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0:01
I've built a career out of sharing science news and looking into new discoveries. So when I read that it's now possible to edit our genes, the very fabric of what makes us who we are, I was captivated. I've become determined to find out how this genetic revolution could change our lives. Could there be a future where it's as easy as ordering genetic modifications from a menu? Like stronger bones, or a disease-free body? And if you could, would you design your DNA? Do the benefits
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outweigh the risks? I'm off to explore if we should be "playing God". Just because we could choose from a mutant menu, does that make gene editing right? Just considering it's use raises so many tough ethical questions. I want to start a wider conversation, so I've gathered a group of informed citizens to see what they would do. Would you edit your own genes? I would love to get rid of my lactose intolerance. I would love that. I'd love to be able to eat ice cream and not
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worry if I have a lactate. At this point, sure. I'm getting old, my joints are starting to hurt I'm in ways that I never thought they would and if I want to continue to be physically active I would love to be able to do stuff that allows me to do that. I probably wouldn't. That would be so boring, wouldn't it? I'd really like to be a tetrachromat. These are people who could see more colors than the usual people. I'd really like that. Yeah I would definitely do that. No no. I
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don't think I would. To me that's an obvious thing, you know. I think having just having extra decades of useful, healthy life. We develop our professional skills and and some small amount of wisdom, and being able to apply that for a little bit longer I think would be powerful. I don't know I really don't know. Should people be able to do that? I think that the option should be available. I don't feel qualified to say, "here's what you should do with your own body."
2:20
If you could choose any aesthetic improvements for yourself, what would they be? Well if I answer that question that would bring attention to my flaws. So removing what we see as flaws with genetic engineering is nothing new. Weeds have become wheat, our tomatoes are sweet and juicy and even our dogs are hypoallergenic. But it takes generations to refine these beneficial traits. Gene editing allows us to fast-track this process by tweaking the DNA of every living thing. And a new breakthrough
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technology called CRISPR-cas9, or CRISPR for short, promises to do this more cheaply and accurately than ever before. So what is CRISPR? CRISPR-cas9, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats is a new gene editing tool that allows us to tweak DNA in all living things. CRISPR was discovered in bacteria as a way they identify and destroy invading viruses. And to edit DNA, scientists have now repurposed what's like a tiny, programmable molecular scalpel to cut at
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precise locations in the genetic code. And then DNA is provided and pasted in to repair that cut. And just like that, mozzie, fish or your DNA has been edited. And since this technology has global implications, I'm traveling around the world, meeting experts, to find out what these implications might be. Are we in the DNA revolution? Yeah I'm pretty sure. Will CRISPR change everything? Definitely CRISPR will change our lives. We're here to meet Jin-Soo Kim, he's a
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gene editing pioneer and he's using this CRISPR technique to try and save the banana and also to develop super muscular pigs. It could solve a food supply problem, but it seems kinda weird. I don't know if I want to eat that pork and I really like pork buns. I'm interested to know if you're using CRISPR to save the banana? The banana is on the verge of extinction because of fungal diseases. All the banana is genetically identical. You know, Cavendish bananas. So, you know, the single pathogen
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can kill every banana on Earth. And then now we try to make banana that is resistant to the fungus. So we can just change one gene at a time, there are some candidate genes, and then fungus cannot infect. That's the idea. So it is like surgery right? If you have some defective gene with fatal phenotype, then you can now use CRISPR to correct the defect. And CRISPR is being used to enhance our food as well as correct defects. With an ever increasing population, especially in Asia,
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scientists are getting creative about bulking up what we eat. We create super-muscular pig by just mutating a single gene called the myostatin. So myostatin actually inhibit muscle growth and differentiation. So we knock out myostatin gene and then the pigs have super muscles. So like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in a pig? Exactly. The pig will provide the lean meat, with a high protein content and low fat content and it could fit healthy diet for many people. So CRISPR is
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making the genetic engineering of everything faster, cheaper and more accurate. Its potential is enormous and in some places it's becoming a reality. So the difference is, you know, whether nature makes it or scientist makes it. Nature can make it, but randomly, so if you just screen 1 million individual and there is a one variant, one mutant with supermuscle phenotype. So to find it, you know, it will take a lot of time and resource. But with this tool, CRISPR-cas9
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or other genome editing tools, now you can do it in one or two years. However you feel about the Schwarzenegger pigs, they're just one way way we can hack evolution for our benefit. More gene-editing pioneers are pushing the boundaries of the revolution, using CRISPR to create, well, just about anything. We're off to Harvard Medical School to speak with George Church about the wild possibilities of gene editing, like the extinction of species. If anyone's going to push further in the
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field, it's him.
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We're definitely in a DNA revolution of both reading and writing genomes and it's much, much bigger than editing, editing is bigger than CRISPR and gene therapies bigger than editing and the revolution is much bigger than any of those. Professor Church published one of the first methods from nothing our genome he more or less invented modern DNA sequencing why is everyone so excited about Chris well yeah you know even though my team was one of the inventing teams I'm mystified the why
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people are so excited about it I think it has cool name as cool personalities involved and some cool projects that were enabled by a whole revolution in reading and writing genomes in general not just editing but writing and I think it's just a little more efficient and the church lab is using CRISPR to try and solve some of Medicine's biggest problems tell me about the the pig organs that you were human izing so one of the health crises in the world has all has been ever since
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transplantation worked is there not enough donors so a solution is to either grow the organs in the lab which is potentially expensive or to grow them in an animal that's well masters of the pig this is recognized three decades ago has all perfectly sized organs and there have been some transplants that worked in in primates for short periods of time but they need to be they need to be crafted so that their composition is compatible with the human recipient so you're using genetic engineering to
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humanize these older them so people won't project it's something that would have been very difficult a few years ago but with CRISPR and other parts of the revolution we can we now make tens of changes hundreds of changes as needed to make a pig this very that could be long-term compatible with less and less immune suppression needed never before have you been able to avoid me a suppression by engineering the donor and finally and it's still hard to engineer a human donor but sew it on eclis the
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pig could end up being a better donor than a human because in engineering as well as growing organs in pigs the human donation church is working towards making animals like the woolly mammoth de-extinction elephant so they can again roam the tundra something they're insulating snow and keeping greenhouse gases locked up in the frozen soil could it crispy give us unicorn so we're getting creative now so there are examples of animals that have single horns in the middle so like the
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rhinoceros has one and it snows but there are other ancient right answers that have it in the middle of the head so anyway I think that you could get a single horn on a horse by looking at horns and other species so open the realm of possibility yes now I mean I took that sounds cool I devil in science fiction a lot of science lecture is now becoming science fact I mean things that really seemed either unimaginable to the unimaginative is now routine and they
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forgot that it used to be unimaginable do you think we'll get to a point where CRISPR is in vogue and people want to edit their genes well it's already in vogue in a certain sense think about it in the media day would it be - television shows and so forth but yeah in terms of in vogue you would do it well so I know of two people who have already done gene therapies on themselves without you know not without going to the usual channels well CRISPR change everything I think
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the genetic revolution including CRISPR will change everything so in this genetic revolution who decides if we should be editing our DNA from lawyers to scientists we're not really sure regulations haven't caught up with reality
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a few months ago I saw a press release from a Swedish plant scientist who could groin in even vegetable the episode with the CRISPR technique just because he could rather he couldn't Sweden elsewhere in Europe it would require government approval Steffan Jensen drew attention to the oddities of the current law that with his prefer Edison vegetables I'm very excited to see your crisper vegetable what have you brought for us hmm yeah comes down there yeah let's see
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let's see I want to see and here is some actually got the chrome extends in about 50 up today you know yeah I'm not really big okay I mean they look beautiful to me Stefan has gone to great lengths to grow this cabbage I'm planning on becoming one of the first people to eat crisper edited vegetables I made holidays how are they are they different to a normal vegetables the only thing that they're different they are lacking a little piece or one gene I believe that you smuggled these seeds
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into Sweden from another country why are they yeah yeah yes or smugglers market oh I got them from other country do it yeah okay but why why couldn't this be grown outside of Sweden because Sweden is the only country Europe that have taken the decision or made their own interpretation of the European law about genetically modified clams they said well if you only do it in this way if you only take some DNA away if you don't add anything then according to their interpretation this is not the Devo
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because if you don't add that thing it also means that they can't detect it so do you think that this is genetically modified well that's what is it what is uniquely modified that's that's the problem it's electrically modified is something which are different in different genetic combinations for what's their nature cause everything with genetically modified because with unclamp reading for millennia and we have a very significant change begin to sort of everything everything we eat I mean
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whatever ways even if we took a potato zeroes on it anything is very different from the natural counterparts well I'll make sure that I don't eat too much of it I mean we have some reindeer luckily we have some other things to go with it so look I bought you some reindeer it is a reindeer hard because I thought that's probably the most swedish thing ever and we have got so we have a reindeer heart and we have some horseradish to go with that we have some potatoes as well
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crispy crispy cabbage there we go our personal thing okay this is mum me number five until them it's crisp and real number five in the world in the world okay I think it's somewhat a historic event and the only that it being cooked internationally so I'm the first international guests to eat your Chris cooking okay great well I feel like that's a historic event so how do you how do you say Bon Appetit in Swedish Vasa who's boss good Varsha good Barcia good dig in
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a few so I'm about to put crisper modified food in my body let's see how this goes
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just tastes like normal cabbage crisper could lead to the unimaginable Stepan publicized his crisper cabbage to highlight the gap between what science can do and what we think we ought to do do you think we're playing God or manipulating nature by genetically modifying things like plants answer you well no I mean first of all we're part of nature so we are constantly being manipulated by our natural environment and we're manipulating back that there's nothing sort of godlike about that the
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benefits are also potentially massive I mean you know feeding the world curing all congenital diseases so playing God in a good way I think that's one of those things which is a very polarizing use of words it's not suddenly we have this one technology which suddenly is the god technology I think is an evolution over time like humans build on knowledge and build on technology how is it different when we manipulate plants over manipulating humans so I think for
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humans because we do whilst biologically we're the same as any other creature but there's any other animal we're all made from the same stuff but we give ourselves special these rules that apply to humans they don't apply to anyone else we generally recognize that there's something special about us humans and so I think that because we have these ethical rules if we were genetically modifying humans we would start to come up against those rules who gets the right to choose whether we added our
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genes or not
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yeah I mean I would go start with personal so I think it should be I think it should be personal it should be you should be for you for you me serve you it's all of us and when I mean that that's all of us and the problem is that it can't just be scientists who work on the technology and it can't just be politicians in a corner you know deciding and it can't just be the public I think all of those people have to get together in order to be cautiously optimistic we have to really think about
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what we're doing and not shy away from because we're scared of crazy mutants happening but like tackle the problem head-on and really be honest about what we can and can't do and what we should or shouldn't do as long as we know what we're doing and not just dive in without checking for unforeseen consequences of seeing that the thing is we don't know all of the unforeseen consequences would you risk your health or your child health to potentially benefit from gene-editing
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how deep we dive it becomes a big ethical consideration I'm on my way to Melbourne to talk to bioethicists Rachel Anthony about ethics and the genetic revolution I see myself not as necessarily telling people what to do but helping people think through the implications of decisions they might make so you're a professional thought provoker I hope so your vegetable thought provoker hands up clarifier question Oscar concept clarifier and revive giver exactly what do you see as
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the range of ethical questions that I should be asking people modifying the genome is such isn't in itself I think for most people a major ethical issue it's the purposes for which is going to be deployed who's going to benefit what kind of safeguards are in place to make sure that it's safe and effective before it actually is used either in an external setting in the case of agriculture or pests or you're thinking you know as an individual the kinds of things if you had a child who had a
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condition or you knew you were at risk to pass on something would be you know is the risk of those kind of unanticipated consequences worth the potential benefit is there a place where you will say this is a good spot for the benefits outweigh outweighed the risk people are generally much more open if it's a biomedical kind of intervention if it's something that's going to cure a disease that's quite severe people are willing to take a little more risk because the benefit is so great if it's
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the kind of intervention that simply is going to create more profit they're much less interested because they don't see the benefit is who decides how much risk we take often companies hold the rights to technologies like CRISPR so it's their moral compass which can set the boundaries
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I first heard about CRISPR actually taking a test my first year of graduate school so I was really lucky to be in the early wave of people who were starting to jump into the field I think the impact that it will have on both healthcare and food is fundamental where in Silicon Valley whether the growing number of biotech startups hoping to commercialize technologies just like Christmas one of them is caribou Biosciences which was born out of one of the labs where the CRISPR technique was
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developed what's the role of a start-up in terms of looking for novel solutions to a problem or to trying to make money for the initial investment for us obviously we're a company and we have obligations to our investors and to our shareholders but we're also very ethically driven by how and where this technology should be used obviously there are a lot of conversations around some of the potential uses for editing the human germline for example and we feel very strongly that that's an
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inappropriate use of the technology so you guys think we should edit the human done we don't why is that if you're starting with a human embryo a single cell that's going to turn into every cell in that person's body any mistakes get propagated across the entire body we simply don't know enough yet to feel that that would be safe or fair to that person to treat their their very first cell in that way the human germline is the DNA you pass on to your children
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it's not affected by gene therapy but if we do choose to edit eggs sperm or a single fertilized cell will not only alter the resulting baby but the DNA of every one of their descendants forever and ever and if that's not enough to give you pause it's also a real challenge it's not one gene one outcome it's tens hundreds of genes that all work together to make you a tall or short as you are or your hair color or your eye color or your intelligence and so it's not as simple as one tiny change
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and it has a very significant or specific impact on someone what is the social cost something like genetic engineering could have lead to more inequality it's a great question I mean I think it's a fundamental question that comes with all drugs the cost of drugs obviously is something that's talked about extensively in the United States right now I think one of the arguments that's frequently put forward by the the drug development world is the cost it actually takes to get these new drugs to
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market and so you you have that compared against sort of the social desire to help cure all of these patients or treat elevate patients regardless of their socioeconomic status is a fundamental challenge for medicine will it create more inequality absolutely absolutely good I think that's why we have to be be very specific and careful important about like how we're doing research and who's funding it and how that actually gets availed to the public so it's not
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just like a super class of people that are really rich being able to modify themselves for their own benefits it is definitely a fear that I have I don't know that I can say that it definitely will but being the thing that strikes me is as a possibility in most medical research it's mostly based on the majority population and so what if minority groups are sort of left behind concerns about accessibility to the genetic revolution are real but can we really ignore a way to cure disease
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there's so many people there is benefit to having a genome that is mutable because without it we wouldn't be here so we know evolution so we're all mutants in a way we we are there is no normal dr. Edelin runs a genetic testing program for prospective parents at Mount Sinai Hospital it's a way we currently screen for genetic disease to minimize the chance of passing it on to our children there are roughly 4,000 genes in the human genome that haven't have some connection or association to
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disease in a genetic test in particular a carrier screen we're assessing a person risk of having a child born with a genetic disorder so we're testing their their DNA their genome and looking for mutations that would cause disease I'm imagining that you have a room that's just full of people spit here yeah visiting room yeah this is the extraction a lot of the hype with CRISPR has been around editing human genes and not everyone thinks we should do that but the reality is gene editing can help
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those with diseases do you think that carrier screening is a more effective way to control genetic diseases than using CRISPR would be at the moment yes there are very few genetic diseases with cures at the moment CRISPR really isn't being used to cure many genetic diseases but it is imaginable Crysta is being used to treat patients with cancer and trials using CRISPR to correct genetic disorder can't be far off do you think we'll get to a point where genetic engineering is widely
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accepted where we could use CRISPR in people I think that if it's going to cure a disease I can't imagine why it wouldn't be widely accepted when a lot of people talk about CRISPR in the media they also talk about designer babies do you think it's realistic that something like CRISPR could be used to design a baby so I think for designer babies we need to understand a lot more about the genome than we do and you know I don't consider carrier screening designer baby
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because you're you're really trying to avoid genetic disorder in your in in your offspring but as far as I color you know athletic ability all of those things I think that's something for the future we'll see where society goes with that if you are having a child and you could pick out diseases from them like if you could design your child's genes and you could say I don't want my child to have all of these diseases what would you choose but I think that's really that's a hard
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question I'm so glad you asked the question that way because that's a psychologist like our minds are so different when we're talking in the abstract versus my kids right we suddenly become totally selfish when it comes to my kids and in general I can be like that idea like we don't want the whole world living long I want my kids living long yeah I don't want them to be sick if I knew that my child was at high risk for specific diseases and I probably would want to do that I mean
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yes I would take them out to find you though there I've actually chosen not to have children but a part of my decision is the self-knowledge that I wouldn't I don't think I have what it takes to take care of a child who would need care for life because they were disabled in some way and that's something that can happen and and if there was a way with genetic editing to know for sure that that wasn't going to be an a problem a concern then maybe that would change my
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decisions a child born with a genetic disease doesn't have exactly think all your life as others in that case I think if we can fix it why not that that's the ultimate cure then the question becomes how far do we go eliminating diabetes eliminating obesity but what about autism and what about ADHD curing genetic disease in humans is about removing unwanted mutations but how far do we go we might all want to use CRISPR as a fast cheap way of turning ourselves into superhumans
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we discovered genetic superhumans who accumulate less cholesterol others are almost diabetes proof and some have stronger bones they're all due to these beneficial mutations that you one day might want to edit into your genes but this is still reliant on us knowing where to edit our DNA finding people with good mutations can show us exactly where those beneficial genes are that's a good question there are probably in a medical research institute at a hospital
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normally we would talk about sickness and disease right but you're a guy who's all about wellness and so loud in here yes what a supercomputer sounds like we believe that medical research has missed a large segment of really important people that we feel like a really interesting study and those are people who should be sick but somehow they've escaped here Mount Sinai there's also a resilience project it's looking for healthy genetic mutations that people carry that protect us against disease
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and so to find them the first thing that we can do is go out and just ask people about what they believe they might match some pattern of resilience the other way that we can go is if somebody doesn't have any evidence that the resilient per se that we can make start with their genome and look in their genome for severe risk factors for disease and then zoom up to the person and see if they lack typical signs and symptoms of that disease to find genetic superhuman this
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through the computer turns through healthy people DNA to find genetic mutations that protect them against disease when you identify these genetic superpowers all these beneficial mutations did it it's possible that someone like me could get those edited into my genome well I suppose I think I think I sort of depends on what time scale that you're talking about I think that there are a lot of different ways that this information could ultimately be turned into new medicines and I think like you
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know editing humans is something or editing their DNA is something there's a lot of work to do yet around figuring out whether or not it's safe and what areas that we can actually have you know good effects for people if genetics superpowers a long way off what can you do right now to drive the genetic revolution speeding things up may lie in more democratized science think DIY and out of a garage like the humble beginnings of Apple Facebook or uber but for your genome
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so it started when I worked at NASA I was a scientist at NASA and their synthetic biology program and I thought what happens if people at home can start to contribute to science and what technology would really get people excited to start to do genetic design in their home and I thought wow it's probably CRISPR allow me so far we've painted labs and universities and hospitals around the world where you might expect to find cutting-edge science here in the Bay Area we're
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visiting a bio hacker in his garage he's selling CRISPR kids DIY Krista kits for a couple of hundred dollars one of the big questions is how do you create something that's tangible using like genetic design that people can use so we thought well what is you know something that we use or do often that uses some sort of organism that we can engineer it the obvious thing is fermentation like making alcohol what's so special about the yeast that you have engineered so oh
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so the yeast that we use it's just a normal Burnie so you could buy from any company online anywhere the cool thing that our kit allows people to do and it's our first kit of many this makes the yeast glow so what you're going to look for is you're going to see a glow on there if they're harmful to me the youth yeah oh no I mean you use like the green fluorescent protein oh no not at all it's not that the bacteria and or anything in any of our kits is hazardous
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or could cause harm everything in it is completely non hazardous can not cause harm at all when you think about like the computer revolution and how that changed everything it wasn't until that they came into homes and people personally had them that the computer revolution like exploded so I think investing in consumers is kind of what Spurs everything you can buy this cutting-edge kit that allows you to use this technology and you don't need anything else you don't need a PhD and you could do
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experiments with CRISPR like that I think is is really cool and it shows the direction that the world is like going in genetic technology genetic designs it should we try something sugar Detroit
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Oh
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yeah
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there's always a chance that there's going to be a renegade scientist or renegade person editing the genetic code but you know as a species I think we've got to really be informed as educated so that we can make good decisions what happens when we start experimenting with our genes and we might create these aesthetic differences will these humans be seen as different than humans who don't have those modifications could that lead to eugenics could that lead to new divides in humanity I don't know
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that stuff is that stuff scary I think that when you're talking about genetic modifications like that to yourself you have to accept that almost nothing is risk or cost free and there's always a trade-off and you have to think ahead and most of us don't really think ahead it's really hard to plan even for next year we've been playing God with our health from transplanting organs and a lot of the fears that people had with that what we're doing over here and sort of get
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used to it I think that's one of the things here about about all of this is there's a lot of outcry and a lot of concern and a lot of fear and then we sort of get used to it we ditch away to it and I think a very similar thing is going to happen with altering genomes of humans
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so everything our DNA is technically possible but it's unwise and untested clinical trials using CRISPR are happening right now as knowledge grows and risk declines the extraordinary becomes commonplace we are undeniably in the middle of a genetic revolution the technology to change us is already here and well you need to decide how the rest of the revolution plays out if we know right now what we want to improve repair or preserve having a conversation about editing our
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DNA none of our future in a better direction we're in the process of improving testing and retesting these technologies until the line between science fiction and science facts will no longer be a question of scientific limit but a matter of choice would you like to place an order
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