much to say about the editing, as he isn't the overarching designer of life in their mythos.

[u/Last_Aeon]

One thing he didn’t mention is the power to modify crop’s genetics.

It could save ton of space, spare tons of land from environmental destruction, and tons more.

Modifying bacteria to digest plastic seems fun too(until they get out of control :v)

[u/OgdruJahad]

I think John's jokes hit pretty well with this video. Also I don't think I can get the image of a tick fucking a mouse in the shower out of my head.

[u/[deleted]]

Just need to colonize space, giant mechs, and segregate the gene altered coordinators and the un-altered naturals humans.

"For the preservation of our blue and pure world!"

[u/aurelorba]

My post to r/lastweektonight

I think designer babies are pretty much inevitable. It portends a real division between the haves with all their genes tweeked to 11, and the have-nots condemned to suffer.

Think Elysium, Brave New World.

Of course there will be 'oopsies' where what seemed like a good gene modification idea goes wrong even though we were assured nothing could possibli go wrong.

[u/BoogsterSU2]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver will non-genetically return in 4 weeks on July 29th.

Segment	Title	Description
1	Killing Teen Slang	John Oliver got #woke after seeing Trump Jr. tweeting a #hip thing about Justice Anthony Kennedy retiring from the #lit Supreme Court. It's so #werpt!
2	Replacing Anthony Kennedy	Speaking of which, who IS gonna replace Justice Anthony Kennedy? Will the Supreme Court be the most Conservative in US history? Pretty much all of Trump's picks are from the ultra-Conservative "Federalist Society." Also, Mitch McConnell couldn't give a FLYING FUCK about fairness OR consistency!
3	Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR	Relevant video

[u/IsntUnderYourBed]

Is there a UK mirror available?