Mindscape 112 | Fyodor Urnov on Gene Editing, CRISPR, and Human Engineering

hello everyone welcome to the mindscape podcast i'm your host sean carroll and i'm sure that you've all heard the excitement the worries the news overall over the last few years about gene editing the possibility of editing human genes at a very detailed level not to mention plant and animal genes of course today's gasfidor ornov is actually not just one of the world's experts he coined the term gene editing and he's been active in the field since the beginning so he knows what he's talking about and i know that as well as prospects for curing diseases and stuff like that there are worries about you know it would be good to cure diseases using gene editing but what if someone made super soldiers and they became bad like the red skull instead of good like captain america wouldn't that be bad so at the end of the this interview i asked theodore i said you know as responsible as we might want to be as scientists as countries as international regulatory agencies isn't it coming to the point where this is almost too easy and almost anyone will be able to do gene editing and make designer babies in their basements or their bedrooms as it were and his answer was a little bit surprising he said absolutely it's gonna happen uh and that's a little bit of a wake-up call you know it is kind of easy to play around with the human genome and we're gonna have to deal with that in one way or the other this all this stuff came about over just the last 10 years or even five years uh with a wonderful little gizmo called crisper cass which you've probably heard about crispr cas9 uh jennifer dudena emmanuel charpentier and other researchers figured out how to basically borrow a mechanism that had already been invented by biology right this is something that exists in bacteria in order to fight off viruses so the crispr cas9 system can recognize a bad virus and then go in and attack and neutralize it and the way that it neutralizes it is by snipping its dna and either just tearing it apart or by inserting something to make it not so bad so the human beings realized oh my goodness bacteria have already figured out how to do this we can use their technology and adapt it to our own needs so it's no doubt that we are at the beginning the very dawn of the gene editing era there's no doubt this will be very very good for a lot of reasons there's no doubt this is going to be scary and new for a lot of reasons so i thought it'd be a lot of fun to talk to someone who's been there before the crispr cast 9 revolution and is still there working at the front lines on both what gene editing is how it works and what it's going to mean for us in the years to come so this is a great conversation with theodor ornov let me just quickly mention also before we start that this podcast is being released the day before the paperback release of my book something deeply hidden so if any of you out there are on the one hand paperback book readers and on the other hand not yet enthusiastic enough to have purchased the hard copy the hardback version rather of uh it's still a hard copy if you get the paperback version the hardback version of something deeply hidden and you want to know about quantum mechanics many worlds and some of the interesting ideas going on in physics with emergent space time and stuff like that be sure to rush out to your local or virtual bookstore and pick up a copy of something deeply hidden i will appreciate it the universe will appreciate it and with that let's go [Music] peter ornoff welcome to the mindscape podcast thank you for having me i'll actually give you a special welcome because uh i've noticed that the past few months it's not been easy to get biologists especially molecular cell biologists onto the show they're they're somehow uh their attention is being absorbed by something else by this weird virus that is sweeping the world so uh are you one of these people whose attention has been diverted from your regular work or have you sort of stubbornly pressed forward with your basic research even in the middle of the pandemic i have been swept away by a tsunami known as the pandemic and as i look around my professional life none of the objects so familiar to me which is my beloved crisper cast which is the the protein that we use to genetic do genetic engineering um and the the human cells that i do genetic engineering on whether they happen to be blood stem cells or lung cells or brain cells none of them are around me instead i'm surrounded by uh snot and spit there is no way to say it except to say it because those are the two types of specimens or as physicians say clinical matrices that we use to test individuals for virus and in fact for the past four and a half months i'd say 99.73 of my life has been devoted to that and productively so do you think that the uh the skill set that you had coming in has been uh well calibrated for the challenges of this you know if you'd asked me 35 years ago when i first walked into a freshman year biology class would there ever be a chance that the types of things you're going to learn would have a real world impact on clinical care i'd say probably not because as many of my peers i signed up to be a research scientist in biology because i love the natural world i think living systems are the most amazing thing out there although i suspect as a physicist you might politely disagree but we're ecumenical here at the mindscape podcast don't worry [Laughter] and i thought i would spend the entirety of my life in the beautiful ivory tower of academia studying fondly my esoteric basic science question the what happened was one divided by that um 20 years ago i had the good fortune of joining a biotech where i then spent 15 years developing ways to genetically engineer people to treat disease which is not exactly ivory tower and then two years ago when i joined the faculty here at berkeley i did so to continue that work on trying to use genetic engineering to treat disease and then of course the pandemic hit in it's kind of amazing to me that the the central tool that the nation and the world needs so desperately to deal with the pandemic which is testing do you or do you not have the virus that the mechanics under the hood of what it takes to answer that question are actually taught to every single phd in my field which is molecular cell biology in the first month of them joining the lab and again if you if you walk around here at berkeley and ask the first year graduate student do you think that whatever you're learning will be used for clinical care not many of them will say oh absolutely but it happens to be the case that the elementary skill sets of testing for the virus are the same elementary skill sets that i learned oh my goodness in late september 1990 when i was a first year graduate student at brown yeah and it seems literally it's literally in the last century and yet the the fundamental mechanics of how one diagnosis an individual to have the virus rely on i guess decades-old techniques which are tried and true oh that's actually good to know i mean i i it makes me think that if ever the world comes into a state where my skill set is called upon to help in some tangible way we're in really big trouble much bigger trouble even though we are now so glad to hear the biologists i am just visualizing this gathering of some uh legislative body that says yes at this point we need a cohort of theoretical physicists it did happen in the manhattan project but it's different now yeah i i by the way of course i'm joking one of one of the truly remarkable things about what you do and what i do is the relevance and the resonance is unpredictable like yeah i think most people don't know that the gps on their phones uh works on einstein's uh theory of relativity right yeah absolutely yeah absolutely and just but i mean no i i swear to you that dude that the majority of people who'd use that just don't don't who use gps just don't think about that similarly i think most people who get diagnosed who get tested for the virus they don't really think about the mechanics and the fact that the mechanics of the testing have to do with really foundational tools of my field which is molecular biology that have been developed over the past 50 years right it's just not something that's in the headlines daily and yet here we are basic biologists used to sitting in our with our test tubes and ourselves in isolation of a laboratory um finding ourselves in the in the in the minds of the public like i i i say to people oh you know rna extraction and lay people ask me oh do you do that qpcr thing or do you do something else and i go well i never thought that the word qpcr would be used which stands for quantitative polymerase chain reaction by the way uh would be ever would ever emerge in a layperson conversation yet here we are well this is a good segue because what i actually want to do is get into crispr and gene editing and then we can see if that circles us back to fighting viruses and so forth so uh for we take it that our audience knows what dna is that our genetic information is stored in dna and also probably most people out there have this feeling that there's been this revolution in the past few years in terms of editing the dna with this crispr cass stuff so maybe you can just tell us you're one of the world's experts what is crispr what does it go around crisping and what are we going to use it for oh my goodness you can skip what are we going to we'll get there we'll get there later what is it how does it work let's put it that way so so asking me about crispr is a bit like asking a koala what it thinks about eucalyptus leaves i could go on and on and on the reason that we coined the term gene editing as an umbrella phrase to describe ways of precise genetic engineering is by explicit analogy to word processing both crispr and the technologies that preceded it which accomplished the same thing due to the human genetic code or as it happens to the genetic code of a cow or to the genetic code of a maze plant and i use these three examples deliberately because these are living things that have been genetically edited or crispered this technique does to the dna of a corn plant a cow or a human precisely what your favorite word processor would do to text you open um a narrative a document on your computer screen you use your mouse to click on a bit of text and then you type on your keyboard whatever desired edit you wish and so i'm delighted that this term gene editing that my colleagues and i came up with 15 years ago is universally adopted and in fact people talk about gene edit gene edited organisms or we introduce this edit into a human cell precisely in the way that people describe introducing an edit into a document that was our explicit goal and i guess we succeeded but i think that maybe people take that analogy too literally uh you know they have the idea that you're just laying out the dna on a slab and then you go and copy and paste something like that i mean the messy biology of it is a bit more uh intricate um that would be the understatement of the year i i i think what was einstein's favorite phrase everything should be made as simple as possible but not necessarily simpler yes so in in telling you how gene editing broadly and how crispr specifically works i really need to carefully walk that line to not not in not oversimplify i think a good place to start is by saying the following human dna is very long you know your audience is doubtless familiar with the number 6.6 times 10 to the 9th letters of genetic code is what it takes to build a human being now a good way to think about how long that is is as follows if you read the genetic code one letter at a time a c t g once one second at a time it'll take you a century to read the entire human genome so first the human genome is very long this is also true of the cow and this is also true for core second with the exception of microbes like really small things that move around and leave their little independent lives most living systems don't like their dna changed in any way at all and this is because dna is you know essentially the the storage document for who who they are yeah and mother nature protects the integrity of the genetic material so and you you can see how extraordinary this repair machinery is if you look at folks who have um the misfortune of not having the machinery to repair damage so for example there are folks with rare diseases who cannot tolerate sunlight because um they don't have the right machinery to fix damage to the dna and they need to wear you know sunscreen spf 10000 right and in fact they sell they near never venture out into the daylight they have to basically be active at night so not only does our does our dna refuse to be changed our dna has a large number of molecular machines that literally babysit it and if something damages it and what are kind what are the kinds of things that damage dna so i mentioned sunlight so uv rays create a particular kind of damage chemicals can damage can damage dna so for example you know the reason smoking causes cancer is it has a chemical which physically damages the dna and the repair machinery doesn't get to it in time and you get you get genetic changes that cause cancer the the other type of damage that our dna gets all the time and this is the most interesting one for people who want to understand how gene editing works is is actually the most drastic one which is literally taking scissors and cutting the familiar double-stranded helix into two so if you think about the two the two individual strands of dna winding around each other in that beautiful double helix now imagine taking scissors and literally cutting that thing so that you have now where you had two double helixes one double helix you now have two so this is the type of damage that occurs um spontaneously just human cells just going about their business sometimes the dna just breaks um humans most often experience it in fact at the doctor's office so when you get a chest x-ray i guess i suppose an assay that's really important right now given the pandemic or when you go to the dentist to get the dental x-ray um the the the rays hit your dna and your dna i don't want to make your audience squirm with fear next time they're in the dentist chair uh other than for anticipation i don't know there's no we don't need additional reasons to not want to go to the dentist but bottom line is that the the x-rays that are used to take a picture of your teeth and of your mouth damage the dna every every bit of dna they encounter by by basically cutting it and the reason this this break is so dangerous is we've all learned about chromosomes we have uh 46 of them 23 pairs one from mom one from dad for each one and we we've all learned and forgotten in high school about mitosis this beautiful process where when a cell needs to divide it makes a copy of all the chromosomes and one copy goes to the cell on the left one copy goes to the cell on the right now can you imagine if if one of these chromosomes has a break this means that during cell division that broken piece will just be left behind and that means losing all the genes that are on that broken off piece and that the overwhelming majority of the time is genetic is a genetic loss that human cells cannot tolerate you can't just get rid of human genes left and right now you can get rid of some but the notion that there would be a break on one of the chromosomes such that an entire chunk of it just gets lost that's incompatible with forget human beings being alive it's incompatible with human cells being alive but people should still go to the dentist because the reason that x-rays whether of a chest or of your oral cavity or that your exposure to ionizing radiation from the sun when you take a commercial flight again not many people are flying these days but back when they used to the the sun will emit rays and it will hit your dna and your dna will be broken into pieces so mother nature has evolved a machine to rapidly heal the break and i'll speak more to this machine in a second except i think it's really important to appreciate how ancient the machine is you know life on earth is what 4.5 billion years old 3.5 you know whatever the number um the machinery that heals the brakes is one of the oldest molecular machines we know so to give you just to give you a representative example budding yeast the tiny yeasties that give us bread and wine and beer and humans their machinery for repairing that kind of damage is so similar that biologists who study that repair machinery in human cells use the exact same nomenclature for the bits and pieces of it as the biologists who study yeast and one thing your audience may not know about experimental biologists is they would rather use each other's toothbrushes than use each other's nomenclature so when people who study human biology use the same gene names as the people who study yeast that is really to acknowledge the majesty of mother nature as having evolved something a very long time ago hundreds and hundreds of million years ago and then preserving it okay so so far we've spent a number of minutes discussing the fact that when our dna is broken um well you know it just gets fixed and what does that have to do with genetic engineering yeah so at this point um and one of the themes i'd love to return to a couple of times as i share with you and your audience the marvelous thing that's gene editing is how often in the let's think about this year old scientific history of gene editing and because that's when gene editing really began it began in 1994 1995 in the laboratory of a scientist at memorial sloan kettering in new york named marie jason and she's actually still there and leads the field and she's absolutely wonderful and in that in the 25 year history of developing gene editing as a tool one of the things we've consistently marveled is how many of the discoveries that have given us remarkable recent advances in gene editing so for example there was recently a person her name is victoria gray and she was comfortable disclosing publicly that she is a a subject that's a strong word to use and that's a technical word in the world of clinical trials to describe a human being who has consented to participate in in a clinical trial of an experimental therapeutic and so she's the subject on the clinical trial to do gene editing for sickle cell disease which she has she got gene edited i think about a year ago when she no longer has sickle cell disease which is kind of astonishing so crispr in seven years went from being uh in eight years i guess history 2020 time flies my goodness in eight years from when jennifer doudna here on the berkeley campus discovered how crispr works we went in just eight years from the discovery to a cure but jennifer doudna's work was focused on fundamental biology she wasn't trying to build and she herself widely acknowledges he was not trying to build a gene editor to treat sickle she's just a curious scientist fascinated by how mother nature works similarly the beginnings of geneticity emerged out of a fundamental curiosity that people had about how do human cells repair damage let me pause for a moment to recommend the great courses plus this is a streaming service that gives you instant access to a wide variety of high-level courses so that you can learn about things in the privacy of your own home at your convenience i love the fact that there's such a wide variety of topics being explored from oceanography to history to philosophy to food and wine and music for example there's one interesting course i came across on digital media literacy it's simply called fighting misinformation so it's a great courses level introduction to how to be a smarter consumer of what you read about and find online the great courses plus is great because it's really convenient you can watch it on your computer you can listen to it it can be on your mobile device on your tv with your family or what have you now is the perfect time to sign up for the great courses plus because mindscape listeners can get a free trial today if they go to this special url the greatcoursesplus.com mindscape that's t-h-e great courses plus dot com slash mindscape and so what emerged by the way it's going to get a little bit technical but you have my word it's technical of the good kind where i'm hopeful that at the end of this of the 60 seconds is going to take me to dive into this rabbit hole of technicality you will go oh yeah okay that makes sense we love it that's why we're basically good so there are basically two ways to repair a broken chromosome the first one is the most logical one you just put the dna back together in them so that pathway is called rather you know not creatively that's called end joining again we could have found a style a more stylish name but there you have it and one of the things that's remarkable about it is sometimes when mother nature puts the two ends back together again she loses a letter or two why well you know mother nature has reasoned that quote unquote only five percent of human dna is actually coding for genes and that means that only five percent of the breaks will happen um in areas of sort of in areas of the genome that make proteins that make you and i and thus you know what one in 20 is okay furthermore it's not that every time a break happens mother nature makes a mistake it's just that she makes the mistakes some of the time and that is one the first key tool in the gene editors toolbox is the ability to cut a gene of interest and the two examples i will give you are ones that actually are in the clinic right now one is to cut a gene that makes humans susceptible to hiv and the other one is to cut a gene that prevents this is where it's going to get fun that prevents the production of a desired form of hemoglobin and in both cases you can imagine a second where if you cut a gene that hiv needs to replicate or if you cut a gene that prevents the production of a healthy hemoglobin you could immediately see why that could be potentially clinically useful right you could take a person with hiv get rid of that gene and maybe the virus will stop doing what it does or you can take a human being with sickle cell disease somebody who cannot make normal globe hemoglobin cut that other gene and you know mother nature will start making the normal hemoglobin and i wouldn't be dragging you through all of these technicalities if that hadn't been done and if that hadn't actually worked on living people not in a you know one of those science fiction novels i i once uh typed the word crispr on amazon by mistake i was going to search the literature and i was just so ups um i was i was trying to buy a book for my kid and i typed crispr as a as a by newtonian inertia in this birchbox and the first thing that came out on amazon is is a novel called crispr the apocalypse sure someone's going to write that book you know once it's out there it's going to happen uh you know i i i recommend against it because the the tagline goes uh a dramatic novel of planetary disaster uh driven by brilliant scientists and maniacal russians i'm not making this up and so jennifer dowd i told jennifer doudou when i saw this that you know it goes brilliant scientists as maniacal russians i said that between her and i we have the two positions covered there you go but so far we're just we're just cutting dna right i mean my impression is we can insert also oh we're getting straight to that so but when the dna is cut it doesn't just shred it comes back together again but you gain or lose a few letters and it turns out because of the way genes work because of the way the genetic code works if you gain or lose one or two letters in a gene that actually kills the gene now your readers will your audience will remember from high school biology that the genetic the the elementary word of the genetic code is is a group of three for example the word a t g is a word in the genetic code and it says start the word taa in the genetic code is a word and it says stop and the the letter the word t t t in the genetic code is a word that says please insert the amino acid phenylalanine um um and so you know i'm not going to recite the genetic code because that's a fantastic way to put people to sleep um but that means that if you lose three letters you're still okay you're still okay because you've just script a word and the text still makes sense for example you know to be or not to be that is question whether it is nobler you know we just lost the word the but it's still intelligible whereas in genetic text which is read as a continuous string if you gain or lose just a letter or two everything after the mistake is gibberish right scientists call this a frame shift which means an inability to correctly interpret where the genetic text starts and ends its words so this ability to break a gene or get rid of a gene by cutting it and then letting mother nature somewhat error prone and joining process give you a what's called a gene knockout is actually really useful clinically i mentioned to you this business about hiv and sickle cell disease it's useful for agriculture so for example the first genetically engineered gene edited crop that will be marketed in the united states not gmo gmos have been on the market since the 90s and as your audience knows more than 90 percent of corn cotton and soybean grown in the united states are actually old-school transgenic gmos no this is a genetic crop and the first gene edited crop will be corn it will be waxy and it will be used for the production of starch and it will not be an insertion or a precise repair of mutation it will be actually such a gene knockout so that's the story of knockout ranging from corn that has desired properties for making of torch two human beings being gene edited to deal with their hiv or sickle cell disease there's one other tool in the arm in the armamentarium of a gene editor and that's the ability to repair mutations and if you want to be so ambitious to insert larger stretches of genetic text so how does that work well i i'm going to have to ask you and the audience to step back yet again to the fundamental biology of how mother nature deals with these rather dangerous breaks right we talked about the fact that the simplest thing to do is just put the two ends back together again and march on mother nature is concerned in fact about precisely the gain or loss of genetic information so she evolved a separate way to heal the brakes which is achieves the same effect the the break is healed but how is magnificently different and this is one of those things well well i should say that podcasts are one of my favorite things because i can bring them with me wherever i am this is one of those where i wish i could magically pop out of your audience's podcast uh device and start waving my hands in the air because this is one of those picture worth a thousand words kinds of things but let me do my best the other way to repair a break is to find an unbroken identical dna molecule and literally do a control c control v right copy paste the missing genetic information from an unbroken intact normal template now where on earth does mother nature have an unbroken intact template well actually many of your cells currently have such a template and in fact um your skin cells your your bone marrow cells your the lining of your intestine and your mouth any time cells divide they have to copy the dna and therefore every time mother nature copies one of your chromosomes it makes an identical copy and i should say in one of those ways in which geneticists have come up with nomenclature that is the bane of existence of all pre-medical students on planet earth is that identical copy of dna is not called a twin which would be logical it's called a sister i can explain why it's one of those terms that really should be retired but never will we just have to live with it okay so yes in all our cells that divide every piece of dna is flanked by an identical copy which unfortunately is called a sister so mother nature evolved this beautiful pathway where if one chromosome is broken that broken end literally it's very sweet it's actually it's kind of warm and fuzzy it there's this little broken end and it searches it truly performs a search like waving its little molecular hand around can somebody help me and what's it searching for it is searching for a molecule a dna molecule of identical sequence and when it finds it it automatically assumes that it is the sister molecule that is its kin it's identical and mother nature then evolved a way to copy paste the information at the break from the sister chromosome into the broken one and heal the rib heal the break i know that's a lot to take in so i'll just recap one chromosome was broken the broken end starts to search for something in its molecular neighborhood that is identical in sequence typically it's what's called a sister chromatid which is identical it copies the missing information from the sister into itself and life can continue yeah so what in heaven's name does that have to do with gene editing much to everyone's surprise and as discovered by a number of people actually studying little budding yeast and then this discovery was expanded to human cells you can fool mother nature now you can't fool her all the time but sometimes you do so when with spectacular results what you can do is this take a chromosome and break it and we can we can we will speak in a second as to how you actually do that what are those molecular scissors normally that break would be either repaired by putting the ends back together which is fine not nothing we can do about that or alternatively it will be repaired by trying to reach out to the sister and saying listen lend me a helping hand here i need i'd like some missing genetic information so it was discovered that you can basically stick inside a yeast cell or a human cell a bunch of dna that is identical in dna that you have made in the lab so this is if this if this is the part where your audience hears the laughter of a maniacal scientist going you know it is alive this would be a good time to evoke the stereotype um nobody ever said it is alive in fact most of us in fact all of us who work at the bench are quite quite silent because we focus on what we're doing so we don't you know rip rip our lab coats off and run around the streets of berkeley saying eureka when you break a chromosome in a in a precise location and then put inside the cell a piece of dna that is identical to the broken stretch but you make a tiny change you literally change one letter mother nature will not notice and will copy paste that change into the chromosome it's amazing that this works but it does and astonishingly well so and i'll just give you some numbers which are kind of amazing um scientists have performed this process on human blood stem cells these are the cells that make red blood cells white blood cells platelets so inside your bone marrow inside inside the bones that form your pelvis or inside the the largest um bone of your of your one of the largest bones in your body which is i think the humerus there's a cavity and inside the cavities is the famous stem cell which which makes all the blood blood blood stem cells that circle around you and keep you alive you know people have shown that you can take a bunch of cells like that and make a break and then provide a a decoy a trojan horse a repair template that places a new piece of genetic information into the chromosome and literally half the cells politely acquire that new genetic change well so i want to give you this number this is this is important i want to sort of dig in on this because this is what is confusing to me so um we're imagining that this is a potentially grown up adult organism and it's not that you have to go in uh with a microscope and look at every single one of their cells and edit it you can insert an edit and it will spread through at least many of the other cells is that right yes and it gets even better to some extent we can control how this spreads now i want to be clear what it is that is spreading it is not the case although that would be kind of amazing if a genetically edited cell starts to say to its neighbors guess what i've been gene edited do you want some of my dna no that's not what happened although that would be kind of astonishing but by the way i should say that there are examples in biology like that bacteria do that all the time but human cells normally do not share dna with each other instead what spreads is the gene editor itself which as i'm about to explain is this tiny molecular machine that we engineer in the lab and then we stick it inside the cells and we can we have two ways of doing that if you want to gene edit an organ such as the eye or the liver you actually have to inject the gene editor into the body typically that's done by enveloping the editor in a virus and this is just before people right now saying that you're going to inject people with a virus is not exactly what is what to say you're not going to get big bugs asking for that right it's a bit like saying during a plague would you like some rats no we do not want more rats um so no this is a very different virus it's not stars cov2 it's innocuous and furthermore it's made even more innocuous by gutting it of whatever it had and replacing its insides with the gene editor so what you basically do for the eye is you inject the virus into the eye and it goes and enters the cells or for the liver you inject the virus directly into the bloodstream and the virus homes to the liver and infects the liver cells and delivers the gene editor and both of these things are being done clinically right now for congenital blindness and for hemophilia respectively so i'm deliberately not using hypothetical examples there are gene edited people on the planet who have been treated using this approach and is the stuff that you're editing into the genes um stuff that you get from a healthy cell or are there gene programmers uh actually writing the gctas in the correct order to get something new the sky is the limit i can tell you what's happening now and what we'd like to do so for now um the genetic engineering of cells um organs in in living humans so whether you engineer the eye or the liver and just to give you a sense of what's on the horizon i think the next genetic engineering will be for muscular dystrophy so it will be the muscle and then people are very excited about applying gene editing to the lung in all those cases what's being done is either repair of a mutation that causes disease or the addition of a normal healthy human gene that corrects the defect in a natural gene so there is no quote unquote genetic augmentation or genetic embellishment right having said that and here's you know this is where it gets fun in fact one of the earliest and biggest success stories not in gene editing but in the bigger field of human genetic engineering was in fact precisely in such genetic augmentation now genetic engineering of people started in 1989 so started a pretty pretty it's pretty remarkable it's 13 years old and it started not by precise editing you know here's a gene here let's fix letter number four it started by just inserting genes using viruses and there are many reasons why one can do that but the most remarkable one that's currently not just widely practiced but it's enough there are two approved medicines in that class is something called cancer immunotherapy and the basic idea that emerged in the late 90s early 2000s was you could cause the body's own immune system to attack the cancer and the way that's done is you engineer a molecule this is literally laboratory engineering you engineer a molecule that will cause your immune system cell to attack the cancer cell then you take the immune system cells out you stick a gene that encodes or specifies the production of of that new molecule you put the cells back in and lo and behold the cells now re-routed or reprogrammed i know those are big words reprogrammed well i mean there is a lot of imagery associated with yours people think people think gothica people think whatever they saw on instagram and you know one has to be careful with language because you know words have meaning so i i'm always very mindful to not say things like you know this is why i think partly why we invented the word gene editing because we wanted to contrast it with you know good old gmos because the i don't think right i i think the damage that has been done by the publicity around gmos i i think is never going to be repaired i think we're just stuck with that um they're they're they're actually safe but the public will never accept that fact so you know we just have to move on but the big point that you seem to be making about the use of gene editing for fighting diseases is in some way you're giving the body the resources that it needs to fight it in a very natural biological way correct so for example our ability to fight hiv by getting rid of that ccr5 gene that's the name of the gene is based on a discovery made here in the san francisco bay area during the the tragedy of the uh of the aids pandemic when uh physicians discovered here in san francisco actually that there are folks whose partners had succumbed to aids and these folks reported having unprotected sex with them and yet were virus free and when their dna was steady they turned out to be naturally lacking that gene and that told physicians first of all that you can lose that gene without any overt symptoms and second that if you get rid of that gene you could potentially protect a person from hiv so natural genetic variation or transferring genetic variation naturally from one person to another became a therapeutic modality similarly for the sickle cell disease treatment strategy that was used to treat as best as we can tell cure victoria grade there are people who have this natural variant of this gene it's basically a reduced form reduced function of that gene that really make normal globin and it was the transfer of that natural variation from those people to people with the disease that is currently being practiced so yes you're exactly right this is moving natural variance from one person to another and is this i mean how optimistic can we let ourselves be about you know the fight against cancer and the dramatic side or even just like allergies hay fever on the less dramatic side are are we gonna be able to wipe these out someday i know that predicting time scales is always hard but is that a realistic target so i can tell you what's gonna happen in the next five to ten years okay and at that point we we completely fall off the cliff of yogi berry you know it's it's hard to make predictions especially about the future yeah and the reason i say this is if you know if the if the history of science and biology my field of the past three decades teaches us anything is never underestimate the remarkable things that scientists can discover that mother nature gives us you know if you if you had told me 10 years ago when we were doing gene editing with first generation tools that there is a scientist at berkeley who will discover a molecular machine that will comes from bacteria that will use rna to find its way to human genes and will cure sickle cell disease i would i would um probably ask for you to get some health with help with your mental health right and i would be egregiously wrong because that's exactly what happened so super hard to extrapolate beyond 10 years because we don't know what technologies will will show up but here's what's going to happen in the next five to 10. there absolutely will be dramatic advancements in the treatment of certain forms of cancer using this approach so certain previously incurable cancers are now curable a lot of people are working on the application of gene editing of the human immune system to eradicate more challenging cancers there's early stage progress a lot of work remains but i am completely convinced that the next five to ten years we'll see more cures when i know cure is a big word um the other one is certain forms of genetic disease so the particular ones that i'm thinking about are sickle cell disease which is remarkable there is a hundred thousand americans suffering from it it's a terrible disease hemophilia uh you know one in one in five to ten thousand uh boys born um in in the united states for example have hemophilia disorder and blood clotting i think those two we can we can realistically expect for the public health burden of those diseases uh and on the folks who have the disease will be dramatically reduced i think my other biggest area of excitement for this technology is actually the treatment of pain okay so there are there are forms of you know as the tragedy of the fact that tens and tens of thousands of our fellow americans have died um due to overdoses from um synthetic painkillers is these things are addictive they're very powerful but they're very addictive so you so you get prescribed something um um for pain and you know you get addicted to it and you die of that which is like such a tragedy so um the the worst offender is this thing called fentanyl which really really kills why does fentanyl exist will fentanyl exist because there are certain forms of pain that don't respond to morphine like cancer pain if you have cancer and if you have metastasis i'm not a physician but i've worked with physicians for 25 years so i i i try to carefully reproduce what i learned from them there are certain forms of cancer pain they're called breakthrough cancer pain for which there's no no conventional um um opiate would help and so there's synthetics such as fentanyl which you give to to folks with terminal cancer so that at least they can die in dignity rather than succumb to horrific pain so we don't need that thing to exist we now know thanks to some remarkable discoveries by geneticists that there is a gene it's kind of astonishing there is now we know two genes and if you get rid of it people feel no pain now that's a bad thing right we you need to feel pain uh some pain yeah yeah you know when you've cut yourself you're in danger or you know there are many reasons why pain sensation is good but when you're when you have criminal cancer and you have horrific pain you don't need pain and so it turns out that there are people who don't have that gene they don't feel pain and then there's a a different group of people they're more rare um they they don't just feel pain they're naturally high so they're they're constantly in a good mood and so one of the one of these genetic changes is in a system that transmits pain from your fingertip for example or your toe you stubbed through the spine to the brain and the other uh genetic system is the so-called endocannabinoid system it's a it's mother nature's natural painkillers that we mother nature uses to get ourselves high in in just the right way and so it turns out that we can use gene editing to get rid of either one of the systems or the other and there are in fact early stage efforts to try to make that into a therapeutic and so in just very realistic terms do i see this entering the clinic in the next three to five years absolutely do i see this having as having a strong potential for becoming a non-opioid non-addictive way to treat certain forms of chronic pain i absolutely do and then the last um which again you know 10 years ago i would have probably suggested you get a reality check but today this is this is this is how fast things are moving i think there are certain forms of common disease for which i really see a major promise for gene editing and i say this because of some recent remarkable discoveries about uh natural protection for heart disease and if there's a theme emerging i talked about people who were resistant to hiv i spoke to you about people who don't feel pain i'm now going to share information about people who never get heart attacks and you know i i have a family history of cardiovascular disease so i would love to have that form of that gene but unfortunately i don't the gene has one of those jaw-breaking names that mean really nothing to lay people it's called pcsk9 but it turns out that those rare individuals who don't have a normal copy they seem to be fine except they don't get heart attacks well it's an exaggeration of course but their risk for heart attack is just vanishingly low okay okay so you know what are we going to do with that yeah ask a mother nature for a different gene no we ask gene editors to get rid of it and in fact there are active efforts and clinical trials could start as early as 2022 to take people with a severe risk for cardiovascular disease in particular for heart attacks and just get rid of this gene prospectively before they die of a heart attack so you know in brass tax terms you will you ask me well what are we looking forward to i'm looking forward to a fundamentally new way to treat cancer a fundamentally new way to approach genetic disease because of course we can repair mutations things like hemophilia or sickle cell disease um i'm excited hugely excited about pain uh not experiencing it but getting rid of it and um i'm really excited about certain common diseases in particular cardiovascular disease beyond that yeah i mean let's let's uh just go all the way and try to cure aging while we're at it right well okay so this is where i'm going to be debbie downer or i suppose not debbie downer but you know the the classic saying is that pessimist is a well-informed optimist aging is not a disease the food and drug administration and the european medicine agency and the therapeutics good administration in the united states and europe and in australia and health canada in canada do not recognize aging as a disease and this is for a good reason and you cannot by definition begin a clinical trial for a disease that doesn't exist okay so um the other problem with doing uh clinical trials for longevity is these trials take a while like imagine you had them so there is a well-studied variant of a gene called igf it doesn't matter what that stands for and folks with certain variants of it consistently live longer they have a they don't just live longer they have a longer health span which is kind of amazing whoa longer health span so now imagine a gene editing trial where you know uh the scientists at the innovative genomics institute at the university of california berkeley have found a way to crank up the longevity gene and there we are with our with our frantic look in our eyes and our lab coats uh about to inject somebody with longevity juice and then of course we wait 45 years to see if they live longer you realize that being deliberately sarcastic because it's actually super hard yeah it is super hard to do so practical terms i mean you're this is the difference right because i'm a i'm a physicist who thinks about uh the cosmological lifespan of the universe and you're someone who actually has the capability of affecting things in real ways over five year time scales so if something takes a century time scale you're like yeah let's not think about it but i want to think about that i mean is is in a few generations could we have little molecular machines running around inside of us uh curing uh or patching us up as we get tiny little dings on our dna and and therefore not maybe making us immortal but extending our lifespan by quite a bit first of all i love the fact you know it is it's such an affecting moment for me you know the universe is what 13.4 billion years old something like that 0.8 yep um yeah i love the fact that you guys know that to like the fraction of a decimal that's just hysterical for me you know 13.7 billion versus 13.9 yeah yeah and here i am stuck with the fact that something like six months versus a year so i love the fact that they you know we you uh the non-physicists think of the think of the of the world as on r and newtonian scale you know of sort of meat meters and centimeters and you think that angstrom or subnets of angstrom and we think in years and you think in billions of years i love that that's amazing so in practical terms the way this is actually going to proceed is we need molecular machines that crank up the body's defenses against damage and that's imaginable that's in fact not science fiction so yes i do envisage a future for example and this is again i want to be very careful because the world has enough uh uh novels on amazon that describe maniacal science and engineering and gothica-like futures so i do imagine a future where humans acquire a molecular machine in their liver that helps the liver tolerate the many perform the many functions that it does and you know the liver is a primary organ for detoxification right and i absolutely see that the other um the the other organ that i think is of huge huge interest and you will say the brain no in fact it's not the brain it's the kidney so chronic kidney disease you know 30 plus million americans have it you know the medicare spends more money on uh dialysis for that condition than the national institutes of health spends a year on its research budget so it's a huge public health burden and it's a tragedy for folks who have it do i see a future where we engineer ways to make human kidneys carry some form of a machine that protects it against chronic kidney disease yes i do so i think the same could be true for the heart do i see a future where we either genetic we are we sort of we place inside the human heart a molecular entity that is wired i don't want to say like i i don't see a future where we have a myocardial infarction and the the infarct is repaired immediately but i absolutely see a future where the heart carries now a molecular machine where when there is a heart attack if the person who had it survives it that um the heart heals factor i absolutely that that is not in in other words all the bits and pieces exist you know it's a little bit like living on mars right i mean can we live on mars i mean yeah we have to first of all get there safely then we have to build a habitat and then we have to find people who actually want to do this but like kind of all the bits and pieces are in principle there you just have to put them together so when i'm describing all of these things it's a little bit like you know the concept of creating a habitat on mars all the pieces are there it's just going to take us together how much of uh what we've been talking about is there's this divide between um epigenetic editing and germline editing which i i suspect is very very important and maybe you're a better person than me to explain what the difference is oh my goodness i hope your podcast is five hours long so let's do germline first very simple it's it's it's one of those things where things are as binary as it gets germline editing of human beings should never be allowed under any circumstances period end of paragraph it's scientists don't like you to use the word never but this is one of those what is germline editing it's gene editing or other genetic engineering that can be passed on to future generations there is no unmet medical need for it the the public health burden of genetic disease that um exists and is quite substantial can be and is being addressed by other means which are safe and ethical germline editing is unethical and in fact illegal and useless for that purpose the only potential reason why people would want to do the germline editing is uh to for human enhancement and the reason that is should be forever banned is we don't know how to enhance people and imagine a setting the classic example is we know of a gene um getting rid of which will somewhat protect you from alzheimer's it's called apoe4 if you happen to have apoe4 and if you get rid of it your risk of alzheimer's would will be dramatically reduced so now imagine we we you know we fertilize an embryo and a human embryo and then we get rid of that gene and then we wait 18 years to see whether that child became an adult and then became an elderly human and is in fact protected against alzheimer's there is no way to do this there's just no mechanical mechanical way um by mechanical i mean just the way the physical world works i shouldn't probably say in your presence physically that's okay it makes sense society that as i've learned through through years of reading and marveling at a late person's books about theoretical physics your world is getting more in the words of alice in wonderland curiouser and curious it is you're not wrong yep so um i think that germline editing is just a non-starter is fortunately illegal uh well it's not illegal it's just not allowed in the united states it's it's it should be banned forever so now epigenetic editing oh goodness um i think you should start a timer because i might just rant on and on what epigenetics epigenetics is a change in the way an organism looks without a change in their dna and this is basically an epigenetic mark is basically molecular makeup you know literally like lipstick or or mascara that human dna wears to try to instruct it what to do so the genetic code specifies what the genes say epigenetics specify whether they say it and how they say it and when right so a prime example of epigenetics gone wrong are neural tube defects in newborns i'm sure you've heard that your audience has heard of spina bifida so that's not a genetic error it's an epigenetic error and it has to do with how the neural tube develops and how during development of that neural tube the genes acquire these epigenetic marks so not changes in the dna but in this molecular makeup and if the changes are placed incorrectly perhaps because mom's diet was deficient in folate and folate is a vitamin that provides an essential biochemical piece to the epigenetic machinery so if mom doesn't get enough folate in her diet then the epigenome here's a pretty word not a genome the epigenome which is the collection of epigenetic marks that her baby's dna is acquiring that her baby's epigenome will be wrong and that baby's at risk for getting spina bifida which is why folate supplementation is a major success of public health for prevention of neural tube defects so scientists and physicians have learned that if you supplement the diet of a woman who would like to become pregnant and of a woman who is pregnant then she can choose to supplement her diet with folate or before becoming pregnant and while carrying the baby and that will substantially reduce although not completely eliminate unfortunately the risk of her um becoming uh delivering a child with spina bifida although full disclosure i believe i want to be very very um what's the word i'm looking for i want to be very respectful uh as all people in my field of the fact that they're ultimately what we do is about folks with the conditions with a disability and their rights their interests their feelings uh are i don't want to sacred is a very strong word but they kind of are yeah and put them first primary right and so i want to be very careful here i you know um i'm sure they're they're we are trying to reduce the prevalence of of this um medical sim condition while being enormously respectful and supportive and caring for the folks who have these conditions right i mean right you know so there's that is what drives all that we do having said that folate supplementation if a woman chooses to take it will reduce the risk of that woman having a child with a neural tube defect why because of an epigenetic effect so believe it or not recent developments have created not just gene editing which is you know you change the sequence of dna by either repairing a mutation or getting rid of a gene or adding a gene you can also do epigenome editing what does that mean you don't change the genes you just change what the genes do and that as it turns out can have real benefits in some settings so for example you can tune the duration of the effect where you know genetic changes like diamonds forever an epigenetic change does not have to be forever you can dial it in to last for a couple of months for some reason and if not it goes away and i wouldn't be saying this to you if your humble servant together with some colleagues at the university of california san francisco carnegie mellon at the white house wasn't working on a project funded by darpa to create such an epigenetic change using crispr in america's war fighters to protect them from radiation damage in the theater of war in america's first responders to protect them uh for when they have to rush to the scene of either potentially a nuclear accident or a dirty bomb scenario and also to protect folks in the united states who are about to undergo radiation treatment for their abdominal or pelvic cancers in all these cases we are engineering a crispr which we hope will create for a few weeks an epigenetic edit to protect the bone marrow and the gut of these individuals whether the warfighter the first responder or the patient in a radiation oncology ward or just a month or so from the danger of radiation poisoning so this is a scenario where an epigenetic edit is preferable to a kinetic one well i want to dig into why it's preferable i mean if you could uh do the same thing but make these soldiers stronger and more resistant to bullets as well as radiation uh and why not make it last a long time i mean i'm asking leading questions because i think these are good issues and we shouldn't just uh zoom over them we should sort of sit down and think about what the issues are so this is something that i myself and all our colleagues and the department of defense has thought hard about um i mean you know america's warfighters will stand up and defend her whatever whatever the whatever the need and so but we have to be respectful of the fact that these women and men have committed their lives to that and we have to be respectful of that right we can we cannot be and i'm not suggesting you're saying that i'm just saying we have to be respectful of their commitment to our country and here i think the department of defense wisely and i concur with their judgment has argued against making a permanent change because you know what that system for protecting us against damage has its benefits you know if a cell is too damaged then you know it might die a normal death rather than survive and potentially acquire a cancerous change yeah in an extreme setting where a a war fighter who is in the special forces the tip of the of the spear as as the department of defense describes them um are you know are are have to be dropped from a helicopter into a regime change scenario where there is a nuclear fuel and this is a realistic thing to contemplate where that fuel can fall into the wrong hands i mean they're putting their lives on the line to save the world from disaster that's one scenario when we protect them for for a month against the harm that they can come in in contact with but when they go when they when they're honorably discharged or to leave the military whatever we want them to go back to lives pre-military so i would be i tell you i would be i would not agree right now to work on a gene edit program for um enhancing uh uh enhancements of that type i i just wouldn't um i epi edits sure but the idea that i would permanently genetically engineer a human being and thus commit them to having that dna for the rest of their lives and this was an enhancement type edit i don't know man it's a it's that would be a hard pill for me to follow well i'm very sympathetic to this idea that it's incredibly difficult to know what all the possible ramifications are were you to go down that road right like even with the best of intentions if you tried to make people uh you know healthier or had better eyesight or whatever or taller or bigger iqs it could ruin other things that we have a difficult time uh anticipating but i guess what i'm what i'm thinking of what i'm not doing is advocating it but i'm what i'm doing is guessing that someone's not going to feel that way someone's just going to do it right it's going to be done somewhere in the world this technology is becoming easier and easier to use right like are there going to be people in their garages 3d printing crispr programs to make different babies absolutely and that's in fact already happening yeah uh i think that the tragedy of gen que has alleged crime is that i don't want to swear on air but like i'm you can imagine i'm in certain words here with your work you know language that i learned to use when i was drafted at the age of 18 when i was drafting to the soviet military that i would have to flag on youtube i understand yeah i know let's but jungkook is a criminal this is the chinese scientist who um who actually did this to human babies right for allegedly allegedly yeah okay so he performed two crimes the first crime is he irreversibly stained my field of genetic engineering to treat disease with uh with a with a imprint of designer baby yeah you know you tell people i do crispr people say oh do you make babies do you make smarter babies yeah no we don't we try to cure cancer and sickle cell disease but yeah but the other thing that's even a deeper crime is he showed to the rogues of the world that this can be done i am absolutely convinced that there are laboratories right now they're underground i mean i don't mean physically i mean metaphorically yeah or who are enhancing quote-unquote embryos for people with too much money too much money and not enough understanding of the science and not enough ethics um that's happening and i think that i don't think there's any way to prevent that from happening because again this is why jennifer dalton's discovery of how crispr works is i mean revolution is not is not enough of a word it puts it put us in a different world right you know um you know as a scientist i would say phase transition but that's that's a good way to put people to sleep i mean maybe i know maybe you know imagine metamorphosis where you have a crawling caterpillar and suddenly you have a flying butterfly so jennifer's discovery converted my world from a crawling uh crawling caterpillar to a flying butterfly just like we were moving in a fundamentally different way we have flight thank you very much um so um it's it's it's actually high school biology easy so are will there be and are there uh people who don't understand the literature and who are delusional doing that right now to themselves and potentially human embryos there are here's what to do about this first embryo and baby editing has to be a crime everywhere to ensure that 100 percent of the time that somebody is outed somebody running you know 1 800 design your baby's jeans dot yeah call every time these people are out there they go to jail period and a paragraph separately and that cannot eradicate that because crispr is too technologically straightforward like you know i don't know anything about nuclear reactors but i suspect that building one requires a certain amount of know-how yes and you have to have the infrastructure and you have to buy the stock so that's not true for crispr the know-how is relatively modest and you can buy the stuff and you can buy this stuff sort of sotto voce you don't have to tell the world oh my god i'm doing crisper in my baby so that has to be driven into as low a prevalence as possible by making it completely illegal human somatic enhancement of consenting adults well let me give you an example botox is legal for wrinkles botox is botulinum toxin is one of the most dangerous substances on earth by weight the food and drug administration has approved a situation where people who don't like wrinkles inject themselves with botox so do i see a future where there's crispr rocks i hope it's not cold that that people inject into themselves to get rid of wrinkles or whatever change their eye color i don't care as long as consenting adults apply to themselves things that have passed regulatory review by the fda by health canada by the ema i'm totally fine but the key issue here is consent right as long as a human being with eyes open agrees then i see no reason difference frankly you know people get tattoos all the time and then getting rid of them is a lot harder people need to understand that a gene edit cannot be eliminated and that they will live with the consequences of that for the rest of their lives but at the end of the day will come down to free will if it's legal for somebody to obtain a piercing in a body part where most people would rather not put a needle it's perfectly fine for people to create a double strand break in their dna using a a procedure that is safe and permanently genetically modify them so we should maybe shift our focus from designer babies to designer grown-ups there will be designer grown-ups for sure there's no no question in my mind and the only thing that needs to happen for that is a fewer years need to pass for the fda to grow comfortable with a safety and efficacy record of gene editing for treating disease and you know the classic example i'll give you is statins statins were you know everybody takes statins if they're at risk of cardiovascular disease but they were not initially developed for prevention they were approved for the treatment of rare forms of heart disease and when it was seen that they're safe you know they're now over-the-counter statins where i think they're about to be um so the same thing will happen with gene editing once we know that it's safe and effective to treat disease somebody will show up and say oh you know i'll give you an example if you get rid of a gene called the androgen receptor and it's on the x chromosome and we know where it is i know i can tell you everything about it if you get rid of that gene you will get rid of boldness so you can put crispr in shampoo can you imagine yes the company that builds that i'm sad to say will be more will be more expensive than apple and google yeah because you know the amount of money that people will spend on their vanity as experience has shown is pretty insane so yeah that i totally see a setting where there is a shampoo i'm not i want to emphasize i i am i haven't had any stimulants other than coffee today so do i see a future where there is a crispr-like molecule formulated in a special ink in a special chemical formula to allow penetration of the scalp and editing the androgen receptor gene in um the the stem cell uh at the bar at the bottom at the root of each hair follicle and thus prevent a male pattern boldness absolutely that this will happen this will happen well i always like to say that i like to end the podcast on optimistic note and that's certainly one but just in case there's another optimistic note out there um do you have some final words about how this all relates back to uh the pandemic and our our current urge to shield ourselves from this nasty little virus that's running around i do i think that real world solutions require many different subunits and they don't emerge from the same field so for example my favorite example is that the space suit that neil armstrong walked the moon in was not made by one some giants contractor it was made by playtex yeah seamstresses at playtex sewed the spacesuit so in 1969 i think is when the moonshot was this marvel of technology the rocket the telemetry the fuel the engine blah blah blah and the spacesuit was sewn by seamstresses of playtex similarly the real world impact of any technology such as crispr on anything such as the pandemic requires multiple technologies and other things to converge in real people have to wear masks but i think we have entered two separate ages in medicine the first one is we have entered the age of the genetically engineered human that is irreversible there are now approved medicines for cancer and for genetic disease where people get genetically engineered this will only rise and over the next decade or two the public health burden of genetic diseases and infectious diseases and cancer will start to be lower in in the developed world where there is access to treatments of that type but we have also entered the age where we don't just read human dna we understand what human dna says and we're doing this at a pace that was uh what was unimaginable before and critically these discoveries are translated into therapeutics or ways to prevent disease much faster than anyone thought possible to take 15 years these days it takes two two years ago regeneron discovered a gene that protects from a non-alcoholic theater hepatitis which is a severe disease of the liver two years later they're in the clinic they're in the clinic with them with a medicine rnai that targets that gene it's unimaginable that two years or only two years pass so as far as the pandemic is concerned for these viruses or other viruses i'm actually excited about the prospect of genetic engineering of humans to genetically vaccinate them for viral infections now frankly where i'd like to go first with this is into the developing world into parts of africa and asia where there's not enough access to hiv medication to use gene editing to genetically vaccinate folks at risk for hiv against it preemptively i think that that that would be i mean obviously this would have to pass regulatory review and would have to you know talk past the highest rigor of ethics in terms of informed consent etc but i think do i see a future where we engineer preemptively gene edits or epi gene edits as this year's vaccine for sars kobe 7 to prevent us protect us from covet uh covet 2026 which there will be kovit 2026 as we all know it's not just covet 19 yeah absolutely i mean we have entered we have entered a very formidable space where the technologies have now converged where genetic engineering or epigenetic engineering of people is a clinical reality and it's just going to grow in scope it really does make make me feel like the state of gene editing in 2020 is sort of like or making predictions about its future it's like trying to predict the future of the personal computer in the early 1980s right like there was clearly something going on and you could see that things would happen but it's probably the unanticipatable consequences that will end up being the ones that will really change things down the road i could not agree with you more and you know sidney brenner one of my scientific idols a nobel laureate and one of the founders of modern experimental biology said progress in science comes from new technologies and new discoveries and new ideas probably in that order which is a stunning thing to say because he was the father of so many ideas that changed the world but techno we live in a we are in a technology driven space i completely agree with you uh i'm not a computer person but you know clearly miniaturization right the transition from i'm old enough to remember floppy disks it's impossible to explain to my 21 year old daughter what a floppy disk is yeah yeah and so i do i anticipate exactly as you said that progress in human genetic and epigenetic engineering in the clinic and for disease protection and potential enhancement will be as unpredictably exciting as what's happened from the good old you know ibm pcat in 1986 or whatever absolutely that's that is exactly what will happen so if we we just buckle our seat belts and and either partici either make this happen or or make use of what's happening so yeah well we appreciate very much you uh helping us to buckle our seat belts here i think it's going to be a wild ride theodore or no thanks so much for being on the windscape podcast truly a pleasure [Music] you

Channel: Sean Carroll

Views: 11,857

Keywords: biology, gene, editing, dna, crispr

Id: oNq3kI407yI

Length: 80min 5sec (4805 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020