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

essentially math science disguised as dinosaurs and outer space to try to seem interesting specifically the story refers to

gene

editing

it is a topic you may have heard of since it is now a plot point in action movies like Rampage What do you think? is happening to my friend? Are you familiar with

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tics? Editing changes will be incredibly unpredictable. Is he the only one? Oh, you didn't know about the 30 foot wall. Wait a second. Wait a second. Let me clarify this. This is a movie about military aerial equipment being used to fight a 30 foot wolf and it's not called Wolf Blitzer, that's a big boost opportunity, that's cinematic negligence, it seems like gene

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doesn't just appear in one movie starring rock the Dwayne Johnson, no, he now also constantly appears on television with varying degrees of excitement or extreme alarm a surprising and controversial breakthrough has arrived in gene editing science this is a milestone that could one day erase some hereditary conditions they fear that the technology could be used to create designer babies this technology has the potential to change our DNA and the DNA of all living and extinct organisms could that lead to eugenics could lead to new divisions in humanity I don't know, those things are Scary exactly, it seems like gene editing will cure all diseases or kill every one of us and the truth is that every time there is a bold new technology people tend to go crazy.

I guess after the invention of the refrigerator there were a number of headlines like can meat be too cold? And what about America's friendly neighborhood? So

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we thought we'd take some time to talk about gene editing, what it is, what its potential might be, and what the chances are of a 30-foot wolf killing us all, and let's start with the fact that detecting genes is actually not new, technologies like these have existed for years. What's new and what's driving a lot of recent coverage is something called CRISPR, which stands for crispy straights in bold pink-striped bats, except it doesn't mean this, but you won't remember and it's not really necessary, so let's get back to it. crispy wrexham.

CRISPR is very complicated, but one of the key scientists who discovered its potential, Jennifer Doudna, has a simple way of explaining how. it works I like to use the word processing analogy because it's very analogous to that. You think of the DNA code as the text of a document. These are the scissors that allow you to cut out the text. Change it. The cell takes control after this. After DNA. is broken and you make a precise change at the repair site, that's basically it, it's like cut and paste in Microsoft Word, if there is something you want to fix on a strand of DNA with CRISPR, in theory you could find it, cut it and paste a solution, at which point Clippy presumably appears and says hello, it looks like you're trying to play God and alter the building blocks of life.

The potential of these Sapeli Crispus is enormous, there is hope that they can eventually be applied to more. There are more than 10,000 conditions, from sickle cell anemia to cystic fibrosis and some cases of early-onset Alzheimer's, but gene editing is tremendously difficult. Diseases often have multiple genes contributing to them, and human trials have been extremely rare, although just a few months ago there were some promising results. Layla was dying of acute lymphob

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ic leukemia, so doctors agreed to try an experimental immunocellular therapy that had never been used outside the laboratory. The result surprised her parents. I took a chance and this is her today standing laughing and laughing and I'm the fact. a miracle that is fantastic and right, it is a miracle, except that you think about it, it is not really science, which I would say is actually better and more convenient than a miracle because you don't have to spend the next two thousand years adoring scientist, you can say thank you, incredible story, for the most part, Gina Acing's applications have been limited to experiments on plants and animals, where the results have been surprising, although often the slightly strange researchers of this laboratory They used CRISPR to isolate and manipulate beagle muscle. or the myostatin gene that makes them the most muscular beagles in the world, okay, okay, so you might think it's weird that scientists act like sexy beagles, but have you ever considered that scientists were sissies?

Change your preconceptions about what a scientist can be hashtag beagle feminism hashtag science it's not just that we've paid because scientists are researching ways to combat human diseases using mice and although scientists know how painstakingly slow this type of research is, it's tempting For the rest of us to start running forward and wildly speculating about where this is all going, could CRISPR give us unicorns? There are examples of animals that have a single horn in the middle, like the rhinoceros has one and its nose, but there are other ancient rhinos. I have it in the middle of my head.

Anyway, I think you could get a single horn on a horse by looking at horns and other species, so it's in the realm of possibility. Yeah, okay, so I have to say that judging by all the hedging you just did in that answer, even if you one day race a unicorn, it clearly won't be this majestic creature that wants you to follow it into a waterfall. magic, it will be more like that, a monster that would beg please kill me and this and this madness now, in fact, in In fact, to get a good idea of ​​the mismatch between expectations and current capabilities, just look at a project in the That scientist is working right now to bring back the woolly mammoth that has been making headlines around the world, but they are nowhere near creating life. animal still and even computer simulations are disappointing in the laboratory.

They have edited about 35 functional woolly mammoth genes into the Asian elephant genome. This is a good start to making a semi woolly mammoth. Yeah, that's not a woolly mammoth. not so much Jurassic Park as a $3.00 off-brand petting zoo, cause pet or whatever, but if you watch the news, you may have noticed that you're not just seeing professional scientists and that's because the underlying technology of CRISPR is very cheap and widely available. almost anyone can use it, which is why gene editing stories almost always feature a detour to meet biohackers like Josiah Zana here in the Bay Area, where he visits a biohacker in his garage and sells CRISPR children.

DIY CRISPR kids for a couple hundred dollars you can buy. this cutting-edge kit that allows you to use this technology and you don't need anything else, you don't need a PhD and you can do CRISPR experiments like that. I think it's really cool, well it sounds revolutionary but to be fair I sell strange ones. the things covered in unknown DNA that come out of your garage already have a name and they are every garage sale in the history of mankind. I'd like to buy your lamp, please, and then I'll take it home and wash it, and look, he's basically selling chemistry sets.

To the extent that they get people excited about science, that's a good thing, but you can see why scientists get frustrated when biohackers like the designer get all the media attention, especially since he makes some pretty pretty statements. crazy things like "I want to live in a world where people get excited." drunk and instead of getting tattoos they're like I'm drunk I'm going to get crispy which is a terrible idea honestly you shouldn't even get drunk and get tattoos no matter how cool Robert Duvall's face covering your abdomen looks on that moment. I'm just saying I regretted it

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October.

Xena even publicly injected herself with DNA that had been modified using CRISPR to try to get bigger muscles, which didn't work, but in that same video she argued that using CRISPR should ideally be like downloading. an application you don't need to know what the application does, how to program it, it works like this and I think that's how it should be with genetic engineering, synthetic biology, why can't people use this technology without necessarily fully knowing how it works? oh I can answer that for you because it could be dangerous and someone could get hurt. Also, I refuse to take scientific knowledge of someone who records vertical images on an iPhone, which is unforgivable, immediately disqualifies him, and now he says he regrets such an experiment.

Behavior is a real concern for serious scientists, not just that a biohacker will harm themselves, but that doctors or scientists may rush a human application before it is ready. Things go wrong and the entire field retreats. Yes, that's exactly what happened to the gene therapy field when a patient named Jesse Gail Singer died during a poorly designed trial and that's not the only thing that worries scientists because the benefits and drawbacks of gene editing can spread far beyond a person and understand why it helps to be familiar with a key distinction: somatic cells are the majority of cells in the body, blood, brain, skin cells where DNA is not passed on to offspring .

Germline edits involve sperm, eggs or embryos that essentially change the DNA of future generations. Somatic cells die with germline cells. Much of what you've seen so far

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, like baby Layla or Xena's muscle experiment, involved somatic cells, while germline cells are how my great-grandfather passed it down to me. this nose when he this bird, the feathers of the great-grandmother she loved. Germline editing could do amazing things. For example, malaria, almost half a million people die from it every year and it's transmitted by mosquitoes, but gene editing could help stop that through something called a gene. Drive scientists do this by inserting an artificial gene into the DNA of mosquito embryos that will make an increasing proportion of female offspring sterile.

The gene drive is embedded in the DNA to ensure the changes are inherited, unlike the natural evolution where chance is involved, that's brilliant and honestly much simpler than my idea of ​​fighting malaria by simply adapting millions. of mosquitoes with tiny condoms, but the moment you move on to germline editing the ramifications can seriously increase because disrupting any ecosystem can have unintended consequences, this has always been true even before gene editing and my Favorite example of this comes from Australia, we are about to In the 1930s a hundred cane toads were introduced to control the cane beetle, for the record they did not do what they did was multiply into hundreds of millions of cane toads and wreak absolute havoc.

Australians hate these things, a documentary was even made. about them featuring a guy who made it his life's work to run over as many as he could align them with the driver's side front wheel, but I seem to be able to get most of the ones I align on the right side of Well, I really try my best to run over cane toads basically because I have a very deep love for the wildlife that occurs here naturally, if it were possible and I was able to completely remove and eradicate them in Australia. I would spend my entire life doing exactly that.

Wow, that guy is in for a nasty surprise when he arrives at the pearly gates and finds out that God is an Australian Kato, so would you like to go to heaven, huh, why don't we go ahead and take a look at the guys, the The point is that ecosystems are very delicate, so you have to be very careful, and a good example of someone taking that kind of care with gene editing can be seen in a project being considered on Nantucket Island as a way to combat Lyme disease, you see, Lyme disease is transmitted from ticks to humans, but before that happens, it goes from mice to ticks, now normally the way it works is like this and the mouse Going through a difficult breakup, it was a relationship that the mouse didn't make. it doesn't want to end and leaves you seriously questioning is the mouse worth it the mouse has a series of rebound dates that only deepen the disillusionment could someone love me? the mouse wanders around dejected the mouse turns to alcohol to numb the pain while drunk he comes across a tinder first the profile of a tick then the mouse is disgusted but then he's actually intrigued oh god he thinks am I really going to do A tick? the mouse goes to the date thinking it's just a date, we're just talking, but the mouse lies to himself because as soon as the tick says maybe we should go somewhere quiet where we can talk BAM, they'rebanging in the shower.

I don't know, then the mouse feels strangely satisfied, he feels desirable again about the ticket, he can't wait to brag to his friends that it's just a mouse and they both completely forget about the encounter until eight months later, when the tick receives a call, bad news, you have Lyme disease and this is how Lyme disease is transmitted from mice to ticks, sometimes, other times, the tick bites the mouse anyway, the point To prevent the spread of lung disease, a biologist named Kevin's Belt is considering introducing genetically modified mice that cannot transmit the disease to ticks and would do so with great caution by testing it on an uninhabited island where the experiment will be performed. and would only make progress on Nantucket if it gained acceptance from the local community, and even with all those safeguards, it is aware of the uncertainty, although Kevin s Pelt is confident that his modified mice will only reduce Lyme disease and cause no harm to Nantucket. ecosystem, he also knows that absolute certainty and genetic engineering do not go together.

Every day I worry that I am missing something profound about the consequences of what we are developing. I'm glad you do because that's the kind of caution you need to take. You want from someone in your position, you clearly don't want to end up in a limerick that goes there once there was a man from Nantucket who gathered some mice in the bucket, altered those designed mice with a splice and now all the seagulls are dead and look, just there are practical considerations about germline editing; There are also huge moral questions, particularly when it comes to humans, because it raises the possibility that one day gene editing could be used not only to fight diseases but for so-called enhancement that sells you into some pretty dangerous territory, even Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers of CRISPR, sees the danger of this.

Here she is telling the story of a dream she once had and it was nice. I walked into a room and a colleague of mine. Jennifer said to me, I would like you to explain CRISPR technology to a friend and he took me to a room and the person was sitting with his back to me and when he turned around I realized that it was some kind of horror, horror that was. It was Hitler and it was actually Hitler with a kind of pig nose and he almost looked like a chimeric pig, a kind of human creature, it's true, she had a dream about a pink Hitler who wanted to learn more about CRISPR and, aside from her reservations ethics, you might also want to examine why your subconscious thinks one of your colleagues is just a casual friend of Hitler and look clearly, the more control people have over the ability to design their children, the greater the moral questions that arise, including who decides what constitutes a The genetic problem that must be solved is deafness and disease.

Many in the deaf community would say no, dwarfism is a disease and he would say no, the idea that we are all sick, that we are suffering, that I suffer from dwarfism, no. I live with dwarfism I have lived with dwarfism for 39 years I am proud to be a second generation raising a third generation of people living with dwarfism I do not suffer I suffer from exactly how society treats me and there are many groups that could rightly worry that it What makes them unique or different can be seen as defects that must be corrected and eugenics is a word that, rightly, terrifies people; that's why it was a mistake for Eugene Levy to make the title of his autobiography, it's a shame, it was a lovely book, as some great anecdotes from Catherine O'Hara were that title really dusted you off.

Its germline is still edited and many countries have bans or restrictions on it, but one place with very few restrictions is China, which generally seems eager to push the limits of gene editing and one of the scientists who works in that laboratory Jack'd Beagle seems to brush off certain ethical questions, CRISPR enables humans, it puts so much power in our hands that it allows us to shape our world in ways never before imagined and there are many people in the US who think well, Not that, that's not for us to do, that's that. a higher power that is for God, so the idea that we could play the role of God makes a lot of people nervous mmm, okay, that guy seems a little indifferent to gene editing technology, which is kind of surprising in a country whose president as you may remember from our show on China is a talking bear that eats honey that's the resemblance he's scared I can't I don't know which is which and look and see my point here in showing you all this is not to scare you there is a lot to do What to be legitimately excited about here: Gene editing has the potential to alleviate a lot of human suffering, but achieving that potential will require careful and time-consuming research;

The science involved is much more complicated than we have had time to understand. until tonight mainly because we needed to make room for that long story about the mouse tick and I emphatically stand by that decision, but hey, as that research moves forward, we need to figure out how to balance the risks and potential rewards of gene editing. which is going to be complicated because everything that is being done tends to mix meticulous professional scientists with free biohackers like this guy, practical applications with crazy theories, best-case scenarios like ending malaria with catastrophic prophecies of 30 foot wolves, but we are At some point we will have to decide where the lines should be drawn because, while Gina can't do incredible things for our health, at least in the future let's try to avoid a future where we end up going all over the place .

She runs over all the Hitler pigs we accidentally created.