Genetic Eye Drops, Kimberlite Explosion, Creative Bots

Summary

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Curiosity Weekly – Episode Summary

Podcast: Curiosity Weekly
Host(s): Nate & Kali (Discovery)
Episode: Genetic Eye Drops, Kimberlite Explosion, Creative Bots
Date: September 6, 2023

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into three recent and fascinating science discoveries: gene therapy via eye drops that restores sight, the volcanic journey that brings diamonds to the Earth's surface, and the newfound creativity of conversational AI. With their trademark banter, Nate and Kali break down the science and its potential impact so all listeners—PhDs or not—can keep up with cutting-edge advancements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Gene Therapy Eye Drops Restore Sight

[01:59 – 05:08]

• A Breakthrough Case: Doctors have used gene therapy, in the form of specially developed eye drops, to reverse blindness in a boy named Antonio Vento Carvajal, who was born with dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (aka “butterfly disease”).
  • “It's caused by a mutation in a gene that plays a big role in producing collagen 7, which is a protein that basically holds our skin and corneas together.” – Kali [02:43]
  • Functionally blind due to eye scarring, Antonio received eye drops derived from a gene-delivering gel previously used on his skin.
  • These eye drops delivered a gene to produce collagen 7, significantly improving his vision in both eyes after surgical removal of scar tissue.
• Is It a Cure?
  • The treatment addresses the root genetic issue but doesn’t change the patient’s genes permanently. Continued application is needed.
  • “So it's not a cure.” – Nate
  • “No, but it's an incredibly effective treatment.” – Kali [04:43-04:45]
• Wider Implications:
  • The method could be adapted to treat Fuchs dystrophy, potentially helping millions with corneal conditions.

Memorable Moment:

• “For millions of people around the world, tomorrow could actually be a bright new day.” – Kali [05:03]

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2. Diamonds’ Journey to the Surface

[05:08 – 08:32]

• Basics of Diamond Formation:
  • Diamonds form roughly 100 miles below the Earth’s surface, requiring immense heat and pressure over millions or billions of years.
• The Kimberlite Connection:
  • Most diamonds are found in kimberlite, a blue-green speckled igneous rock, named after the South African city of Kimberley.
  • Diamonds are transported to the surface via volcanic eruptions of kimberlite—ancient geological “rocket fuel.”
  • “When the Earth's mantle starts to get all wiggly and wobbly, these kimberlite shoots open up and it blasts through the ground like rocket fuel.” – Nate [06:43]
• The Mystery and New Findings:
  • New research links kimberlite eruptions with the breakup of supercontinents, but with a surprising 26-million-year delay between continental breakup and kimberlite eruptions.
  • The “underground cauldron” effect from tectonic activity causes a delayed explosive event that brings diamonds to the surface.
• Wonder at Deep Time:
  • “One thing that's amazing to me is that geologists are still learning new things about processes that happened billions of years ago.” – Kali [08:06]

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3. AI Out-Creates Most Humans

[09:03 – 12:46]

• Landmark Study:
  • A recent study by Dr. Eric Guzik tested ChatGPT-4’s creativity using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a gold standard for creativity assessment.
  • ChatGPT-4 was scored blindly alongside 24 students and 2,700 students’ historic scores from 2016.
• Results:
  • ChatGPT-4 ranked in the top 1% for originality and fluency and the top 97% for flexibility—outperforming almost all humans in the study.
  • “They had tested ChatGPT3 the year before, and it didn't score as well as humans. That means that the latest iteration of this tech has made pretty huge leaps, at least in creativity.” – Kali [11:56]
• What Does This Mean?
  • Far from rendering humans obsolete, AI creativity could aid innovation in business, technology, and medicine, sparking new ideas.
• Thinking Like a Human:
  • “To score high on the flexibility skill, you might say that you're going to totally unravel the shag carpet, re spin all the fibers into rope and use it to recreate the rickety bridge in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” – Kali [11:32]
• Hopeful Takeaway:
  • “It's not that it's doing my job for me, it's just giving me new ideas that I can use to grow or change my business.” – Nate [12:32]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Kali, on restoring sight: “For millions of people around the world, tomorrow could actually be a bright new day.” [05:03]
• Nate, on kimberlite eruptions: “The kimberlite forms around 75 miles underground. And when the Earth's mantle starts to get all wiggly and wobbly, these kimberlite shoots open up and it blasts through the ground like rocket fuel.” [06:43]
• Kali, on creativity tests: “To score high on the flexibility skill, you might say that you're going to totally unravel the shag carpet, re spin all the fibers into rope and use it to recreate the rickety bridge in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” [11:32]
• Nate, reflecting on AI creativity: “It's not that it's doing my job for me, it's just giving me new ideas that I can use to grow or change my business.” [12:32]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Gene Therapy Eye Drops – [01:59 – 05:08]
• Diamonds & Kimberlite Eruptions – [05:08 – 08:32]
• AI vs. Human Creativity – [09:03 – 12:46]

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Tone & Style

The episode is lighthearted, conversational, and playful, with science explained in accessible everyday language. Nate and Kali use humor, pop culture references, and natural curiosity to make complex discoveries feel personal and exciting.

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Perfect for listeners who want science that’s fresh, digestible, and fun, this episode packs transformative medical news, geologic marvels, and the next chapter in AI—reminding us that curiosity is the best way to grow your mind.

Transcript

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[Nate]

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[Kali]

I need a coffee.

[Nate]

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[Kali]

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell, and if you know my husband Dax, then you also know he loves shopping for a car. Selling a car, not so much.

[Nate]

We're really doing this, huh?

[Kali]

Thankfully, Carvana makes it easy. Answer a few questions, put in your van or license, and done. We sold ours in minutes this morning and they'll come pick it up and pay us this afternoon.

[Nate]

Bye bye, Truckee.

[Kali]

Of course, we kept the favorite.

[Nate]

Hello, other Truckee.

[Kali]

Sell your car with Carvana today. Terms and conditions apply.

[Nate]

Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity daily from Discovery. Time flies when you're learning super cool stuff. I'm Nate.

[Kali]

And I'm Kali. If you're dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you're a loyal listener, welcome back.

[Nate]

Today you'll learn about gene therapy, eyedrops, a diamond's journey to the surface, and the growing creativity of AI without further.

[Kali]

Ado, let's satisfy some curiosity. Doctors have developed an eye drop that uses gene therapy to bring sight back to the blind.

[Nate]

Okay. Wow. Why have I not heard of this before? Like curing blindness. Kind of feels like it should be the story of the century.

[Kali]

Okay, I realize it's a pretty bold statement, but as always, there are a few catches.

[Nate]

Ah, right. If something sounds too good to be true.

[Kali]

Right. Yeah. Except that this actually could lead to a massive shift in the way doctors treat certain disorders.

[Nate]

Okay. So it could be the story of the century.

[Kali]

It could be huge. A boy named Antonio Vento Carvajal was born with a super rare genetic condition called dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa.

[Nate]

That's quite a mouthful.

[Kali]

Yeah, Sometimes people call it butterfly disease because those who suffer from it have incredibly delicate skin. It's caused by a mutation in a gene that plays a big role in producing collagen 7, which is a protein that basically holds our skin and corneas together.

[Nate]

Collagen 7. So it's like a. A glue that just holds us together.

[Kali]

I mean, kinda. So people with butterfly disease have trouble producing it, and that means that they are incredibly prone to injury. Just a brush of skin can leave them injured.

[Nate]

Oh, that sounds awful.

[Kali]

It is. And what's worse, those bruises and injuries generally heal back up with scar tissue. And that's what happened to Antonio's vision. Minor injuries on his eyes left them scarred over. For most of his life, he was functionally, if not totally, blind.

[Nate]

So where do those eye drops you mentioned come in?

[Kali]

Dr. Alfonso Saboteur, who saw Antonio at the University of Miami Health center, had heard of a gel called Vijuvic that uses inactive herpes simplex virus to deliver the gene that produces the collagen 7 to the skin. Antonio has been using the cream on his skin, and it was working. His skin was healing faster. The scar tissue was going away, and he was doing better. So Dr. Saboteur thought, I mean, hey, what if we used it on his eyes?

[Nate]

So the cream was clearing up his skin, so they just decided to, what, rub it in his eyes?

[Kali]

Sort of. Dr. Saboteur had the gel reformatted so it would be safe. He performed a surgery to remove some of the scar tissue from Antonio's right eye and then dropped it in there. And, I mean, guess what? That eye healed up. There's no scar tissue. And what's more, his vision kept getting stronger and stronger and is now nearly perfect.

[Nate]

Holy cow. Okay, you said that was his right eye. How about the left eye?

[Kali]

They did that one. Next. And same thing is happening. It's getting better and better.

[Nate]

So this is like a. Is it a cure? I know sometimes treatments work on the symptoms, but the underlying cause of the disease remains. Is this like that?

[Kali]

That is a great question. So the eye drops deliver a gene therapy, and while it absolutely hits at the root cause of the disease, it doesn't actually alter the patient's genes. That basically means that Antonio and other patients like him have to get ongoing treatment.

[Nate]

So it's not a cure.

[Kali]

No, but it's an incredibly effective treatment. And what's even more exciting is that they think it could be adapted to treat Fuchs dystrophy, a disorder of the cornea that affects around 18 million Americans and is one of the leading reasons for corneal transplants.

[Nate]

Well, I suppose if it can work for that, who's to say it can't work for other conditions, too?

[Kali]

Exactly. For millions of people around the world, tomorrow could actually be a bright new day.

[Nate]

All right, Cal, where do diamonds come from?

[Kali]

Ooh, I know this one. Space?

[Nate]

No.

[Kali]

The mall.

[Nate]

Try again.

[Kali]

The tooth of a kraken. From my last D and D campaign.

[Nate]

Yes, that's it. You've correctly identified.

[Kali]

I did it. I found it.

[Nate]

I know. You're kidding, right?

[Kali]

I am totally kidding, yes. But maybe. Okay, I don't actually know exactly where they come from, but I do know that they are the product of intense pressure and heat over millions of years. Right.

[Nate]

You got it. Maybe even billions of years. And as you probably also know, they are the hardest mineral known to mankind. Scientists know that they generally formed about 100 miles below our feet, where the enormous heat and pressure of the shifting continents kind of smushes pure carbon together into crystal form.

[Kali]

So, diamonds. But wait a second. If they formed 100 miles underground, how do they get to the surface?

[Nate]

Glad you asked, because that is part of the question that scientists have been asking for decades. They have a really great idea how it all works. But there are some mysteries that remain. And that said, a new study published in the journal Nature, is shedding new light on this ancient process. Let's start with kimberlites.

[Kali]

And those are a kind of rock, right?

[Nate]

Exactly. They're kind of this greenish, bluish, speckled igneous rock that's formed as magma cools. And the thing is, most of the world's diamonds are found in huge deposits of kimberlites. In fact, kimberlites are named after Kimberley, South Africa, where they were first found.

[Kali]

So the kimberlites and the diamonds must form together.

[Nate]

The kimberlite forms around 75 miles underground. And when the Earth's mantle starts to get all wiggly and wobbly, these kimberlite shoots open up and it blasts through the ground like rocket fuel.

[Kali]

And it brings the diamonds with it.

[Nate]

Yes, but what's been puzzling scientists is the fact that most volcanic activity happens much, much closer to the surface. So how in the world did these volcanoes happen so incredibly deep underground?

[Kali]

I mean, yeah, I guess if all volcanoes produced diamonds, they Wouldn't be so rare and special.

[Nate]

Exactly.

[Kali]

So what have they found?

[Nate]

Dr. Thomas Gurnan, a geologist at the University of Southampton in England, and his team pored over data connecting continental breakups and these kimberlite deposits.

[Kali]

Right. I mean, I guess when a continent breaks up, that would probably be powerful enough to form one of these deep volcanoes.

[Nate]

That is what they assumed, but they found something weird. The continents broke up, but the kimberlite eruptions didn't happen for another 26 million years.

[Kali]

Okay, I'm no geologist, but that's kind of a long delay. What is going on down there?

[Nate]

Well, with modeling, they believe what happened is that the ripping apart of the continents was so catastrophic and massive that it sort of created an underground cauldron that swirled and melted everything in its path and then eventually erupted, sending the kimberlite and the diamonds upward.

[Kali]

I mean, one thing that's amazing to me is that geologists are still learning new things about processes that happened billions of years ago.

[Nate]

Not only that, but the diamonds we buy for our special people could have been formed when the supercontinent Pangea was just on its way out. No one will ever be able to see these processes happening. But studies like this can give us a better understanding of the forces that shaped our world.

[Shopify Announcer]

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[Kali]

A new study is showing that ChatGPT is likely more creative than about 99% of college students.

[Nate]

Okay, so we recently learned about robotic skin that could self heal. And I was imagining a Terminator style assassin robot when maybe I should have been imagining a creative robot comedian yucking it up at a comedy club. Yeah, either way, we're doomed.

[Kali]

Okay, not so fast. This could actually be a good thing.

[Nate]

Well, I guess I'm not creative enough to understand how this could be a good thing.

[Kali]

Okay, okay, don't. Don't be smart. Then let me explain how this all came about. So, Dr. Eric Guzik is an assistant clinical professor at the University of Montana's College of Business. And he's been fascinated by creativity since he was A kid, he studied the work of psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance, who had created something called the Future Problem Solving Process and a test called the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, or the ttct, which has become one of the gold standards in assessing for creativity.

[Nate]

So let me guess, he had chat GPT do the test.

[Kali]

Yeah, GPT 4, to be specific. He also had 24 of his students take it, and the results were compared to 2,700 college students who took the test back in 2016. So these tests are actually graded by an outside service, and they didn't know AI was involved in any way with these assessments. So when they graded, they basically thought they were all from, you know, humans.

[Nate]

Okay. This does remind me of the Turing.

[Kali]

Test a little bit, in a way. Absolutely. For those of you at home, the Turing Test was an experiment developed by famed British mathematician Alan Turing as a way to measure a machine's ability to act basically human. And large language models like ChatGPT have been able to pass it, basically fooling users into believing they're talking to another human.

[Nate]

So the folks who graded these creativity tests, they were sort of doing an unofficial Turing Test of their own.

[Kali]

In a way, you could say that the TTCT tests for a few different Fluency, originality, and flexibility. Fluency is the ability to come up with a ton of new ideas.

[Nate]

Originality seems obvious. I assume it means the ability to come up with original ideas.

[Kali]

Exactly. And flexibility is the ability to come up with new types of ideas.

[Nate]

What does that mean?

[Kali]

Okay, let's say that you were asked to figure out a bunch of ways to use a shag carpet.

[Nate]

Okay. You could use it to dance on, to lay on top of. Oh, you could use it to generate static electricity with.

[Kali]

See, those are very creative. You've come up with some ideas there. But to score high on the flexibility skill, you might say that you're going to totally unravel the shag carpet, re spin all the fibers into rope and use it to recreate the rickety bridge in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

[Nate]

Ah, okay, gotcha. It's thinking of entirely new uses for something that's kind of fascinating. Okay, so how did GPT do it?

[Kali]

Scored in the top 1% for originality and fluency, but only the top 97% for flexibility. The thing is, they had tested ChatGPT3 the year before, and it didn't score as well as humans. That means that the latest iteration of this tech has made pretty huge leaps, at least in creativity.

[Nate]

So tell me again why we're not doomed.

[Kali]

Well, many believe that these large language models represent a threat to our jobs and some even think to our civilization. This use case could actually help people come up with new and novel ideas for business, tech, or even medicine. Dr. Guzik thinks that this could be a real game changer for innovation.

[Nate]

I guess I can see that, like if I'm an entrepreneur, it's not that it's doing my job for me, it's just giving me new ideas that I can use to grow or change my business.

[Kali]

See, and I would give you high marks for that answer. You are a creative guy after all.

[Nate]

Yes. I knew it. Let's recap what we learned today to.

[Kali]

Wrap up Doctors in Miami have used a gene therapy delivered in an eye drop to restore vision in a boy who suffers from dystropic epidermolysis below or butterfly disease, a rare genetic disorder that makes skin and eye tissue so delicate that a single touch can cause great injury.

[Nate]

Researchers have discovered clues that show kimberlite minerals, in which diamonds are often found, erupted to the surface from nearly 100 miles below, millions of years after the breaking up of supercontinents like Pangea.

[Kali]

A new study has found that the large language model ChatGPT4 demonstrates creative ability higher than 99% of college students who have taken a similar test.

[Nate]

Curiosity Daily is produced by Wheelhouse DNA for discovery.

[Kali]

You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts and we would love it if you could take a second to leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts.

[Nate]

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