October 1, 2025 • 36 mins
As the gene editing field kept growing, so did the dangers. Back in 2018, Jennifer Doudna received an email from a Chinese scientist claiming that he had genetically edited two twin babies. The news reverberated across the world and made Doudna and her colleagues urgently consider the implications of what their discovery could mean for humanity.
Walter Isaacson sits down with Evan and tells him why the field has always been ripe with ethical questions, and how the COVID-19 pandemic pushed researchers to recalibrate their priorities.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
For years, Walter Isaacson had immersed himself in the world
of Jennifer DOWDNA and the other Crisper pioneers. In hours
of conversations. He'd work to capture the stories behind the invention.
But at a certain point he decided he needed to
approach Crisper from a different angle to understand it in
a more pans on way. So he traveled to Downa's
lab on the tree lined campus of UC Berkeley, sat
(00:35):
down on a lab bench alongside a couple of grad students,
and got to work editing genes from a human kidney cell.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You're sitting on a bench in front of a lab
table usually has a big hood on top so that it,
you know, exhausts the air and there's not a lot
of fumes. And you have some test tubes in a
little rack, just like he used to have in chemistry
class in eighth grade, and you pipe pets, and those
pipe pets allow you to put tiny drops of things
(01:05):
into the test tube. In the case of editing with Crisper,
there would be some preprogrammed RNA targeted thing with an enzyme,
meaning a protein that can cut or do other things.
A spark reactions attached to it. Both Gavin Knott and
(01:27):
Jennifer Hamilton, who had graduate students in the lab, hovered
over me with my pipets and my glasses and goggles
and latex gloves on and showed me how to mix
the different ingredients we had, put it into a test tube,
and then look and see whether I had edited in
(01:52):
a gene that would make it glow green, sort of
a phosphorescent gene. And after a while you get to
put it into a centrifuge, or you get to put
it under microscopes, and you'll get to see were your
cuts actually made. They said, here it is, and there,
indeed was the gene spliced in.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Isaacson tells me that one of the things that struck
him most during the process was discovering how with crisper
gene editing was relatively easy to do with a little help.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I was surprised that even I could do it. I know,
I had a couple of graduate students hovering around and helping,
and I realized that this is going to be a
technology that's not only easy to use, but it's easy
to reprogram. I didn't actually program the guide RNA. Somebody
else had done it for me. But if I decided
(02:47):
I wanted to make a cut in the parts of
DNA that show my eye color, or the parts of
the DNA that grow hair, whatever it may be, I
realized that it wouldn't be all that hard to program
the molecule.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Isaacson's realization mirrors one that Dowdna had herself, as the
technology behind cris Burg continued to spread.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
After Jennifer Dowdner and Emmanuel Shoppenjay publish their paper, Jennifer
had a dream or a nightmare, and it was that
somebody wanted to meet with her about this new technology.
And she opens the door to the room. The person
looks up and it's Adolph Hitler, sort of in a
(03:31):
pig's head, and she's taken aback. And she realizes, of
course that eugenics, I mean, this is what the Nazis
were trying to do to edit the human race. That
in the wrong hands, this tool could just be not
(03:52):
just powerful, but evil. And she realized at that point
that she would have to want to gather scientists from
around the world because it had to be international to say,
let's think through the implications of this. There is the
Prometheus issue, which is Prometheus snatches the technology from the gods,
(04:17):
fire from the liver of the gods, and it becomes problematic,
it's harmful. That, of course, is written large with the
atom bomb project. And if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer,
you know he's called the American Prometheus. And so you
have to wrestle with the moral implications of the technology
(04:39):
you've created.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
From the atom bomb to gene editing, scientists have long
had to grapple with the risks that their own inventions
present for society. They've been forced to search their consciences
and at times to galvanize their colleagues and efforts to
contain those risks. As Isaacson writes, for decades, widespread human
genome editing had lived in the realm of science fiction.
(05:02):
Now with Chrisper, it's arriving, and the question is are
we ready? I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is on Crisper,
the Story of Jennifer Downa. This is episode four Franken Monsters.
DWNA wasn't alone in thinking about the ethical repercussions of
gene editing. Isaacson notes that the field of biotechnology has
(05:24):
always been right with these questions.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
One of the first groups to wrestle with the biotechnology
ethical issues was a group that had Paul Berg and
Herbert Boyer and the people in the nineteen seventies who
had done the original genetic engineering of recombinant DNA in
(05:47):
producing new types of organisms by fusing things together and
had patented them. And this was causing a problem that
maybe commercial labs are going to create Franken monster. And
they go to a conference center in California known as Asilomar,
and they decide to discuss the ethics of it and
(06:10):
the rules of the road. And the second year was
a big conference. It's called a Silomar too, and they
made a series of guidelines to allow the technology to proceed.
They called it a prudent path forward was their watchword.
And they worry mainly about the safety, like how do
(06:31):
you keep these things from escaping the lab. They didn't
worry enough about the moral implications of genetic engineering. And
this is not yet human gene editing like Christopher does,
but it's a type of genetic engineering where you can
create new microorganisms that might be good at fighting diseases,
(06:55):
and they also might be pathogens that escape and are
really bad.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So even if the question and the technology surrounding gene
editing had changed down to return to the early organizational
efforts of her colleagues as a framework.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
When Jennifer decides to start this process of dealing with
the ethical implications of Chrisper gene editing, she goes back
to the nineteen seventies conferences of a Sillomar where Paul Berg,
Herbert Boyer, Jim Watson, and David Baltimore had all gathered
(07:30):
together do the rules of the road and create this
prudent path forward for genetic engineering. And she even gets
some of the original players. She gets David Baltimore, she
gets Paul Berg to be sort of honorary chairs of
this process she starts, and she goes to not a
Sillomar but another resort in California, and they gather people
(07:54):
for a series of meetings that discuss not only the
safety issues but the moral issues. I should we be
making gene edits and especially inheritable gene edits so that
we're not only fixing sickle cell anemia and a single patient,
but we might want to make permanent genetic edits that
(08:17):
are inheritable so that their children and nobody in their
family will ever have any of their descendants, we'll ever
have sickle cell again. And that's a line across It's
called the germ line, but it's like a red line,
which is all right, we're not just doing it in
one patient and if it doesn't work, well, that's bad
for the patient, but the species survives. What if we're
(08:38):
now doing it in something that will change the human species?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And what was their general conclusion coming out of these meetings?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
One of them was, don't make inheritable gene edits. We're
just not ready for that. We don't know how to
do it, but we also don't know the moral implications.
That gets blown away when one of these men, they're
about to go to Hong Kong to have another session
because they're doing internationally, and suddenly word comes forth that
(09:11):
a little known Chinese scientist, Ju juang Qi, had made
inheritable gene edits to twin girls in China by editing
them when they were embryos, so all of their cells
are edited and all of their descendant cells will be
edited to make it so they didn't have a receptor
for the virus HIV, which sounds like a good thing
(09:33):
to do, but it crossed that line, and so that
shakes everybody up.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
The scientist Jo Jianqui had actually personally reached out to
Daudna to tell her about his feet. Isaacson says that
gene editing researchers didn't receive the news the way jan
Qui expected.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
He sends her an email and the subject is baby's
born and she looks at it and she's a gas.
She realizes, oh my god, this guy is edited embryos
and made these genetically altered, inheritable changes in babies. And
she calls David Baltimore and they're supposed to be meeting
(10:11):
in Hong Kong for one of these conferences, and Jennifer says,
I'm catching an earlier plane. Meet me in Hong Kong
because Han Shuang key was going to be there. He
was supposed to just talk about his ears on some panel,
and he wasn't planning to talk about doing an inheritable
gene edits. In fact, he didn't want to. He was
trying to keep it secret. And they decide they have
(10:34):
to let him present what he has done, and it's
all very awkward in this hotel in Hong Kong, where
he'd keep sending messages to Jennifer's room saying, I've got
to talk to you, you know, I've got to save
my reputation, and she's saying, you have to do this
presentation and you have to answer questions. But then the
(10:56):
questions were sort of technical, not very interesting questions, and
it was kind of messy. They never confronted the deep issues,
and then Jojuan Ki kind of walks off stage and
leaves and goes back to China. He thought he was
going to be world famous, like the person who cloned
Dolly the Sheep, or you know, one of those big breakthroughs.
And he had hired an American public relation specialist who
(11:21):
had set up sort of embargoed private interviews with the
Associated Press that would be released when he did his
scientific paper and videos. He made five videos that were
held until they were going to all be released on
the same day, and then the paper comes out and
(11:43):
all of a sudden, people realize, well, he's not going
to be celebrated. This was actually a crossing of an
ethical line.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Still Doubna and some of our colleagues believed that what
happened with Hojenqui shouldn't dictate the rules of the field,
but more so serve as a warning and tells me
that crisper researchers were trying to walk a delicate line
between enforcing appropriate rules and potentially stunting their own research.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
They wanted to make sure that people didn't just run
away with this saying, but they also wanted to make
sure that governments, regulators, and people didn't try to stop
research on it. And so Jennifer, unlike Eric Lander and
some others, fights the notion of having a moratorium or
a ban, and we ended up not having a moratorium
(12:30):
on crisper gene editing, and we're still trying to find
this prudent path forward. So they think that maybe they
can put the genie back in the bottle or keep
Pandora's box closed, And so far there hasn't been a
runaway efforts to do inheritable gene edits. And the Chinese
(12:53):
even cracked down on this scientist, put him under house arrests,
took his license away. But the moment, the rules of
the road are being respected.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And you describe a little bit how doubt does thinking
did evolve over time when it came to, you know,
not necessarily favoring a moratorium, but like feeling stronger at
one point about putting harder lines. And what changed over
the course of a few years for her.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
She originally wanted a whole lot of restrictions on the
use of Crisper and said it was kind of dangerous
to go too fast. But it conferences and in other
places I'd see people come up to her, they pull
out a photograph say, this is my daughter and she
has this genetic thing. She's going to die in a
(13:42):
year a year and a half. It's degenerative. Can you
save her life please? And Jennifer would have to say,
we're going to try to do that someday with crisper,
but no, it's not going to be ready in six
months a year. And also she began to realize all
the suffering that could be stopped with crisper, so she
(14:05):
began to be a little bit more open about the
potential and wanting to make sure that too many restrictions
were not put on it. Her ideas changed. Also. Another
thing causing to evolve was, of course, the coronavirus and
(14:26):
COVID were suddenly were confronted with a viral attack.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Among many things, COVID brought to the forefront the importance
of RNA technology. Isaacson tells me that from the beginning
of the pandemic, DOWDNA and her colleagues understood that they
needed to get to work creating testing materials and eventually
a vaccine.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Jennifer Dowd, who had been working on Crisper, all of
a sudden realizes when COVID hits, how nature had created
in this way of fighting viruses, and how relevant suddenly
to our own lives, because we have to fight a
(15:09):
virus just like bacteria did. And in some ways nature
is amazing that way that something that starts as a
pure curiosity of what weird bacteria from salt ponds do
become so central to our own lives when we get
attacked by viruses. It's really just a week or so
(15:31):
into the first news of the pandemic and they start
forming teams with or organizing it. Like one team that's
going to build a testing system, another team that's going
to build the next generation of testing using Crisper to
test for the viruses. Another team that's going to try
to do a Crisper based vaccine for the virus. And
(15:54):
so these teams start to work, and some of it
is very mundane, like just testing everybody in the Bay
Area she who has COVID because they didn't have good
COVID test back then. Teams were doing things that are
still ongoing, like using Crisper for a vaccine that will
guard against any form of coronavirus.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And even as they got together and informed these teams
some of what they were doing, including the testing, it
sort of outpaced the government's ability to process it. Like
they had tests ready, but they needed to jump through
all these hoops to get the tests approved because no
one had anticipated that this would even be possible.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
We have to remember how meshy the original response to
COVID was.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
People will have heard, you know, the COVID vaccines, the
modernic vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine are RNA related. Can you
explain to what extent Crisper itself played a role in
the vaccines that we know now versus treatments that may
come down the line.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
The new vaccines that most of us had against COVID,
known as mRNA vaccines meaning Messenger RNA. That is not
exactly the same as CRISPER, but it still uses the
notion that RNA is this miracle molecule and it can
(17:21):
be programmed to do things. So that's how RNA technology
more than just Crisper technology, but RNA as a messenger,
as a molecule that could tell the cell to do
something and be programmed by us to tell the cell
to do something we wanted to do. That's in the
(17:41):
realm of the world of RNA and CRISPER, but it's
a particular type of thing called messenger RNA.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Throughout this race to understand how the COVID nineteen virus
worked and how RNA and CRISPER could work together to
stop it, Isaacson tells me old rivalries into the forefront,
but this time the goal was one that transcended personal recognition.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You have Jennifer's lab racing to do it, Fung Jang's
lab racing to do it. And this time, even though
they're sort of competing, they know the stakes for society
are huge, and they're working together more and not trying
to beat each other to patents is the way science
should work.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
There couldn't have been a more a stronger moment to
illustrate the value of the basic research than what happened
right as they are developing these these technologies.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean, I'm writing this book and thinking I'm
a bit of an arcane field, which is what's RNA doing?
And I was even wondering, how does the book come
to some you know, relevant conclusions so people don't think
they're just reading the book about, you know, a gene
editing tool. And it was interesting because COVID is just
(19:00):
so at the core of what the book is about,
because it's about organisms that have to fight off viruses
and as I said, bacteria have been doing this for
billions of years. It's the biggest war ever happened on
this planet. And the fact that out of pure curiosity
(19:21):
we could learn something about how bacteria fight viruses and
apply it to ourselves just at the moment when we're
getting a viral pandemic with a spike protein, we can
even mimic using messenger RNA. I think that helped show
how relevant and exciting but also important the science can be.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Coming up after the break, we dive into a middle
of the night call to DAWDNA one that we confirmed
she had embarked on the right research path all along.
In the middle of all this, in October of twenty twenty,
Jennifer Dowdner gets a call in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, she's in a conference, the first in person conference
she's been to. I think it's down in Palo Alto,
you know, an hour down from Berkeley. And in the
middle of the night, the phone rings and she doesn't answer.
It's on vibrate, but finally she answers, and it's a
reporter at four am SEC. What's your reaction to the
Nobel Prize? She says, who won the Nobel Prize. The
reporter says, you did, and with Emmanuel looks at her
(20:33):
phone and she sees a lot of miscalls from Stockholm, Sweden,
and she says, oh, okay, I'll call you back. I
stayed up that night even if Jennifer dowdan didn't. I
was here in New Orleans, and I set my alarm
for whatever it is, three am, four am for when
it was going to be announced in Stockholm, and they
(20:55):
start announcing it and they said, this year's prize goes
for the tool that will help us with the secrets
of life and edit our genes. And I go, yes,
it's crisper.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
And all of these labs at this point have to
some extent turned their attention or part of their attention
towards commercializing these technology, towards finding through companies, finding the
treatments that will actually bring them into human use, and
that creates all these other dilemmas, ethical dilemmas that arise
(21:27):
out of it. And I want to talk a little
bit about that. Can you run us through some of
your thought experiments on the implications of crisper being used
in a variety of different ways.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think the big ethical issues are when is it
okay to edit our genes? And in the book, I
start with a whole lot of cases, and so we
got to go slowly, step by step, because slopes are
less slippery that way, and this could be a slippery slope.
And so you can look at things that are debilitating
(22:03):
conditions like sickle cell, and it's a simple edit, and
you can do it in effect only the individual involved,
not reproductive cells. And that's a no brainer to me.
There is a person in the book, David Sanchez, who's
a sweet, wonderful kid, was seventeen when we were doing
(22:25):
the book, and he loves playing basketball except for when
he doubles over in pain on the floor because he
has sickle cell. And so he becomes part of one
of the experiments to treat sickle cell, and they tell him,
with crisper, we can cure this, and we can even
(22:47):
with crisper if we do it in reproductive cells or embryos,
make it so that your children will never have sickle cell,
and all of your descendants will never have sickle cell.
And David says, that's great, and then he pauses this
in a documentary he was being interviewed for and says,
(23:08):
but maybe I should let my kid decide that. Maybe
that should be their choice. And I said to him,
wait a minute. You know you doubled over in pain.
Do you want that to happen to you kid? He said, well,
I learned a lot from sickle cell. I learned perseverance,
I learned how to get up off the floor. And
so maybe we shouldn't just edit it out of the
(23:31):
human species, but use it as treatments at times. And
I thought, well, that's amazing for a seventeen year old
have been this morally thoughtful about it. And I asked
him again later and he said, now that I think
about it, I probably want my kids to be edited
so that they'll never have sickle cell. I said, what
about perseverance? He said, I want to teach him perseverance,
(23:55):
but I don't want him to feel the pain that
I felt when I crumple up up playing basketball. So
these are complicated ethical things. Then you get to the
next step of thinking on this slope we're going down,
and you say, well, you know, if we can edit
for sickle cell so that the blood cells are not
(24:17):
crumpled and does carry less oxygen, and we can fix it.
What if we get edited so they carry a little
bit of extra oxygen, like fifty percent more oxygen each cell.
I could edit my kids and all of my descendants
to be amazing Olympic athletes. Is that ethically worse than
(24:39):
curing sickle cell? I would say yes, that's a difference
between making a cure for a bad disorder or making
an enhancement to the human species. I asked George Church.
He says, what do you mean, what's wrong with enhancing
the human species? What if we can edit IQ and
make it better? All of us want our kids. Maybe
(25:01):
we can make our kids taller. Tell me what's wrong
with trying to enhance your kids and make them more powerful?
So I asked Jennifer, we all have to think about it.
One thing that's wrong with it is if these genetic
treatments will be costly, and they will be, you could
(25:24):
have it so the rich can buy better genes for
their kids than poor people. You don't want to have
two species, the genetically you know, that's the brave New
World issue, the genetically enhanced part of the species and
the genetically inferior part of the species. Secondly, if you
(25:44):
let each individual decide, they can go into a clinic
and you give them as if it's the genetic supermarket.
Here's the list. What do you want? Blond hair, blue eyes?
Do you want brown hair? And you can secretly, with
no knowing, you can check off what do you want?
What would people check off? At the end of the book,
(26:06):
I talked about sitting on the balcony here in New
Orleans and Royal Street in the French Quarter, and all
sorts of things are happening. There's a funeral for Leah Chase,
a great creole of colored cook, and there's a naked
bicycle race for safety traffic safety. There's a gay pride parades,
and you look at the diversity to people tall and
(26:28):
short and straight and gay and trans, and black and white,
and people from Gallia Day University sign language, and you think,
what if we could edit out all deafness, What if
we could edit out so every parent could choose sexual orientation,
skin color, would we hurt the beautiful diversity of our species?
(26:50):
These are the moral issues that Jennifer and then at
other places I was trying to wrestle.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
With, and it raises to return to sort of you know,
the big questions. One of them you've touched on here,
which is you write about how with something like deafness
or autism, if that could be you know, quote unquote treated.
It also raises a question like what is a disorder?
What is a disability? One person's disability is not necessarily
(27:18):
another person's disability in this world? And how do we
decide which things even if you forget about enhancements, what
are things that we're even able to treat right?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
And if we in society as a whole make decisions,
we'd probably say, let's not edit out being gay, Let's
not edit out even you know, being on the autism spectrum.
But if you leave it to each individual parent, they
might say, I don't want my kid to ever suffer
from depression. I don't want them to be even in
(27:52):
a small part of the autism spectrum or aspergers or
whatever they want to call it. And maybe you're editing
out the hemming ways. You're editing out van Go, You're
editing out people who had either psychological or personal or whatever,
or editing out Helen Keller, you know from being deaf?
(28:16):
Was the world better off without van Go and Helen Keller? No,
If you're a mother and father and say your kid
will be born deaf, but we can easily change that,
would you say, yeah, please change it. I'll let you think.
Would you do it? And you know in the book
(28:36):
there's somebody there who's a deaf couple and they're about
to have a child. They want to make sure their
child is deaf because they want to keep that' subculture alive.
How much of this should be individual choice or how
much should be society as a whole saying you're not
allowed to do some of these things.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The ethical considerations around Crisper cast nine will likely only
grow as the technolog He continues to advance the news
around Baby kJ renewed mainstream interests in the field and
what it can accomplish, but Isaacson tells me there's still
a long way to go.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
We're not quite as far along as I thought we
might be. It's been ten years, but we have cured
sickle cell in patients Victoria Gray, she's pictured in the book,
part of the experiment. But now they're the private companies
Crisper Therapeutics of Emmanuel Sharp and Jay, who have a
cure for sickle cell. And there are four or five
(29:32):
other type syndrums that we can now fix. The big
one about to happen in clinical trials is cancer treatments,
where you can use Crisper to change some of the
immune system so that you're cancer fighting treatments or the
(29:52):
cancer cells can be defeated. That's a shorthand of it.
But yet we're about to have we have very personalized
cancer treatments targeted to your particular tumor, and Crisper can
make it so that that type of treatment can work
more easily.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
It did strike me that you end the book on
really a note of optimism about both Crisper but also
the sort of like understanding and connection to science that
people were having because of the mRNA vaccines at that
moment in COVID, and it feels like that has all
gone a little bit south or a lot south since
(30:36):
that moment. So I'm wondering how you feel, first of all,
about the way people view science today and how that
connects up with how people view what crisper can do.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
One of the great tragedies of our time has been
over the past few years, a backlash against science, just
part of the larger backlash against expertise and establishment. So,
you know, a book, like a book on Jennifer Dowd
can explain what is it a messenger RNA does and
(31:13):
when people say the mRNA vaccine is going to destroy
my DNA and change me forever, No, no, no, understand it.
It doesn't even go into the nucleus of yourself. It's
just an RNA. It's on the outside of your you know,
the outer part of your cell making protein, so it
doesn't change your genetic code. Now that may not, you know,
(31:40):
be an easy cell, but it's a beautiful thing to
understand the science, And I think it's a shame that
after COVID and the great advances that we've had using
RNA to make a vaccine within a year, pretty much
knocking back the dangers of COVID and using these treatments
(32:05):
to cure sickle cell. I think it's important for people
to marvel at and understand how these work so that
people can be inspired, like Jennifer was when she read
The Double Helix, to become scientist, or even if you're
not going to become a science be odd and inspired
(32:26):
by what science can do and the beauty of understanding
it so that you can make your own informed judgments
about what treatments you may want.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It feels like that backlash towards science, towards expertise is
either enabling or fueling this current attack on basic science,
the funding for basic science to begin with. And you
spend a lot of time in the book describing the
way these very basic questions of curiosity lead down the
(32:58):
road to changes in our lives, positive changes in our lives.
How are you feeling in this moment when a lot
of basic science feels like it's under threat.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
For eighty years, since the end of World War Two,
we've had a system that has made the United States
the powerhouse in innovation. It was a system set up
by Beneva Bush, who is somebody who ran science for
the government during the war, including the Adam Baum project,
but also had been a provost at MIT and started
a company rightly, and he said, we're going to have
(33:31):
a system where government funds basic science research and does
it at university labs, and then allows it when it's
successful and turns into a tool we can use to
be commercialized by companies. If we stop funding that basic research,
that means like we're destroying the seeds that will become
(33:54):
innovations in the future. And China, which is doing huge
amounts of basic reat search, whether it's on life sciences
or gene editing or AI, will totally surpass us, and
so will other places. So there's nothing worse you could
do for the future of America.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
You've written about this sort of your view of the revolutions,
the revolution of atoms, followed by the revolution of bits
and the digital era, and now comes the revolution in biology.
Do you feel like your perspective on that has changed
at all, that they could be slowed down or stopped.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
I think the revolution in the life sciences will define
the first half of our century, the next twenty five
years or so, I think it will be combined with
the revolution in artificial intelligence. In fact, if you look
at the Nobel Prizes, if you look at Demis Hosipus
who just won it, it was for applying AI to
(34:54):
how proteins fold and how the folding of proteins determines
what they can do. Because James Watson taught us in
a double helix, and as Jennifer taught us about RNA,
the structure of a molecule helps make it a key
that can unlock certain things. So as we have AI
(35:17):
do protein folding, and as we have AI and machine
learning go through databases of everybody's genetic code and what
type of things work and don't work, this whole revolution
of life sciences combined with AI technology has unbelievable potential.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
In the next episode of On Crisper, we listen to
a conversation between Isaacson and Jennifer Downer at the New
Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. You won't want to
miss it on Crisper. The Story of Jennifer Downa is
a production of Kaleidoscope, and iHeart this show is based
on the writing and reporting of war Walter Isaacson. It's
hosted by me Evan Ratliffe and produced by Adrianna Tapia
(36:04):
with assistance from Alex Janenveldt, who was mixed by Kyle Murdoch,
and our studio engineer was Thomas Walsh. Our executive producers
are Kate Osbourne and Mangashatikadur from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Nobel
from iHeart Podcasts. If you enjoy hearing stories about visionaries
and science and technology, check out our other seasons based
on the biographies that Walter Isaacson has written. On Musk
(36:25):
for an intimate dive into all the facets of Elon
Musk and on Benjamin Franklin to understand how his scientific
curiosity shaped society as we know it.
For years, Walter Isaacson had immersed himself in the world
of Jennifer DOWDNA and the other Crisper pioneers. In hours
of conversations. He'd work to capture the stories behind the invention.
But at a certain point he decided he needed to
approach Crisper from a different angle to understand it in
a more pans on way. So he traveled to Downa's
lab on the tree lined campus of UC Berkeley, sat
(00:35):
down on a lab bench alongside a couple of grad students,
and got to work editing genes from a human kidney cell.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You're sitting on a bench in front of a lab
table usually has a big hood on top so that it,
you know, exhausts the air and there's not a lot
of fumes. And you have some test tubes in a
little rack, just like he used to have in chemistry
class in eighth grade, and you pipe pets, and those
pipe pets allow you to put tiny drops of things
(01:05):
into the test tube. In the case of editing with Crisper,
there would be some preprogrammed RNA targeted thing with an enzyme,
meaning a protein that can cut or do other things.
A spark reactions attached to it. Both Gavin Knott and
(01:27):
Jennifer Hamilton, who had graduate students in the lab, hovered
over me with my pipets and my glasses and goggles
and latex gloves on and showed me how to mix
the different ingredients we had, put it into a test tube,
and then look and see whether I had edited in
(01:52):
a gene that would make it glow green, sort of
a phosphorescent gene. And after a while you get to
put it into a centrifuge, or you get to put
it under microscopes, and you'll get to see were your
cuts actually made. They said, here it is, and there,
indeed was the gene spliced in.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Isaacson tells me that one of the things that struck
him most during the process was discovering how with crisper
gene editing was relatively easy to do with a little help.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I was surprised that even I could do it. I know,
I had a couple of graduate students hovering around and helping,
and I realized that this is going to be a
technology that's not only easy to use, but it's easy
to reprogram. I didn't actually program the guide RNA. Somebody
else had done it for me. But if I decided
(02:47):
I wanted to make a cut in the parts of
DNA that show my eye color, or the parts of
the DNA that grow hair, whatever it may be, I
realized that it wouldn't be all that hard to program
the molecule.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Isaacson's realization mirrors one that Dowdna had herself, as the
technology behind cris Burg continued to spread.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
After Jennifer Dowdner and Emmanuel Shoppenjay publish their paper, Jennifer
had a dream or a nightmare, and it was that
somebody wanted to meet with her about this new technology.
And she opens the door to the room. The person
looks up and it's Adolph Hitler, sort of in a
(03:31):
pig's head, and she's taken aback. And she realizes, of
course that eugenics, I mean, this is what the Nazis
were trying to do to edit the human race. That
in the wrong hands, this tool could just be not
(03:52):
just powerful, but evil. And she realized at that point
that she would have to want to gather scientists from
around the world because it had to be international to say,
let's think through the implications of this. There is the
Prometheus issue, which is Prometheus snatches the technology from the gods,
(04:17):
fire from the liver of the gods, and it becomes problematic,
it's harmful. That, of course, is written large with the
atom bomb project. And if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer,
you know he's called the American Prometheus. And so you
have to wrestle with the moral implications of the technology
(04:39):
you've created.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
From the atom bomb to gene editing, scientists have long
had to grapple with the risks that their own inventions
present for society. They've been forced to search their consciences
and at times to galvanize their colleagues and efforts to
contain those risks. As Isaacson writes, for decades, widespread human
genome editing had lived in the realm of science fiction.
(05:02):
Now with Chrisper, it's arriving, and the question is are
we ready? I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is on Crisper,
the Story of Jennifer Downa. This is episode four Franken Monsters.
DWNA wasn't alone in thinking about the ethical repercussions of
gene editing. Isaacson notes that the field of biotechnology has
(05:24):
always been right with these questions.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
One of the first groups to wrestle with the biotechnology
ethical issues was a group that had Paul Berg and
Herbert Boyer and the people in the nineteen seventies who
had done the original genetic engineering of recombinant DNA in
(05:47):
producing new types of organisms by fusing things together and
had patented them. And this was causing a problem that
maybe commercial labs are going to create Franken monster. And
they go to a conference center in California known as Asilomar,
and they decide to discuss the ethics of it and
(06:10):
the rules of the road. And the second year was
a big conference. It's called a Silomar too, and they
made a series of guidelines to allow the technology to proceed.
They called it a prudent path forward was their watchword.
And they worry mainly about the safety, like how do
(06:31):
you keep these things from escaping the lab. They didn't
worry enough about the moral implications of genetic engineering. And
this is not yet human gene editing like Christopher does,
but it's a type of genetic engineering where you can
create new microorganisms that might be good at fighting diseases,
(06:55):
and they also might be pathogens that escape and are
really bad.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So even if the question and the technology surrounding gene
editing had changed down to return to the early organizational
efforts of her colleagues as a framework.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
When Jennifer decides to start this process of dealing with
the ethical implications of Chrisper gene editing, she goes back
to the nineteen seventies conferences of a Sillomar where Paul Berg,
Herbert Boyer, Jim Watson, and David Baltimore had all gathered
(07:30):
together do the rules of the road and create this
prudent path forward for genetic engineering. And she even gets
some of the original players. She gets David Baltimore, she
gets Paul Berg to be sort of honorary chairs of
this process she starts, and she goes to not a
Sillomar but another resort in California, and they gather people
(07:54):
for a series of meetings that discuss not only the
safety issues but the moral issues. I should we be
making gene edits and especially inheritable gene edits so that
we're not only fixing sickle cell anemia and a single patient,
but we might want to make permanent genetic edits that
(08:17):
are inheritable so that their children and nobody in their
family will ever have any of their descendants, we'll ever
have sickle cell again. And that's a line across It's
called the germ line, but it's like a red line,
which is all right, we're not just doing it in
one patient and if it doesn't work, well, that's bad
for the patient, but the species survives. What if we're
(08:38):
now doing it in something that will change the human species?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And what was their general conclusion coming out of these meetings?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
One of them was, don't make inheritable gene edits. We're
just not ready for that. We don't know how to
do it, but we also don't know the moral implications.
That gets blown away when one of these men, they're
about to go to Hong Kong to have another session
because they're doing internationally, and suddenly word comes forth that
(09:11):
a little known Chinese scientist, Ju juang Qi, had made
inheritable gene edits to twin girls in China by editing
them when they were embryos, so all of their cells
are edited and all of their descendant cells will be
edited to make it so they didn't have a receptor
for the virus HIV, which sounds like a good thing
(09:33):
to do, but it crossed that line, and so that
shakes everybody up.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
The scientist Jo Jianqui had actually personally reached out to
Daudna to tell her about his feet. Isaacson says that
gene editing researchers didn't receive the news the way jan
Qui expected.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
He sends her an email and the subject is baby's
born and she looks at it and she's a gas.
She realizes, oh my god, this guy is edited embryos
and made these genetically altered, inheritable changes in babies. And
she calls David Baltimore and they're supposed to be meeting
(10:11):
in Hong Kong for one of these conferences, and Jennifer says,
I'm catching an earlier plane. Meet me in Hong Kong
because Han Shuang key was going to be there. He
was supposed to just talk about his ears on some panel,
and he wasn't planning to talk about doing an inheritable
gene edits. In fact, he didn't want to. He was
trying to keep it secret. And they decide they have
(10:34):
to let him present what he has done, and it's
all very awkward in this hotel in Hong Kong, where
he'd keep sending messages to Jennifer's room saying, I've got
to talk to you, you know, I've got to save
my reputation, and she's saying, you have to do this
presentation and you have to answer questions. But then the
(10:56):
questions were sort of technical, not very interesting questions, and
it was kind of messy. They never confronted the deep issues,
and then Jojuan Ki kind of walks off stage and
leaves and goes back to China. He thought he was
going to be world famous, like the person who cloned
Dolly the Sheep, or you know, one of those big breakthroughs.
And he had hired an American public relation specialist who
(11:21):
had set up sort of embargoed private interviews with the
Associated Press that would be released when he did his
scientific paper and videos. He made five videos that were
held until they were going to all be released on
the same day, and then the paper comes out and
(11:43):
all of a sudden, people realize, well, he's not going
to be celebrated. This was actually a crossing of an
ethical line.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Still Doubna and some of our colleagues believed that what
happened with Hojenqui shouldn't dictate the rules of the field,
but more so serve as a warning and tells me
that crisper researchers were trying to walk a delicate line
between enforcing appropriate rules and potentially stunting their own research.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
They wanted to make sure that people didn't just run
away with this saying, but they also wanted to make
sure that governments, regulators, and people didn't try to stop
research on it. And so Jennifer, unlike Eric Lander and
some others, fights the notion of having a moratorium or
a ban, and we ended up not having a moratorium
(12:30):
on crisper gene editing, and we're still trying to find
this prudent path forward. So they think that maybe they
can put the genie back in the bottle or keep
Pandora's box closed, And so far there hasn't been a
runaway efforts to do inheritable gene edits. And the Chinese
(12:53):
even cracked down on this scientist, put him under house arrests,
took his license away. But the moment, the rules of
the road are being respected.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And you describe a little bit how doubt does thinking
did evolve over time when it came to, you know,
not necessarily favoring a moratorium, but like feeling stronger at
one point about putting harder lines. And what changed over
the course of a few years for her.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
She originally wanted a whole lot of restrictions on the
use of Crisper and said it was kind of dangerous
to go too fast. But it conferences and in other
places I'd see people come up to her, they pull
out a photograph say, this is my daughter and she
has this genetic thing. She's going to die in a
(13:42):
year a year and a half. It's degenerative. Can you
save her life please? And Jennifer would have to say,
we're going to try to do that someday with crisper,
but no, it's not going to be ready in six
months a year. And also she began to realize all
the suffering that could be stopped with crisper, so she
(14:05):
began to be a little bit more open about the
potential and wanting to make sure that too many restrictions
were not put on it. Her ideas changed. Also. Another
thing causing to evolve was, of course, the coronavirus and
(14:26):
COVID were suddenly were confronted with a viral attack.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Among many things, COVID brought to the forefront the importance
of RNA technology. Isaacson tells me that from the beginning
of the pandemic, DOWDNA and her colleagues understood that they
needed to get to work creating testing materials and eventually
a vaccine.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Jennifer Dowd, who had been working on Crisper, all of
a sudden realizes when COVID hits, how nature had created
in this way of fighting viruses, and how relevant suddenly
to our own lives, because we have to fight a
(15:09):
virus just like bacteria did. And in some ways nature
is amazing that way that something that starts as a
pure curiosity of what weird bacteria from salt ponds do
become so central to our own lives when we get
attacked by viruses. It's really just a week or so
(15:31):
into the first news of the pandemic and they start
forming teams with or organizing it. Like one team that's
going to build a testing system, another team that's going
to build the next generation of testing using Crisper to
test for the viruses. Another team that's going to try
to do a Crisper based vaccine for the virus. And
(15:54):
so these teams start to work, and some of it
is very mundane, like just testing everybody in the Bay
Area she who has COVID because they didn't have good
COVID test back then. Teams were doing things that are
still ongoing, like using Crisper for a vaccine that will
guard against any form of coronavirus.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And even as they got together and informed these teams
some of what they were doing, including the testing, it
sort of outpaced the government's ability to process it. Like
they had tests ready, but they needed to jump through
all these hoops to get the tests approved because no
one had anticipated that this would even be possible.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
We have to remember how meshy the original response to
COVID was.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
People will have heard, you know, the COVID vaccines, the
modernic vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine are RNA related. Can you
explain to what extent Crisper itself played a role in
the vaccines that we know now versus treatments that may
come down the line.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
The new vaccines that most of us had against COVID,
known as mRNA vaccines meaning Messenger RNA. That is not
exactly the same as CRISPER, but it still uses the
notion that RNA is this miracle molecule and it can
(17:21):
be programmed to do things. So that's how RNA technology
more than just Crisper technology, but RNA as a messenger,
as a molecule that could tell the cell to do
something and be programmed by us to tell the cell
to do something we wanted to do. That's in the
(17:41):
realm of the world of RNA and CRISPER, but it's
a particular type of thing called messenger RNA.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Throughout this race to understand how the COVID nineteen virus
worked and how RNA and CRISPER could work together to
stop it, Isaacson tells me old rivalries into the forefront,
but this time the goal was one that transcended personal recognition.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
You have Jennifer's lab racing to do it, Fung Jang's
lab racing to do it. And this time, even though
they're sort of competing, they know the stakes for society
are huge, and they're working together more and not trying
to beat each other to patents is the way science
should work.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
There couldn't have been a more a stronger moment to
illustrate the value of the basic research than what happened
right as they are developing these these technologies.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean, I'm writing this book and thinking I'm
a bit of an arcane field, which is what's RNA doing?
And I was even wondering, how does the book come
to some you know, relevant conclusions so people don't think
they're just reading the book about, you know, a gene
editing tool. And it was interesting because COVID is just
(19:00):
so at the core of what the book is about,
because it's about organisms that have to fight off viruses
and as I said, bacteria have been doing this for
billions of years. It's the biggest war ever happened on
this planet. And the fact that out of pure curiosity
(19:21):
we could learn something about how bacteria fight viruses and
apply it to ourselves just at the moment when we're
getting a viral pandemic with a spike protein, we can
even mimic using messenger RNA. I think that helped show
how relevant and exciting but also important the science can be.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Coming up after the break, we dive into a middle
of the night call to DAWDNA one that we confirmed
she had embarked on the right research path all along.
In the middle of all this, in October of twenty twenty,
Jennifer Dowdner gets a call in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, she's in a conference, the first in person conference
she's been to. I think it's down in Palo Alto,
you know, an hour down from Berkeley. And in the
middle of the night, the phone rings and she doesn't answer.
It's on vibrate, but finally she answers, and it's a
reporter at four am SEC. What's your reaction to the
Nobel Prize? She says, who won the Nobel Prize. The
reporter says, you did, and with Emmanuel looks at her
(20:33):
phone and she sees a lot of miscalls from Stockholm, Sweden,
and she says, oh, okay, I'll call you back. I
stayed up that night even if Jennifer dowdan didn't. I
was here in New Orleans, and I set my alarm
for whatever it is, three am, four am for when
it was going to be announced in Stockholm, and they
(20:55):
start announcing it and they said, this year's prize goes
for the tool that will help us with the secrets
of life and edit our genes. And I go, yes,
it's crisper.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
And all of these labs at this point have to
some extent turned their attention or part of their attention
towards commercializing these technology, towards finding through companies, finding the
treatments that will actually bring them into human use, and
that creates all these other dilemmas, ethical dilemmas that arise
(21:27):
out of it. And I want to talk a little
bit about that. Can you run us through some of
your thought experiments on the implications of crisper being used
in a variety of different ways.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I think the big ethical issues are when is it
okay to edit our genes? And in the book, I
start with a whole lot of cases, and so we
got to go slowly, step by step, because slopes are
less slippery that way, and this could be a slippery slope.
And so you can look at things that are debilitating
(22:03):
conditions like sickle cell, and it's a simple edit, and
you can do it in effect only the individual involved,
not reproductive cells. And that's a no brainer to me.
There is a person in the book, David Sanchez, who's
a sweet, wonderful kid, was seventeen when we were doing
(22:25):
the book, and he loves playing basketball except for when
he doubles over in pain on the floor because he
has sickle cell. And so he becomes part of one
of the experiments to treat sickle cell, and they tell him,
with crisper, we can cure this, and we can even
(22:47):
with crisper if we do it in reproductive cells or embryos,
make it so that your children will never have sickle cell,
and all of your descendants will never have sickle cell.
And David says, that's great, and then he pauses this
in a documentary he was being interviewed for and says,
(23:08):
but maybe I should let my kid decide that. Maybe
that should be their choice. And I said to him,
wait a minute. You know you doubled over in pain.
Do you want that to happen to you kid? He said, well,
I learned a lot from sickle cell. I learned perseverance,
I learned how to get up off the floor. And
so maybe we shouldn't just edit it out of the
(23:31):
human species, but use it as treatments at times. And
I thought, well, that's amazing for a seventeen year old
have been this morally thoughtful about it. And I asked
him again later and he said, now that I think
about it, I probably want my kids to be edited
so that they'll never have sickle cell. I said, what
about perseverance? He said, I want to teach him perseverance,
(23:55):
but I don't want him to feel the pain that
I felt when I crumple up up playing basketball. So
these are complicated ethical things. Then you get to the
next step of thinking on this slope we're going down,
and you say, well, you know, if we can edit
for sickle cell so that the blood cells are not
(24:17):
crumpled and does carry less oxygen, and we can fix it.
What if we get edited so they carry a little
bit of extra oxygen, like fifty percent more oxygen each cell.
I could edit my kids and all of my descendants
to be amazing Olympic athletes. Is that ethically worse than
(24:39):
curing sickle cell? I would say yes, that's a difference
between making a cure for a bad disorder or making
an enhancement to the human species. I asked George Church.
He says, what do you mean, what's wrong with enhancing
the human species? What if we can edit IQ and
make it better? All of us want our kids. Maybe
(25:01):
we can make our kids taller. Tell me what's wrong
with trying to enhance your kids and make them more powerful?
So I asked Jennifer, we all have to think about it.
One thing that's wrong with it is if these genetic
treatments will be costly, and they will be, you could
(25:24):
have it so the rich can buy better genes for
their kids than poor people. You don't want to have
two species, the genetically you know, that's the brave New
World issue, the genetically enhanced part of the species and
the genetically inferior part of the species. Secondly, if you
(25:44):
let each individual decide, they can go into a clinic
and you give them as if it's the genetic supermarket.
Here's the list. What do you want? Blond hair, blue eyes?
Do you want brown hair? And you can secretly, with
no knowing, you can check off what do you want?
What would people check off? At the end of the book,
(26:06):
I talked about sitting on the balcony here in New
Orleans and Royal Street in the French Quarter, and all
sorts of things are happening. There's a funeral for Leah Chase,
a great creole of colored cook, and there's a naked
bicycle race for safety traffic safety. There's a gay pride parades,
and you look at the diversity to people tall and
(26:28):
short and straight and gay and trans, and black and white,
and people from Gallia Day University sign language, and you think,
what if we could edit out all deafness, What if
we could edit out so every parent could choose sexual orientation,
skin color, would we hurt the beautiful diversity of our species?
(26:50):
These are the moral issues that Jennifer and then at
other places I was trying to wrestle.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
With, and it raises to return to sort of you know,
the big questions. One of them you've touched on here,
which is you write about how with something like deafness
or autism, if that could be you know, quote unquote treated.
It also raises a question like what is a disorder?
What is a disability? One person's disability is not necessarily
(27:18):
another person's disability in this world? And how do we
decide which things even if you forget about enhancements, what
are things that we're even able to treat right?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
And if we in society as a whole make decisions,
we'd probably say, let's not edit out being gay, Let's
not edit out even you know, being on the autism spectrum.
But if you leave it to each individual parent, they
might say, I don't want my kid to ever suffer
from depression. I don't want them to be even in
(27:52):
a small part of the autism spectrum or aspergers or
whatever they want to call it. And maybe you're editing
out the hemming ways. You're editing out van Go, You're
editing out people who had either psychological or personal or whatever,
or editing out Helen Keller, you know from being deaf?
(28:16):
Was the world better off without van Go and Helen Keller? No,
If you're a mother and father and say your kid
will be born deaf, but we can easily change that,
would you say, yeah, please change it. I'll let you think.
Would you do it? And you know in the book
(28:36):
there's somebody there who's a deaf couple and they're about
to have a child. They want to make sure their
child is deaf because they want to keep that' subculture alive.
How much of this should be individual choice or how
much should be society as a whole saying you're not
allowed to do some of these things.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The ethical considerations around Crisper cast nine will likely only
grow as the technolog He continues to advance the news
around Baby kJ renewed mainstream interests in the field and
what it can accomplish, but Isaacson tells me there's still
a long way to go.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
We're not quite as far along as I thought we
might be. It's been ten years, but we have cured
sickle cell in patients Victoria Gray, she's pictured in the book,
part of the experiment. But now they're the private companies
Crisper Therapeutics of Emmanuel Sharp and Jay, who have a
cure for sickle cell. And there are four or five
(29:32):
other type syndrums that we can now fix. The big
one about to happen in clinical trials is cancer treatments,
where you can use Crisper to change some of the
immune system so that you're cancer fighting treatments or the
(29:52):
cancer cells can be defeated. That's a shorthand of it.
But yet we're about to have we have very personalized
cancer treatments targeted to your particular tumor, and Crisper can
make it so that that type of treatment can work
more easily.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
It did strike me that you end the book on
really a note of optimism about both Crisper but also
the sort of like understanding and connection to science that
people were having because of the mRNA vaccines at that
moment in COVID, and it feels like that has all
gone a little bit south or a lot south since
(30:36):
that moment. So I'm wondering how you feel, first of all,
about the way people view science today and how that
connects up with how people view what crisper can do.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
One of the great tragedies of our time has been
over the past few years, a backlash against science, just
part of the larger backlash against expertise and establishment. So,
you know, a book, like a book on Jennifer Dowd
can explain what is it a messenger RNA does and
(31:13):
when people say the mRNA vaccine is going to destroy
my DNA and change me forever, No, no, no, understand it.
It doesn't even go into the nucleus of yourself. It's
just an RNA. It's on the outside of your you know,
the outer part of your cell making protein, so it
doesn't change your genetic code. Now that may not, you know,
(31:40):
be an easy cell, but it's a beautiful thing to
understand the science, And I think it's a shame that
after COVID and the great advances that we've had using
RNA to make a vaccine within a year, pretty much
knocking back the dangers of COVID and using these treatments
(32:05):
to cure sickle cell. I think it's important for people
to marvel at and understand how these work so that
people can be inspired, like Jennifer was when she read
The Double Helix, to become scientist, or even if you're
not going to become a science be odd and inspired
(32:26):
by what science can do and the beauty of understanding
it so that you can make your own informed judgments
about what treatments you may want.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It feels like that backlash towards science, towards expertise is
either enabling or fueling this current attack on basic science,
the funding for basic science to begin with. And you
spend a lot of time in the book describing the
way these very basic questions of curiosity lead down the
(32:58):
road to changes in our lives, positive changes in our lives.
How are you feeling in this moment when a lot
of basic science feels like it's under threat.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
For eighty years, since the end of World War Two,
we've had a system that has made the United States
the powerhouse in innovation. It was a system set up
by Beneva Bush, who is somebody who ran science for
the government during the war, including the Adam Baum project,
but also had been a provost at MIT and started
a company rightly, and he said, we're going to have
(33:31):
a system where government funds basic science research and does
it at university labs, and then allows it when it's
successful and turns into a tool we can use to
be commercialized by companies. If we stop funding that basic research,
that means like we're destroying the seeds that will become
(33:54):
innovations in the future. And China, which is doing huge
amounts of basic reat search, whether it's on life sciences
or gene editing or AI, will totally surpass us, and
so will other places. So there's nothing worse you could
do for the future of America.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
You've written about this sort of your view of the revolutions,
the revolution of atoms, followed by the revolution of bits
and the digital era, and now comes the revolution in biology.
Do you feel like your perspective on that has changed
at all, that they could be slowed down or stopped.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
I think the revolution in the life sciences will define
the first half of our century, the next twenty five
years or so, I think it will be combined with
the revolution in artificial intelligence. In fact, if you look
at the Nobel Prizes, if you look at Demis Hosipus
who just won it, it was for applying AI to
(34:54):
how proteins fold and how the folding of proteins determines
what they can do. Because James Watson taught us in
a double helix, and as Jennifer taught us about RNA,
the structure of a molecule helps make it a key
that can unlock certain things. So as we have AI
(35:17):
do protein folding, and as we have AI and machine
learning go through databases of everybody's genetic code and what
type of things work and don't work, this whole revolution
of life sciences combined with AI technology has unbelievable potential.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
In the next episode of On Crisper, we listen to
a conversation between Isaacson and Jennifer Downer at the New
Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. You won't want to
miss it on Crisper. The Story of Jennifer Downa is
a production of Kaleidoscope, and iHeart this show is based
on the writing and reporting of war Walter Isaacson. It's
hosted by me Evan Ratliffe and produced by Adrianna Tapia
(36:04):
with assistance from Alex Janenveldt, who was mixed by Kyle Murdoch,
and our studio engineer was Thomas Walsh. Our executive producers
are Kate Osbourne and Mangashatikadur from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Nobel
from iHeart Podcasts. If you enjoy hearing stories about visionaries
and science and technology, check out our other seasons based
on the biographies that Walter Isaacson has written. On Musk
(36:25):
for an intimate dive into all the facets of Elon
Musk and on Benjamin Franklin to understand how his scientific
curiosity shaped society as we know it.
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