StarTalk Podcast: The Code of Life and CRISPR with Jennifer Doudna and Walter Isaacson

[Music] this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your host and your personal astrophysicist and i got with me today my co-host chuck knight jack hey neil how are you always good to have you chuck and you're always cheerful and and got a nice smile it's all a lie neil it's just a facade i'm i'm very well media trained so today we've got really a hot topic oh my gosh we're going to talk about crispr that gene editing tool we're going to talk about the origin of life and what role rna did or did not play in that and i have no expertise in this at all so uh we we're gonna feature an interview with jennifer doudna who is an expert in this in fact she's a co-invented crisper and in fact was recognized by the 2020 nobel prize yeah the nobel prize for that and not only that i'm bringing in somebody he's actually an old friend not old old friend but a recent acquaintance uh walter isaacson uh walter welcome to star talk hey it's great to be with you neil yeah walter i mean your your bio if i went through your bio we have no room for the show so let me let me cherry cherry-pick it if i may author journalist professor of history at tulane university uh and you co-host uh amanpour and company with christian amanpour and formerly the ceo of the aspen institute in colorado that's a place where very deep thinking people go to have deep thoughts and one-time editor of time magazine chair of cnn so you've got the pedigree but more important for this program you you're a biographer of really important thinkers who have shaped our understanding of this world and civilization you've got the best-selling biographies of leonardo da vinci einstein steve jobs benjamin franklin and benjamin frank i think of him as a scientist even though many think of him as a founding father and surely you got all up in that story but you've also become the biographer of jennifer doudna oh my gosh in a new book called the code breakers and i thought i'd get to you before this book sailed away it's i hit number one on the times bestseller so you don't even need this pr so i'm just saying you know doing it for the greatness and fun of being with you yeah okay that that's great so let me ask you did you start this sort of uh work as a biographer of jennifer downer i had to well before the nobel prize was announced so what what was the trigger here that got you into it because i think she's the only one of your people you have biographied that was alive at the time the book came out well yes uh about recent biographies that's true and i wanted to be able to take on the life sciences revolution you know through einstein was able to do the physics revolution of the first half of the 20th century and then through steve jobs do the digital revolution but i think even more consequential will be this revolution where molecules from the new microchips we can reprogram them to do our bidding to make the proteins we want if we need a vaccine against covet to be the guide that will help us chop up our dna and maybe edit it and add things to our genome so to me that's like the most consequential revolution of our time and uh jennifer doudna was a perfect central character she's somebody who starts off by marveling on dna but then she does the structure of rna she co-discovers the crispr technology the gene editing technology you talked about she's been involved with the covid uh fight against covet she wins the nobel prize and uh she even more importantly in some ways now is gathering the scientists the politicians the ethicists to say when should we be using these gene editing tools so what a wonderful central character she is and and she shared the nobel prize uh my notes show here uh emmanuel chappentier a french biochemist is that right absolutely they met in puerto rico at a conference and bonded together like two chemical compounds i flew on over to berlin uh which is where emmanuel sharpened jay's lab is and spent a lot of time with her it was a wonderful collaboration the two of them had and jennifer's had other collaborations along the way but it's the first time two women scientists alone have won a nobel prize like that so it was pretty fortuitous both for the book but i think for the time we're in uh to have jennifer dowden and emmanuel charpentier suddenly become world heroes now nobel's rules are that you can award up to three people in one category in any given year in that year it only went to those two right they didn't even bring anybody else into that list a little surprising a little surprising to me i set my alarm for 4 am so i could watch the live stream thinking it was a bit too early for the crisper technology to win a nobel but i let out a shout when they said these scissors will rewrite the code of life and change science into a new apoc and uh then i waited for the names and it was emmanuel and then jennifer i thought it was going to be fong zhang as well the competitor they have at the broad institute of mit and harvard but in some ways what he did was show how it can work in human selves and i'm hoping maybe someday he and george church uh win the nobel prize for medicine uh you're telling me you woke up at four in the morning to listen to um well who does that why except for you yeah well i mean i was writing a book about jennifer doudna and emmanuel sharpente and all the other players oh i get it so you let out a shout out you know you know who let out a bigger shout you're a publisher no who did not let out a shout who's that jennifer doudna she slept through it she did not uh wake up and when she wakes up finally there's all these missed phone calls from stockholm now i've never had that experience of seeing missed phone call from stockholm on my cell phone that was pretty amazing yeah that's uh that's what we call a baller move oh yeah yeah where where you're so confident you're like yeah i'm a i'm going to go to sleep and i'm badass and they can wait you know stockholm can wait stockholm can wait yes well her career began studying rna and and our origin of life we think possibly began with rna so i chatted with her about her origins let's check it out well this takes me back to when i was uh first starting my my graduate work and my advisor jack shostak was fascinated by the question of the origin of life and he and a few other people at the time wondered whether rna molecules might in many ways hold the clues to life's uh you know to life's origins on earth by providing the the link between dna which is now the material the genetic material that is used in all cells as far as we know there are viruses that use rna in some cases as its genetic material for example the coronavirus the virus that causes covid19 is an rna virus and and the fascinating thing about rna and the reason why i got interested in it is because it's a molecule that has fundamentally the ability to not only encode genetic information but also to do chemistry so that means that rna molecules have the ability to form three-dimensional shapes that allow them to do things like cut and paste other molecules of rna and some people think that that might have even allowed very primitive forms of rna to make copies of themselves and that would potentially have formed the basis for a self-replicating rna-based system or world early on in the origin of life so that was how i originally got interested in it and what's happened over the last few decades really since i did my graduate work in the 80s over the last few decades scientists studying rna have come to realize that rna is doing all sorts of really interesting things in cells that we didn't know about at the time so we know now that rna molecules are helping cells decide when and where to make proteins they're helping cells decide uh how to how to regulate different parts of the chromosome and they're also involved in things like crispr that help cells protect themselves from viruses and i'm sure there's a lot of other things that haven't yet been discovered about rna okay so then all right so if rna is the is the contractor the construction contractor oh we need some of these aren't fold this way or you need some of that do this chemistry um is there any insight into how you get the rna itself how you go from organic molecules to rna is there where are we on that frontier well we certainly know how rna is made in modern cells we don't really know where it originated from if we're going to rewind the clock if we had a time machine we could go back and see what was going on and i'm working on that time machine okay i want a ticket but yeah you know i think i think understanding how rna came into existence in the early uh you know early years of the earth is is very much a mystery it's not known some people think so francis crick who is one of the co-discoverers of the structure of dna came to feel that life might have been seeded from outside of our uh our earth you know and and that maybe rna came in from somewhere else so some people think that might be the case so the answer is that we don't know it's a mystery right now yeah so if if it came if we came from mars that would mean we're all descendants of martians that would be kind of fun or perhaps perhaps some people are more descendant than others of martians yeah so she was talking about that's basically we say in astrobiology the panspermia hypothesis but if if life on earth came from mars then you still have the question of how life on mars began so so walter here she is getting all into rna but but recent memory tells me that her whole world her her scientific community was all about dna and the human genome project and recombinant dna and gene therapy so how does she end up swimming upstream against all of that to end up focusing on rna when i wrote about her childhood she said she loved playing soccer but unlike the boys she wasn't always running to the ball she liked playing positions where others weren't playing and getting a sense of the whole field so in the 1990s when a lot of the alpha males that you know so well neil were in part of the human genome project sequencing dna she was there as she said with jack just stack studying rna and it turns out that rna is a far more interesting molecule and when you ask about where did the rna come from how did life begin just as the the primordial soup of chemicals four billion years ago rna is pretty simple and if it jostles together and those four letters of rna it can replicate itself as jennifer showed and maybe that it just started replicating itself so those those four letters you're referring to the amino acid letters the letters which are similar to the dna four letters but there's a one letter difference just to make sure that biology students are staying awake for that lesson okay good and gene editing as an activity has very high precision with crispr i can imagine without that level of precision it's kind of like a crapshoot or may if it's not a crap shoot it's there's risks involved that are minimized with crispr is that right yeah and you can still have off target edits but the great thing about crispr technology is it's advancing in leaps and bounds and so when we talk about a nobel prize i think david lew at harvard might also win one from madison because he's created things like base editing and prime editing where if uh crispr is like a scissors that can cut dna these are fine pencil points that can do it exactly right and then even edit in a sequence and even do multiple genes so really in the 10 years since jennifer doudna and emmanuel sharpen jay made their discovery we keep advancing on that genetic editing front so to make sure we're all on the same page and all of our listeners i actually got jennifer to describe precisely how crispr works so let's check it out it's quite amazing it's a system that evolved originally in bacteria as a way that bacteria fight viral infection so in the natural world there's a lot of viral infection going on all the time in bacteria so there's a lot of evolutionary pressure to develop ways to fend off these viruses and one of those pathways is called crispr and what it does is provide cells a way to steal snippets of virus dna and store them as a record of that virus and that and then use that molecular information to fight the viral virus if it shows up in the cell and so by studying how it works and in particular a protein that's called cas9 that allows bacteria to program cas9 with these little snippets of information that help these proteins find viruses and if they find them what cas9 does is to cut and its job is to cut dna that in a way that in bacteria leads to destruction of the viral dna but in our cells or plant or animal cells it can be used to make cuts that will trigger cells to change the dna sequence during the process of dna repair and that's fundamentally how gene editing works with crispr wow wait wait so what you're saying is um we're finally as smart as bacteria because they've been doing this for a billion years i wouldn't go that far neil so so walter i'm told that you they allowed you to edit a gene yourself did they really let a journalist into a lab to do this oh man it was so exciting to be in the lab with jennifer and a couple of her graduate students and you know i like to learn to do by doing and the way we did it was we first edited a bacteria cell which is sort of what happened in the 2012 paper that jennifer and emanuel did that won the nobel prize and then the next day we took the step that fong jiang jennifer doudna george church do and see if he could do it in a human cell so i did it in a human kidney cell and it was pretty easy in the lab which was probably the most frightening thing about it but i don't want you to worry neil we took it afterwards and mixed it with chlorine and poured it down the drain and flushed it so my edited cells are not part of the planet earth there's not some new creature crawling out from under the rock i was going to say somewhere in the sewer right now there's a chlorine monster chlorine there's a chlorine monster somewhere in the sewer that is just now getting its legs so i checked with jennifer to see how far away we are from this process possibly editing more complex human traits than what might simply be encoded in a single gene so let's check it out this probably won't come as a surprise to many people that um in fact there isn't a single gene for musical ability or or you know astrophysical inclinations or you know things like that that we can put our finger on and in fact it's you know by far typically the case that for human traits there are probably dozens if not hundreds or even more genes that are involved and so the reality of you know genome editing to create uh people that have you know particular intellectual capabilities for example is i think you know a distant uh possibility however again you know just circling back to what is possible i think you know already on the horizon we have the potential to manipulate individual genes that are known to either directly cause disease or you know give people a sort of a propensity to develop disease and i'll give you a couple of examples so you know i think many folks are familiar with a disease called sickle cell disease or sickle cell anemia so that that is a very well characterized genetic disease that results from a single mutation in a single gene in in the human genome and crispr is capable of correcting it or making a an ameliorating change elsewhere in the genome and that's actually already being done in patients and it's already been shown to be effective so you know it's extraordinary and it's kind of already giving everybody in the field uh the the sense that you know we're on the verge of being able to provide potentially a cure for that type of genetic disease where there's a single gene that causes a uh disorder and you know another example is muscular dystrophy uh cystic fibrosis is in this category and and there are there are quite a few others so i think you know that's where crispr is gonna have a real impact walter i it's not surprising i guess that darpa took interest in this technology the defense advanced research projects what does the a stand for in that agency agency so what is it that they what what are they going to do with it you know first of all a malevolent actor or enemy power could decide to use crispr to do anything from creating gene drives that will change mosquitoes so that they can carry deadly pathogens or as vladimir putin said to a youth conference in moscow maybe we'll use crispr to create soldiers that don't feel pain or don't feel fear oh that's vlady he's such a romantic and uh so you can imagine the defense department is one of the biggest spenders in this area they've come up with and a person who's been working with jennifer was part of it something called anti-crispr which is pretty much uh what it sounds like and just like we may have ballistic missile systems and russia may have them we develop anti-ballistic missile systems so i think we have to guard against you know bad actors using this technology so science fiction becoming science it's that it always happens doesn't it neil man yeah that's that's the thing about really great science fiction is that half of it's already happened we're going to take a quick break but when we return we're going to address the philosophical and ethical implications of crispr when star talk returns we're back star talk chuck nice co-host jack hey neil you're tweeting at chuck nice comic thank you sir okay i like i like your your occasional posts there they make me smile but sometimes they're like making fun of other people and i guess that's still okay sometimes i i am a comedian and so that's how that works [Laughter] so we're talking about gene editing oh my gosh and we're featuring my interview with biochemist jennifer doudna and recently winning sharing the nobel prize in this very subject and walter isaacson the one and only biographer of genius out there as well as other things he's done in his career of course and i want to talk about the ethical challenges that this technology brings and uh let me actually begin with a clip of jennifer doudna addressing the difference between somatic editing and germline editing in the crispr technology so let's check it out germline means changing dna in embryos or other kinds of germ cells like eggs or sperm basically cells that can produce an entire organism and if dna is altered in those cells then the those changes become part of the entire organism and furthermore they can be inherited by future generations so it's a heritable change to the dna which is very different in my mind from somatic cell editing which means editing cells that are already fully developed so they're not going to be able to produce a new organism or pass their changes on to future generations they might they might make they might make new cells that have those changes in an individual but they won't be inherited by future individuals and that's fundamentally different than germline editing to me because it remains localized in one individual rather than being passed on to future generations okay so that's good or bad for example if i have sickle cell or tay sachs less likely tay sachs but if i have one of these that you have identified the gene and and i'm a a full human being you can remove those those disease symptoms from me and the disease entirely but i still carry that into my offspring correct so so why wouldn't you want germline editing well you might want to right i mean i think there may come a time when we decide that it would be unethical not to do that in the germline for certain certain types of disease i don't think that time is now i don't think the technology is where it needs to be for one thing and also i don't think that uh you know society is ready for this like how do we ensure equitable use affordable access all of those sorts of things but you know if we set all that aside for the moment i think what you just said is a is a very real possibility that in the future the technology is robust and we decide that uh we meaning you know i don't know who he is really here but you know maybe a parent would decide that you know i would really like to not pass this trait on to um my children and furthermore i don't want my children to have to deal with it when they come around time for them to have kids and so i'm just going to get rid of it once and for all by editing the germline that that that could happen in the future walter most conversations about crispr are not so much about the innovative science of it but about the ethical and moral implications and you devote justifiably a significant real estate in your book addressing these issues can you can you help help us through how bad it could get relative to how good it could get well i think most of what will happen will be really good because every creature large and small on this planet uses every trick in its playbook to say okay how can i thrive how can i survive and i think humans can and will and should do that the question is when you start doing things that could be problematic one thing that would be problematic is if we just let this be a free market thing where rich people can buy better genes for their children and make them taller or make them you know boost uh whatever their muscle mass whatever they want to do and not only will that uh uh increase the inequality in our society it will encode it permanently in our species which would just be a eugenic horror show uh you know like brave new world of the movie gattaca we don't want that to happen the other thing is that one of the really important things about the species that makes it creative but also makes it uh you know resilient helps it survive is that we have a lot of diversity in this species people tall and short and fat and skinny and gay and straight and trans and you know different hues and different backgrounds and different personalities and if all of a sudden parents are saying here's the model child we want we won't we won't have a great diversity in our species i think those are science fictiony in the moment meaning we're talking 20 30 40 years away but when jennifer says we should decide this but then says who is we i'll answer that question we as me and you and everybody listening to this podcast we ought to be somewhat familiar with these problems that are going to happen we're all screwed walter just showed us him if it's up to us as a society we're oh well wait wait walter it is it is inevitable that if we can remove bad traits that we can add good traits so you'll say that's not good but what's gonna stop it who's how's that gonna do is is there are you imagining a realistic future here rather than a utopian future oh yeah i mean i think there are all sorts of medical procedures that either get approved or don't get approved oh okay uh whether they're drugs or approvals and yeah and i think we have international conferences i've jennifer doudna in my book we you know i travel with her and she gathers people from around the world and so the chinese academy one of the characters in my book is drong ching pay who is one of the people at the chinese academy uh robin level badge at the royal academy in england all these people trying to figure it out and once you have an international consensus and things get regulated sure some people will be using off target you know pharmaceuticals some people be trafficking in elephant tusks but we can try to minimize those things by saying they're not legal so i'm gonna say but doesn't it i mean if once you once you do have a road map as to what is indeed ethical inevitably what you will have created is a black market for those who want to circumvent those those ethical guidelines and create whatever the hell they want to create that's what he just said about the tusks so that's what i'm saying yeah so no so uh but it's easy my point that's my question it's easy to find the person who is trafficking in tusk how do you find the person who made my kid lebron james when both my parents are white but yes somehow here i am lebron james the greatest basketball player ever like we don't have any idea how that happened like how do you how would you even police you can't do that on a street corner right well you know a lot of things are kind of hard to police but you know we can't stop it all i think we're going to be able to save our species if we make sure that maybe one percent of the cases sneak through because people engage in medical tourism or they find some back channel way to have gene editing in the next 30 40 50 years but i think we as a society are pretty good at saying these are the things we aren't going to do whether it be through regulation or just social shaming well check chuck we have a sort of example of that because back in 2018 uh there was scientists in china that used crispr to actually edit the embryos of unborn human embryos to make them hiv resistant and so i just had to ask jennifer about that and get her reaction to what it means in the present and in the future check it out yeah so this this story was um you know probably the most shocking uh so far with crispr honestly because in this situation a scientist had actually used crispr in human embryos not just for research which has been done in other labs but for the purpose of implanting those embryos to create a pregnancy and in fact that did occur and uh those those children were were born and as you mentioned neil the the stated purpose of that uh that work was to protect those kids from future infection by hiv using a crispr based approach where their cells were were you know edited so they couldn't express a protein that's necessary for hiv infection so while that might sound like a good idea at a high level it turns out that there are already very well known um you know other ways of treating or preventing hiv infection for kids that are born to parents that might have a pre-existing hiv infection and also i think in this in this instance it was absolutely irresponsible and frankly just flatly unethical to use it in uh in this way because uh for many reasons but one of them is that you know the parents i don't think could really understand uh the technology or just how how experimental it was and how untested it was i mean to do this on your children is you know kind of the most extreme um use of something like this and also just that you know i think even the the the data that were published for that particular uh application showed that the technology itself is just not not ready for that kind of use we don't have enough control over it yet in embryos to use it safely right but so so how do you regulate it then do you just make it so socially and ethically objectionable that there's cultural pressure against it or or do you need actual laws governmental laws and international treaties or regulations surrounding it what's that going to take well i certainly think the former is is probably the most um you know the most realistic strategy right now and that means basically creating a you know a culture around the technology that supports what i would call responsible use and and and really really um uh makes a very strong statement against unethical or just you know uninformed frankly uh uses of the technology and that's what had what happened after that announcement in 2018 i think there was a really interesting kind of international rejection of that work um it was uh not published in uh you know i think in the end i don't really think that that uh that a manuscript reporting that study was was published anywhere you know in any kind of a peer reviewed journal even though it had been submitted to those journals uh but you know those journals said you know we're not we're not going to to support this we're not going to publish it it was not done in an ethical fashion and this is just some simply not work that we're going to publicize and uh so that would be scientists policing ourselves in that sense and that has tremendous value right so i think it's very important i think it's you know the the reality is that it's and you you you have seen this in in other fields you know that it's very difficult for governments to um to first of all even to draft you know legislation that would be suitable uh for controlling technologies and look at look at the challenges with things like social media right very difficult to police it how do we how do we do that appropriately it's not they don't even know what questions to ask right right very difficult right it's very hard and then even if you could draft legislation how would you ever enforce it and how would you enforce it globally i think it's unrealistic so to me the better approach or just the more realistic approach is frankly just to really engage the the the you know the scientists and the technologists in this and create a culture around the the technology that uh very strongly supports uh the the you know the i would call it the appropriate and ethical use of the technology walter just a moment ago you were referring to you me chuck and others common folk to to have a say in the ethical use of this technology but uh it wasn't that long ago really when eugenics was sort of sweeping sort of the western world as a way of improving the human species breeding out the bad traits breeding in the good traits and there were panels and committees and surely at that time they considered homosexuality something you're going to have to breed that out because that's deviant so what kind of thinking have you done about what might be the evolution of a morality from one time to another yes it's a great question and in the book i talk about the fact that yes we had state-sponsored eugenics whether it was in the united states in the early 1900s and of course in nazi germany but i think we also have to get our minds around what could be happening if you had a free market and maybe a free market eugenics you talk about homosexuality i think nowadays people would be appalled at the notion that we would try to edit our you know sexual orientation of our child or change it in some way but if you left it to every parent and to the free market who knows what choices a individual families may make and yet in our system in the united states in particular we tend to leave reproductive choices to the individual or to the family and so this is where we're going to get into some conflict in figuring this out because i think sometimes it changes if you're in a fertility clinic and it's confidential and nobody knows what you can pick you might pick the gender you might pick the gender orientation you might pick anything uh as your designer baby closed behind closed doors and so i think that's why our whole morality has to change we have to say what are true disabilities such as having tay sachs or sickle cell and what are things that we may that society may uh cause to be disabilities but shouldn't be and i think we have to make sure that we don't label things as bad just because society has prejudices because as you said there were prejudices 20 30 40 years ago we would find abhorrent but here's my prediction 20 30 40 years from now people will look back at us and find our prejudices well two things one hopefully the first thing that they're able to edit out completely is asininism okay so you know if we if we can get rid of them a lot of that stuff will take care of itself so that's a gene for that they just found it that guy's an egg hole we found the gene we found the gene to get rid of the second thing the second thing though that that i will say is somewhat frightening is that even now very recently there is a world power government that was very much involved in the fertility decisions of its citizens so you know what happens when governments say you know what for these reasons we need to do thus and so so perhaps there needs to be treaties immediately worked upon to make sure that with this technology governments themselves don't take actions to uh interfere with people's decisions in these areas absolutely and i think that one way to help push back in that in the long run is for individuals for real people to understand this technology figure out what they're comfortable with and even in authoritarian regimes if the people truly have a sense of morality about something the leaders will eventually have to follow them and so i had to ask jennifer about sort of the fear factor involved in designer babies let's check out her reply is the fear factor um justified yes and no i think it's important to be you know realistic about what the technology can and cannot do right now or even in the future is it going to allow us to create super soldiers for example uh no i don't think that's happening anytime soon but you know does it have the potential to allow parents who are using in vitro fertilization to make tweaks to their their children's dna yes it does and so that does bring along i think very important questions uh ethical and otherwise that have to be addressed um and and so that's where i sort of feel that you know having that conversation now even while the technology is still developing is very important that's really good so that it doesn't bite us in the ass when it's too late yeah i i hope that's the case for sure we got to take another break but when we return walter i want to get into what role crispr may have played in the race to find a vaccine for this virus this pandemic that we're in when star talk returns we're back star talk we're talking about gene editing we're talking about crispr and in this segment we're bringing covid into the mix and we're featuring my interview with jennifer doudna biochemist who invented crispr somebody had to do it there she was with some close colleagues of hers and we've got the person who has served as her biographer in this modern time walter isaacson walter it's always good to see you and always good to hear what you have to say and of course uh chuck nice um that means to sound like it sounds like oh and chuck knight of course because that's exactly what it was no i mean here i am let's be honest i'm sitting here with the world's most renowned science educator and the world's most renowned biographer of course it's going to be oh yeah and chuck knight we love you chuck uh jennifer if you only just joined us jennifer actually won the nobel prize in 2020. walter she won it in biochemistry why didn't she win it in human physiology because that's a whole other category and it seems like that would be appropriate are they saving that category for more uh more rewards for this discovery it was a basic discovery in science it's how the chemistry of this tool works and it was done in labs and done in test tubes and so i think it was appropriate that it was the chemistry prize i do think people are now applying it to humans and using it as a medical tool and i hope eventually that some of the people doing that including george church and fong jiang who first showed how it could be used in human cells and david liu who's creating new ways to use crispr technology for editing in humans that someday they may win the prize in medicine okay so that's so this is this is the right way this would happen because the there's a their conduits that connect branches of science that are in nature that does it all the time and it's kind of artificial that we even do it at all so the fact that you have a basic chemistry discovery that gets exploited in the service of the human condition that that makes perfect sense walter just just the way you describe that let me ask you tell me about competition in science and what you've discovered in your as a biographer of her work jennifer's work you know competition is a good thing in my opinion and she's a competitive person and some people say that i think meaning it to be slightly insulting and i say yeah she's very competitive isn't that great and when she heard footsteps in 2012 when she and emmanuel charpentier were doing this discovery about crispr but there were lithuanian scientists working on it there are people in different labs she pushed hard to get it done fast in competition as you know that's what causes us to work weekends that was what caused jennifer doudna in california and emmanuel sharpened j in europe to work around the clock by handing things off to each other when sunset happened in one place or the other so i think that competition was good but at the end when kovitz struck they decided the labs around the world to put aside some of the competition and to make discoveries out in the open sharing the information and not asserting patent rights well okay so this is that this is an uh this is duty rises above the what was otherwise the competitive spirit personal glory it's a back seat it's good to know that that still exists and you make an excellent point walter about competition in science where initially you might think of it as some kind of a dig on someone but almost everything else we do in this world thrives on competition you go to sporting events you go to a track meet you want to see who wins and the runners want to win right so and you celebrate that and the struggle that gets you there so there's no reason why science shouldn't be any different especially if the end if in the end the results are valuable discoveries so what precisely did they do to help covet well you know when covid struck about a year ago in march of last year jennifer dowden had dropped her 17 year old son off at a robot building camp and she woke her husband up at two in the morning said we got to go back to fresno and pick up andy because i don't want him there in this convention center now that i hear about this pandemic and andy's an only child he's rolling his eyes but as they leave the parking lot they get a text message saying robot competition canceled and that's when jennifer decided to gather people throughout the bay area the scientists and focus their attention on turning their tools to fighting coronavirus likewise fong zhang and the people the broad institute in cambridge mass did the same and what they do are multiple things one is you can easily use crispr as we've talked about as a detection technology to detect the genetic material of coronavirus and testing was a real cock-up during this pandemic now we're going to be able to have at-home testing kits that work instantly secondly we can fight coronavirus the next time around the way bacteria do which is not by stimulating our immune system which is kind of a messy process but just by detecting the virus in our system and cutting it up and killing it and thirdly that whole notion of using rna as something you can code which goes back to jennifer doudna's graduate work that's what we're doing with the pfizer and modern vaccines which is we're coding rna to be a messenger to tell our own cells what little proteins to produce that will create immunity to the virus so this so which is it fair to say that without the crispr technology we might still be reaching for for vaccines at this point well no i think the vaccines come out of the earlier work we've done on rna which is that you can code it to be a guide which is what crispr is or you can encode it to be a messenger telling ourselves to build proteins and it was the latter that's involved in these pfizer and modern vaccines but if it's going to be the treatments or the treatments that don't even involve vaccines that'll even be better that's going to be crisper directly chopping up the virus oh so so it formed an important motivating force to further expand the power of crispr over our destiny is that a fair characteristic and it also showed as we said at the beginning of the show that rna is the miracle molecule it's the star of my book along with jennifer doudna and it's like having a microchip if you can code rna to do your bidding you can make vaccines and you can make gene editing tools and how long did you take you to write this book the code breakers you know for seven or eight years i've been gathering string on it because i've been wanting to write about the health sciences i was finishing up leonardo but i kept meeting jennifer doudna and i also met george church who you know and i've met fong jiang and eric lander and many other people in the book and i was trying to figure it out right we can't just go by his name that quickly eric lander is now the very first uh the very first cabinet science post ever in the history of the country eric lander a really good choice by uh joe biden yes secretary of science for the first time yeah exactly and it's a great choice because what eric lander has shown is his magnetic ability to bring together talent and he built the broad institute into the best place on the planet for translating genetics into medicine and uh he's you know people talk about competitive he's as competitive as they come he competed against jennifer doudna with his team but they all know that they were part of a more noble mission in a higher calling can i ask a question that is unrelated but i'm just gotta know okay okay and we can always cut this i think out of the video okay we can always cut it okay but it's killing me i gotta know this from work i'm preparing to dock i'm preparing the dock without intro like that okay so check it out so all these brilliant people that you have chronicled their lives and their accomplishments who do you like best okay well you know as a person there's nobody more likeable than jennifer doudna and i tell you i've written about some people and i knew steve jobs pretty well i was spending a lot of time with him when i was doing that book steve jobs was brilliant he drove people crazy he drove him to distraction he also drove him to do things that they never dreamed they would be able to do but nobody said he was the coziest warmest fuzziest person they had ever met jennifer is cozy and gentle and loves to mentor people and so i would put her and benjamin franklin as the two people who seem uh just the person you want to have dinner with or a beer with and and by the way i share those same sentiments when i when we laid down the tracks of the interviews work we've just cut in uh i said i just want to stay on for like three hours of course she she's busy she's got other other things but it was it was just it was a delight to just be educated by her and just to have her have her do all the talking that that was great so i i had to ask jennifer what did she see what might be in the future of crispr because will that pave the way for curing cancer and other diseases that have been a blight on our civilization will in a hundred years we look back in the primitive 2020s and say oh look at all the diseases that they the our species once had so let's see what she has to say about this so jennifer what's the future of the science of crispr will it just get cheaper and faster and now you can do it in your kitchen or and what else are you working on i don't know about doing it in your kitchen but it's certainly going to get cheaper and faster and better over time it already is and yeah i think i think we're going to see you know increasing uses in in clinical medicine i think we're going to see we didn't talk about this today neil but a big big area of impact for crispr is and agriculture we have a big effort right now at the innovative genomics institute that i founded a few years ago to use crispr to address climate change and i think that's going to be you know a very interesting kind of area of development of this technology and and for myself yeah i mean we're we're continuing to do fundamental research in my academic lab on crispr uh molecules understanding how they work and also really digging into the ways that that this technology will become affordable and widely available in the future for um you know for for solving real world problems you know walter you said earlier that you were worried about the inequality gap growing if only the rich people can afford crispr and touch up their offspring and the poor people can't but if it becomes very affordable like for example let's just look at self you know smartphones even poor people have smartphones so the technology though it's still costly it wasn't out of reach of people who were not otherwise rich so is there a future where it is accessible to everyone and therefore you can't invoke the inequality argument you can't play that card anymore that's what we should be aiming for and it's a great question neil and it's a great comparison to digital technology which had the ability to create a digital divide and probably did during this pandemic you know when people were having the students were having to study from home there was somewhat of a digital divide but as you said we've been able to try to make digital technology widespread and the cost keeps going down because the cost of microchips keeps going down now when it comes to crispr that should be our goal i was in jennifer dowd in his lab with a guy named fyodor yurnov about one of the most colorful characters in the book and his job there is bring the cost down because when victoria gray got cured last year of sickle cell that was about a million dollars that treatment but if you could do it in the body rather than extract the stem cells and have to reinsert them you can bring the cost down dramatically and so that should be our goal for the next phase of crispr is say let's make this health part of this technology the one that cures bad disabilities let's make it as available as possible so is it possible that we'll get to a place where instead of in in the truest sense of manipulation we're just trying to make things better in other words this is what you we already see you do well we've identified that like you do this well you do that well what we're going to do is augment that to the best of your ability i mean how do you how do you feel i'm asking you too neil how do you guys feel about that ethically as a means of manipulating gene expression i think one thing about that chuck that would be good is that it preserves the diversity and respects the individuality of people and it says well you know you joked i think you were making me into lebron james or somebody well you know that ain't going to be me but i think every person can first of all have the disabilities things that are true disabilities you know muscular dystrophy that's a disability or even problematic you know genetic conditions you have let's remove those so that every person can flourish to the extent their abilities and their desires uh lead them to it seems to me there would always be this sort of fuzzy boundary between what anyone is declaring should be fixed and what shouldn't be absolutely the boundary is fuzzy and in my book i try to make us open our minds a bit to say what are true disabilities and what are things that are disabilities only because society doesn't accommodate them well and those of us in the hearing enabled community we may say we want to make sure our kids don't have congenital deafness but if you're in the deaf community you might say we're adding a lot to our society i don't think there's easy answers to things like that even david sanchez as i mentioned in my book says well those of us who have sickle cell you know sickle cell drove miles davis to drink it drove him to drugs it probably drove him to death but it also drove miles davis to do bitch's brew or kind of blue some of the greatest uh and so we have to march down this path by understanding yes you know franklin roosevelt was forged by polio but that doesn't mean we're going to quit using the polio vaccine uh sickle cell may have forged miles davis but what does that mean should we be editing out sickle cell should we be editing out deafness shortness these are not easy answers but in my book i walk through talking to people in all the communities including what we sometimes call the disabled community and say hey let's open our minds a bit because this is an interesting ethical journey we're about to go on the differently abled community that that is so walter i think i have the solution you do edit out the sickle cell gene but you edit back in the gene for jazz and that way you still get the winner everybody's a winner all around yeah you're talking to somebody in new orleans in new orleans you're homebound anthony overlooks royal street and at the moment doreen ketchins is playing her clarinet and i want to edit that gene in because i've learned i would love to play clarinet i used to play it pretty well and i want that gene so i can play it again well i'm glad you didn't play so that you can write these books walter it's great to have you on the on the landscape among mortal keep mortal other folk and thanks for agreeing to this interview on star talk and chuck always good to have you dude oh it's a pleasure all right we got to call it quits there this has been star talk i've been your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always bidding you to keep looking

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 100,489

Rating: 4.9142222 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, DNA, CRISPR, Designer babies, Gene editing, Jennifer Doudna, RNA, biology

Id: u6tFWjXbOfw

Length: 55min 41sec (3341 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021