There's a Gene for That

What are gene therapy and gene doping? How do researchers reprogram viruses to carry human genes? Will messing with our genes make us less human?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey, they're welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks in the future and says, Billy Jean is
not my lover. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm I'm Lauren foc

(00:21):
obamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that sound of disapproval
is to the terrible quote that they chose to start
this episode. We're talking about, right, Billy Jane. Yeah, uh
so Jeane therapy. Billy Geane therapy is when you have
to listen to to Michael Jackson songs until you feel better.
But that's a good therapy, is a good therapy. I
I don't mind that at all. It's it's the dancing here. Yeah. Now,

(00:45):
gene therapy is something that has incredible potential but definitely
had a rocky start. And uh, you know, if you
don't really know that much about DNA and jeans or chromosomes,
if all that confuses you, go back and listen. We
we record a pocast immediately before this one should have
published just before this podcast did that goes into sort
of gene one oh one, and so listen to that one.

(01:08):
So you can get caught up. We're gonna be pushing
on right now talking about gene therapy, which is an
attempt to treat genetic diseases at the molecular level. So
you're actually trying to address molecules that have some form
of defective element to them and replace those with quote
unquote good molecules are good genes. So a good point

(01:33):
of distinction maybe to start with, would be, um, how
is this different than all of the normal ways we
fight diseases? Well, a lot of the ways we fight diseases.
There's of course ways where we just try and treat
symptoms where we're not actually addressing the underlying problem, possibly
because there may not be a way of addressing the
underlying problem, or you're just letting your body do the
work exactly maybe and you're just trying to make yourself

(01:55):
feel better while that happened. For example, if you have
a cold, there is no cure or for the common cold, right,
but there are lots of different ways you can treat
your symptoms and try to manage symptoms have different levels
of efficacy depending upon whom you ask, but that's one
way of doing it. Or for example, if you take
an antibacterial medication to try to clear something out of

(02:16):
your system that's attacking those bacteria that are attacking your
your body in some way, shape or form. Right, So
that's another way where you're actually trying to fight off
some sort of quote unquote alien invasion. Alien in the
sense of it doesn't belong inside of you. Uh. Your
body uses antibodies, which are proteins that attack foreign cells

(02:38):
or sometimes its own cells, depending on how your immune
system is functioning. Right. Right, there are cases where you
have things like allergic reactions where your body goes into
overdrive trying to kill something that doesn't actually need to
be killed. I speak from terrible, terrible experience. Uh. So
these are all normal or quote unquote normal ways that

(02:58):
we use to fight off illnesses. But some illnesses, genetic illnesses,
have to do with actual information that's in our DNA,
that is defective genes that are encoded the wrong way
and therefore are not producing the proper proteins the right
way for certain processes. And there's lots of different types

(03:20):
of genetic diseases that cover a wide range. So we're
not gonna go and talk about all of them, because
that's that alone would be a series of podcasts. But
one common element here is that these diseases have these
these faulty genes at the very core of the problem.
And if we were somehow able to remove the faulty

(03:42):
genes from ourselves and insert good, healthy genes in their place,
we could end up possibly curing the disease. Or if
we could figure out how to um turn on or
off a gene that is doing the opposite thing right,
right and keeping my jeans. You know, we didn't talk
about this in the last podcast, but it does bear saying.

(04:04):
And I think jeans are complicated, right, So you know
you didn't say that, well, well in the s in
the sense of like, if you think, think of Jeanes
like a switchboard. Alright, So think about a switchboard where
every single switch is connected to a an LED light.
So you've got a bank of LED lights, and you've
got a bank of switches, and when you turn on
a switch an L a ED light comes on, and

(04:26):
then when you turn it off, the LED light goes off.
If that's all jeanes were, we'd be set. That would
be so easy to fix. But what actually happens is
you have to flip like seven random switches all across
the board to make the light come on, right, and
if you also turns a few other lights on, and
it also makes a weird quacking noise. Right, we're back
to the potypus. If you and if you turn, if

(04:48):
you turn one switch off, maybe the quacking noise goes
off and three of the lights go off, but then
five more lights come on. It's so complex and it's
only and it's within this this uh network of g
means and how they all express themselves. Keeping in mind
that some genes can express themselves in multiple ways. That's
why it's it's not so easy as just say, you know,

(05:09):
turn that one switched the button. Yeah, the word for
what all of the genes produced together is the phenotype.
That's sort of the external expression of when you've got
all the switches switched on. And so the goal of
gene therapy is to address these faulty genes and to
fix them in a way that is not harmful to
the patient, which can also be very difficult because again

(05:33):
it's really complex. Sometimes when you're when you think you're
fixing one thing, you might be actually creating a much
larger problem or maybe just a different problem. And I've
got some really interesting examples that are terrifying about that.
You can't wait to get to that. So let's talk
a little bit about mutations. You know, how how do
genes mutate in the first place? Uh? And there's actually

(05:54):
quite a few ways. First of all, when you're talking
about genes, you're talking about this this data essentially that's
encoded in DNA, and that data gets copied over and
over and over again during cellular division. You get copies
of your d N a uh, and sometimes changes happen
when these copies. Sometimes sometimes mistakes are made, so to speak.

(06:16):
So it's kind of like, you know, if you were
to ever make a copy of a copy of a
copy of a copy on a photocopy, or you know
that final copy doesn't look as good as that original one.
In a very basic way, that's kind of similar to
what I'm talking about here. Also, environmental factors can cause
changes to your genes, so right, or even you know

(06:38):
what what chemicals are in the food you eat, the
water you drink, or the other stuff that you drink,
you know, all sorts of stuff. I think things like
stress can affect your genes to some extent. So you know,
there are a lot of different factors here. It's very,
very complex, and most of those changes that are going
to happen are going to happen in um somatic cells,
in your bodily cells, not in your um sex chromosome

(07:01):
cells that are are passed on too, or your chromosomes
period that are passed on to your children. UM, that's
that's a epo genetics, and that's a whole different, whole
different issue. But but some of the changes can lead
to like we talked about in our stress, some of
them can can potentially be inherited. Whether or not that
ends up expressing itself in offspring is another question. So

(07:22):
one interesting thing I think about inherited genetic diseases is
that for the most part, they're recessive. So in order
for you to have a full expression of a genetic disease,
you have to have inherited two copies of the mutated
gene to really inherit the disorder. When you think about this,
isn't that surprising, right? You wouldn't You wouldn't expect for

(07:43):
most genetic diseases to be in dominant genes because uh
in in any species, because if it were a dominant expression,
then those those life forms, whatever creature you're talking about,
most of them probably wouldn't get to an age where
they could reproduce, and that gene would eventually phase its
way out of the overall population. But if it's a

(08:05):
recessive gene, then not that many comparatively speaking, will display
this or will express this gene, this trait of this, uh,
this whatever the genetic diseases um. So it can actually
continue to exist within a population longer than it would
if it were a dominant gene. So that I thought
was really interesting. But let's let's talk about kind of

(08:28):
the history of gene therapy itself, so we kind of
find why it could be potentially really helpful in the
fields of medicine. It was back in nineteen seventy two
when there was a paper that was authored by a
parent Friedman and Roblin who the pair wrote a paper
called gene Therapy for Human Genetic Disease question mark because

(08:51):
they were actually asking the question could gene therapy potentially
address this? And they proposed replacing defective DNA with good
un quote DNA uh. They also cited the first attempts
at gene therapy experiments going back all the way to
nineteen seventy. Now, this paper was written in seventy two, UH,
and in fact, other sources I saw said that the

(09:12):
experiments that happened in the seventies and eighties were in
large part unauthorized trials, which that leads to some pretty
serious setbacks in gene therapy. As when I get up
into the nineties, I'll talk more about that, UM, but
gene therapy isn't as far along as it potentially could be.
I think in part because of some overenthusiastic but perhaps

(09:36):
misguided trials, and so in labs that were in the
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and in the National
Cancer Institute conducted experiments which showed cells from a patient
with a d A deficiency UH that's out of no
scene d M in as deficiency, which affects the immune

(09:57):
systems ability to fight off infection. Those could be corrected
in a tissue culture using a retrovirus to insert corrected
genes into the cells. And this is actually still how
they're mostly proposing to do gene therapy. Right. Virus it's
one of the ways. UH. Viruses have some issues, but
viruses are really good at penetrating cells. I mean, that's

(10:19):
what they do in order to replicate, right, And we've
said before that sometimes it makes more sense not to
try and copy or outdo mother nature, but to just
use it, Yeah, coopt what mother nature is already doing. Right.
If you take a virus and you strip out all
the stuff that makes it dangerous, essentially it's ability to
self replicate and any other uh, information that would otherwise

(10:41):
alter your cells, and then put in the stuff you
want to have injected into a cell, and then introduce
that into the tissue or patient. Then it does the
work for you. I mean, it's a perfect machine of viruses.
Is a machine designed to inject DNA into foreign cells.
Right now, there are some problems, uh. First of all,

(11:02):
I mean there's everyone's always worried about the idea of
using viruses in the first place, especially they don't understand
a lot about how viruses work. But it's also not
ideal for every situation. For example, if you want to
treat something that is found in brain tissue, virus is
a bad idea because viruses are too large to penetrate
the blood brain barrier. So you've got to find something

(11:23):
that's even smaller than a virus, your typical virus to
be able to penetrate that barrier to deliver the good
DNA to brain tissue. They are developing um I think
that they are currently developing some methods specifically with Parkinson's
disease that that may use viruses. But there there's the
main approach I've seen is using liposomes and creating essentially

(11:48):
a plastic coding for liposomes that would allow it to
move through the blood brain barrier effortlessly compared to most
viruses which would not be able to penetrate it. They
are also playing with different kinds of virus is these days.
I think originally retroviruses were what we're being used in
these days, um lent of viruses are being used things
like um HIV actually that have a really long incubation

(12:11):
period and can infect non dividing cells. So it interesting
winds up doing. But continue, continue with your time, back
to the history. So we've we've got this this retrovirus
that was used in this early experiment, they showed that
it could be done. In six they began to experiment
to introduce correct genes into bone marrow cells and animals

(12:34):
to see how safe it would be as a treatment.
So they're using the animal's actual bone marrow cells to
deliver good quote unquote DNA and the conclusion was that
it was safe, but they didn't get the correct gene
to enough cells for it to be considered effective. So,
in other words, bone marrow just wasn't the right vector
for delivering this kind of treatment. It worked, but non

(12:56):
a level that would have created enough change for it
to be a good treat it. So in they try
white blood cells instead of bone marrow cells, and that
increased the number of cells that were affected. So they thought,
ha ha, here we're onto something. Uh. And in there
was an experiment with tumor infiltrating lympho sites t i

(13:17):
L cells UH that showed that using a virus to
insert DNA material would be a safe form of treatment. Now,
this experiment was more about inserting a DNA marker into
t I L cells. It wasn't about putting in good DNA.
It was about identifying this cell as a t I
L cell. But the one of the other pieces of

(13:38):
information they got was, oh, well, this could work for
other applications beyond just marking a cell. We might be
able to actually do gene therapy using this approach. Sotumber four,
the National Institutes of Health treated a four year old
girl with a d A deficiency. They also treated nine
year old girl with a d A deficiency, and this

(13:58):
was one of the first approved of trials for g therapy.
So this approach was not incredibly effective at first, although
the last information I could find both patients are leading
normal lives now they do not have this a d
A deficiency apparently anymore. But the the delivery methods have

(14:22):
improved significantly since nine. There was actually very few successes
in early gene therapy experiments all the way through the
eighties into the nineties, and that was one of the
reasons why gene therapy took had a real rough go
in the early days. Right, not a big surprise. We're

(14:43):
talking about something incredibly sophisticated that we have admittedly only
a you know, a sliver of understanding, Like there's so
much we don't know about genes, right, and we hadn't
mapped the human genome until right, So it's it's not
a big surprise that it took a while because we
were still learning about what we were doing while we

(15:03):
were doing it. Um Dr Claudio Born and none of
the Vita Salute. San Rafael University in Milan experimented with
gene therapy delivery systems using a hematopoetic stem cells to
deliver genes. So now we're trying other methods of stem
cells was another vector in researchers used gene therapy to

(15:28):
treat babies who had a d A deficiency and moving
up to nine. This was this was a terrible year
for gene therapy. It was a terrible tragedy as well.
So there have been very there's been a lot of trials,
very few successes, but the entire discipline of gene therapy
suffered a serious setback because Uh, there was a patient

(15:51):
who was undergoing gene therapy to treat a liver disease
at the University of Pennsylvania. That patient's name is Jesse Gelsinger.
Jesse Gelsinger uh died during the trial and it was
the first death attributable to gene therapy. That led to
increased scrutiny of gene therapy programs across the entire world,

(16:12):
and a lot of conclusions were drawn that many, not
not all, but many of these trials did not follow
terribly rigorous standards, or perhaps were not designed in the
most ethical manner. The the desire to try and be
the first to UH to have a working gene therapy
might have been guiding people to act recklessly, particularly with

(16:35):
the lives or well being of patients. And it raised
a lot of criticism about gene therapy in general. So
even the people who were following very stringent, strict scientific
processes and being as ethical as possible were brought under
the microscope, and there were a lot of questions about
when is it actually acceptable to move from the experimental

(16:58):
stage where your work ing on some isolated tissue or
you're working with an animal not a human being, UH,
and then move that to human trials, When is that
actually an acceptable moment in gene therapy? And the whole
thing kind of brought the discipline to a crawl for
a couple of years, and there's still a lot of
scrutiny there obviously, because this is this is potentially very

(17:23):
useful but also very dangerous type stuff. In two thousand two,
researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Copernicus Therapeutics created
the liposomes UH that there were twenty five nanometers across,
so a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That's
incredibly tiny, and that they wanted to use to carry

(17:44):
therapeutic DNA through pores in the nuclear membrane. And that
same year, sickle cell disease was treated in mice using
gene therapy for the first time and showing that that
could be an effective treatment. Two thousand three, the University
of California used liposomes coated in paul ethylene glycol. That's
what I was talking about earlier, the PEG material, which

(18:05):
that was determined to be a good vector for delivering
gene therapy to the brain because again most viruses, not all,
but most viruses are too large to penetrate the blood
brain barrier. And then in two thousand six, National Institutes
of Health used gene therapy to treat melanoma and showed
for the first time that gene therapy could be a
viable treatment for cancer. Now that's the history. Lesson, let's

(18:28):
talk about what's going on kind of around that time too.
More recent. I want to stress that when I look
at information about gene therapy, I still very often see
phrases like last resort, right I think that usually these
experiments and and this research that's going on is on
children with terrible fatal diseases, and and so frequently it

(18:51):
is it is a last resort, right, and its and
it's just well, I just wanted to stress this. Despite
the fact that we have moved past some of these
early days, like, there's still a whole lot of caution
about it, and there should be. I mean, because again,
we there's still so much we don't understand that that
it needs. We need to have caution, not only just

(19:11):
to be ethical and safe and give the patient as
good a chance at recovery or treatment as possible, but
also just so we keep our own expectations in check
and we don't sit there and think, oh, if I
just change out this one little strand of information within
this person's cells, everything's going to be fine. Uh. It's
it's important to realize that there's so much we don't

(19:33):
know that we have to proceed with caution, because until
we know all that information, we could potentially do more
harm than good in our treatment. Yeah. One of the
uh interesting studies I found was related to vaccines. So
right now a vaccine is pretty much always preferable as

(19:56):
the way to prevent somebody from contracting a disease. Sure,
but what about in the case of a disease where
we just can't get a reliable vaccine like HIV UM Now,
the human immunodeficiency virus, it's difficult to create a vaccine
because of the structure of the virus. Antibodies have to

(20:17):
recognize elements on the external structure of a virus UM
to in order to want to attack it, to to
recognize it and prevent it UM. But HIV is kind
of stealth. It doesn't have those external structures, which is
difficult to recognize UM. And so there's been all this
difficulty creating a vaccine. But some recent research, especially some

(20:39):
stuff published in Nature in two thousand eleven, found that, well,
at least in a trial on mice, the immuno deficiency
virus is susceptible to gene therapy that would prevent transmission UM,
and so a gene therapy could be sort of like
a preventative measure to keep you from contracting HIV. Of course,

(21:03):
the trouble is, as with all these other cases we've
been talking about, it it's it's dangerous basically, right, and
there there are other diseases and conditions where we have
little to no treatment right now, Like it may be
that all we can do is treat some symptoms, but
we can't treat anything that's underlying that. So everything from
Parkinson's to Alzheimer's, that these kind of a lot of

(21:26):
blood blood related genetic disorders right a lot of these
different genetic disorders, we really have no way of treating
anything beyond some symptoms in some cases, like in some
we don't even have ways of treating the symptoms necessarily.
So that's one of those things that people are really
looking at. Gene therapy is potentially being another attempt to uh,
to treat something that otherwise we pretty much can only

(21:50):
just try and and and increase the patient's comfort as
much as possible because there's nothing else we can do.
Um in those cases, I think are the ones that
are going to have the most attention to acted at
them for the near term. For gene therapy. Absolutely, I
wanted to correct myself really quick, really quickly from from earlier.
Lenty viruses are a genus within the retrovirus family, but

(22:13):
they but they're they're specific properties are important. I was
talking about them like they're two totally different things. That is,
that is an untruth right there. I knew that, No,
I didn't so in all these cases, and especially because
the science is still pretty preliminary. We're talking about last resort,
we're talking about it's still something we're not very sure about,

(22:35):
and we were only using cases where there's no other option. Really, right,
But what if we got a lot better at it, sure,
to the point where we can actually treat these diseases,
people can lead healthy lives. These genetic disorders become a
thing of the past. I see the future you're painting, right,
and so its future where gene therapy is just completely safe.

(22:55):
It's run of the mill. It's it's like vaccines are today.
So you know, your chance of having a problem is
one in some huge number. And we're having a sporting
stars cheating by having gene therapy to make their blood
more oxygen absorbent. Exactly. Oh well, well, guys, you're you're
like totally I was. I was right there in the

(23:16):
happy future where everybody was healthy, and now you're you're
twisting it. What's going on? You're talking about gene doping.
Gene doping, tell me about gene doping, Lauren, Well, gene
doping doesn't exist right now, but we're we're afraid could
happen in some kind of terrible future. Is is that? Yes?
That that that people would use gene therapy in order to,
you know, do do the same kind of things that

(23:37):
medications are that illegal medications in most sporting worlds are
are used for now, the whole blood doping stuff, the
phrase comes from blood doping, which is where you know,
you draw your own blood and you keep that out
in store. It let your body regenerate more to replace it,
and then right before the big race, you shoot yourself
back up with your blood so you've got extra red
blood cells. You can get even more oxygen to your muscles,

(23:58):
your superman yeah, relatively speaking, Yeah, But what if instead
of all that, you could alter your genes? Right, there's
a gene called 'm airy throw poteen. I think I
got that right in one we're going to go with it.
E p O that regulates how many red blood cells
are created in your body and um and when it's

(24:19):
functioning normally, it'll shut off when you've got enough, But
if you wanted a few more in there to boost
you know, Unfortunately in trials, it's difficult to get them
to turn off. Once you've turned them on, and then
you're just like a blood sprinkler, crazy blood bags like toad,

(24:41):
just blood shooting out your It was it was, it
was pretty. It was pretty tragic, and and and and many,
you know, many other things can go terribly wrong, which
is why we're not doing this right now. Okay, but
so Jeane doping this paint, say, it's it's a mersure
of the the future we were talking about in this

(25:01):
dystopian future. It's a future where you can mess with
your genes, you can just do stuff right, so like
in BioShock, you can just you know, yeah, yeah, we're
beyond beyond the ability to do things like determine what
color eyes your children are going to have or what
sex your child will be. That too, write, but I

(25:22):
think you might be little too far. Here we go,
here's where the X Men come in. Okay, all right,
I knew we were going to get there. I knew
we're going to get to the X Men. But honestly,
I mean, we are talking about the potential in the future.
Let's say that we have perfected as close as you
can to perfecting anything anyway, uh, some gene replacement therapy
or gene alteration to the point where we can genetically

(25:46):
modify human beings so that they are the best of
the best. So before we get to X men territory,
we're really talking about Connunian Song territory, Wrath of con
type stuff. These are the These are the people who
are genetically engineered to be intelligent and strong. They were
meant to be warriors to end up ending a conflict,

(26:09):
and then once the conflicts over, what do they do next?
Then we should have been into space. So there's that
that future. But you're talking about even going beyond that.
Let's say that that's even the possibility where we're able
to make people the quote unquote the best people they
could be based upon the genetic information they carry inside them.
You're talking about going even further than that and giving

(26:30):
people abilities that are not even human. Right. Yeah, Well, okay,
so this raises a problem I have with the x men. Okay,
this is one problem you have with the x mentor
this is the problem that it isn't it's the main
it's an Okay, So the x men is the x men.
It is what it is because I could go out
of my hands. I could go on about cable for hours. Okay,

(26:53):
let's not talk about the summers. I can kind of
see clause. I can kind of see it like no
cla like like, let's say, though, that wasn't actually a mutation, right,
Wolverine got claus but no, no, he has bone clause.
They were coded in adamantium. Yea, his claws are actually bone. Okay,
we're good to get as Matt, when Magneto stripped him

(27:14):
of all of his adamantium skeleton, his bone claws remained.
This is excellent. Okay, so I can actually kind of
see clause. I mean that seems like a long way off,
but it's it's within the realm of physical possibility. And
that's the thing I want to make a distinction about. Actually,
there are two things. Um. One is physical possibility. I

(27:38):
don't think Gambit makes any sense. Well, he has that
really thick Louisiana accent. It's really hard to understand what
he's saying. The problem with Gambit isn't that, um, he
has incredible powers. It's that the incredible power he has
doesn't make sense in terms of physics. Sure, so you're
saying that the ability to touch something and make it

(28:01):
molecularly vibrate to the point where it explodes makes no sense. Yeah,
I don't see how that could ever be a property
of the human body. How different How could you transfer
that energy in such a way like, yeah, there's no
mechanism for it. Yeah, I would say probably the same
thing about like shooting cold rays. I mean that that

(28:21):
just seems it's not necessarily so much that it's a
problem with DNA, it's a problem with physics, like how
do you make rays of cold come out of here? Right?
We do not have the you know, genesis for laser
beams to shoot out of our eyeballs, so therefore it's unlikely.
Magnets or being able to control magnetism, I mean, yes,
we all have an electric field, like like living things

(28:43):
create electric fields, and electric fields can affect magnets because
the electromagnetic effect there, you know. But being able to
control entire huge hunks of metal, well anyway, all that, Yeah,
that's that's just bones. I can see bone claws, I
can see it would be it would be very strange,

(29:05):
but having weird bone claws that come out of your
hand Okay, that seems like a more physically acceptable or
or even sending an incredibly heightened immune system. Sure, you know,
I was going to say Logan's other mutant power is
regeneration and so and I can see how having an
extremely quick working immune system would would be a thing. Well, yeah,

(29:27):
most like mammals don't regenerate like that, but like reptiles can. Sure, right,
you lizard can slower, slower speed. But yeah, we've talked
about using things like gene therapy for regenitative medicine, so
that kind of fits in with that, right, So I
think this is, uh, that kind of thing is not
so much beyond the realm of possibility. But the other

(29:48):
thing I want to talk about with x men and
genetics is this idea that all of these powers tend
to be presented as if they're created by a single mutation. Right,
it's called the X gene within the within the cannon. Yeah,
it is a single gene. And depending on which bit
of media of the X men you are consuming, sometimes

(30:08):
it's it's it's an on or off option, which is
not how you can actually you can actually be treated
to a point where your your mutant nobility is turned
off as is seen and I think the third of
the X Men films that I never saw. But anyway, yeah,
I mean like the idea that this one gene could
have essentially unlimited expressions is kind of interesting. I can

(30:31):
see that by say, um, either genetic engineering so top
down control of your DNA sequence, or millions of years
of evolution, maybe we could get bone claws that shoot
out of our hands. You don't think we're going to
get to the point where we can teleport the bone
claus No, but the bone claws that shoot out of
your hand would not be one mutation, right right. The

(30:55):
problem is it's a it's a misunderstanding of what mutations
look like when they happen. You don't A mutation doesn't
cause a like complex, fully formed working apparatus that was
not previously there. You can you know, mutations that turn
into wings probably start as little tiny flaps and have

(31:18):
to be amplified over generations of success in more causes.
You know, your your ear lobe to be directly connected
or a little bit floppy when where it matches up
with your head, and and you know which is a
great mutant power, but floppy ear, floppy ear that was
one of my favorite like eighth tier X Men floppy
ear that was one of the lesser known powers of

(31:39):
Omega Red floppy ear. So anyway, getting back into this discussion,
you know, the there's also a confusion about how mutations
are passed on, and that if a mutation is passed on,
it must therefore be beneficial to whatever creature has that mutation.
But because we're talking about very complex this ums, sometimes

(32:01):
that mutation can go along with other traits that are advantageous.
The mutation itself may or may not be It might
not be a problem, but it might not necessarily be advantageous.
So it's not that you know, whatever creature currently exists
in its uh you know, the like that if you
were to take a representative animal from any species and say,

(32:23):
this is an example of all the traits that are
the most advantageous for this animal. Because this animal is alive,
therefore it has all the traits that were beneficial. That's
that's facetious. Orry, you know, it's not not true at all.
I mean, it's it's much more complicated than that. So
when you hear about mutations and mutations being passed along,
sometimes they are beneficial and sometimes that's exactly the reason

(32:45):
why the creatures that are alive now share that particular mutation.
It's because it was one that gave them an advantage
in whatever ecosystem they evolved in. But other ones, you know,
it's just they happen to pee back on with traits
that were very advantageous for survival, and that's why they
too have survived those mutations. But it's complicated stuff. Like

(33:08):
you said, it's not just one thing that manifests itself
immediately and fully formed. Uh format you know, things like
like birds. Now we essentially understand to be the evolutionary
descendant of dinosaurs actually, like they are dinosaurs, yeah, tree,
But it's one of those things where it took a

(33:29):
long time for us to figure that out, right. It
was like, you know, we we didn't have that direct
that understanding of that that line of descent until relatively recently.
The I think the t rex had featheries, don't they. Yeah,
a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. Yeah, yeah, which totally
changes my view of what dinosaurs should look like, you know,

(33:50):
based upon the way I learned about him when I
was a kid. Of course, when I was a kid.
It was shortly after the dinosaurs had died out. So
I feel like we've strayed a little bit. Maybe, so
we were talking about X men in terms of mutations,
well mutations and sort of top down control. Maybe what
the x chene does is is set off a whole
crazy like nuclear reaction of other changes in human DNA.

(34:14):
Maybe that's what it did, like a Domino effect, but
not Domino the character. We're actually talking about Domino the
little things that fall over correct. But to bring it
back to the real world, let's so, so let's say,
is not the real world? Yeah, so we're we're ruling
out the shooting fire, shooting cold stuff like that, but saying, okay,
maybe you could have bone claws or whatever. Um, is

(34:35):
it ethical? Is it ethical to voluntarily mess with our
genes if we have the power to do it. It's
a good question. I mean, it really all depends upon
your definition of what ethics are I think, I mean,
and also what messing with and also and also whether
or not the person who's getting messed with is doing
so voluntarily. That clearly would have a huge impact if

(34:58):
it's because if you're telling you about you know, making
choices for an unborn child, then you are making determinations
that are going to affect that child's life, and the
child has no say in the matter. But then if
you're leaving it all up to just biology, the child
really doesn't have a say in a matter of what
you can So is it better to leave it up

(35:21):
to chance? Is it better to make determinations? And if
it's better to make determinations, how far should that go?
I believe there was a court case relatively recently in
the UK where UM, one of the associations of the deaf,
got together and and protested a bill that had gone
through the government that said that UM, certain kinds of
genetic testing and certain kinds of genetic selection are okay, like,

(35:43):
for example, testing to to make sure that your child
is of hearing. And they were like, why can't deaf
parents choose to have a deaf child? Well, and and
to be fair, I mean, the deaf culture is a culture.
There is there is an entire deaf community, and anyone
who has not ever interacted with anyone who actually is
part of the deaf community. Just because your deaf does

(36:05):
not necessarily mean you are in the deaf community, right,
But they have a very strong sense of identity and
they you know, that's a that's part of their culture.
It's something that they value, and to discount it is
pretty tough. I mean, that's kind of that's that raises
some pretty tough questions. Yeah, if you have your own language,

(36:27):
you've definitely got something going on. Oh yeah, yeah, And
and you know, and at a certain point, who is
you know, what what kind of lawmaking bodies are allowed
to legislate that, legislate that? And at what point is
it bad for people to decide? At what point? At
what point do you have a government decide what it
is that makes a person and then says anything that

(36:50):
doesn't fit this definition isn't a person. Therefore they don't
get getting into terrifying Third Reich style. Yeah, right, Well,
what I was going to say is that all this
makes me feel creepy. In one reason is that at
the at the far end of the scale, we've all
decided that eugenics is bad. Yes, but uh so, how
close is this to eugenics? That's a good question. And

(37:11):
I think one thing we can be thankful for right
now is that we've got plenty of time to ask
those questions. And to come to some conclusions. Obviously, we
can't draw any right now, or at least I'm not
prepared to. This is a complicated issue that I think
about that you know, we're so far away right now
technologically speaking and medically speaking, that we've got time to
have these discussions. And just to be clear, we are

(37:34):
in these ethical considerations. We're talking about voluntary changes. We're
not talking about stuff you would need to save your
life or or whatever the case might be secure deadly. Yeah.
We're talking about things like being able to determine if
your kid is going to uh have a genetic predisposition
to being athletic, that sort of stuff, or you know,

(37:55):
even more subtle changes in or or influence. This isn't
a child's genetic makeup. So again, we're not really there
at this point, but it is the conversations that are
interesting and worth having absolutely, yeah, and and and working
towards a point where we can use gene therapy to
help cure diseases without also causing cancer on the side,

(38:19):
that would be good. Yeah yeah yeah. So um, all right, well, anyway,
that kind of wraps up our our conversation. We're probably
gonna talk a lot more about x men as soon
as we sign off here um and possibly then move
on to other pantheons within the Marvel universe. Uh, we'll see.
But in the meantime, I suggest for all of you

(38:39):
guys out there listening, if you want to be involved
in our conversation, go to FW thinking dot com. That's
the website where we've got everything, the podcasts, the blog post,
the video series, links to other articles that talk about
the same sort of concepts that we're talking about here
to go into greater detail. We're gonna find a lot
of awesome information there and we look forward to hearing
from you. We will talk to again really soon. For

(39:05):
more on this topic and the future of technology, visit
Forward Thinking dot Com. Problem brought to you by Toyota.
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