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How Gene Editing Works · Stuff You Should Know

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Speaker 1: This episode of Stuff you Should Know is brought to
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Speaker 1: your first purchase. Squarespace set your website apart. Welcome to
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Speaker 1: you Stuff you Should Know friendhouse Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
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Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
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Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. Did you see that squirreled
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Speaker 1: W Chuck Bryant picture. Yeah, it's pretty great. Big thanks
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Speaker 1: to Sally Ridge, illustrator Drawer of Things, who made this
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Speaker 1: one of We used to get a lot of fan
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Speaker 1: ar't have you noticed we don't get that much anymore.
0:57
Speaker 1: Everybody take this for grana. Uh maybe no, we get
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Speaker 1: jingles now. Yeah, we get all kinds of cool stuff,
1:03
Speaker 1: But we just used to get a ton of fan art,
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Speaker 1: and this is like one of the more delightful pieces
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Speaker 1: of pan art we've ever gotten. We posted it on
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Speaker 1: our Instagram actually yeah, and Facebook, So thank you Sally
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Speaker 1: for that and go to Sally rich dot net to
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Speaker 1: see her work. Uh and I'm a little squirrel, I'm
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Speaker 1: a weasel, which I don't know what to make of. Ye,
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Speaker 1: I'm just going with it. It's cute. I first saw
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Speaker 1: that too, and I was like, h r. It was
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Speaker 1: like if it was a weasel in the skunk could
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Speaker 1: be like, I really have to think it, think it through.
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Speaker 1: But you as a squirrel, you have a little beard
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Speaker 1: even too, it's pretty cute. It is very cute. Um,
1:36
Speaker 1: so Chuck. We say all that to say, have you
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Speaker 1: ever seen a gene a grown gene naked? Can you?
1:45
Speaker 1: Can you keep up with jeans and DNA and all
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Speaker 1: that nuclear tides? Do you remember this stuff? A little bit?
1:50
Speaker 1: I had to go back and brush up on a little.
1:53
Speaker 1: If you have a primer, feel free, because I have
1:55
Speaker 1: a bit of a primer. I'll probably screwed up royally. Well.
1:57
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, an alternate title for this show
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Speaker 1: could be called, um, how the crisper gene editing works?
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Speaker 1: Uh A, k A, what's gonna mess up? Yeah, it's
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Speaker 1: it's kind of I mean, it's sort of simple, but
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Speaker 1: it also is a little minded thing. It's simple. If
2:13
Speaker 1: you are a geneticist, it's it's almost like laughably scarily simple.
2:19
Speaker 1: But um, two people like us, it's it's like sure, um,
2:23
Speaker 1: all right, well let's go back. Let's talk a little
2:25
Speaker 1: bit about genes first, right to a little weasel in
2:27
Speaker 1: a squirrel. So if you if you go into one
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Speaker 1: of those squirrels cells and you go into the nucleus
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Speaker 1: of the cell, you're gonna find a pair of chromosomes, right,
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Speaker 1: And these chromosomes are made up of DNA, and the
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Speaker 1: DNA itself is made up of nucleotide pairs. What is it?
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Speaker 1: G A t TC Is that right? Um? Add nine
2:50
Speaker 1: goes to oh who is it? Yeah? Add nine goes
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Speaker 1: to thymine and guanine goes to cytoscene. Right, Okay, so
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Speaker 1: you got attica. Yes, And when you put these these
3:02
Speaker 1: amino acids together, you have what are called nucleotide based
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Speaker 1: pairs and they make up d N A. Now, if
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Speaker 1: you take a strand of DNA, this thing from um
3:11
Speaker 1: it's like a Stanford site for dummies. So it really
3:14
Speaker 1: spoke to me. But it said it said that if
3:16
Speaker 1: you could stretch out your d NA, it would be
3:20
Speaker 1: like six ft long. Did you know that in the
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Speaker 1: nucleus of a cell. I thought you were about to
3:25
Speaker 1: say it would be the exact exact height that you are.
3:28
Speaker 1: That would be pretty neatly in my mind would have
3:29
Speaker 1: been blown. Yeah, that would be something else. Wow, maybe
3:33
Speaker 1: it is because I'm about six ft Because supposedly your
3:35
Speaker 1: wingspan is a fingertip to fingertip is the same as
3:39
Speaker 1: your height. I've heard that before. That's not true, though,
3:41
Speaker 1: because some people have larger wingspans than others than their height,
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Speaker 1: like proportionately. I got you anyway, go ahead. So it's
3:47
Speaker 1: just a dirty lie, I think. So. Huh. Well, if
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Speaker 1: you take this DNA right and you look at it,
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Speaker 1: you can see that there's different sequences and along this
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Speaker 1: these this very long six ft strand of d N A,
4:03
Speaker 1: these sequences are broken down into what are called genes, right,
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Speaker 1: And so a gene is really just a string of
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Speaker 1: nucleotide base pairs that create or lead to the production
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Speaker 1: of a specific protein. And you say, okay, well, great protein,
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Speaker 1: we eat that it's steak done. No. Proteins do way
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Speaker 1: more than that. They're involved in just about every part
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Speaker 1: of your body, from like the building box of cells
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Speaker 1: to chewing to blinking, the thinking like, proteins are very
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Speaker 1: very important, and your proteins are expressed through your genes. Okay,
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Speaker 1: I think I got that fairly right. Every once in
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Speaker 1: a while, this code, especially when a cell divides and
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Speaker 1: the d n A that was in the original cell
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Speaker 1: is copied for to the new cell, that translation can
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Speaker 1: go a little bit wrong, and so all of a sudden,
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Speaker 1: along these billions of base hairs, there's a there's a
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Speaker 1: there's a mistranslation, and what you have then is a mutation.
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Speaker 1: For the most part, mutations are not problems. As a
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Speaker 1: matter of fact, Um, any one of us has something
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Speaker 1: like an estimated five to ten mutations deadly mutations in
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Speaker 1: our genes right now. But we only have one copy.
5:20
Speaker 1: And there are very few diseases that you only need
5:22
Speaker 1: one copy of a genetic defect for, right, So we're
5:26
Speaker 1: basically fine. If you get two pairs of mutated problematic genes,
5:31
Speaker 1: then you can have a disease. And there's a lot
5:33
Speaker 1: of diseases that are genetic in origin. Everything from um
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Speaker 1: cystic fibrosis to cancer is the result of a gene
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Speaker 1: that's mutated and gone Haywire. The whole point of everything
5:48
Speaker 1: I just said is that we from the dawn of humanity,
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Speaker 1: even before then, ever since we were little amiba, have
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Speaker 1: been subject to the ms and the vagaries of genetic mutations.
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Speaker 1: Sometimes they help us, sometimes they do nothing, sometimes they
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Speaker 1: create disease. But as of two thousand twelve, we are
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Speaker 1: technically leaving the thumb of genetic mutations tyranny potentially, yeah,
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Speaker 1: through Crisper Jean editing. Yeah. It's it's pretty remarkable, it
6:26
Speaker 1: really is. It's very tough. I know, I say this
6:28
Speaker 1: a lot. I think I said it's tough to underestimate
6:31
Speaker 1: the craze of super balls or something stupid like that.
6:34
Speaker 1: It's really tough to overstate how much the Crisper gene
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Speaker 1: editing um technique could change humanity in the world. If
6:46
Speaker 1: everything goes well, hopefully within the next decade we'll see
6:51
Speaker 1: real human trials for some of these applications. That's the hope. Yeah. Uh,
6:58
Speaker 1: and it may happen because this is one of the
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Speaker 1: most heavily funded arms of scientific health medicinal research out
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Speaker 1: there right now. It's also one of the newest too,
7:09
Speaker 1: and it's already one of the most heavily funded because
7:11
Speaker 1: it's it's showing that much promise, Like everybody keeps looking
7:14
Speaker 1: into it more and more and more, and they're like
7:16
Speaker 1: every every time they look at it where they're like,
7:18
Speaker 1: it's like we just unlocked a secret of life. Yeah,
7:22
Speaker 1: we just figured it out, and we can make so
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Speaker 1: much money on it. So let's start a company and
7:28
Speaker 1: invest a lot of money in its research. Alright. So
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Speaker 1: crisper c R I s p R all capitalized stands
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Speaker 1: for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, which is why
7:42
Speaker 1: they called it crisper, because that is a mouthful. And
7:45
Speaker 1: unless you're a geneticist, like you said that, probably those
7:48
Speaker 1: string of words together probably just make your head spin, right,
7:52
Speaker 1: but if you if you take them in separate. And
7:54
Speaker 1: I watched this video. I can't remember who did it,
7:57
Speaker 1: but I'll post it on the podcast page, this Ted Talk. No,
8:01
Speaker 1: it wasn't a Ted Talk. It was by a dude.
8:04
Speaker 1: Oh um, oh, what's Bozeman Science? It was a Bozeman
8:09
Speaker 1: science video. It was really good Bozeman Montana. It was
8:13
Speaker 1: just Bozeman science. So now there's a Bozeman Montana and
8:16
Speaker 1: a Bozeman Science But anyway, the guy on the video said,
8:20
Speaker 1: just kind of take it separately, and it's actually to
8:23
Speaker 1: two parts. You've got the short palindromic repeats are the thing,
8:30
Speaker 1: and the clustered regularly inner space then kind of describes
8:34
Speaker 1: what that thing is. Right, So the short palindromic repeats
8:37
Speaker 1: is what you need to focus on the start. But
8:41
Speaker 1: let's back up a little bit. Let's talk a little
8:43
Speaker 1: bit about genetically modifying things. Uh, we've been doing this
8:47
Speaker 1: for a while. Everyone knows about Dolly the sheep and
8:51
Speaker 1: cloning and genetically modified fruits and vegetables. Um, even selective
8:57
Speaker 1: breeding is a is a type of genetic model application.
9:00
Speaker 1: Sure you know. So it's nothing new, it's been going
9:02
Speaker 1: on for a while. But um, in the early two thousand's,
9:07
Speaker 1: there was a discovery of an enzyme. We'll not discovery
9:11
Speaker 1: the enzyme, but a discovery of how to use an
9:12
Speaker 1: enzyme called zinc finger nucleaise And what that would do
9:17
Speaker 1: is replace, it would delete and replace very specific bad
9:22
Speaker 1: genes that would make you get a disease, let's say. Right.
9:28
Speaker 1: So it was a huge finding but really expensive. Yeah,
9:32
Speaker 1: they were about five thousand dollars a piece, and they
9:34
Speaker 1: didn't work every time for sure, and um, they were
9:37
Speaker 1: just difficult to manufacture, difficult to understand, difficult to implement.
9:41
Speaker 1: But they did do something pretty amazing, which was they
9:44
Speaker 1: went in removed a gene from a strip of DNA
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Speaker 1: and could replace it with another gene that you wanted.
9:52
Speaker 1: The thing is, it was just tough to use, basically,
9:54
Speaker 1: So there was a big breakthrough, but it wasn't a
9:57
Speaker 1: sweeping breakthrough because it was it was fragile and difficult
10:02
Speaker 1: and expensive. That's right. Uh, fast forward to well, I
10:05
Speaker 1: guess let's go back in time rather seven. Uh, sophomore
10:10
Speaker 1: in high school. George Brett was the man. Yeah, sure
10:14
Speaker 1: he was. Uh. John Cusack started say anything in seven
10:20
Speaker 1: maybe something around there. I think that was eighty nine ish.
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Speaker 1: No singles was like no singles is definitely in the nineties,
10:29
Speaker 1: because I was I think it's like ninety I'm gonna
10:32
Speaker 1: go with one, all right, while you look that up.
10:36
Speaker 1: So nine eight seven is when the word crisper first
10:40
Speaker 1: appears in a journal article because the scientists said, you
10:43
Speaker 1: know what, we found this thing in E. Coal i
10:47
Speaker 1: these short repeats. What year was it? Uh? These short
10:51
Speaker 1: repeats and the E. Coli bacteria UM of d n
10:56
Speaker 1: A and that's weird. There should not be repeats of
10:58
Speaker 1: DNA and this bacteria. So it was noteworthy. Yeah, it's
11:02
Speaker 1: like what is that, right, it's a little weird. So
11:05
Speaker 1: they took note, and I guess just say anything came
11:07
Speaker 1: out and they decided to watch Cameron Crow movies for
11:10
Speaker 1: the next decade. As they got bad, they started watching
11:14
Speaker 1: singles and UM. In twelve is when Crisper and this
11:19
Speaker 1: is just a few short years ago, is when Crisper
11:22
Speaker 1: really came on the scene. Uh. And that's when all
11:25
Speaker 1: this money started pouring into the research. And it's like
11:28
Speaker 1: advanced light years in the last four years, right. And
11:31
Speaker 1: the big, the big difference between what happened in seven
11:34
Speaker 1: what happened in two dozen twelve is that they figured
11:36
Speaker 1: out what these um short palindromic repeats were. Right, you
11:41
Speaker 1: have these little strips of d n A in E.
11:44
Speaker 1: Coli And then they found out later on you can
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Speaker 1: find it in most bacteria, if not at all. These
11:49
Speaker 1: short little strips seemed to be separating out these these
11:54
Speaker 1: what seemed to be like random strings of DNA, but
11:57
Speaker 1: they separated them out in a red alert interspersed manner. Right,
12:02
Speaker 1: So they looked at the little bits of random DNA
12:06
Speaker 1: and they realized that it matched viral DNA, and they
12:10
Speaker 1: totally weird, Yeah, because they're like, well, wait, this is
12:13
Speaker 1: a bacteria. What is viral DNA doing in here? And
12:16
Speaker 1: someone I'm not exactly sure who's just Eugene Conan was
12:21
Speaker 1: a paradigm changing giant is the unsung hero in this.
12:26
Speaker 1: Coonan said, you know what I think is going on.
12:28
Speaker 1: I think what we're seeing here is essentially a database
12:32
Speaker 1: that a bacteria houses in its own DNA where when
12:37
Speaker 1: it's invaded by a virus, it captures that viruses DNA
12:42
Speaker 1: or RNA, snips up some of it and stores it in.
12:46
Speaker 1: It's the in this um genetic database, so that when
12:49
Speaker 1: it sees that again, it will recognize the virus and
12:53
Speaker 1: can attack it. Yeah, it's a it's a genetic adaptation
12:57
Speaker 1: present and is not all bacteria, but in any bacteria
13:00
Speaker 1: cells to help it survive, because the bacteria has like
13:05
Speaker 1: a few minutes once it starts to get attacked by
13:07
Speaker 1: a virus to live, right, Okay, so it's part of
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Speaker 1: its immune system, right, this database of what's called crisper. Yeah,
13:14
Speaker 1: then there's another thing that they figured out about bacteria
13:17
Speaker 1: that's associated with the Crisper database. In any given bacteria
13:21
Speaker 1: and a bacteria that has it, it's called CAST nine.
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Speaker 1: It's Crisper associated um enzymes. I think C A S nine.
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Speaker 1: It's a it's a protein. It's an RNA guided enzyme
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Speaker 1: in protein, right, and it has this really neat function.
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Speaker 1: It goes to a virus or viral DNA or viral RNA,
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Speaker 1: and it captures it. It unzips it, which is not
13:45
Speaker 1: everything can do that now, and then it also precisely
13:48
Speaker 1: snips it and then delivers that snip to the bacteria's
13:54
Speaker 1: Crisper database for storage. Yeah, so what you have is
13:57
Speaker 1: a it's an it's an edit as a p posed
14:00
Speaker 1: to like we've been working with working with genetic addition
14:03
Speaker 1: and transfer for years, like treating people with transferring into
14:09
Speaker 1: like bone marrow. Let's say, but this is an actual edit,
14:12
Speaker 1: like they like in it in this article, even though
14:14
Speaker 1: our own article never mentioned CAST nine, which is like,
14:18
Speaker 1: I can't even believe you can't really have one with
14:20
Speaker 1: the other. It was weird, but uh, this CAST nine
14:24
Speaker 1: is literally they liken it to an assassin like that
14:27
Speaker 1: comes in very surgically with a pair of scissors, very
14:29
Speaker 1: specifically removes ideally just that part. Yeah, the bad part.
14:34
Speaker 1: So we'll talk a little more about this. We get
14:36
Speaker 1: to take a break though, everybody. We're getting a little
14:38
Speaker 1: work though, So Chuck, you you're calling the cast the
15:02
Speaker 1: Crisper cast nine system, which is basically what it is,
15:06
Speaker 1: a an assassin for bacteria, right, it goes after the
15:10
Speaker 1: viruses cuts him up. Somebody figured out along the line
15:14
Speaker 1: that you can take this natural bacterial immune response and
15:20
Speaker 1: sick it on not just viruses, but other stuff, not
15:25
Speaker 1: just somebody. Cal Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doodna. Yeah, she's gonna
15:32
Speaker 1: win a she's gonna win a Nobel Prize one day.
15:35
Speaker 1: She's totally up for it. She will and and I
15:38
Speaker 1: would advise if anyone is into Ted Talks to watch
15:40
Speaker 1: her Ted Talk on this. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. So, um,
15:44
Speaker 1: she is a Juda Dowdna. Uh well, I said Dudna,
15:48
Speaker 1: but we'll go with down okay, one of those. Um.
15:52
Speaker 1: She she was the first to suggest that you can
15:56
Speaker 1: use this natural system to edit jeans and other things things.
16:00
Speaker 1: And I think they started out in very simple organisms,
16:05
Speaker 1: but what they found over time. Is that this seems
16:09
Speaker 1: to be universal that as long as something has DNA
16:13
Speaker 1: you can use the Crisper cast nine system on it
16:17
Speaker 1: to edit genes. Yeah to uh. She likened it to
16:21
Speaker 1: fixing a typo or she said it was like a
16:23
Speaker 1: genetic vaccination card that yourself can have. Yeah, So it
16:28
Speaker 1: goes in, it snips out the bad part, and sometimes
16:32
Speaker 1: it just joins from there and just repairs it. But
16:35
Speaker 1: other times it sticks uh, something else in it joins it. Right,
16:40
Speaker 1: So depends Yeah, it depends on the system that you're using.
16:43
Speaker 1: Like you can you can just stick a Crisper cast
16:46
Speaker 1: nine thing, So you you give it a You basically
16:50
Speaker 1: give this bacterial immune response a little piece of the
16:56
Speaker 1: gene that you want edited, and it says, exam is
17:00
Speaker 1: it just like it would if if it were in
17:02
Speaker 1: a bacteria and it were being invaded by a virus.
17:05
Speaker 1: So it examines this gene and says, Okay, this is
17:07
Speaker 1: what I need to go find, And it goes and
17:09
Speaker 1: finds it on a strand of DNA. And this thing
17:12
Speaker 1: doesn't care what DNA it's looking at. It's just doing
17:15
Speaker 1: its thing right, So if you stick it on any DNA,
17:18
Speaker 1: it's going to go find that sequence, that genetic sequence
17:22
Speaker 1: on whatever DNA it's exposed to, and then it's going
17:26
Speaker 1: to un zip it. It's going to cut it out,
17:28
Speaker 1: and then one thing you can do is just say
17:30
Speaker 1: done and done, and then the DNA is going to
17:32
Speaker 1: repair itself. But what you've just done is removed that
17:35
Speaker 1: whole sequence of nucleotide base pairs that makes up a gene,
17:39
Speaker 1: and so when it's fuses back together, it's going to
17:43
Speaker 1: be missing that gene. So you can delete a gene
17:46
Speaker 1: is what that's called, or you can add a third
17:49
Speaker 1: component to and say, here's what you're looking for, here's
17:53
Speaker 1: the here's the guide RNA that you want to go find.
17:56
Speaker 1: Um use the cast nine system to go cut it out,
17:59
Speaker 1: un zip and cut it out, and then replace it
18:02
Speaker 1: with this. Here's some blueprints for what you should install
18:06
Speaker 1: in the in the place of the gene you just
18:08
Speaker 1: edited out, so you can delete and then now add
18:12
Speaker 1: whatever gene you want. And what they found, this incredibly
18:15
Speaker 1: mind bobbling, chuck, is that you can take a gene
18:18
Speaker 1: from a different organism and put it into another organism.
18:24
Speaker 1: You can basically just copy and paste and cut and
18:27
Speaker 1: paste DNA and that's what this system is allowing people
18:31
Speaker 1: to do. So what does all this mean. It means
18:33
Speaker 1: you could potentially remove a gene for blindness, You could
18:38
Speaker 1: remove a gene for cystic fibrosis and repair. Uh. Well,
18:43
Speaker 1: we'll talk about HIV a little bit more in a minute. Um,
18:47
Speaker 1: you could create more disease resistant crops. Uh. You could
18:51
Speaker 1: create a bioweapon that could wipe out a species. I
18:54
Speaker 1: mean there are bad applications as well. Well. The people
18:57
Speaker 1: have talked about that. And remember was zekea virus? Like
19:00
Speaker 1: people are saying, well, let's just get mosquitoes to to
19:03
Speaker 1: stop reproducing and then that'll stop the spread of zecra virus.
19:07
Speaker 1: What they're talking about is using gene editing. Yeah, and
19:10
Speaker 1: if you watch that uh ted talk from Jennifer down
19:14
Speaker 1: she says, slow we need to slow it down. And um,
19:19
Speaker 1: she and her I don't know she was partnered. She
19:22
Speaker 1: said she co invented. I don't know if it was
19:24
Speaker 1: Coonan or not, but whoever her partner and crime here
19:28
Speaker 1: is I was a French, a French um researcher. So
19:32
Speaker 1: it wasn't Emmanuel something I can't remember last name. So
19:35
Speaker 1: she said they basically called for a moratorium for now
19:39
Speaker 1: and said everyone just stopped for a minute. Yeah, and
19:43
Speaker 1: everybody's like, well, how much money is There's a lot
19:46
Speaker 1: of money at stakes, so we'll see where that goes.
19:47
Speaker 1: But she she did call for a pause, is what
19:50
Speaker 1: she called it. UM, so they could kind of set
19:53
Speaker 1: up some guidelines on how to use and not misuse
19:57
Speaker 1: this technology. Yeah. And the reason why UM, I mean,
20:00
Speaker 1: I salute her for that. That's a big deal. But
20:04
Speaker 1: that's a big problem that we're facing in this world
20:06
Speaker 1: is that our technology is starting to outpace our understanding
20:10
Speaker 1: of all of the things that can do. And then
20:13
Speaker 1: in addition to that, it's becoming much more democratized to
20:16
Speaker 1: where people can get their hands on incredibly advanced technology
20:21
Speaker 1: UM in the comforts of their own home. And this
20:23
Speaker 1: is a really good example of that because the Crisper
20:26
Speaker 1: system you can send off for on the internet for
20:29
Speaker 1: anywhere from like thirty bucks to seventy five bucks, and
20:32
Speaker 1: you will have a bacteria that you can introduce your
20:37
Speaker 1: guide RNA too or your host RNA too, and and
20:41
Speaker 1: basically airstolize it and expose it to a mouse, and
20:46
Speaker 1: that bacteria will go in and edit that mouse's Janes,
20:49
Speaker 1: and you can do this if you know what you're
20:51
Speaker 1: doing with a relatively clunky setup at your in your
20:55
Speaker 1: home and in the So like the idea that we
20:59
Speaker 1: need to stop in and talk about what direction we
21:01
Speaker 1: should go with this or what restrictions we should place
21:03
Speaker 1: on it. I think that's a fantastic idea. Well, yeah,
21:06
Speaker 1: because we all we did a show on Designer Children.
21:09
Speaker 1: Uh jeez, was it before two thousand twelve? I don't know.
21:14
Speaker 1: I would guess it came out of this because I
21:16
Speaker 1: don't remember. I don't remember talking about the crisper jine
21:18
Speaker 1: in that episode, but that's potentially one of the applications
21:21
Speaker 1: is I don't want my child to have Huntington's disease,
21:26
Speaker 1: and it's in there, so let's take it out. Oh
21:30
Speaker 1: I also want my kid to be tall and have
21:32
Speaker 1: blue eyes. Yeah, it gets a little dicey, it does.
21:36
Speaker 1: Um Designer Humans, Well, just go back and listen of
21:41
Speaker 1: that episode. It's fun fraught with complications. You start to
21:44
Speaker 1: run into the idea of like genetic or eugenics. Well, yeah,
21:47
Speaker 1: they have and they have nuts because obviously not everyone
21:50
Speaker 1: could afford to do something like that, So then you
21:52
Speaker 1: have you know, the wealthy uber races even taller and
21:55
Speaker 1: blonder than ever, right exactly. But then they've also decided
21:58
Speaker 1: that tall and blond is the ideal, So then they
22:01
Speaker 1: start like editing people's jeans who aren't tall and blond,
22:07
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, you have nothing but
22:08
Speaker 1: tall and blonde people. Right, Like you said, I've never
22:12
Speaker 1: even seen that movie. What's a good one? Is it? Really? Yeah? Man,
22:16
Speaker 1: they're like a you know, a thinking person's reindeer game
22:21
Speaker 1: sci fi. You bring that movie up way too much. Um,
22:25
Speaker 1: just a thinking person's sci fi future movie. Have you
22:29
Speaker 1: seen Equilibrium with Christian Bale? No? I haven't either. It's
22:34
Speaker 1: got like three stars on Netflix, and that's not enough
22:37
Speaker 1: for me to pull the trigger on I've never heard
22:39
Speaker 1: of that, which is a bad sign. It seems like
22:41
Speaker 1: it's from about the same time as Gadica make me
22:43
Speaker 1: a little earlier. But it's Christian Bale. He's good. Yeah,
22:47
Speaker 1: it's a little crazy, he's still good. We're done, you
22:51
Speaker 1: and me. He's never gonna live that. What a great tirade.
22:56
Speaker 1: He did it right before we shot our TV show too,
22:58
Speaker 1: so like we walked around on set like say and
23:00
Speaker 1: that all that was a running joke that was fun. Uh,
23:04
Speaker 1: you want to take another break. Let's take a break
23:06
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about kind of where we are right
23:08
Speaker 1: now and and what some people think about his future.
23:32
Speaker 1: All right, Chuck. So obviously we're on the verge of
23:35
Speaker 1: UM great designer children like probably next week, right. I
23:39
Speaker 1: don't think it's that quick, No, But I did read
23:42
Speaker 1: this article because this sounded too good to be true
23:45
Speaker 1: when I was reading it. It's like, Man, the Christopher gene.
23:47
Speaker 1: That's it's going to solve everything from food shortage to
23:51
Speaker 1: every disease known demand like cancer. Right. Cancer, Cancer is
23:55
Speaker 1: basically the result of UM something called the P fifty
23:59
Speaker 1: three protein not being expressed by a gene. And the
24:03
Speaker 1: P fifty three protein goes in and says, hey, I
24:06
Speaker 1: think you're a tumor. You stop multiplying. And if that,
24:09
Speaker 1: if that protein is not there to tell the cell
24:12
Speaker 1: to stop multiplying, it keeps multiplying, and all of a sudden,
24:14
Speaker 1: you got a tumor, a k A cancer. Right, So
24:17
Speaker 1: you could go in and and just edit that gene
24:21
Speaker 1: to make sure the P fifty three UM protein is expressed. Bam,
24:24
Speaker 1: you just cured cancer on the genetic level. So yes,
24:27
Speaker 1: it could just improve the world. Correct sir, So I
24:32
Speaker 1: read this article, I was all excited, um, and you
24:35
Speaker 1: should still be excited. This isn't a complete poopoo, but
24:39
Speaker 1: this was just like this week. Uh, the gene editor
24:42
Speaker 1: Cristoper won't fully fix sick people anytime soon. And here's why. Um.
24:46
Speaker 1: So this lady, Jocelyn Kaiser sort of throws a bit
24:50
Speaker 1: of a wet blanket on it, um, but not completely there.
24:54
Speaker 1: She's just sort of like, there's still a ways to go.
24:57
Speaker 1: So here's one of the things, um, most diseases apparently,
25:02
Speaker 1: uh like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy um, where gene correction
25:09
Speaker 1: is already kind of a thing, like where they require
25:11
Speaker 1: gene correction. Um. Basically, what she's saying is it has
25:16
Speaker 1: to be done in a living person. Like you can't
25:19
Speaker 1: extract the cells and do it and then put the
25:21
Speaker 1: cells back in like they currently do with gene transfer,
25:24
Speaker 1: because uh, not enough of the cells will survive apparently.
25:29
Speaker 1: So that's one of the roadblocks right now. You need
25:31
Speaker 1: to treat the cells inside the body. Well, one thing
25:34
Speaker 1: I have challenge, one thing I wondered maybe this this
25:37
Speaker 1: um lady talks about it. But how do you how
25:40
Speaker 1: do you direct the the Crisper CAST nine system to
25:45
Speaker 1: the right cell? She just said it's I mean, in
25:49
Speaker 1: her ted talk, she doesn't get super specific. She says,
25:52
Speaker 1: it's an RNA guided protein. Um, that's what I ran
25:56
Speaker 1: across too. I didn't run acress anybody said, oh well
25:58
Speaker 1: this is how did that look for that too? I
26:00
Speaker 1: think it will just call it the magic of science. Um. Yeah,
26:06
Speaker 1: but I mean it's it's very precise though. You know,
26:08
Speaker 1: it's not like they just throw it in there and
26:09
Speaker 1: see what happens. So there there's something guiding it. Um.
26:13
Speaker 1: It's a safety risk right now because when this this
26:18
Speaker 1: Crisper cleaves it off with the scissors. Uh, it is
26:21
Speaker 1: in a very specific location. But they don't know yet
26:24
Speaker 1: if it could potentially, because once you've created these things,
26:27
Speaker 1: you deliver it through a viral vector. It's in there
26:30
Speaker 1: and this cast nine is going to keep replicating itself
26:33
Speaker 1: for forever. So they don't know if fifteen years down
26:36
Speaker 1: the line, if the thing starts cleaving causing cancer basically.
26:41
Speaker 1: But what they think now is they haven't seen that yet.
26:44
Speaker 1: So it's just like, let's keep an eye out for
26:46
Speaker 1: this so it's not like the worst news ever, but
26:49
Speaker 1: so far these mice are doing well and that's not happening. Well.
26:51
Speaker 1: This is like a very hot topic in bioethics as well,
26:54
Speaker 1: and one of the things that people I'm sure like
26:57
Speaker 1: um Dubner are um pressing for is figuring out how
27:02
Speaker 1: to reverse engineer the stuff or reverse the effects of it,
27:06
Speaker 1: to engineer it so it stops after a while, so
27:09
Speaker 1: that if it it like if you did introduce it
27:12
Speaker 1: into a wild population, it wouldn't just wipe that population
27:16
Speaker 1: off the face of the earth. It would eventually slow.
27:19
Speaker 1: Well that's exactly what they're hoping to do, is that
27:22
Speaker 1: CAST nine will eventually stop doing it thing there's you
27:25
Speaker 1: can hope in one hand and then figure it out scientifically.
27:28
Speaker 1: And they're trying to figure it out. Okay, yeah, I
27:31
Speaker 1: thought you were saying, like yeah, they just oh no, no, no,
27:33
Speaker 1: that that they know that's an issue, and that's one
27:35
Speaker 1: of the like roadblocks are trying to overcome. One of
27:38
Speaker 1: the other things is the CAST nine um it's a
27:42
Speaker 1: process that it can only be active when the cells
27:44
Speaker 1: are like dividing actively dividing, and apparently that's just not
27:49
Speaker 1: you know, the liver, you're stem cells, your eyes, your blood.
27:54
Speaker 1: It's not always actively dividing. So they're trying to work
27:58
Speaker 1: around that. Basically every limitation they found so far, they're saying,
28:04
Speaker 1: it's not a it's not a deal Breaker's not a
28:06
Speaker 1: deal breaker. Yeah, we think we can figure something out
28:10
Speaker 1: to work around it. I'm sure they will. So that's
28:12
Speaker 1: the good news. It's just too it seems to be
28:15
Speaker 1: working too well, and it's just too easy to do.
28:19
Speaker 1: There's this there's not just gonna like leave it on
28:22
Speaker 1: the table. Well, no way. I couldn't get around the
28:25
Speaker 1: liver cells not replicating. Uh. And then you know, we
28:28
Speaker 1: mentioned HIV earlier. This article needs updating in our on
28:31
Speaker 1: our site because it said that it kind of overcame HIV. Uh,
28:36
Speaker 1: but that's not true. Now apparently HIV defeated the efforts
28:41
Speaker 1: Christoper right now, but again they said that this isn't
28:46
Speaker 1: this doesn't mean it's over. Um, we think we can
28:51
Speaker 1: overcome this as well, and that eventually could be a
28:54
Speaker 1: cure for HIV. So right now, and they said they
28:57
Speaker 1: weren't too surprised because HIV. To go back and listen
29:00
Speaker 1: to our episode on that it is a tough tough
29:04
Speaker 1: cookie cookie and UM has a knack for mutating and
29:09
Speaker 1: replicating in the face of all kinds of drugs. But
29:12
Speaker 1: they think if they use those drugs along with this,
29:14
Speaker 1: maybe that could be an alternative. UM. Yeah, I mean
29:19
Speaker 1: the future is bright. I think they just it's so
29:21
Speaker 1: early in the game, is the deal. But that's why
29:25
Speaker 1: I think a pause is a good idea. I don't
29:27
Speaker 1: know if I've gotten that across that. I feel like, Yeah,
29:31
Speaker 1: there's one other thing I ran across and researching, something
29:33
Speaker 1: called a DNA drive. You can take this Crisper gene
29:37
Speaker 1: UM Crisper cast nine system, and UM you can add
29:43
Speaker 1: this other component called a DNA drive. Right, And so
29:46
Speaker 1: this DNA drive is basically like UM. It has the
29:49
Speaker 1: ability to during reproduction two not only take the edited gene,
29:56
Speaker 1: or not only to edit a gene in say a
29:59
Speaker 1: miss guito, but when that mosquito reproduces the chromosomes that
30:04
Speaker 1: are contributed with the edited gene, basically, UM break the
30:11
Speaker 1: corresponding spot on the other parents chromosomes, and then when
30:17
Speaker 1: it repairs itself inserts the blueprints so that the edited
30:21
Speaker 1: gene is copied. So then the offspring has both two
30:26
Speaker 1: pair or one pair of the edited gene, which means
30:30
Speaker 1: when they reproduce and they reproduce to somebody else that
30:33
Speaker 1: has both pairs of the same gene, um their offspring
30:38
Speaker 1: has a chance of inheriting that gene and so it
30:42
Speaker 1: can spread through a population of mosquitoes and fix it
30:46
Speaker 1: for your family, fixes it or keeps you from reproducing
30:51
Speaker 1: or whatever. The gene is. Yes, and in a large population,
30:54
Speaker 1: say like a big mosquito population, that means you can
30:57
Speaker 1: spread the edited gene and like a single growing reason.
31:01
Speaker 1: But that's one reason why people are like, we need
31:03
Speaker 1: to figure out how to be able to turn this
31:04
Speaker 1: off because maybe we need mosquitoes. That turns out we
31:08
Speaker 1: shouldn't just wipe them off the face of the earth,
31:10
Speaker 1: although we remember we did a show on that, and
31:13
Speaker 1: some scientists think, no, we don't need them. Yeah, I
31:15
Speaker 1: remember that. Are you got anything else? I got nothing else.
31:18
Speaker 1: I'm sure we can do a follow up on this
31:20
Speaker 1: if we want. If you want to know more about
31:22
Speaker 1: the Crisper gene editing, sweet, you can type that word
31:27
Speaker 1: into the search part house to works dot com and
31:29
Speaker 1: insisted search parts time for listener mail. I'm gonna call
31:34
Speaker 1: this l s D. We've got a lot of great
31:37
Speaker 1: emails from well, I just read this from people who
31:41
Speaker 1: use it and like it. Hey, guys, love the show,
31:44
Speaker 1: but UH, it's been great to learn so much about
31:46
Speaker 1: a variety of topics to and from work. I recently
31:48
Speaker 1: listened to LSD. I got to share my story. Three
31:51
Speaker 1: years ago, my father died unexpectedly a stroke, and it
31:54
Speaker 1: took my whole family by surprise. And became very depressed
31:57
Speaker 1: for MutS and felt like I was diving into on
32:00
Speaker 1: autopilot and wasn't finding any enjoyment in my day to
32:02
Speaker 1: day life. One night, I was hanging out with my
32:04
Speaker 1: friends and was offered some LSD. I had taken some
32:07
Speaker 1: years ago and had a wonderful experience with it, so
32:10
Speaker 1: I thought maybe this could be helpful. Turned out to
32:12
Speaker 1: be the best decision I ever made. I had several
32:15
Speaker 1: powerful revelations about life and developed a deeper appreciation for
32:19
Speaker 1: my friends and family and for the love that binds
32:21
Speaker 1: us all together. Also gained a fresh perspective on how
32:24
Speaker 1: much beauty there is in the world and how I
32:26
Speaker 1: am a part of it. This experience really helped UH
32:29
Speaker 1: set me back on the right path and is a
32:31
Speaker 1: moment in my life that can point to as life changing.
32:35
Speaker 1: I believe the drug has a lot of potential for
32:36
Speaker 1: psychiatric use, can be immensely beneficial with helping people work
32:40
Speaker 1: through serious psychological and emotional issues. I truly hope that
32:44
Speaker 1: it is reclassified from Schedule one so it can be
32:47
Speaker 1: further studied and seen as a medicinal aid and not
32:51
Speaker 1: a harmful chemical. Uh. And that I'm gonna just say
32:55
Speaker 1: is from anonymous because I didn't hear back whether or
32:58
Speaker 1: not this dude wanted his name right on the air.
33:00
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, anonymous, anonymous man, and thanks to everybody
33:04
Speaker 1: who sending emails like that. We heard from a lot
33:06
Speaker 1: of people who are like, yeah, I really love acid,
33:09
Speaker 1: you know, and you know they weren't stories from people
33:13
Speaker 1: that hurt, like you're going to hear this man. Yeah,
33:15
Speaker 1: it was like, hey, I enjoy taking LSD sometimes and
33:18
Speaker 1: I'm a responsible, growing up adult and nothing that helps
33:22
Speaker 1: me out. I don't think we got a single one
33:24
Speaker 1: like that was just a jackass taking LSD, Like all
33:30
Speaker 1: of them are very thoughtful and because that's our audience, buddy, Yeah,
33:34
Speaker 1: full drug users, if you want to get in touch
33:38
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33:41
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33:44
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33:47
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