VICE (2013) s04e01 Episode Script

(theme music playing) This week on VICE, Boko Haram's campaign of terror spreads across Africa.
(men shouting) Behind me is a compound which two days ago was the site of a suicide attack.
And then, advances with our genetic code are changing the future of human evolution.
We're at the National Resource Center for Mutant Mice.
They're editing the mouse embryos right here.
The couple wants a baby with blue eyes.
They said, "Can we get a boy, and can the boy have blue eyes?" (gunshot) (crowd chanting) The deadliest terror group in the world today isn't ISIS or Al Qaeda.
According to a recent report, it's the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram.
And even after six years of war with the military, Boko Haram is as deadly as ever, finding new ways to implement their terror tactics in the region.
This pile of rubble that I'm standing on was Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram's mosque.
Book Haram began right here at this very spot as a religious movement.
Yusuf preached hard-line Islam.
The name "Boko Haram" roughly translates to "Western education is sinful.
" But he was also an outspoken critic of government corruption and was accused of leading violent attacks against authorities.
The police executed him without trial in 2009.
I wanted to get the government's perspective on how Yusuf's death contributed to Boko Haram's rise, so we spoke to Nigeria's president Muhammadu Buhari.
(speaking English) Boko Haram's new leader, Abubakar Shekau, used that sense of injustice to transform the group into a fearsome paramilitary force that in 2015 controlled thousands of square miles of Nigerian territory.
When I reported on this story in March last year, the Nigerian army was engaged in a full-scale military campaign against the group.
Since that report, Boko Haram has gone underground, embracing terrorist guerrilla tactics instead.
In 2015, thousands of more people died in more than 230 attacks.
So I went back to Nigeria to see how the face of this conflict has changed.
I spoke to Kashim Shettima, the governor of the hardest-hit state.
How do you categorize how the war, or the conflict, is progressing? (speaking English) Kaj Larsen: But that's a daunting task, considering how difficult it is to figure out who actually is Boko Haram.
I'm in this heavily armed convoy of about 30 vehicles, including an armored personnel carrier.
And this road, which has been frequently attacked by the insurgents, leads to the Sambisa Forest.
Sambisa Forest is the last known stronghold of Boko Haram.
The governor had come to this village, newly recaptured from Boko Haram, to calm the local population.
But the residents here had already taken matters into their own hands.
(men shouting) I heard that they arrested four Boko Haram in this village.
They've put them, like, on parade.
What's wrong with these guys? What's wrong with his friends? Tell me about these guys.
Who are these guys? Why did they come? Larsen: One of the key elements of fighting this counter-insurgency has been civilian militia capturing a lot of the members of Boko Haram and turning them over to the military.
You know him? How? Man: Many Boko Haram they caught-- they will mention this particular person.
Man #2: He's a bad type, notorious.
He's notorious? Man #3: Very dangerous, very dangerous.
Larsen: What has this guy done that makes him so bad? He is their gang leader.
He's killed people-- this guy? Yes, he is killing people.
Larsen: As government forces detain more and more alleged Boko Haram members, innocent civilians are getting caught in the middle.
Auto mechanic Saleh Isa Babawo was arrested last year and taken to Giwa Barracks-- the local jail.
This is a burn? Yeah.
Fuck.
What is this? What happened here? Oh, from being tied up? It just ripped away your flesh? Do you think the conditions in Giwa Barracks-- the way they treat you and other innocent people-- has created a backlash against the security forces? Stories like this are just the tip of the iceberg.
Lucy Freeman, an investigator for Amnesty International, says that in the hunt for Boko Haram, the military has been committing mass atrocities of its own.
We recently released a report documenting very serious human rights violations by the military.
We found that they had committed war crimes.
One of the most horrific cases that we documented in this report was on the 14th of March, 2014.
There's a large military detention center in Northeast Nigeria called Giwa Barracks.
And on that day, Boko Haram came and attacked the barracks.
They freed the prisoners there, over a thousand people.
A large number of people tried to go home to their families.
They were rounded up by the military and the civilian JTF, and we documented the execution of at least 620 of them.
We received video footage from that particular day, which showed these men lined up next to a large pit.
And a man dressed in military uniform then cuts their throat.
None of those people have been brought to justice.
Larsen: Abuses like this only strengthen Boko Haram's resolve.
In 2015, more than 10,000 people were killed, making it the deadliest year yet.
To get their point of view on the Giwa Barracks raid, we gained unprecedented access to an active Boko Haram commander and his deputy.
How many members do you have? What's wrong with your leg? You have a bullet? How did that happen? Was this the attack on Giwa Barracks? Larsen: You're not afraid to fight with soldiers? You don't think you'll be killed? Larsen: We wanted to know if the commander was involved in the group's most infamous attack-- the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls from a school in Chibok, which sparked outrage around the world.
Everybody is talking about the Chibok girls.
Where are they? (chuckles) So they're now a bargaining chip? While the Chibok girls remain missing, this is far from an isolated incident.
In the town of Yola, we met 16-year-old Zainab, who's one of thousands of women who have been abducted by Boko Haram.
But they don't just marry these girls.
They've begun using them in their attacks.
(Zainab speaking) Zainab escaped after five months in captivity, but not before she was impregnated by one of her captors.
Larsen: As the cycle of violence continues to build, it's now spilled outside of Nigeria's borders.
Is Boko Haram spreading to the region? To see how far the fight had spread, I traveled to N'Djamena, Chad, where the conflict shows no signs of slowing down.
Behind me is a compound which two days ago was the site of a bloody Boko Haram suicide attack.
(flies buzzing) Did you find any materials or anything, any bomb-making materials? Larsen: What they found was a small arsenal intended to launch more of these attacks around Chad.
This is an RPG round right here.
This bag has, I'd estimate, like, As the hunt for Boko Haram escalates in Chad, these soldiers say that militants from around the region are still joining up to wage jihad.
(whistling) Most of the Boko Haram-- they're Kanuri, right? (speaking English) Now it's everybody? From Mali, Bamako, Timbuktu? That's bad.
It gets worse.
Boko Haram, which killed more people in terror attacks than ISIS in 2014, has actually pledged allegiance to them, even renaming themselves the Islamic State's West Africa Province.
This new alliance between Boko Haram and ISIS does not bode well for the region.
Shane Smith: Since the beginning of life on Earth, evolution has been steered by the demands of survival in the natural world.
However, today, new technology is completely upending that process, allowing us to alter different species as we go forward, including our own.
So how is it that the mosquitoes are genetically modified? What's different about these guys than any other mosquitoes? (speaking English) Isobel Yeung: These mosquitoes have been genetically modified to breed with, and eliminate, their own species in an urgent attempt to wipe out carriers of dengue fever.
Every week, 800,000 of these mosquitoes are being released into the wild.
It's crazy to think that you're trying to solve the dengue fever problem by releasing so many mosquitoes into the wild.
Yeung: Neighborhoods targeted by the program are seeing a more than 90% reduction in dengue-carrying mosquitoes.
These doctored mosquitoes are part of a larger movement to produce animals that fight the diseases they spread.
In Scotland, in the same facility that produced Dolly the sheep, the first-ever cloned animal, Dr.
Bruce Whitelaw is trying to create pigs that are resistant to African swine fever.
He's an expert in a field called transgenics.
So what "transgenic" means is that you've taken a gene which you have constructed in the laboratory, and you've introduced it into the genome of the animal.
When you look at this snout here, you'll see it's got a yellow tinge to it.
Yeung: Hey, piggy, piggy.
So what they've done is, they've taken the fluorescent gene, which is naturally present in jellyfish, and they've put it inside these pigs as a little marker, so they know which ones are transgenic or not.
Yeung: In the past, genetic engineering technologies often used visual markers like this to prove that they even worked.
But the science has recently taken a huge step forward.
The breakthrough is a molecular technology called CRISPR CAS-9.
It's a protein that uses molecular blades to make cuts in host DNA, replacing genes you don't want with genes you do.
It has the power to transform every form of life as we know it.
It's all about a way of editing genes, known as CRISPR.
Female reporter: CRISPR is being described as a game changer.
Breakthrough Prize is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.
Jennifer Doudna, a leading professor of chemistry and biology at UC Berkeley, codiscovered CRISPR.
Really, what we're doing with the CRISPR technology is, we're using it as a scalpel, a very precise cleaver, that makes breaks in the DNA where we as scientists want to introduce changes.
DNA is the computer program that runs the cell.
What if there's a mistake somewhere in that code? CRISPR technology allows us to find the place where this mistake has occurred in the DNA and allow the cell to correct that mistake.
And within just a few months of our publication of our initial work, many scientists were testing it in plants, animals, and in all cases it was working extremely well.
We really have to actually for the first time confront this possibility of being able to alter human beings in the future and the wisdom of doing that.
Yeung: One reason for that caution is that CRISPR edits are so easy to apply across all species.
At New York University, researcher Michael Perry is looking at the genes that affect butterflies' vision.
In this case, we're gonna try to edit a gene that we think might be involved in making the butterfly eye able to see more colors than other types of insects.
Okay, so now the needle is in the egg.
So now you can see some yolk being displaced.
Yeung: Yeah.
Okay, and that's it.
It's as simple as that? It's as simple as that.
That's one edited gene? That is one edited genome.
So how different would this process look if you were injecting human embryos? (chuckles) Not my specialty.
Yeung: In theory, applying CRISPR to humans could eliminate diseases and steer our evolution.
The problem is that so far, we can't always predict what will happen.
The antennae is drooping.
Its legs haven't formulated properly.
And the color is gone on the wings.
Michael Perry: Right.
We knew from research in fruit flies that this gene played a role in developing antennae and in producing bristles on the legs, but we didn't expect a role in wing pattern.
And so, even in this gene that was reasonably well studied, we could predict what some of the effects would be.
We did not expect a role in color pattern.
Do you think that this kind of technology will fundamentally impact our future? Everyone is excited about CRISPR.
I think it really is gonna change biology in general.
Yeung: While CRISPR is not yet considered safe to use on human embryos, genetic selection is already happening in the US.
Dr.
Jeffrey Steinberg is using a process known as PGD to genetically analyze embryos and allow parents to screen for diseases and even choose favorable traits in their children.
PGD starts for Pre-implantation-- before it goes back to Mom-- Genetic Diagnosis.
And that way we're able to make these decisions that the parents want to make before they get the embryo.
Mm-hmm, and so the purpose of that is to identify certain diseases that might exist in certain embryos Exactly.
and also the sex.
Right, we can identify gender with almost 100% certainty.
So what are we looking at here? This is a PGD report.
So this is a PGD report from the laboratory.
So these embryos were biopsied yesterday.
So here we have an embryo-- XX means girl.
The next one-- But it's XY instead of XX.
So this is a normal male.
The couple wants a baby with blue eyes.
They've got three girls.
They said, "Can we get a boy, and can the boy have blue eyes?" And what we got back was a report showing that embryo number five and embryo number seven carry the genes for blue eyes.
It's just a case of selecting which ones you want to put in there.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So we asked Mom and Dad, "Here's what we've got.
What do you want?" Yeung: We met with Deborah and Jonathan, one of thousands of couples across the country who have chosen to use PGD.
It sounds like a no-brainer, you know, if you want to be able to test for more diseases and have the healthiest child that you can.
And you also chose to have sex selection, right? Yep, right.
Yeah, we're picking a girl.
We both want to have a baby girl.
Were there any other traits that you were selecting for or that you had the option to select for? I think we'll be offered eye color.
Well, when we met with Dr.
Steinberg, they're-- the advances they're making are pretty incredible.
We had no idea about eye color, but that is something that he offers.
We're not doing eye color.
You're going in for your actual retrieval process tomorrow, is that right? How are you feeling? Very nervous.
So here we go, a little pinch.
Just hold real still.
Yeung: In Dr.
Steinberg's clinic, Deborah's eggs were removed to be fertilized and then genetically analyzed.
Steinberg: So we finished the first two.
We're gonna pass that off.
So they've got the fluid now.
They're gonna be taking a look under the microscope and we'll find that first egg for you.
And here you can see what these technicians are doing.
This is an egg? Two eggs? A little pinch again.
Yeung: Here comes another one.
Yeung: Just egg-hunting.
You did great.
We're taking one sperm, and we're injecting it into the yolk of the human egg.
There's the needle.
You can see one little sperm swimming up inside of the needle.
And now he's very gently going to push the tip of the needle into the yolk of the egg.
Yeung: So that's it? It's fertilized.
It's a fertilized egg.
Wow.
So where's this PGD technology heading? What's next, after eye color? The next place that it's headed is towards being able to diagnose more and more diseases.
And the final place that it's headed is into allowing us to select more and more elective traits, characteristics.
Such as? Height, weight.
How soon before we can select for height? I mean, I can give you a five-year estimate.
Five years before we can select for height? Yeah.
Yeung: The global push to develop these technologies is only intensifying.
So we spoke to Jamie Metzl, an expert in both genomics and foreign policy.
Ultimately, humans are a data set.
And as our computing power increases, we're able to look at these extremely complex genetics and then pull all the pieces together and do genome-wide association studies to try to figure out what genes do what.
So does that mean that the countries or the societies with the most data on genetics are leading the way in terms of national competitiveness? We are at the very early stage of this revolution.
And, like in any revolution and any transformation, first movers always have a strategic advantage.
China has identified biotechnology as a strategic pillar in their most recent five-year plan.
Yeung: That 2011 plan devoted more than $308 billion to biotechnology.
It's paving the way for a large-scale, assembly-line approach to decoding the specific functions of genes.
In Nanjing, CRISPR technology is now being used to edit the genes of mice, in an effort to isolate desired traits.
We're at the National Resource Center for Mutant Mice.
This is where they edit hundreds of thousands of different types of mice.
What we're looking at down these microscopes are tiny, tiny little mouse embryos.
And what they're doing is, they're injecting them.
So they're editing the mouse embryos right here.
(man speaking Chinese) Wow, that's a lot of embryos.
(Cunxiang Ju speaking) Wow.
What are they doing here? (man speaking Chinese) These guys here are being edited, so the result is that they're completely bald.
These ones here-- they're missing the metabolism gene, which means that they're very, very fat.
In this room, they could hold the key to curing aging, to curing diabetes, to curing cancer.
There's just so much possibility held in this room of rodents.
The mouse genome is 85% similar to the human genome, so unlocking their gene functions could be critical to understanding our own traits.
And that could be huge here, where pre-birth services are already in massive demand.
We watched as couples lined up down the block for different types of fertility procedures.
Some of these people have been queuing outside this Beijing public hospital since 2:00 a.
m.
It's like a stampede in here.
Everyone's just racing to get an appointment so they can hopefully see an IVF doctor.
And as thousands and thousands of couples choose the latest available treatments, the future is quickly approaching.
Companies are now developing sequences that decode genes at record speeds.
And all that data will eventually be funneled here, into one of the largest gene banks in the world.
In here, they're gonna be storing human genomes.
This is pretty representative of China's massive commitment and big, big push for the genetics industry.
But as the industry grows, so does our concern about where it's headed.
Outrage over the latest move toward designer babies.
For the first time, Chinese scientists use new technology to alter DNA in human embryos.
Serious implications of designer babies.
It will take us down a slippery slope.
Yeung: This technology continues to advance.
And with parents potentially being offered more and more traits for purchase, we may be altering the future of the human race itself.
So how much are we moving towards a future of genetic haves and have-nots? Certainly, there is the danger of the more advantaged people in society today becoming even more advantaged.
And that's very dangerous.
The worst-case scenario is that we get into some type of genetic arms race, where people are manufacturing their-- their children.
After four billion years of evolution, we are now beginning a process where we will take active control of our evolution.
And the consequences of that are incredible.
If you had a time machine, and you traveled a thousand years into the future and brought a child back to today, that kid would be Superman.