Unnatural Selection (2019) s01e01 Episode Script
Cut, Paste, Life
1 Chill out.
I'm a dog breeder.
I knew a little bit about genetics, but not about genetic engineering.
I'm not a PhD, or I have no degree, actually.
I have a GED.
I had assumed that getting DNA and making changes and stuff cost millions of dollars and that you needed a huge lab and research team and all this sort of stuff, but you'd be surprised what there is on YouTube.
Just selective breeding isn't enough.
Big dogs age fast and die young.
Can we make dogs that have even better noses? Get a dog who, um who's healthy, but he's also what you intended him to be.
These are the bacteria that I'm using.
This is bioluminescence.
They produce their own light chemically.
This is my first experiment on the dogs.
I started thinking about, "What do I need to do so nobody's gonna doubt it?" I need to do something that's obviously completely unnatural.
No dogs glow, so if I make a dog that glows, nobody's gonna doubt it was genetic engineering.
We're on the verge of a technological breakthrough that could change the future of mankind.
Most people have no idea how rapidly things are changing.
We're now changing the DNA, the code of life.
It's amazing, the sorts of things that we could do with this.
The question is, should we? What happens if diseases were just eradicated? All technology is inherently about changing away from what is natural.
You can't really see it.
It's a frozen, uh, sample.
I don't know if you can see that liquid frozen in the bottom there.
It's, uh, basically a protein that can be used for genome editing.
It can alter the DNA in any cell in any organism, including animal and plant cells, even human cells.
So, here I am holding this little tube, and it looks so simple, but it will have profound implications for the future.
We are about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science, the science that deals with the nature of living things.
Our story is about you and me.
The story is the same for all living things.
Animals, plants, even the lowliest creature.
Using physical and chemical clues, scientists have been able to figure out how the DNA molecule looks in detail.
We don't have a map of the human chromosomes yet, but we know the genes are there.
We know that they determine what our cells will do and what we will be like.
You think they'll ever see what those units look like? Well, they're getting warm.
And the road they're taking is leading them close to the secret of life itself.
A revolutionary technology that can edit genetic mistakes is getting attention and scrutiny this morning.
It's very exciting.
This is a molecule that can change one of the three billion letters of DNA.
This is the future.
It'd be a major change in our ability to transform genes.
It allows us to potentially make uh, designer plants, designer animals, correct diseases.
For years we debated it, but we couldn't do it.
Now we can do it.
Working with evolution a lot does make you think about "Why are we here?" and "What should we be doing?" We think it's tragic when evolution makes something beautiful and then it goes away forever.
But evolution doesn't care.
Evolution is always interested in what can be better.
It does not care about suffering.
The interesting question in my mind is to what extent we should defy evolution in service to our morality.
What life has explored in all of this incredible diversity is still the tiniest of tiny fractions of what is actually possible.
What's different now is that we can read the DNA of every species in this room.
We're learning how to intervene in the process that has been going on since the beginning of life.
It's amazing the sorts of things that we could do with this.
But the question is should we, and who gets a say? A genome is DNA that consists of a code of four different letters: A, C, G, and T.
In the early 2000s, there was that sort of catalytic event when we created the first draft sequence of the human genome.
hoping it's gonna be the best year all of us have ever had.
Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.
This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.
Gathering together all that information about the human genome allowed unprecedented insight into the evolutionary mechanisms that created humans.
And having that parts list allows us to understand how that code makes people, how it is broken in people with diseases.
This piece of paper has 6,400 letters, front and back.
Given the size of the genome, it would take one million of these pieces of paper, printed front and back, to print out the entire genome.
One letter change in the 6.
4 billion bases can cause a serious disease.
Where are you? I know you're somewhere.
- Which one are you looking for? - I'm looking for the other two planes that I did not Oh, I found one.
There's one, and your other big one's over here.
- What's this? - It's your rocket, buddy.
Where's the button on this thing? - I got it.
- Oh, you got it.
Can you help me put these back on, Mom? Coolest thing about space is black holes.
Basically a giant thing that pulls everything into it, even light.
Every single little molecule gets torn apart.
Ten, nine And this is called spaghettify.
I'm not joking.
It's called "spaghettify.
" It's what it's called.
- one - Science is a crazy thing.
zero.
Live connect.
Liftoff! I want to be the first person to ever go to Mars.
What I can see is I can't really explain it.
It's hard.
It's hard to explain.
You can't You can't know something that you don't know.
Main menu.
Folder name.
Re Li Cradle.
Document to open.
Everyone.
"Everyone else is headed toward" Space.
Exclamation mark, double quote.
When he was very little, I noticed he wasn't looking at our faces.
Doctors suggested that he was on the spectrum, um, of having autism.
Um put you up here.
Wait, wait.
Look out, there.
Put you right there.
Ha ha! I'm the most powerful person in the whole world! Nothing can stop me now! "You are wrong, Jafar.
There is one person who is still mightier than you: the Genie.
" Insurance wouldn't pay for genetic testing.
They said that there was no benefit for a young child to have genetic testing.
"We won't pay for it.
" "The l-law is the law.
" We ended up seeing a low-vision specialist.
And then, we finally got the answer.
He's missing both copies of the RPE65 gene.
One from me, one from his father.
He will eventually go completely blind.
One of the most significant developments in this field is the newly discovered ability to modify the very genes in our DNA.
The technique is known by the acronym CRISPR.
CRISPR is a technique that allows scientists to go into the DNA of a plant or an animal, or even a human being, and remove or replace a small part of that organism's genetic code.
- How big of a breakthrough is this? - Wow! The potential of what can be done here.
CRISPR has generated immense excitement.
It's fast, cheap, and can cut and paste genetic code with great precision.
A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna, who helped develop this breakthrough What is CRISPR-Cas9? We found a protein in bacteria, and that led to a fundamental change in the technology for gene editing.
It really works like a molecular scalpel, but it's programmable.
We can control where it makes a change in a DNA sequence.
Chemical cleavers in the protein swing into position and cut the DNA so that you get a clean break, and in the process, introduce a change.
Could it cure virtually any disease? - Any disease that has a genetic basis.
- That's incredible.
If you had asked me whether it would be possible, even a few years ago, I would have laughed.
I would have said that's going to take maybe a long time to get to the point where science can do that.
And here we are, a few years later, and we're in possession of a tool that gives scientists remarkable control over the code of life.
What is the dark side of this technology? We're talking about something that would affect human evolution.
It's raised a lot of concerns, - ethical concerns - Yeah.
about playing God.
- You are changing something forever.
- Yeah.
You are relaxed about that? I wouldn't say I'm relaxed about it.
We are experiencing a revolution.
CRISPR is a technology that has opened up our imagination.
These zebrafish, they're amazing.
They have this ability that if you cut their fin or their heart, they will grow it back and it will work perfectly again.
We are now trying to move this to humans.
What is it that we have to turn on and off in our genomes to have this ability? We are learning how to copy, edit, paste DNA, the same thing you will do in a word processor.
That means rewriting the book of life.
What we see here is a chicken embryo that has a normal appearance.
It has a head.
It has limbs.
This experiment entailed just adding one factor, one gene, and when you go a little in detail, you can see that there is something growing here that is not normal.
An entire new limb.
We will not need to ask another person, "Give me your heart.
" We will be able to regenerate our hearts, our limbs, or any other organ of our bodies.
We are about to see the magic.
This is tissue engineering.
Eventually, if your kidney is damaged, these cells can regrow your kidney.
We can fix mutations, can repair broken genes, can cure diseases.
So, here we are.
I will target a neuron that will be edited to engineer brain cells.
CRISPR was originally discovered in bacteria, and now clearly works in human cells.
So, early-onset Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, could be diseases of the past.
And even HIV and cancer.
Think about that.
By using the Cas9 system, we can create cartilage and cure or prevent arthritis in humans.
We can turn on that gene and help treat muscle dystrophy.
Muscle size is also bigger.
It is natural to ask, "Can we make a better human being?" There are some ethical concerns and implications with this.
What are they, and how will they be addressed? And where's the line? The potential to make a child smarter, faster, bluer eyed This really is something that needs to be discussed.
On the other hand it is also important to realize that these technologies may open the door for rewriting the book of life in ways that we don't understand today.
I think we all agree that it's good to fix diseases.
I'm not sure we all agree on whether it's good or bad to try to enhance our abilities intellectual abilities, physical abilities, to try to create new functions for which we don't even know today what they are.
Has anybody First, has anybody ever heard of CRISPR? It's this genetic engineering technology.
I'm I'm curious to hear your opinions on this stuff.
We can take a gene from one organism, put it in another, and make a medication that can save a bunch of people's lives.
And you start thinking about other things.
Let's say they can genetic engineer any organism they wanted.
Does that kind of scare you? Everybody doing genetic engineering? Like, humans becoming smarter or stronger? Like, should we really be doing that? Should we really be messing with it? 'Cause then you get into the whole Nazi, like blonde hair, blue eyes thing.
Are you saying people would try to create a master race or somebody Just like, if you already have a certain amount of power, then I mean, I don't know how to explain what I'm trying to say.
No, so what you're trying to say, I think, is people who have a lot of money, they might use that money to genetically engineer themselves way better than everybody else.
Yeah.
What if that was democratized? What happens if somebody came up with an easy method to use it so that anybody could? I feel like that would just be really chaotic.
Like, it would be more fair, but it would lead to a lot of, like, weird shit running around that might fuck with the environment.
Yeah, nice.
Down.
All right, good.
Push down on that.
Just push down like this.
Like There you go.
Now lift up.
There you go.
Stick your pipette down.
So, we have a tube of bacteria that we're gonna genetically engineer.
One for each person.
If you see little white dots on your plate it should take, like, 24 to 48 hours you know your genetic engineering experiment worked.
By people learning how to computer program, they also learn how to be a criminal hacker at the same time.
Should we not teach people computer programming because they can use the same knowledge to do something bad? People are really afraid of what they don't understand.
Really afraid of change.
I started out working at NASA.
And at NASA, I worked on engineering bacteria to help astronauts survive on Mars.
I was hearing a lot about CRISPR, and I thought, "What if I could break this down? What if I could make a protocol that wouldn't have to be done in a lab, but could be done in a home?" One big thing that everybody is afraid of is that only the rich and the powerful will be able to use genetic engineering.
If we can give access to everybody it could completely change the balance of power.
So, in this box is everything you need to do your CRISPR experiment at home.
Of course, the most important part is the DNA.
These are DNA that contain all the CRISPR components, replicated in bacteria.
We got some plastic tubes.
We got some gloves.
This is nutrients for the bacteria to grow on.
Bacteria have been used for lots of amazing things.
Drugs, like insulin, or anti-cancer agents.
The kit comes with an example experiment to engineer these bacteria to survive in a non-hospitable environment.
You're changing one single protein.
Sometimes that's all it takes to give somebody superpowers.
But people can do much more.
We have advanced engineering guides, if people wanna do something else than what's included with the kit.
We're here to discuss the science and ethics of genetically-engineered human DNA.
It is rare that prominent members of the scientific community come together to warn our leaders of a technological breakthrough that could change the future of mankind.
If genetic modifications are made to so-called germline cells sperm, eggs, embryos then the modifications will be carried forward to future generations, which has implications that we need to carefully consider.
Dr.
Doudna, you were one of the developers of this new technology.
When did you start being concerned about that? I think we've seen now this technology is is very democratic and very simple to employ.
The concerns we will have is that countries will see this as, "Oh, my God, it might be terribly unethical, but it gives us a leg up, uh, militarily or economically.
" Can you even list the countries that, within five years, could be where we are now? I'm not sure that it even requires, um, countries.
It's individuals who have access to the, um capacity.
If we should see an element get outside the bounds, can we do anything? Sodium tetraborate, magnesium chloride, yeast extract.
These are some chemicals from Josiah.
And some bacteria for stuff.
So the nice thing is that you can get things that you wouldn't necessarily get from a bigger supplier.
They wouldn't send it to a regular person.
You don't have to have, like, a business license and and all this sort of stuff.
And then of course, it's, like, a tenth of the price.
This is one of the the coolest things.
This is a bioluminescent rat.
He's part firefly.
He was genetically engineered with firefly genes to give him the ability to glow.
He just runs around like a little rat light bulb.
Here's a bunch of them.
Big labs use green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish as a signal that their test worked.
If I can do that, successfully move a gene from a bacteria to a dog, it opens up a whole bunch of options there never were.
Okay.
So, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, a composer, a mathematician.
He invented things.
He was born out of wedlock and he was born into poverty, so he did overcome a lot of things, too.
My favorite da Vinci invention was the robotic knight.
Okay.
So it's the first, like, humanoid robot.
Yeah, humanoid automaton.
He was, um, like 500 years ahead of his time in some cases.
Mm-hmm.
"A successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence.
" What are you trying to What are you trying to make? So, I'm gonna make a game.
Doesn't have to be complicated, but you have to make it from code.
Come all the way around.
Good girl.
Pet her.
Tell her "good girl.
" - Good girl.
Tell her.
- Good girl.
- Good girl.
- Good girl.
Sebastian, can you bring the puppy over? Grab him by the collar, and let's just walk.
There you go.
Gonna have to work with him to get his prey drive up good.
Have to give them a little bit of stress and see how they process it.
What I'm looking for is a dog that's heat tolerant, large, protective, intelligent, athletic, fast.
Good girl.
Dogs are something we've been selectively modifying for like, 40,000 years.
Some of the modifications have been not useful for them or for us.
So they're just, like, fashion.
They have more genetic diseases than any other species on the planet.
That's our fault.
That's something we did.
It takes a long time to make significant changes.
In order to get ten generations down the line, you'd have to take 150 years to do it.
With genetic engineering, you can do it in a generation or two.
Come.
Now we can just direct evolution to fix the mistakes that we've made.
We do want to communicate that gene editing is prone to genetic errors and that this could be a real significant problem for food and environmental safety.
I want the infographic to be one that you can just look at and understand what gene editing is, what is CRISPR.
We can make it shorter.
I mean, fewer words are better, right? To allow people to play and experiment with profoundly risky technologies is incredibly problematic, and can put, not just individuals, but can put entire environments and other people in very dangerous situations.
Genetic engineering can affect all the different realms of our lives, everything from insects and animals and food to bioweapons and and pharmaceuticals.
We know that genetically-engineered organisms will escape from labs, whether it is a high security lab or somebody's garage.
It needs to have extremely careful regulations.
We need oversight and we need to have safety assessments.
We need to ask all the questions beforehand, not watch the disasters happen later.
Got a few nice insects.
Yeah.
Got a couple of deer ticks sitting here.
That one's a lone star tick.
Five years from now, that's all you'll see here.
Diseases carried by ticks are on the rise, the annual total more than tripled.
Why are we seeing this surge? Climate change plays into it.
So, the warmer the temperatures, the more the ticks can live in northern climates that they normally couldn't live in before.
Lyme is sort of the most famous, but there are other diseases besides Lyme that ticks carry.
No question.
There are more and more of these diseases, and some of them, it can even be fatal, and some of them create permanent neurologic deficits.
In your story, you profile a young scientist named Kevin Esvelt, and I want to quote a line from your story: "Capable of fundamentally altering the natural world.
" I mean, that is a pretty extraordinary set of ambitions.
It's a tremendously energetic and ambitious idea.
You report on a particular experiment they're running in Nantucket, trying to target Lyme disease.
Can you explain what they're hoping to do there? Got one.
The real reservoir for Lyme is the white-footed mouse.
So there are ticks on his ear.
Means he's probably busily infecting them.
Kevin Esvelt said, "Gee, let's rewrite the DNA of the mouse so that it is resistant to the Lyme tick, so when a Lyme tick bites it, it doesn't matter.
" But when you're talking about editing DNA, you're talking about changing a species.
And that's not a minor thing.
That's a fundamental, powerful choice.
So, these mice were vaccinated, and so they should be immune.
That's the hope.
The hope is we'd be able to make mice that actually kill ticks that bite them.
If we can make any tick that bites a mouse die, it's not gonna transmit anything.
It will disrupt the transmission cycle of every tick-borne disease.
And by encoding that in the genome of the mice, we could ensure that all of their descendants would be similarly immune to ticks.
You say that CRISPR could enormously improve the world, but it could also endanger the world.
How How could gene editing endanger the world? Because it is an attempt to alter the shared environment, it's not like developing a new medicine.
If we develop a new medicine, your doctor recommends it to you, you can say no.
You can opt out.
But this is an environmental change.
And so if the community decides to do it, you will be affected.
You can't opt out.
This is about figuring out how to develop these kinds of technologies in a responsible manner, and I think that means community control.
So they're talking about genetically modifying enough mice so that they could be released and mate with the mice that are here and win out.
And what you're doing is you're changing the genetics of something forever, and you're changing an entire species in an ecosystem, and I think it's kind of ridiculous to pretend that we could figure out what would happen all the time if you did something like that.
Well, let me just point out that our current civilization is not sustainable, absent continued advances.
So we have no choice.
We have to continue.
The question is, as technology becomes increasingly powerful can we make wise decisions? But it is your environment and your call, and that is the only ethical way to do this.
And involving you from the get-go, that's why this is different, I think.
What's a victory look like in a vote? Is it 51 percent? Is it all the people who live on the island? I mean, what is a democratic victory for changing the genetic essence of life look like? Well, maybe this is a punt, but I'm not sure it's appropriate for me to tell you how to run your government.
A hand.
We've talked about democracy, but in the future, the tools might become direct and democratic.
Maybe ten years or 30 years from now, a small group of people could decide to make changes on their own.
Right.
Or next Tuesday.
Uh When Anyone? Everyone? I really don't have any moral or ethical concerns about the use of genetic engineering.
I'm more concerned about the government regulating it so the people don't have access to it.
If I could do anything, I'd definitely work on engineering humans.
I think that's something that you'll probably start to see in the next year.
Biohackers actively working on engineering themselves.
Frogs can use almost all the same DNA elements that can be used in humans.
So they're a great way to prototype things like changes in muscle growth or different performance things.
These are the frogs we're going to inject with the gene therapy.
Scientists actually don't anesthetize the frogs when they do these experiments.
Look at that guy.
- Trying to escape! - Oh, no.
They're so slippery.
Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no! These frogs are so hard to grab.
It's pretty entertaining.
You have the knocked-out frog.
This is a solution of DNA, the IGF-1 gene.
This should cause the frogs to increase their growth in size and muscular strength.
There we go.
Boo.
All right, Esther, for you.
We'll see, uh, what the results are looking like after five or six times or three months or something.
Most scientists working on their own can't reliably anticipate the consequences of what they're doing.
Six years ago, no one imagined that we would have a tool that would work in so many different species.
And now we're making changes that we are, for the first time, contemplating releasing into the wild where they'll evolve outside of our control.
The prospect of a wave of genetically-modified anything sweeping generation after generation, geographically expanding into city, country across continents is utterly terrifying.
Which is why I have nightmares about fruit flies.
Yellow engineered flies.
They're everywhere.
People are screaming in the background, and I'm overwhelmed by horror and then I always wake up.
Given the stakes for this field and possibly for all of biotechnology, perhaps it's not unreasonable that I have such nightmares.
Good! I'm glad you do.
Because that is the kind of caution you want from someone in his position.
He clearly doesn't want to end up in a limerick that goes, "There once was a man from Nantucket who gathered some mice in a bucket.
He altered those mice, engineered with a splice, and now all the seagulls are dead.
" Things can absolutely go wrong.
We are two-year-olds when it comes to understanding the ecosystem.
So we want to know, do mice from over there come over here? Do you think they come along that sandbar? I'd be stunned if there wasn't some amount of mouse gene flow, at least some years.
When you're engineering a system you don't understand, you make the smallest possible change that you think has a chance of solving the problem before you scale up.
What we need is a field trial on a small, mostly uninhabited island and seeing what happens.
I was checking to see if the - There you go.
- Just need to lift it up a bit.
I'm sure I can get this thing working.
The released mice would be genetically altered.
But in this case, our proposal would involve keeping them 100 percent mouse.
That is, they would not have any foreign DNA from other species.
Their immunity is passed on to their next generation? Yes, we would take the genes that encode those antibodies and put them into the germline, that is the cells that will make sperm and eggs of the mice, so they will be inherited by offspring.
I'm wondering if you can point to a single case in history where we've brought a new species to an island, and the results turned out beneficial.
There There are lots of cases where it turned out poorly.
Absolutely.
But we've done this in lab mice, and it works great.
It seems like this step is skipping many other organic steps that are reversible, whereas this one is irreversible.
And I think that to rush this in the next two months would be a huge mistake, one we can't reverse.
I mean, if we have to wait, and it delays things, then it delays things, right? There's a lot of things that could delay this project.
The point is solving the problem in a way that the community is comfortable with.
It's more important to do it right, so let's do it right.
If we don't intervene in many existing problems, they will just get worse.
Yes, there's going to be opposition.
And maybe that's discouraging, but I don't think there's any way to do anything that would work in the long run without the consent of the communities who live there.
So a large part of what I'm doing is trying to come up with a new way of developing these technologies hand-in-hand with the communities, in fact, driven by the communities directly, because an unethical group of researchers could conceivably do it on their own without asking anyone.
It would be discovered, people would be outraged, and then that would be the end of that technology for a very long time.
All benefits lost.
Trust is in short supply in our society, and further damaging social confidence in technologies is something we should be deeply, deeply afraid of.
What do you do when someone disagrees with something you want to do, and you think it's right, and you're very convinced, but somebody disagrees with you? How do you handle it? I'm not saying that we humans have great ways of overcoming disagreements like that.
But at least the debate needs to happen in public, and then, hopefully, we can come to a decision.
Maybe it will be wise.
I will be watching your experiment with great interest.
What if it shuts down the work? What if Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, these communities you're working with, say no? Then we walk away.
We have to walk away.
I think science fosters a community of protected, coddled individuals.
Um And they're super risk-averse.
People always have these stupid ethical arguments about whether people should use CRISPR or not, but, like, it's pointless if nobody's using it.
Welcome to Synbiobeta 2017.
He helped initiate the Human Genome Project I'm tired of all this stuff just being, like, fiction, and I'm tired of going to conferences like this, and it's boring as shit, where a bunch of people get up there and talk about bullshit that doesn't affect anybody.
The world before us is almost science fiction-like.
As you could probably already assume, this workshop will be a bit different from the rest of the conference.
I gotta spice it up a little by seducing you with some free human CRISPR DNA.
My whole goal and purpose is to make this technology accessible now.
Basically, no matter what it takes.
Oh, you can come in.
Feel free.
Now, if I want to modify myself with CRISPR, what do I need to know? You don't even need to search far.
There are actually websites out there.
You can type in the name of a gene and press enter, so that the Cas9 enzyme can cut in your genome at this exact place, and you could modify yourself with CRISPR.
This DNA right here modifies the myostatin gene.
I don't know if you've ever seen those, like, jacked dogs and pigs that they always have in the media with CRISPR, right? So, myostatin knockouts cause you to have more muscles and more strength.
If you basically took his DNA and put it on your skin, it would change the genetic material of your cells.
That's all it takes.
Maybe that's scary.
I don't know.
To me, it sounds really awesome.
- Yeah? - What about off-target activity? There's off-target activity with People are complaining about off-target activity and it's, like, I go outside in San Francisco, and I breathe in something, and it's modifying my genome.
I smoke a cigarette, it's modifying my genome.
It actually modifies my genome enough that I can literally grow another organ.
Right? Tumor or something like that.
Oh, totally okay.
The FDA doesn't regulate that shit.
The sun.
UV light is modifying your genome when you're out there.
You know? Nobody complains about those off-target effects.
So what's what's stopping us? What's stopping us from just all putting this in our shot glasses and making ourselves jacked right now? So, have you tried it? What's holding you back? What's holding me back? Are you suggesting maybe I should try it? Well, isn't that what you're suggesting we do? All All right, let's do it.
What we got here is some, uh, DNA mixed with, uh, PEI, which is a polycationic polymer.
This is a syringe.
All right.
There we go.
I don't know why people don't try it.
The amount of cells it's gonna modify will be pretty small.
Probably take a number injections over a period of time to actually see a significant effect on my body.
- Thank you very much.
- If the efficiency's low, you can just make more.
So like, this DNA, you put it in bacteria, tomorrow, you're gonna have ten times, 100 times, 1,000 times as much.
No, no, no, take it.
I want people to have a choice.
Right? Because it's not gonna be me who like Probably not gonna be any of these big companies that change the world.
Like, it's gonna be some dude in his apartment and garage who none of us even know the name of right now, right? That's the person that's gonna change the world.
"Biohackers," they're called.
Basically, in their bedroom, they can inject themselves.
So we have somebody like Josiah Zayner who's a former NASA scientist.
I mean, he edits the gene into his muscles.
Biohacker Josiah Zayner Josiah Zayner He is injecting himself with DNA.
Visante said his stunt was reckless, and could it could have led to severe consequences, like his own immune system attacking his actual muscles.
If there's a possibility to take out mutations that cause cancer, why can't we test it? Guy's just trying to get his muscles bigger.
He makes some pretty wild statements.
He argued that using CRISPR should ideally be like downloading an app.
Why can't people use this technology without necessarily completely knowing how it works? Oh, oh, oh I can answer that one for you.
Because it could be dangerous and someone could get hurt.
Biohacking, right, or whatever you want to call that, is is a problem that doesn't have an easy solution, if you even think of it as a problem.
We ordered a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit.
It just arrived in the mail.
I've decided to take up biohacking, which is amateur genetic engineering.
We have a package! We got it from The, dash, Odin The king of the Odin Project.
Odin himself, Josiah Zayner.
What is a biohacker? Somebody who's doing science non-traditionally, so outside of like a big corporation or an academic lab.
CRISPR, genetic modification I think it's the new frontier.
You injected a modified gene, myostatin.
Here's a dog.
I wanna look like the dog on the left.
Yeah, it wasn't so much that I wanted muscle.
- It was just like a good proof of concept.
- You were trying to get beefed up.
I'm really just focused on getting stuff out to people, like DNA literacy.
- I want people - Yes! Yes! to understand how this stuff works, so then we have our next generation of scientists and medical doctors who are just way beyond what any of us can do right now.
Everyone says, "Any idiot can do CRISPR.
" I'm not sure about any idiot, but it is easy.
People using a genetic chemistry set and doing that in their basement is something we don't have control over.
- It's not easy to regulate.
- This is illegal in some countries.
- Germany, a good example.
- Yeah.
You can go to jail for using some of our kits.
If I now add this tiny little droplet to this smush in this tube over here, I will go to jail.
If the purpose is to perform gene editing on bacteria, okay, you can make bacteria phosphorescent.
This is our glow-in-the-dark beer.
But what are biohacking kits for, but for trying to genetically modify individuals? He talks of being in the midst of a genetic revolution.
- He's right.
- He's right.
He also goes on to say, "I think this is, like, literally a new era of human beings.
It's gonna create a whole new species of humans.
" If you could give yourself a DNA treatment to change something about you, give yourself some kind of power or ability, what would the one thing be? We have these people here who are talking about science fiction.
The technology's out there, and a lot of it is becoming reality right now and in the near future, and a lot of it's being prevented by the government.
The regulations in the US, and kind of in the world, prevent genetic-engineering technology from going forward.
To me, that's kind of fucked up.
Don't you want to be superhuman? Like, if I came to you tomorrow and said, "Look, $500, I can genetically modify you so you never have to work out again.
" Would you do it? Are there really any serious consequences that could harm me? We don't know.
There's relatively little that we know about biology.
But how how will we know if we don't do it? Well, that's why that's why people do clinical trials.
But you can't do clinical trials on healthy people.
I just gotta go for this.
In here is my skin tissue, which presumably has been genetically engineered.
There is a reason for oversight before things are permitted to be done to human participants.
This is just the first step, but if this is possible He's very relaxed about enhancements.
You know, it gets back to the question of who decides and who regulates, uh, such a such a thing.
There are still technical challenges to work out, but we can see that this is coming.
Now you're introducing a bioengineered organism into the wild.
Doesn't seem very bioethical to me.
You worry too much.
I worry too much.
Right.
- Right.
- I don't know.
The problem I ran into is uh, one of my males has gone sterile on me, but I just got another dog brought in from Texas who is much younger, but he doesn't quite like me yet.
So, he still tries to eat me when I get near him.
I talked to one dog breeder who found out, who's super excited, but I think some people are getting weird ideas about what's going on.
Just a bunch of crazy guys tinkering in their basements trying weird shit, don't know what the hell we're doing.
I don't think you can change anybody's mind.
Right.
And you're better off just doing your your stuff and trying to show people through your work.
Yeah.
The only thing I would really like is a bigger centrifuge.
Send over a list of all the stuff you need, and I'm sure we can get it out tomorrow or Tuesday or something.
When your great-grandfather was a pig farmer and your grandfather was a welder and so on, you don't get a whole lot of opportunity to go to MIT.
The scientists, um who are against DIY bio people, it's sort of a paternal kind of thing, uh, where it's like, "Okay, these these poor stupid people don't know how to do anything, and they're just gonna hurt themselves.
" Science itself isn't something that they have a right to claim ownership of.
The dogs are very, very scent oriented, so the right smells are really the whole procedure.
Ah! He's camera shy.
Biology's kind of a dirty job.
I bet they don't teach that at MIT.
I feel like, right now, a lot of fear is causing people to push back against progress.
It might terrify people because he's just doing it in his shed.
So they just say, "Just don't do it," full stop.
But I think it's great that we can take these ideas and manifest them.
I don't find it terrifying at all that people could even alter themselves to be whatever they want to be.
It's on my hands.
It landed on my hand.
You know, why hem and haw over whether it's unnatural? I guess I don't feel like humanity is to be stuck in the past.
I want to go to the future where people can be anything.
This is a fluorescent microscope.
It basically allows you to see fluorescent things at the microscopic scale.
If the DNA winds up inside the sperm, then you can see it under the microscope.
So if the sperm glow, then it works.
There they are.
Some of them are glowing super brightly.
This gene started in a jellyfish and wound up in a dog's sperm.
That's exciting.
Which one are these? So these are the ones that have undergone the treatment.
We are going to compare them to the mice that have not undergone any treatment.
This mouse is very old.
You can see the curvature of the spine that we see in old people.
Now, this is the sibling of the mouse.
They are born on the same day from the same mother.
The only difference is this mouse has been genetically engineered to express four genes that are normally expressed in stem cells and in the embryo.
If you turn them on in an old individual, they can make the cells much younger.
And we can see this mouse is much more active, much healthier in gross appearance, and doesn't have the curvature of spine that we saw in the other mouse.
We can clearly see the difference between them.
They are the same age.
This is wonderful.
What is the average time we increased their lifespan? Thirty percent extension in their maximum life span.
Incredible.
The excitement of this experiment is that we can see for the first time that you can reverse the process of aging.
The implications are so vast.
In a way, all we are doing is against nature, is against evolution.
Safety lines, ethical lines, moral lines.
This is the unknown territory.
And when we don't know, we are afraid.
In the end, my personal opinion is that we change our lines, our ethical and moral lines, when we see sound results that are positive for humankind.
We're okay to make glasses, to see that everyone sees the same thing.
But we're not okay to have binoculars in us so that we see better than the other.
- No? That's something that - Yes.
We're okay to restore vision to the same level, and no one will say this is an ethical thing, if wear glasses, but if I wear two binoculars that will make me see better than you, that's the problem, no? That's what, with enhancement, is what we are discussing here.
Because maybe you can do it, maybe I cannot do it.
It will generate um inequalities.
But in principle, if everyone could have the vision of an eagle, what is wrong with that? When you go up on stage, make sure you have all your Props! - And when you are performing - Act it out.
Act it out! Thank you.
Jackson, that reminds me.
You could be a little bit meaner, Jackson.
I know you're not a mean person, but can you act mean? Mm-hmm.
And try to put your head in the direction of the people to whom you are speaking.
- Does that make sense? Okay.
- Mm-hmm.
Let's do this.
Let's go.
Let's do this.
The lamp! Once I have it, the world will be mine.
Hurry, to the Cave of Wonders.
Oh, we come from a land Where mirage is the rule And the wildest tales come true The lamp is almost mine, mine, mine! Give me that lamp! The lamp is upside down.
Hold it.
Welcome back, kiddies.
I made a few changes around here.
Changes, changes! A whole new world A dazzling place I never knew But when I'm way up here It's crystal clear That now I'm in a whole new world With you Can you help me? Catch one for me? I have one.
Do you want it? Don't pinch him.
Um - It's in your hand.
Right there.
Wait.
- I don't see him.
This is so cool.
I can't really see at night.
If there's, like, any lights, that's all I see.
Just the lights that are coming from the lights.
So there's a full moon.
Crescent.
Half.
Gibbous.
Full.
He obviously wants to work for NASA.
It's dark all around here.
I don't think there's anything over here.
No, there are no stars, Ava.
There's teensy weensy ones.
I still only see the sun.
He really wants to be an astronaut.
He wants to go into space more than anything.
They're trying to get here.
Mars.
Good idea.
I feel like something, like is going to happen, like, so wrong, and, like, it's not gonna be very good for Earth.
That That's what worries me.
He watches films about space and NASA, and in it, they said something to the effect, "Astronauts have to have 20-20 vision.
" And that just It really upset him for a long time.
And I believe Like, when he says something, that something's gonna happen or he's gonna do something, I believe him.
He's gonna go to space.
I believe it.
An FDA advisory panel voted unanimously yesterday to recommend approval of a groundbreaking treatment for people with a faulty gene that causes severe vision loss starting in childhood.
They take a virus and put in a normal copy of the gene and they inject it into the white of the eye.
And then, literally, days later, sight returns to most of the people in the trial.
It's amazing.
I feel like we're on the cusp of some, like, major changes for him.
And it's an amazing thing.
This is the start of a new revolution.
This is science fiction science, because it really is something we've dreamed of and talked about for decades, but now it's happening.
Every important undertaking that faces us is limited by biology.
As a species on a single planet, we are at serious existential risk.
And one of the problems that we need to solve is how we're going to get people living safely in space on other planets.
There's a lot of focus on the rockets to get us up there, the vehicles, you know, that we can, uh, rove planets and mine planets, but unlike previous journeys into space where we've gone and come back, at some point, we're gonna have to take a one-way journey.
We're gonna have to go without any promise of coming back, and our biology is gonna have to be fit for space.
You know, radiation-intense environments, um, low-gravity environments.
And those challenges will only be met once we understand how we can make the changes in our genomes to thrive, uh, on other planets.
When I was a kid, growing up reading Isaac Asimov and other other science fiction writers, watching Star Trek on TV and things like that, things that were clearly in the realm of fiction at that time are increasingly being realized.
It's a powerful tool partly because it is democratizing.
It's available inexpensively to scientists around the world.
Whether we as a society will will grapple with that appropriately remains to be seen.
I think we're at a crossroads right now.
What does this look like, writ large, if we begin to engineer our entire world, if we start to engineer all that we can in nature? This is going to have long-lasting ripple effects, and we don't have to go that way.
Humanity is very bad at saying no to technologies everywhere.
Because even if you say no, is everyone else in the world going to say no? Our civilization is vulnerable.
It's not sustainable.
We have no choice but to continue exploring the tree of knowledge, but we always run the risk of discovering something that we cannot handle.
So it's a balance.
I don't know where that will go.
I try to imagine a world where people can overcome a lot of the inequalities that have been placed upon them.
We're no longer constrained by the genetics we were born with.
It immediately removes that barrier, that, like, rich people get something, and poor people don't.
Like, rich people get expensive medical treatment, poor people don't.
That can change.
The way I see it, life is information.
A person and and a, you know, pile of organic matter are made of the same materials.
It's just how it's organized.
Get up.
Hey, Daddy! You see that small chunk of wood? Can I chop that up? - Okay.
There you go.
- Oh! It was right there.
If you rearrange the atoms in a pile of, you know, rotten leaves, you can make a person.
Because you've got all the right materials there, but the wrong information.
People think of themselves as objects, but we're not anything like an object because I'm not the material.
I'm the information that organizes the material.
When you have the power to change that, you can just tweak the information a bit and then let it spread and reorganize matter from the ground up.
There's so many things that could be, that aren't.
That nature may never have made or may never have evolved.
And now you're going to make choices that change things.
Then what kind of world can we build? Peek-a-boo.
Don't put your lips on it.
Why are you guys taking pictures? What did they take from you? My blood.
Your blood.
Do you know why they took your blood? No.
- Yeah, to help me see.
- Yeah! They called me yesterday.
Okay.
Are they able to cure it? Yeah.
Oh, yes! There's a chance that you might be able to see.
Are you excited? I thought I was just gonna be stuck like this my whole entire life.
When are we going down?
I'm a dog breeder.
I knew a little bit about genetics, but not about genetic engineering.
I'm not a PhD, or I have no degree, actually.
I have a GED.
I had assumed that getting DNA and making changes and stuff cost millions of dollars and that you needed a huge lab and research team and all this sort of stuff, but you'd be surprised what there is on YouTube.
Just selective breeding isn't enough.
Big dogs age fast and die young.
Can we make dogs that have even better noses? Get a dog who, um who's healthy, but he's also what you intended him to be.
These are the bacteria that I'm using.
This is bioluminescence.
They produce their own light chemically.
This is my first experiment on the dogs.
I started thinking about, "What do I need to do so nobody's gonna doubt it?" I need to do something that's obviously completely unnatural.
No dogs glow, so if I make a dog that glows, nobody's gonna doubt it was genetic engineering.
We're on the verge of a technological breakthrough that could change the future of mankind.
Most people have no idea how rapidly things are changing.
We're now changing the DNA, the code of life.
It's amazing, the sorts of things that we could do with this.
The question is, should we? What happens if diseases were just eradicated? All technology is inherently about changing away from what is natural.
You can't really see it.
It's a frozen, uh, sample.
I don't know if you can see that liquid frozen in the bottom there.
It's, uh, basically a protein that can be used for genome editing.
It can alter the DNA in any cell in any organism, including animal and plant cells, even human cells.
So, here I am holding this little tube, and it looks so simple, but it will have profound implications for the future.
We are about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science, the science that deals with the nature of living things.
Our story is about you and me.
The story is the same for all living things.
Animals, plants, even the lowliest creature.
Using physical and chemical clues, scientists have been able to figure out how the DNA molecule looks in detail.
We don't have a map of the human chromosomes yet, but we know the genes are there.
We know that they determine what our cells will do and what we will be like.
You think they'll ever see what those units look like? Well, they're getting warm.
And the road they're taking is leading them close to the secret of life itself.
A revolutionary technology that can edit genetic mistakes is getting attention and scrutiny this morning.
It's very exciting.
This is a molecule that can change one of the three billion letters of DNA.
This is the future.
It'd be a major change in our ability to transform genes.
It allows us to potentially make uh, designer plants, designer animals, correct diseases.
For years we debated it, but we couldn't do it.
Now we can do it.
Working with evolution a lot does make you think about "Why are we here?" and "What should we be doing?" We think it's tragic when evolution makes something beautiful and then it goes away forever.
But evolution doesn't care.
Evolution is always interested in what can be better.
It does not care about suffering.
The interesting question in my mind is to what extent we should defy evolution in service to our morality.
What life has explored in all of this incredible diversity is still the tiniest of tiny fractions of what is actually possible.
What's different now is that we can read the DNA of every species in this room.
We're learning how to intervene in the process that has been going on since the beginning of life.
It's amazing the sorts of things that we could do with this.
But the question is should we, and who gets a say? A genome is DNA that consists of a code of four different letters: A, C, G, and T.
In the early 2000s, there was that sort of catalytic event when we created the first draft sequence of the human genome.
hoping it's gonna be the best year all of us have ever had.
Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.
This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.
Gathering together all that information about the human genome allowed unprecedented insight into the evolutionary mechanisms that created humans.
And having that parts list allows us to understand how that code makes people, how it is broken in people with diseases.
This piece of paper has 6,400 letters, front and back.
Given the size of the genome, it would take one million of these pieces of paper, printed front and back, to print out the entire genome.
One letter change in the 6.
4 billion bases can cause a serious disease.
Where are you? I know you're somewhere.
- Which one are you looking for? - I'm looking for the other two planes that I did not Oh, I found one.
There's one, and your other big one's over here.
- What's this? - It's your rocket, buddy.
Where's the button on this thing? - I got it.
- Oh, you got it.
Can you help me put these back on, Mom? Coolest thing about space is black holes.
Basically a giant thing that pulls everything into it, even light.
Every single little molecule gets torn apart.
Ten, nine And this is called spaghettify.
I'm not joking.
It's called "spaghettify.
" It's what it's called.
- one - Science is a crazy thing.
zero.
Live connect.
Liftoff! I want to be the first person to ever go to Mars.
What I can see is I can't really explain it.
It's hard.
It's hard to explain.
You can't You can't know something that you don't know.
Main menu.
Folder name.
Re Li Cradle.
Document to open.
Everyone.
"Everyone else is headed toward" Space.
Exclamation mark, double quote.
When he was very little, I noticed he wasn't looking at our faces.
Doctors suggested that he was on the spectrum, um, of having autism.
Um put you up here.
Wait, wait.
Look out, there.
Put you right there.
Ha ha! I'm the most powerful person in the whole world! Nothing can stop me now! "You are wrong, Jafar.
There is one person who is still mightier than you: the Genie.
" Insurance wouldn't pay for genetic testing.
They said that there was no benefit for a young child to have genetic testing.
"We won't pay for it.
" "The l-law is the law.
" We ended up seeing a low-vision specialist.
And then, we finally got the answer.
He's missing both copies of the RPE65 gene.
One from me, one from his father.
He will eventually go completely blind.
One of the most significant developments in this field is the newly discovered ability to modify the very genes in our DNA.
The technique is known by the acronym CRISPR.
CRISPR is a technique that allows scientists to go into the DNA of a plant or an animal, or even a human being, and remove or replace a small part of that organism's genetic code.
- How big of a breakthrough is this? - Wow! The potential of what can be done here.
CRISPR has generated immense excitement.
It's fast, cheap, and can cut and paste genetic code with great precision.
A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna, who helped develop this breakthrough What is CRISPR-Cas9? We found a protein in bacteria, and that led to a fundamental change in the technology for gene editing.
It really works like a molecular scalpel, but it's programmable.
We can control where it makes a change in a DNA sequence.
Chemical cleavers in the protein swing into position and cut the DNA so that you get a clean break, and in the process, introduce a change.
Could it cure virtually any disease? - Any disease that has a genetic basis.
- That's incredible.
If you had asked me whether it would be possible, even a few years ago, I would have laughed.
I would have said that's going to take maybe a long time to get to the point where science can do that.
And here we are, a few years later, and we're in possession of a tool that gives scientists remarkable control over the code of life.
What is the dark side of this technology? We're talking about something that would affect human evolution.
It's raised a lot of concerns, - ethical concerns - Yeah.
about playing God.
- You are changing something forever.
- Yeah.
You are relaxed about that? I wouldn't say I'm relaxed about it.
We are experiencing a revolution.
CRISPR is a technology that has opened up our imagination.
These zebrafish, they're amazing.
They have this ability that if you cut their fin or their heart, they will grow it back and it will work perfectly again.
We are now trying to move this to humans.
What is it that we have to turn on and off in our genomes to have this ability? We are learning how to copy, edit, paste DNA, the same thing you will do in a word processor.
That means rewriting the book of life.
What we see here is a chicken embryo that has a normal appearance.
It has a head.
It has limbs.
This experiment entailed just adding one factor, one gene, and when you go a little in detail, you can see that there is something growing here that is not normal.
An entire new limb.
We will not need to ask another person, "Give me your heart.
" We will be able to regenerate our hearts, our limbs, or any other organ of our bodies.
We are about to see the magic.
This is tissue engineering.
Eventually, if your kidney is damaged, these cells can regrow your kidney.
We can fix mutations, can repair broken genes, can cure diseases.
So, here we are.
I will target a neuron that will be edited to engineer brain cells.
CRISPR was originally discovered in bacteria, and now clearly works in human cells.
So, early-onset Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, could be diseases of the past.
And even HIV and cancer.
Think about that.
By using the Cas9 system, we can create cartilage and cure or prevent arthritis in humans.
We can turn on that gene and help treat muscle dystrophy.
Muscle size is also bigger.
It is natural to ask, "Can we make a better human being?" There are some ethical concerns and implications with this.
What are they, and how will they be addressed? And where's the line? The potential to make a child smarter, faster, bluer eyed This really is something that needs to be discussed.
On the other hand it is also important to realize that these technologies may open the door for rewriting the book of life in ways that we don't understand today.
I think we all agree that it's good to fix diseases.
I'm not sure we all agree on whether it's good or bad to try to enhance our abilities intellectual abilities, physical abilities, to try to create new functions for which we don't even know today what they are.
Has anybody First, has anybody ever heard of CRISPR? It's this genetic engineering technology.
I'm I'm curious to hear your opinions on this stuff.
We can take a gene from one organism, put it in another, and make a medication that can save a bunch of people's lives.
And you start thinking about other things.
Let's say they can genetic engineer any organism they wanted.
Does that kind of scare you? Everybody doing genetic engineering? Like, humans becoming smarter or stronger? Like, should we really be doing that? Should we really be messing with it? 'Cause then you get into the whole Nazi, like blonde hair, blue eyes thing.
Are you saying people would try to create a master race or somebody Just like, if you already have a certain amount of power, then I mean, I don't know how to explain what I'm trying to say.
No, so what you're trying to say, I think, is people who have a lot of money, they might use that money to genetically engineer themselves way better than everybody else.
Yeah.
What if that was democratized? What happens if somebody came up with an easy method to use it so that anybody could? I feel like that would just be really chaotic.
Like, it would be more fair, but it would lead to a lot of, like, weird shit running around that might fuck with the environment.
Yeah, nice.
Down.
All right, good.
Push down on that.
Just push down like this.
Like There you go.
Now lift up.
There you go.
Stick your pipette down.
So, we have a tube of bacteria that we're gonna genetically engineer.
One for each person.
If you see little white dots on your plate it should take, like, 24 to 48 hours you know your genetic engineering experiment worked.
By people learning how to computer program, they also learn how to be a criminal hacker at the same time.
Should we not teach people computer programming because they can use the same knowledge to do something bad? People are really afraid of what they don't understand.
Really afraid of change.
I started out working at NASA.
And at NASA, I worked on engineering bacteria to help astronauts survive on Mars.
I was hearing a lot about CRISPR, and I thought, "What if I could break this down? What if I could make a protocol that wouldn't have to be done in a lab, but could be done in a home?" One big thing that everybody is afraid of is that only the rich and the powerful will be able to use genetic engineering.
If we can give access to everybody it could completely change the balance of power.
So, in this box is everything you need to do your CRISPR experiment at home.
Of course, the most important part is the DNA.
These are DNA that contain all the CRISPR components, replicated in bacteria.
We got some plastic tubes.
We got some gloves.
This is nutrients for the bacteria to grow on.
Bacteria have been used for lots of amazing things.
Drugs, like insulin, or anti-cancer agents.
The kit comes with an example experiment to engineer these bacteria to survive in a non-hospitable environment.
You're changing one single protein.
Sometimes that's all it takes to give somebody superpowers.
But people can do much more.
We have advanced engineering guides, if people wanna do something else than what's included with the kit.
We're here to discuss the science and ethics of genetically-engineered human DNA.
It is rare that prominent members of the scientific community come together to warn our leaders of a technological breakthrough that could change the future of mankind.
If genetic modifications are made to so-called germline cells sperm, eggs, embryos then the modifications will be carried forward to future generations, which has implications that we need to carefully consider.
Dr.
Doudna, you were one of the developers of this new technology.
When did you start being concerned about that? I think we've seen now this technology is is very democratic and very simple to employ.
The concerns we will have is that countries will see this as, "Oh, my God, it might be terribly unethical, but it gives us a leg up, uh, militarily or economically.
" Can you even list the countries that, within five years, could be where we are now? I'm not sure that it even requires, um, countries.
It's individuals who have access to the, um capacity.
If we should see an element get outside the bounds, can we do anything? Sodium tetraborate, magnesium chloride, yeast extract.
These are some chemicals from Josiah.
And some bacteria for stuff.
So the nice thing is that you can get things that you wouldn't necessarily get from a bigger supplier.
They wouldn't send it to a regular person.
You don't have to have, like, a business license and and all this sort of stuff.
And then of course, it's, like, a tenth of the price.
This is one of the the coolest things.
This is a bioluminescent rat.
He's part firefly.
He was genetically engineered with firefly genes to give him the ability to glow.
He just runs around like a little rat light bulb.
Here's a bunch of them.
Big labs use green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish as a signal that their test worked.
If I can do that, successfully move a gene from a bacteria to a dog, it opens up a whole bunch of options there never were.
Okay.
So, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, a composer, a mathematician.
He invented things.
He was born out of wedlock and he was born into poverty, so he did overcome a lot of things, too.
My favorite da Vinci invention was the robotic knight.
Okay.
So it's the first, like, humanoid robot.
Yeah, humanoid automaton.
He was, um, like 500 years ahead of his time in some cases.
Mm-hmm.
"A successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence.
" What are you trying to What are you trying to make? So, I'm gonna make a game.
Doesn't have to be complicated, but you have to make it from code.
Come all the way around.
Good girl.
Pet her.
Tell her "good girl.
" - Good girl.
Tell her.
- Good girl.
- Good girl.
- Good girl.
Sebastian, can you bring the puppy over? Grab him by the collar, and let's just walk.
There you go.
Gonna have to work with him to get his prey drive up good.
Have to give them a little bit of stress and see how they process it.
What I'm looking for is a dog that's heat tolerant, large, protective, intelligent, athletic, fast.
Good girl.
Dogs are something we've been selectively modifying for like, 40,000 years.
Some of the modifications have been not useful for them or for us.
So they're just, like, fashion.
They have more genetic diseases than any other species on the planet.
That's our fault.
That's something we did.
It takes a long time to make significant changes.
In order to get ten generations down the line, you'd have to take 150 years to do it.
With genetic engineering, you can do it in a generation or two.
Come.
Now we can just direct evolution to fix the mistakes that we've made.
We do want to communicate that gene editing is prone to genetic errors and that this could be a real significant problem for food and environmental safety.
I want the infographic to be one that you can just look at and understand what gene editing is, what is CRISPR.
We can make it shorter.
I mean, fewer words are better, right? To allow people to play and experiment with profoundly risky technologies is incredibly problematic, and can put, not just individuals, but can put entire environments and other people in very dangerous situations.
Genetic engineering can affect all the different realms of our lives, everything from insects and animals and food to bioweapons and and pharmaceuticals.
We know that genetically-engineered organisms will escape from labs, whether it is a high security lab or somebody's garage.
It needs to have extremely careful regulations.
We need oversight and we need to have safety assessments.
We need to ask all the questions beforehand, not watch the disasters happen later.
Got a few nice insects.
Yeah.
Got a couple of deer ticks sitting here.
That one's a lone star tick.
Five years from now, that's all you'll see here.
Diseases carried by ticks are on the rise, the annual total more than tripled.
Why are we seeing this surge? Climate change plays into it.
So, the warmer the temperatures, the more the ticks can live in northern climates that they normally couldn't live in before.
Lyme is sort of the most famous, but there are other diseases besides Lyme that ticks carry.
No question.
There are more and more of these diseases, and some of them, it can even be fatal, and some of them create permanent neurologic deficits.
In your story, you profile a young scientist named Kevin Esvelt, and I want to quote a line from your story: "Capable of fundamentally altering the natural world.
" I mean, that is a pretty extraordinary set of ambitions.
It's a tremendously energetic and ambitious idea.
You report on a particular experiment they're running in Nantucket, trying to target Lyme disease.
Can you explain what they're hoping to do there? Got one.
The real reservoir for Lyme is the white-footed mouse.
So there are ticks on his ear.
Means he's probably busily infecting them.
Kevin Esvelt said, "Gee, let's rewrite the DNA of the mouse so that it is resistant to the Lyme tick, so when a Lyme tick bites it, it doesn't matter.
" But when you're talking about editing DNA, you're talking about changing a species.
And that's not a minor thing.
That's a fundamental, powerful choice.
So, these mice were vaccinated, and so they should be immune.
That's the hope.
The hope is we'd be able to make mice that actually kill ticks that bite them.
If we can make any tick that bites a mouse die, it's not gonna transmit anything.
It will disrupt the transmission cycle of every tick-borne disease.
And by encoding that in the genome of the mice, we could ensure that all of their descendants would be similarly immune to ticks.
You say that CRISPR could enormously improve the world, but it could also endanger the world.
How How could gene editing endanger the world? Because it is an attempt to alter the shared environment, it's not like developing a new medicine.
If we develop a new medicine, your doctor recommends it to you, you can say no.
You can opt out.
But this is an environmental change.
And so if the community decides to do it, you will be affected.
You can't opt out.
This is about figuring out how to develop these kinds of technologies in a responsible manner, and I think that means community control.
So they're talking about genetically modifying enough mice so that they could be released and mate with the mice that are here and win out.
And what you're doing is you're changing the genetics of something forever, and you're changing an entire species in an ecosystem, and I think it's kind of ridiculous to pretend that we could figure out what would happen all the time if you did something like that.
Well, let me just point out that our current civilization is not sustainable, absent continued advances.
So we have no choice.
We have to continue.
The question is, as technology becomes increasingly powerful can we make wise decisions? But it is your environment and your call, and that is the only ethical way to do this.
And involving you from the get-go, that's why this is different, I think.
What's a victory look like in a vote? Is it 51 percent? Is it all the people who live on the island? I mean, what is a democratic victory for changing the genetic essence of life look like? Well, maybe this is a punt, but I'm not sure it's appropriate for me to tell you how to run your government.
A hand.
We've talked about democracy, but in the future, the tools might become direct and democratic.
Maybe ten years or 30 years from now, a small group of people could decide to make changes on their own.
Right.
Or next Tuesday.
Uh When Anyone? Everyone? I really don't have any moral or ethical concerns about the use of genetic engineering.
I'm more concerned about the government regulating it so the people don't have access to it.
If I could do anything, I'd definitely work on engineering humans.
I think that's something that you'll probably start to see in the next year.
Biohackers actively working on engineering themselves.
Frogs can use almost all the same DNA elements that can be used in humans.
So they're a great way to prototype things like changes in muscle growth or different performance things.
These are the frogs we're going to inject with the gene therapy.
Scientists actually don't anesthetize the frogs when they do these experiments.
Look at that guy.
- Trying to escape! - Oh, no.
They're so slippery.
Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no! These frogs are so hard to grab.
It's pretty entertaining.
You have the knocked-out frog.
This is a solution of DNA, the IGF-1 gene.
This should cause the frogs to increase their growth in size and muscular strength.
There we go.
Boo.
All right, Esther, for you.
We'll see, uh, what the results are looking like after five or six times or three months or something.
Most scientists working on their own can't reliably anticipate the consequences of what they're doing.
Six years ago, no one imagined that we would have a tool that would work in so many different species.
And now we're making changes that we are, for the first time, contemplating releasing into the wild where they'll evolve outside of our control.
The prospect of a wave of genetically-modified anything sweeping generation after generation, geographically expanding into city, country across continents is utterly terrifying.
Which is why I have nightmares about fruit flies.
Yellow engineered flies.
They're everywhere.
People are screaming in the background, and I'm overwhelmed by horror and then I always wake up.
Given the stakes for this field and possibly for all of biotechnology, perhaps it's not unreasonable that I have such nightmares.
Good! I'm glad you do.
Because that is the kind of caution you want from someone in his position.
He clearly doesn't want to end up in a limerick that goes, "There once was a man from Nantucket who gathered some mice in a bucket.
He altered those mice, engineered with a splice, and now all the seagulls are dead.
" Things can absolutely go wrong.
We are two-year-olds when it comes to understanding the ecosystem.
So we want to know, do mice from over there come over here? Do you think they come along that sandbar? I'd be stunned if there wasn't some amount of mouse gene flow, at least some years.
When you're engineering a system you don't understand, you make the smallest possible change that you think has a chance of solving the problem before you scale up.
What we need is a field trial on a small, mostly uninhabited island and seeing what happens.
I was checking to see if the - There you go.
- Just need to lift it up a bit.
I'm sure I can get this thing working.
The released mice would be genetically altered.
But in this case, our proposal would involve keeping them 100 percent mouse.
That is, they would not have any foreign DNA from other species.
Their immunity is passed on to their next generation? Yes, we would take the genes that encode those antibodies and put them into the germline, that is the cells that will make sperm and eggs of the mice, so they will be inherited by offspring.
I'm wondering if you can point to a single case in history where we've brought a new species to an island, and the results turned out beneficial.
There There are lots of cases where it turned out poorly.
Absolutely.
But we've done this in lab mice, and it works great.
It seems like this step is skipping many other organic steps that are reversible, whereas this one is irreversible.
And I think that to rush this in the next two months would be a huge mistake, one we can't reverse.
I mean, if we have to wait, and it delays things, then it delays things, right? There's a lot of things that could delay this project.
The point is solving the problem in a way that the community is comfortable with.
It's more important to do it right, so let's do it right.
If we don't intervene in many existing problems, they will just get worse.
Yes, there's going to be opposition.
And maybe that's discouraging, but I don't think there's any way to do anything that would work in the long run without the consent of the communities who live there.
So a large part of what I'm doing is trying to come up with a new way of developing these technologies hand-in-hand with the communities, in fact, driven by the communities directly, because an unethical group of researchers could conceivably do it on their own without asking anyone.
It would be discovered, people would be outraged, and then that would be the end of that technology for a very long time.
All benefits lost.
Trust is in short supply in our society, and further damaging social confidence in technologies is something we should be deeply, deeply afraid of.
What do you do when someone disagrees with something you want to do, and you think it's right, and you're very convinced, but somebody disagrees with you? How do you handle it? I'm not saying that we humans have great ways of overcoming disagreements like that.
But at least the debate needs to happen in public, and then, hopefully, we can come to a decision.
Maybe it will be wise.
I will be watching your experiment with great interest.
What if it shuts down the work? What if Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, these communities you're working with, say no? Then we walk away.
We have to walk away.
I think science fosters a community of protected, coddled individuals.
Um And they're super risk-averse.
People always have these stupid ethical arguments about whether people should use CRISPR or not, but, like, it's pointless if nobody's using it.
Welcome to Synbiobeta 2017.
He helped initiate the Human Genome Project I'm tired of all this stuff just being, like, fiction, and I'm tired of going to conferences like this, and it's boring as shit, where a bunch of people get up there and talk about bullshit that doesn't affect anybody.
The world before us is almost science fiction-like.
As you could probably already assume, this workshop will be a bit different from the rest of the conference.
I gotta spice it up a little by seducing you with some free human CRISPR DNA.
My whole goal and purpose is to make this technology accessible now.
Basically, no matter what it takes.
Oh, you can come in.
Feel free.
Now, if I want to modify myself with CRISPR, what do I need to know? You don't even need to search far.
There are actually websites out there.
You can type in the name of a gene and press enter, so that the Cas9 enzyme can cut in your genome at this exact place, and you could modify yourself with CRISPR.
This DNA right here modifies the myostatin gene.
I don't know if you've ever seen those, like, jacked dogs and pigs that they always have in the media with CRISPR, right? So, myostatin knockouts cause you to have more muscles and more strength.
If you basically took his DNA and put it on your skin, it would change the genetic material of your cells.
That's all it takes.
Maybe that's scary.
I don't know.
To me, it sounds really awesome.
- Yeah? - What about off-target activity? There's off-target activity with People are complaining about off-target activity and it's, like, I go outside in San Francisco, and I breathe in something, and it's modifying my genome.
I smoke a cigarette, it's modifying my genome.
It actually modifies my genome enough that I can literally grow another organ.
Right? Tumor or something like that.
Oh, totally okay.
The FDA doesn't regulate that shit.
The sun.
UV light is modifying your genome when you're out there.
You know? Nobody complains about those off-target effects.
So what's what's stopping us? What's stopping us from just all putting this in our shot glasses and making ourselves jacked right now? So, have you tried it? What's holding you back? What's holding me back? Are you suggesting maybe I should try it? Well, isn't that what you're suggesting we do? All All right, let's do it.
What we got here is some, uh, DNA mixed with, uh, PEI, which is a polycationic polymer.
This is a syringe.
All right.
There we go.
I don't know why people don't try it.
The amount of cells it's gonna modify will be pretty small.
Probably take a number injections over a period of time to actually see a significant effect on my body.
- Thank you very much.
- If the efficiency's low, you can just make more.
So like, this DNA, you put it in bacteria, tomorrow, you're gonna have ten times, 100 times, 1,000 times as much.
No, no, no, take it.
I want people to have a choice.
Right? Because it's not gonna be me who like Probably not gonna be any of these big companies that change the world.
Like, it's gonna be some dude in his apartment and garage who none of us even know the name of right now, right? That's the person that's gonna change the world.
"Biohackers," they're called.
Basically, in their bedroom, they can inject themselves.
So we have somebody like Josiah Zayner who's a former NASA scientist.
I mean, he edits the gene into his muscles.
Biohacker Josiah Zayner Josiah Zayner He is injecting himself with DNA.
Visante said his stunt was reckless, and could it could have led to severe consequences, like his own immune system attacking his actual muscles.
If there's a possibility to take out mutations that cause cancer, why can't we test it? Guy's just trying to get his muscles bigger.
He makes some pretty wild statements.
He argued that using CRISPR should ideally be like downloading an app.
Why can't people use this technology without necessarily completely knowing how it works? Oh, oh, oh I can answer that one for you.
Because it could be dangerous and someone could get hurt.
Biohacking, right, or whatever you want to call that, is is a problem that doesn't have an easy solution, if you even think of it as a problem.
We ordered a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit.
It just arrived in the mail.
I've decided to take up biohacking, which is amateur genetic engineering.
We have a package! We got it from The, dash, Odin The king of the Odin Project.
Odin himself, Josiah Zayner.
What is a biohacker? Somebody who's doing science non-traditionally, so outside of like a big corporation or an academic lab.
CRISPR, genetic modification I think it's the new frontier.
You injected a modified gene, myostatin.
Here's a dog.
I wanna look like the dog on the left.
Yeah, it wasn't so much that I wanted muscle.
- It was just like a good proof of concept.
- You were trying to get beefed up.
I'm really just focused on getting stuff out to people, like DNA literacy.
- I want people - Yes! Yes! to understand how this stuff works, so then we have our next generation of scientists and medical doctors who are just way beyond what any of us can do right now.
Everyone says, "Any idiot can do CRISPR.
" I'm not sure about any idiot, but it is easy.
People using a genetic chemistry set and doing that in their basement is something we don't have control over.
- It's not easy to regulate.
- This is illegal in some countries.
- Germany, a good example.
- Yeah.
You can go to jail for using some of our kits.
If I now add this tiny little droplet to this smush in this tube over here, I will go to jail.
If the purpose is to perform gene editing on bacteria, okay, you can make bacteria phosphorescent.
This is our glow-in-the-dark beer.
But what are biohacking kits for, but for trying to genetically modify individuals? He talks of being in the midst of a genetic revolution.
- He's right.
- He's right.
He also goes on to say, "I think this is, like, literally a new era of human beings.
It's gonna create a whole new species of humans.
" If you could give yourself a DNA treatment to change something about you, give yourself some kind of power or ability, what would the one thing be? We have these people here who are talking about science fiction.
The technology's out there, and a lot of it is becoming reality right now and in the near future, and a lot of it's being prevented by the government.
The regulations in the US, and kind of in the world, prevent genetic-engineering technology from going forward.
To me, that's kind of fucked up.
Don't you want to be superhuman? Like, if I came to you tomorrow and said, "Look, $500, I can genetically modify you so you never have to work out again.
" Would you do it? Are there really any serious consequences that could harm me? We don't know.
There's relatively little that we know about biology.
But how how will we know if we don't do it? Well, that's why that's why people do clinical trials.
But you can't do clinical trials on healthy people.
I just gotta go for this.
In here is my skin tissue, which presumably has been genetically engineered.
There is a reason for oversight before things are permitted to be done to human participants.
This is just the first step, but if this is possible He's very relaxed about enhancements.
You know, it gets back to the question of who decides and who regulates, uh, such a such a thing.
There are still technical challenges to work out, but we can see that this is coming.
Now you're introducing a bioengineered organism into the wild.
Doesn't seem very bioethical to me.
You worry too much.
I worry too much.
Right.
- Right.
- I don't know.
The problem I ran into is uh, one of my males has gone sterile on me, but I just got another dog brought in from Texas who is much younger, but he doesn't quite like me yet.
So, he still tries to eat me when I get near him.
I talked to one dog breeder who found out, who's super excited, but I think some people are getting weird ideas about what's going on.
Just a bunch of crazy guys tinkering in their basements trying weird shit, don't know what the hell we're doing.
I don't think you can change anybody's mind.
Right.
And you're better off just doing your your stuff and trying to show people through your work.
Yeah.
The only thing I would really like is a bigger centrifuge.
Send over a list of all the stuff you need, and I'm sure we can get it out tomorrow or Tuesday or something.
When your great-grandfather was a pig farmer and your grandfather was a welder and so on, you don't get a whole lot of opportunity to go to MIT.
The scientists, um who are against DIY bio people, it's sort of a paternal kind of thing, uh, where it's like, "Okay, these these poor stupid people don't know how to do anything, and they're just gonna hurt themselves.
" Science itself isn't something that they have a right to claim ownership of.
The dogs are very, very scent oriented, so the right smells are really the whole procedure.
Ah! He's camera shy.
Biology's kind of a dirty job.
I bet they don't teach that at MIT.
I feel like, right now, a lot of fear is causing people to push back against progress.
It might terrify people because he's just doing it in his shed.
So they just say, "Just don't do it," full stop.
But I think it's great that we can take these ideas and manifest them.
I don't find it terrifying at all that people could even alter themselves to be whatever they want to be.
It's on my hands.
It landed on my hand.
You know, why hem and haw over whether it's unnatural? I guess I don't feel like humanity is to be stuck in the past.
I want to go to the future where people can be anything.
This is a fluorescent microscope.
It basically allows you to see fluorescent things at the microscopic scale.
If the DNA winds up inside the sperm, then you can see it under the microscope.
So if the sperm glow, then it works.
There they are.
Some of them are glowing super brightly.
This gene started in a jellyfish and wound up in a dog's sperm.
That's exciting.
Which one are these? So these are the ones that have undergone the treatment.
We are going to compare them to the mice that have not undergone any treatment.
This mouse is very old.
You can see the curvature of the spine that we see in old people.
Now, this is the sibling of the mouse.
They are born on the same day from the same mother.
The only difference is this mouse has been genetically engineered to express four genes that are normally expressed in stem cells and in the embryo.
If you turn them on in an old individual, they can make the cells much younger.
And we can see this mouse is much more active, much healthier in gross appearance, and doesn't have the curvature of spine that we saw in the other mouse.
We can clearly see the difference between them.
They are the same age.
This is wonderful.
What is the average time we increased their lifespan? Thirty percent extension in their maximum life span.
Incredible.
The excitement of this experiment is that we can see for the first time that you can reverse the process of aging.
The implications are so vast.
In a way, all we are doing is against nature, is against evolution.
Safety lines, ethical lines, moral lines.
This is the unknown territory.
And when we don't know, we are afraid.
In the end, my personal opinion is that we change our lines, our ethical and moral lines, when we see sound results that are positive for humankind.
We're okay to make glasses, to see that everyone sees the same thing.
But we're not okay to have binoculars in us so that we see better than the other.
- No? That's something that - Yes.
We're okay to restore vision to the same level, and no one will say this is an ethical thing, if wear glasses, but if I wear two binoculars that will make me see better than you, that's the problem, no? That's what, with enhancement, is what we are discussing here.
Because maybe you can do it, maybe I cannot do it.
It will generate um inequalities.
But in principle, if everyone could have the vision of an eagle, what is wrong with that? When you go up on stage, make sure you have all your Props! - And when you are performing - Act it out.
Act it out! Thank you.
Jackson, that reminds me.
You could be a little bit meaner, Jackson.
I know you're not a mean person, but can you act mean? Mm-hmm.
And try to put your head in the direction of the people to whom you are speaking.
- Does that make sense? Okay.
- Mm-hmm.
Let's do this.
Let's go.
Let's do this.
The lamp! Once I have it, the world will be mine.
Hurry, to the Cave of Wonders.
Oh, we come from a land Where mirage is the rule And the wildest tales come true The lamp is almost mine, mine, mine! Give me that lamp! The lamp is upside down.
Hold it.
Welcome back, kiddies.
I made a few changes around here.
Changes, changes! A whole new world A dazzling place I never knew But when I'm way up here It's crystal clear That now I'm in a whole new world With you Can you help me? Catch one for me? I have one.
Do you want it? Don't pinch him.
Um - It's in your hand.
Right there.
Wait.
- I don't see him.
This is so cool.
I can't really see at night.
If there's, like, any lights, that's all I see.
Just the lights that are coming from the lights.
So there's a full moon.
Crescent.
Half.
Gibbous.
Full.
He obviously wants to work for NASA.
It's dark all around here.
I don't think there's anything over here.
No, there are no stars, Ava.
There's teensy weensy ones.
I still only see the sun.
He really wants to be an astronaut.
He wants to go into space more than anything.
They're trying to get here.
Mars.
Good idea.
I feel like something, like is going to happen, like, so wrong, and, like, it's not gonna be very good for Earth.
That That's what worries me.
He watches films about space and NASA, and in it, they said something to the effect, "Astronauts have to have 20-20 vision.
" And that just It really upset him for a long time.
And I believe Like, when he says something, that something's gonna happen or he's gonna do something, I believe him.
He's gonna go to space.
I believe it.
An FDA advisory panel voted unanimously yesterday to recommend approval of a groundbreaking treatment for people with a faulty gene that causes severe vision loss starting in childhood.
They take a virus and put in a normal copy of the gene and they inject it into the white of the eye.
And then, literally, days later, sight returns to most of the people in the trial.
It's amazing.
I feel like we're on the cusp of some, like, major changes for him.
And it's an amazing thing.
This is the start of a new revolution.
This is science fiction science, because it really is something we've dreamed of and talked about for decades, but now it's happening.
Every important undertaking that faces us is limited by biology.
As a species on a single planet, we are at serious existential risk.
And one of the problems that we need to solve is how we're going to get people living safely in space on other planets.
There's a lot of focus on the rockets to get us up there, the vehicles, you know, that we can, uh, rove planets and mine planets, but unlike previous journeys into space where we've gone and come back, at some point, we're gonna have to take a one-way journey.
We're gonna have to go without any promise of coming back, and our biology is gonna have to be fit for space.
You know, radiation-intense environments, um, low-gravity environments.
And those challenges will only be met once we understand how we can make the changes in our genomes to thrive, uh, on other planets.
When I was a kid, growing up reading Isaac Asimov and other other science fiction writers, watching Star Trek on TV and things like that, things that were clearly in the realm of fiction at that time are increasingly being realized.
It's a powerful tool partly because it is democratizing.
It's available inexpensively to scientists around the world.
Whether we as a society will will grapple with that appropriately remains to be seen.
I think we're at a crossroads right now.
What does this look like, writ large, if we begin to engineer our entire world, if we start to engineer all that we can in nature? This is going to have long-lasting ripple effects, and we don't have to go that way.
Humanity is very bad at saying no to technologies everywhere.
Because even if you say no, is everyone else in the world going to say no? Our civilization is vulnerable.
It's not sustainable.
We have no choice but to continue exploring the tree of knowledge, but we always run the risk of discovering something that we cannot handle.
So it's a balance.
I don't know where that will go.
I try to imagine a world where people can overcome a lot of the inequalities that have been placed upon them.
We're no longer constrained by the genetics we were born with.
It immediately removes that barrier, that, like, rich people get something, and poor people don't.
Like, rich people get expensive medical treatment, poor people don't.
That can change.
The way I see it, life is information.
A person and and a, you know, pile of organic matter are made of the same materials.
It's just how it's organized.
Get up.
Hey, Daddy! You see that small chunk of wood? Can I chop that up? - Okay.
There you go.
- Oh! It was right there.
If you rearrange the atoms in a pile of, you know, rotten leaves, you can make a person.
Because you've got all the right materials there, but the wrong information.
People think of themselves as objects, but we're not anything like an object because I'm not the material.
I'm the information that organizes the material.
When you have the power to change that, you can just tweak the information a bit and then let it spread and reorganize matter from the ground up.
There's so many things that could be, that aren't.
That nature may never have made or may never have evolved.
And now you're going to make choices that change things.
Then what kind of world can we build? Peek-a-boo.
Don't put your lips on it.
Why are you guys taking pictures? What did they take from you? My blood.
Your blood.
Do you know why they took your blood? No.
- Yeah, to help me see.
- Yeah! They called me yesterday.
Okay.
Are they able to cure it? Yeah.
Oh, yes! There's a chance that you might be able to see.
Are you excited? I thought I was just gonna be stuck like this my whole entire life.
When are we going down?