← ON CRISPR: The Story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter Isaacson
ON CRISPR: The Story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter Isaacson
ON CRISPR Episode 4: Franken Monsters
00:36:47
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Host
This is an iHeart podcast. The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [00:21]
Walter Isaacson
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [00:33]
Narrator/Host
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [00:47]
Evan Ratliff
Sacred Scandal is back, the hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith. For 19 years, Elena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season she's telling her story.
- [00:59]
Narrator/Host
When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen. I was 19 years old when Martial Macel, the leader of the legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.
- [01:08]
Evan Ratliff
Surviving meant hiding. Escaping took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred the many secrets of Martial Maciel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:22]
Narrator/Host
In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.
- [01:31]
Walter Isaacson
Had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.
- [01:37]
Narrator/Host
Five, six white people pushed me in the car. I'm going, what the hell?
- [01:41]
Walter Isaacson
Basically your stay at home moms were.
- [01:43]
Evan Ratliff
Picking up these large amounts of heroin.
- [01:44]
Walter Isaacson
All you gotta do is receive the package. Don't have to open it, just accept it. She was very upset, crying. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
- [01:54]
Narrator/Host
Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
- [02:04]
Walter Isaacson
December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
- [02:09]
Narrator/Host
The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA.
- [02:19]
Walter Isaacson
Term just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
- [02:22]
Narrator/Host
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of law and criminal justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Classmates.
- [02:51]
Evan Ratliff
For years, Walter Isaacson had immersed himself in the world of Jennifer Doudna and the other CRISPR pioneers. In hours of conversations, he'd worked to capture the stories behind the invention. But at a certain point, he decided he needed to approach CRISPR from a different angle to understand it in a more hands on way. So he traveled to Doudna's lab on the tree lined Campus of UC Berkeley, sat down on a lab bench alongside a couple of grad students and got to work editing genes from a human kidney cell.
- [03:21]
Walter Isaacson
You're sitting on a bench in front of a lab table, usually has a big hood on top so that it, you know, exhausts the air and there's not a lot of fumes. And you have some test tubes and a little rack, just like you used to have in chemistry class in eighth grade. And you have pipettes, and those pipettes allow you to put tiny drops of things into the test tube. In the case of editing with crispr, there would be some pre programmed RNA targeted thing with an enzyme, meaning a protein that can cut or do other things or spark reactions attached to it. Both Gavin Knott and Jennifer Hamilton, who are graduate students in the lab, hovered over me with my pipette and my glasses and goggles and latex gloves on, and showed me how to mix the different ingredients. We had put it into a test tube, and then look and see whether I had edited in a gene that would make it glow green, sort of a phosphorescent gene. And after a while, you get to put it into a centrifuge, or you get to put it under microscopes, and you'll get to see were your cuts actually made. They said, here it is, and there indeed was the gene spliced in.
- [04:54]
Evan Ratliff
Isaacson tells me that one of the things that struck him most during the process was discovering how with crispr, gene editing was relatively easy to do with a little help.
- [05:05]
Walter Isaacson
I was surprised that even I could do it. I know I had a couple of graduate students hovering around and helping, and I realized that this is going to be a technology that's not only easy to use, but it's easy to reprogram. I didn't actually program the guide rna. Somebody else had done it for me. But if I decided I wanted to make a cut in the parts of DNA that show my eye color or the parts of the DNA that grow hair, whatever it may be, I realized that it wouldn't be all that hard to program the molecule.
- [05:41]
Evan Ratliff
Isaacson's realization mirrors one that Doudna had herself. As the technology behind CRISPR continued to.
- [05:47]
Walter Isaacson
Spread after Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published their paper, Jennifer had a dream or a nightmare, and it was that somebody wanted to meet with her about this new technology. And she opens the door to the room. The person looks up and it's Adolf Hitler sort of in a pig's head. And she's taken aback, and she Realizes, of course, that eugenics, I mean, this is what the Nazis were trying to do to edit the human race. That in the wrong hands, this tool could just be not just powerful, but evil. And she realized at that point that she would have to want to gather scientists from around the world because it had to be international to say, let's think through the implications of this. There is the Prometheus issue, which is Prometheus snatches a technology from the gods, fire from the liver of the gods, and it becomes problematic, it's harmful. That, of course, is writ large with the atom bomb project. And if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer, you know he's called the American Prometheus. And so you have to wrestle with the moral implications of the technology you've created.
- [07:19]
Evan Ratliff
From the atom bomb to gene editing, scientists have long had to grapple with the risks that their own inventions present for society. They've been forced to search their consciences and at times to galvanize their colleagues in efforts to contain those risks. As Isaacson writes, for decades, widespread human genome editing had lived in the realm of science fiction. Now, with crispr, it's arriving, and the question is, are we ready? I'm Evan Ratliff, and this is on crispr, the story of Jennifer Doudna. This is episode four, Frankenmonsters. Doudna wasn't alone in thinking about the ethical repercussions of gene editing. Isaacson notes that the field of biotechnology has always been ripe with these questions.
- [08:05]
Walter Isaacson
One of the first groups to wrestle with the biotechnology ethical issues was a group that had Paul Berg and Herbert Boyer and the people in the 1970s who, who had done the original genetic engineering of recombinant DNA in producing new types of organisms by fusing things together and had patented them. And this was causing a problem that maybe commercial labs are going to create. Frankenmonsters. And they go to a conference center in California known as a solomar, and they decide to discuss the ethics of it and the rules of the road. And the second year was a big conference. It was called Asilomar 2. And they made a series of guidelines to allow the technology to proceed. They called it a prudent path forward was their watchword. And they worried mainly about the safety, like, how do you keep these things from escaping the laboratory? They didn't worry enough about the moral implications of genetic engineering. And this is not yet human gene editing, like CRISPR does. But it's a type of genetic engineering where you can create new microorganisms that might be good at fighting diseases, and they also might be pathogens that escape and are really bad.
- [09:37]
Evan Ratliff
So even if the questions and the technology surrounding gene editing had changed, Doudna returned to the early organizational efforts of her colleagues as a framework.
- [09:46]
Walter Isaacson
When Jennifer decides to start this process of dealing with the ethical implications of CRISPR gene editing, she goes Back to the 1970s conferences of Asilomar, where Paul Berg, Herbert Boyer, Jim Watson and David Baltimore had all gathered together, do the rules of the road and create this prudent path forward for genetic engineering. And she even gets some of the original players. She gets David Baltimore, she gets Paul Berg to be sort of honorary chairs of this process. She starts and she goes to not Asilomar, but another resort in California. And they gather people for a series of meetings that discuss not only the safety issues, but the moral issues of should we be making gene edits and especially inheritable gene edits so that we're not only fixing sickle cell anemia in a single patient, but we might want to make permanent genetic edits that are inheritable so that their children and nobody in their family will ever have any of their descendants will ever have sickle cell again. And that's a line across, it's called the germline, but it's like a red line, which is all right, we're not just doing it in one patient. And if it doesn't work, well, that's bad for the patient, but the species survives. What if we're now doing it in something that will change the human species?
- [11:21]
Evan Ratliff
And what was their general conclusion coming out of these meetings?
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Walter Isaacson
One of them was don't make inheritable gene edits. We're just not ready for that. We don't know how to do it, but we also don't know the moral implications. That gets blown away when at one of these meetings they're about to go to Hong Kong to have another session, because they're doing it internationally. And suddenly word comes forth that a little known Chinese scientist, He Zhuangqi, had made inheritable gene edits to twin girls in China by editing them when they were embryos. So all of their cells are edited and all of their descendant cells will be edited to make it so they didn't have a receptor for the virus hiv, which sounds like a good thing to do, but it crossed that line. And so that shakes everybody up.
- [12:17]
Evan Ratliff
The scientist, He Jiankui, had actually personally reached out to Doudna to tell her about his feet. Isaacson says that gene editing researchers didn't receive the news. The way Jankui expected.
- [12:29]
Walter Isaacson
He sends her an email. The subject is babies born. And she looks at it and she's aghast. She realized, oh, my God, this guy has edited embryos and made these genetically altered inheritable changes in babies. And she calls David Baltimore. And they were supposed to be meeting in Hong Kong for one of these conferences. And Jennifer says, I'm catching an earlier plane. Meet me in Hong Kong. Because Hon Shuangqi was going to be there. He was supposed to just talk about his. He was on some panel, and he wasn't planning to talk about doing inheritable gene edits. In fact, he didn't want to. He was trying to keep it secret. And they decide they have to let him present what he has done. And it's all very awkward in this hotel in Hong Kong where he keeps sending messages to Jennifer's room saying, I've got to talk to you. I've got to save my reputation. And she's saying, you have to do this presentation and you have to answer questions. But then the questions were sort of technical, not very interesting questions, and it was kind of messy. They never confronted front of the deep issues. And then He Zhuangqi kind of walks off stage and leaves and goes back to China. He thought he was going to be world famous, like the person who cloned Dolly the sheep or, you know, one of those big breakthroughs. And he had hired an American public relations specialist who had set up sort of embargoed private interviews with the Associated Press that would be released when he did his scientific paper and videos. He made five videos that were held and told they were going to all be released on the same day. And then the paper comes out, and all of a sudden people realize, well, he's not going to be celebrated. This was actually a crossing of an ethical line.
- [14:28]
Evan Ratliff
Still, Doudna and some of her colleagues believe that what happened with He Jiankui shouldn't dictate the rules of the field, but more so serve as a warning. Isaacson tells me that CRISPR researchers were trying to walk a delicate line between enforcing appropriate rules and potentially stunting their own research.
- [14:46]
Walter Isaacson
They wanted to make sure that people didn't just run away with this thing, but they also wanted to make sure that governments, regulators, and people didn't try to stop research on it. And so Jennifer, unlike Eric Lander and some others, fights the notion of having a moratorium or a ban, and we end up not having a moratorium on CRISPR gene editing. And we're still trying to find this prudent path forward. So they think that maybe they can put the genie back in the bottle or keep Pandora's box closed. And so far, there hasn't been a runaway efforts to do inheritable gene edits. And the Chinese even cracked down on this scientist, put him under house arrest, took his license away. So at the moment, the rules of the road are being respected.
- [15:42]
Evan Ratliff
And you describe a little bit how Doudna's thinking did evolve over time when it came to not necessarily favoring a moratorium, but feeling stronger at one point about putting harder lines and what changed over the course of a few years for her.
- [15:58]
Walter Isaacson
She originally wanted a whole lot of restrictions on the use of crispr and said it was kind of dangerous to go too fast. But at conferences and at other places, I'd see people come up to her, they'd pull out a photograph, say, this is my daughter and she has this genetic thing. She's going to die in a year, a year and a half. It's degenerative. Can you save her life, please? And Jennifer would have to say, we're going to try to do that someday with crispr, but no, it's not going to be ready in six months, a year. And also she began to realize all the suffering that could be stopped with crispr. So she began to be a little bit more open about the potential and wanting to make sure that too many restrictions were not put on it. Her ideas changed also. Another thing causing to evolve was of course, the coronavirus and Covid. We're suddenly, we're confronted with a viral attack.
- [17:11]
Evan Ratliff
Among many things, Covid brought to the forefront the importance of RNA technology. Isaacson tells me that from the beginning of the pandemic, Doudna and her colleagues understood that they needed to get to work creating testing materials and eventually a vaccine.
- [17:27]
Walter Isaacson
Jennifer Doudna, who had been working on crispr, all of a sudden realizes when Covid hits how nature had created in bacteria this way of fighting viruses and how relevant suddenly to our own lives, because we have to fight a virus just like bacteria did. And in some ways, nature is amazing that way. That something that starts as a pure curiosity of what weird bacteria from salt ponds do become so central to our own lives when we. We get attacked by viruses. It's really just a week or so into the first news of the pandemic, and they start forming teams with or organizing it. Like one team that's going to build a testing system, another team that's going to build the next generation of testing, using CRISPR to test for the Viruses, another team that's going to try to do a CRISPR based vaccine for the virus. And so these teams start to work. And some of it is very mundane, like just testing everybody in the Bay Area see who has Covid. Because they didn't have good Covid tests back then. Teams were doing things that are still ongoing, like using CRISPR for a vaccine that will guard against any form of coronavirus.
- [18:55]
Evan Ratliff
And even as they got together and formed these teams, some of what they were doing, including the testing, it sort of outpaced the government's ability to process it. Like they had tests ready. But they needed to jump through all these hoops to get the tests approved because no one had anticipated that this would even be possible.
- [19:13]
Walter Isaacson
We have to remember how messy the original response to Covid was.
- [19:17]
Evan Ratliff
People will have heard, you know, the COVID vaccines, the modernic vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine, are RNA related. Can you explain to what extent CRISPR itself played a role in the vaccines that we know now versus treatments that may come down the line?
- [19:36]
Walter Isaacson
The new vaccines that most of us had against Covid, known as MRNA vaccines, meaning messenger rna, that is not exactly the same as crispr, but it still uses the notion that RNA is this miracle molecule and it can be programmed to do things. So that's how RNA technology, more than just CRISPR technology, but RNA as a messenger, as a molecule that could tell the cell to do something and be programmed by us to tell the cell to do something we want it to do. That's in the realm of the world of RNA and CRISPR, but it's a particular type of thing called messenger RNA.
- [20:29]
Evan Ratliff
Throughout this race to understand how the COVID 19 virus worked and how RNA and CRISPR could work together to stop it, Isaacson tells me old rivalries came to the forefront. But this time the goal was one that transcended personal recognition.
- [20:43]
Walter Isaacson
You have Jennifer's lab racing to do it, Fong Zhang's lab racing to do it. And this time, even though they're sort of competing, they know the stakes for society are huge and they're working together more and not trying to beat each other to patents is the way science should work.
- [21:01]
Evan Ratliff
There couldn't have been a more, a stronger moment to illustrate the value of the basic research than what happened right as they are developing these technologies.
- [21:13]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, I mean, I'm writing this book and thinking, well, I'm a bit of an arcane field, which is, what's RNA doing? And I was even wondering, how does the book come to some, you know, relevant conclusions? So people don't think they're just reading the book about, you know, a gene editing tool. And it was interesting because Covid is just so at the core of what the book is about because it's about organisms that have to fight off viruses. And as I said, bacteria have been doing this for billions of years. It's the biggest war ever happened on this planet. And the fact that out of pure curiosity, we could learn something about how bacteria fight viruses and apply it to ourselves just at the moment when we're getting a viral pandemic with the spike protein, we can even mimic using messenger rna. I think that helped show how relevant and exciting but also important the science can be.
- [22:25]
Evan Ratliff
Coming up after the break, we dive into a middle of the night call to Doudna, one that would confirm she had embarked on the right research path all along.
- [22:39]
Walter Isaacson
All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth is a whole lie.
- [22:44]
Narrator/Host
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [23:00]
Walter Isaacson
I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.
- [23:02]
Narrator/Host
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [23:11]
Walter Isaacson
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [23:18]
Narrator/Host
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [23:29]
Evan Ratliff
I did not know her and I.
- [23:30]
Walter Isaacson
Did not kill her or rape or.
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Narrator/Host
Burn or any of that other stuff.
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Walter Isaacson
That y' all said. They literally made me say that I.
- [23:35]
Narrator/Host
Took a match and struck and threw it on her.
- [23:37]
Walter Isaacson
They made me say that I poured gas on her.
- [23:42]
Narrator/Host
From Lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
- [23:52]
Walter Isaacson
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [24:01]
Narrator/Host
Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley, feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [24:23]
Evan Ratliff
At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling. In the new season of sacred scandal, we pull back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception. A man of God, Martial Maciel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.
- [24:42]
Narrator/Host
My name is Elena Sada. And this is my story. It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out.
- [24:54]
Evan Ratliff
This season on Sacred Scandal. Hear the full story from the woman who lived it. Witness the journey from devout follower to determined survivor as Helena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him. Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light. Listen to Sacred the Many secrets of Martial Maciel as part of the My Cultura podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
- [25:25]
Narrator/Host
In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.
- [25:35]
Evan Ratliff
We had 30 agents ready to go.
- [25:37]
Walter Isaacson
With shotguns and rifles, and you name it.
- [25:40]
Narrator/Host
But what they find is not what they expected.
- [25:44]
Walter Isaacson
Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these large amounts of. They go, is this your daughter? I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years.
- [25:57]
Narrator/Host
Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray.
- [26:09]
Walter Isaacson
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
- [26:13]
Narrator/Host
Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It may look different, but Native culture is very alive. My name is Nicole Garcia, and on Burnsage Burned Bridges, we aim to explore that culture. It was a huge honor to become a television writer because it does feel oddly like very traditional and feels like Bob Dylan going electric, that this is something we've been doing for like, hundreds of years. You carry with you a sense of purpose and confidence. That's Ciara Teller Ornelas, who, with Rutherford Falls, became the first Native showrunner in television history. On the podcast Burn Bridges, we explore her story along with other Native stories, such as the creation of the first Native Comic Con or the importance of reservation basket. Every day, Native people are striving to keep traditions alive while navigating the modern world, influencing and bringing our culture into the mainstream. Listen to Burn Sage Burn bridges on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [27:27]
Evan Ratliff
In the middle of all this, In October of 2020, Jennifer Doudna gets a call in the middle of the night.
- [27:34]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, she's in a conference, the first in person conference she's been to. I think it's down in Palo Alto, you know, an hour down from Berkeley and in the Middle of the night, the phone rings and she doesn't answer it, it's on vibrate. But finally she answers and it's a reporter at 4am saying, what's your reaction to the Nobel Prize? She says, who won the Nobel Prize? The reporter says, you did. And with Emmanuel looks at her phone and she sees a lot of missed calls from Stockholm, Sweden. And she says, oh, okay, I'll call you back. I stayed up that night, even if Jennifer Doudna didn't. I was here in New Orleans and I set my alarm for whatever it is, 3am, 4am for when it was going to be announced in Stockholm. And they started announcing it and they said, this year's prize goes for the tool that'll help us with the secrets of life and edit our genes. And I go, yes, it's crispr.
- [28:32]
Evan Ratliff
And all of these labs at this point have to some extent turned their attention or part of their attention towards commercializing these technologies, towards finding, through companies, finding the treatments that will actually bring them into human use. And that creates all these other dilemmas, ethical dilemmas that arise out of it. And I want to talk a little bit about that. Can you run us through some of your thought experiments on the implications of CRISPR being used in a variety of different ways?
- [29:05]
Walter Isaacson
I think the big ethical issues are when is it okay to edit our genes? And in the book, I start with a whole lot of cases and say, well, you got to go slowly, step by step because slopes are less slippery that way and this could be a slippery slope. And so you can look at things that are debilitating conditions like sickle cell. And it's a simple edit and you can do it and affect only the individual involved, not reproductive cells. And that's a no brainer to me. There is a person in the book, David Sanchez, who's a sweet, wonderful kid, was 17 when we were doing the book, and he loves playing basketball, except for when he doubles over in pain on the floor because he has sickle cell. And so he becomes part of one of the experiments to treat sickle cell. And they tell him, with CRISPR we can cure this and we can even with crispr, if we do it in reproductive cells or embryos, make it so that your children will never have sickle cell and all of your descendants will never have sickle cell. And David says, that's great. And then he pauses. This is in a documentary he was being interviewed for and says, but maybe I should let my kids decide that maybe that should be their choice. And I said, to him, wait a minute, you know, you doubled over in pain. Do you want that to happen to your kid? He said, well, I learned a lot from sickle cell. I learned perseverance. I learned how to get up off the floor. And so maybe we shouldn't just edit it out of the human species, but use it as treatments at times. And I thought, well, that's amazing for a 17 year old. Have been this morally thoughtful about it. And I asked him again later and he said, now that I think about it, I probably want my kids to be edited so that they'll never have sickle cell. I said, what about perseverance? He said, I want to teach them perseverance, but I don't want them to feel the pain that I felt when I crumple up playing basketball. So these are complicated ethical things. Then you get to the next step of thinking on this slope we're going down and you say, well, you know, if we can edit for sickle cell so that the blood cells are not crumpled and thus carry less oxygen, we can fix it. What if we could edit it so they carry a little bit of extra oxygen, like 50% more oxygen each cell? I could edit my kids and all of my descendants to be amazing Olympic athletes. Is that ethically worse than curing sickle cell? I would say yes. That's a difference between making a cure for a bad disorder or making an enhancement to the human being species. I asked George Church, he says, what do you mean? What's wrong with enhancing the human species? What if we can edit IQ and make it better? All of us want our kids. Maybe we can make our kids taller. Tell me what's wrong with trying to enhance your kids and make them more powerful? So I asked Jennifer, we all have to think about it. One thing that's wrong with it is, is if these genetic treatments will be costly and they will be, you could have it so the rich can buy better genes for their kids than poor people. You don't want to have two species. The genetically, you know, that's the brave new world issue. The genetically enhanced part of the species and the genetically inferior part of the species. Secondly, if you let each individual decide they can go into a clinic and you give them as if it's the genetic supermarket. Here's the list. What do you want? Blond hair, blue eyes? Do you want brown hair? And you can secretly, with nobody knowing, you can check off. What do you want? What would people check off? At the end of the book, I talk about sitting on the balcony here in New Orleans, in Royal street, in the French Quarter. And all sorts of things are happening. A funeral for Leah Chase, a great Creole of color cook. And there's a naked bicycle race for safety, traffic safety. There's a gay pride parades. And you look at the diversity of people, tall and short and straight and gay and trans and black and white, and people from Gallia Day University, sign language. And you think, what if we could edit out all deafness? What if we could edit out so every parent could choose sexual orientation, skin color? Would we hurt the beautiful diversity of our species? These are the moral issues that Jennifer and then at other places I was trying to wrestle with.
- [34:22]
Evan Ratliff
And it raises to return to sort of the big questions, one of them you've touched on here, which is you write about how with something like deafness or autism, if that could be, you know, quote unquote treated. It also raises a question like, what is a disorder? What is a disability? One person's disability is not necessarily another person's disability in this world. And how do we decide which things? Even if you forget about enhancements, what are things that we're even able to treat right?
- [34:54]
Walter Isaacson
And if we in society as a whole make decisions, we'd probably say, let's not edit out being gay. Let's not edit out even being on the autism spectrum. But if you leave it to each individual parent, they might say, I don't want my kid to ever suffer from depression. I don't want them to be even in a small part of the autism spectrum or Asperger's or whatever they want to call it. And maybe you're editing out the Hemingway's, you're editing out Van Gogh, you're editing out people who had either psychological or personal or whatever, or editing out Helen Keller, you know, for being deaf. Was the world better off without Van Gogh and Helen Keller? No. If you're a mother and father and you say your kid will be born deaf, but we can easily change that, would you say, yeah, please change it. I'll let you think, would you do it? And you know, in the book, there's somebody there who's a deaf couple and they're about to have a child. They want to make sure their child is deaf because they want to keep that subculture alive. How much of this should be individual choice or how much should be society as a whole saying, you're not allowed to do some of these things?
- [36:20]
Evan Ratliff
The ethical considerations around CRISPR Cas9 will likely only grow as the technology continues to advance the news around Baby KJ Renewed mainstream interest in the field and what it can accomplish. But Isaacson tells me there's still a long way to go.
- [36:35]
Walter Isaacson
We're not quite as far along as I thought we might be. It's been 10 years, but we have cured sickle cell in patients. Victoria Gray, she's pictured in the book Part of the experiment, but now they're the private companies, CRISPR Therapeutics of Emanuel Sharpin j who have a cure for sickle cell. And there are four or five other type syndromes that we can now fix. The big one about to happen in clinical trials is cancer treatments where you can use CRISPR to change some of the immune system so that your cancer fighting treatments or the cancer cells can be defeated. That's a shorthand of it, but yeah, we are about to have very personalized cancer treatments targeted to your particular tumor, and CRISPR can make it so that that type of treatment can work more easily.
- [37:38]
Evan Ratliff
It did strike me that you end the book on really a note of optimism about both crispr, but also the sort of like, understanding and connection to science that people were having because of the MRNA vaccines at that moment in Covid. And it feels like that has all gone a little bit south or a lot south since that moment. So I'm wondering how you feel, first of all about the way people view science today and how that connects up with how people view what CRISPR can do.
- [38:16]
Walter Isaacson
One of the great tragedies of our time has been over the past few years, a backlash against science as part of the larger backlash against expertise and establishment. So a book like a book on Jennifer Dowd can explain what is it a messenger RNA does. And when people say the MRNA vaccine is going to destroy my DNA and change me forever. No, no, no. Understand it. It doesn't even go into the nucleus of your cell. It's just an rna. It's on the outside of your, you know, the outer part of your cell making protein so it doesn't change your genetic code. Now, that may not, you know, be an easy sell, but it's a beautiful thing to understand the science. And I think it's a shame that after Covid and the great advances that we've had using RNA to make a vaccine within a year, pretty much knocking back the dangers of COVID and using these treatments to cure sickle cell. I think it's important for people to marvel at and understand how these work so that people can be inspired like Jennifer was when she read the double helix to become scientists, or even if you're not going to become a scientist, be awed and inspired by what science can do and the beauty of understanding it so that you can make your own informed judgments about what treatments you may want.
- [40:02]
Evan Ratliff
It feels like that backlash towards science, towards expertise, is either enabling or fueling this current attack on basic science. The funding for basic science to begin with, and you spend a lot of time in the book describing the way these very basic questions of curiosity lead down the road to changes in our lives, positive changes in our lives. How are you feeling in this moment when a lot of basic science feels like it's under threat?
- [40:34]
Walter Isaacson
For 80 years, since the end of World War II, we've had a system that has made the United States the powerhouse in innovation. It was a system set up by Vineva Bush, who was somebody who ran science for the government during the war, including the atom bomb project, but also had been a provost at MIT and started a company, Raytheon. And he said, we're going to have a system where government funds basic science research and does it at university labs and then allows it when it's successful and turns into a tool we can use to be commercialized by companies. If we stop funding that basic research, that means, like, we're destroying the seeds that will become innovations in the future. And China, which is doing huge amounts of basic research, whether it's on life sciences or gene editing or AI, will totally surpass us and so will other places. So there's nothing worse you could do for the future of America.
- [41:38]
Evan Ratliff
You've written about this sort of your view of the revolutions, the revolution of atoms followed by the revolution of bits in the digital era, and now comes the revolution in biology. Do you feel like your perspective on that has changed at all? That they could be slowed down or stopped?
- [41:55]
Walter Isaacson
I think the revolution in the life sciences will define the first half of our century, the next 25 years or so. I think it will be combined with the revolution in artificial intelligence. In fact, if you look at the Nobel Prizes, if you look at Demis Hassabis, who just won, was for applying AI to how proteins fold and how the folding of proteins determines what they can do. Because as James Watson taught us in the double helix, and as Jennifer taught us about rna, the structure of a molecule helps make it a key that can unlock certain things. So as we have AI do protein folding, and as we have AI and machine learning, go through databases of everybody's genetic code and what type of things work and don't work, this whole revolution of life sciences combined with AI technology has unbelievable potential.
- [43:09]
Evan Ratliff
In the next episode of on crispr, we listen to a conversation between Isaacson and Jennifer Doudna at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. You won't want to miss it. On crispr. The Story of Jennifer Doudna is a production of Kaleidoscope and I Heart. This show is based on the writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me, Evan Ratliff and produced by Adriana Tapia with assistance from Alex Zonenbeld. It was mixed by Kyle Murdoch and our studio engineer was Thomas Walsh. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne and Mangasha Tighadour from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell from iheart Podcasts. If you enjoy hearing stories about visionaries in science and technology, check out our other seasons based on the biography that Walter Isaacson has written on Musk for an intimate dive into all the facets of Elon Musk and on Benjamin Franklin to understand how his scientific curiosity shaped society as we know it.
- [44:15]
Narrator/Host
The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [44:29]
Walter Isaacson
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [44:41]
Narrator/Host
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever, wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [44:54]
Evan Ratliff
Sacred Scandal is back, the hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith. For 19 years, Elena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season she's telling her story.
- [45:07]
Narrator/Host
When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen. I was 19 years old when Marcial Macel, the leader of the Legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.
- [45:16]
Evan Ratliff
Surviving meant hiding. Escaping took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the many secrets of Martial Maciel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [45:30]
Narrator/Host
In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.
- [45:39]
Walter Isaacson
Had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.
- [45:45]
Narrator/Host
Five, six white people pushed me in the car. I'm going, what the hell?
- [45:49]
Walter Isaacson
Basically your stay at home moms were.
- [45:50]
Evan Ratliff
Picking up these large amounts of heroin.
- [45:52]
Walter Isaacson
All you gotta do is receive the package. Don't have to open it, just accept it.
- [45:56]
Narrator/Host
She was very upset, crying.
- [45:58]
Walter Isaacson
Once I saw the gun. I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
- [46:01]
Narrator/Host
Listen to the Chinatown sound on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Stephanie, Beatriz and Melissa Fumaro, and this is More Better. We are jumping right in and ready to hear from you, your thoughts, your questions, your feelings about socks with sandals. And we're ready to share some possibly questionable advice and hot takes. God, that sucks so hard, though. I'm so sorry. Can you out petty them? Can you match their pettiness for funsies? Yeah, all the things. Because aren't we all trying to get a little more better? Listen to More better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.