Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR

Summary

Radiolab – "Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR" (June 6, 2015)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the revolutionary genetic technology known as CRISPR, tracing its discovery, biological function, and the profound ethical and societal questions it raises. Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich explore the origins of CRISPR, its role as a microbial immune system, and its explosive potential as a cheap, precise, and universal gene-editing tool. Through conversations with science writer Carl Zimmer, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, and other researchers, the episode weaves scientific insight with the excitement, hope, and anxiety surrounding the technology's rapidly expanding capabilities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Discovery of CRISPR: A Scientific Mystery

• Conference Party Anecdote
  Jad Abumrad recounts an encounter with excited biologists at a conference:

  “They started to lose their shit, like, genuinely lose their shit about this thing called CRISPR.” (01:56)

• CRISPR first observed in a 1987 Japanese paper as a strange repeated DNA pattern in E. coli (03:02)
• Over time, these sequences were found in many bacteria, suggesting unknown but important biological function.

2. Biology of CRISPR: Bacteria's Immune System

• The strange DNA: repetitive sequences with unique “blurps” between them.
• Scientists discover “blurps” are snippets of viral DNA:

  "All these bacteria have little snippets of virus DNA wedged in these particular places in their genome, which is a little weird if you think about it." – Carl Zimmer (06:23)

• Eugene Koonin proposes these are virus “mugshots”—basically a bacterial memory of invaders, akin to a most-wanted poster (08:13)
• Mechanism: When attacked by a familiar virus, bacteria use CRISPR to recognize and immediately destroy invaders using “molecular assassins”:

  “Take this mugshot. If you see anything that matches this pattern, kill it.” – Carl Zimmer (11:15)

3. CRISPR as a Powerful Genetic Tool

• Jennifer Doudna and others realize CRISPR could be repurposed for targeted genome editing:

  “This could be an amazing technology... This is a tool we can use to cut DNA where we want to cut DNA.” – Jennifer Doudna (12:50, 12:57)

• Implications: Targeting any gene (e.g., those causing diseases like hemophilia), “smart scissors” can precisely cut and potentially replace genetic material (13:48)
• Repair is easier than expected — new genetic material can be “thrown” in the vicinity, and repair enzymes install it (14:03).
• Cheap and precise compared to older techniques ($75 vs. $5,000 per experiment) (16:13)
• Works in virtually any organism:

  “I'm waiting for someone to say CRISPR doesn't work in species X and I have not heard of that.” – Carl Zimmer (16:39)

4. The Post-CRISPR World: Possibilities and Perils

• Beyond curing disease, CRISPR can be used for “semi-science-fiction”:
  • Resurrecting extinct creatures (e.g., making a chicken into a dinosaur-like creature, or bringing back woolly mammoths) (21:57)
  • “Designer” traits in humans (e.g., taller children, stronger muscles) (22:37)
• Raises a profound philosophical/ethical debate:

  "There's something about human beings, including scientist human beings... there's an angelic side ... and there's a very, very difficult side. As the human beings get more and more power... that future will include the imaginations, both light and dark, of humans." – Robert Krulwich (24:54)

5. Ethics, Limits, and the Start of a New Era

• Jennifer Doudna and others underline the red line: no use on human sperm/egg cells or embryos (27:18)
• Editing embryos = permanent, heritable changes; consent is impossible (27:26)

  "If you imagine making these changes and they cascade through generation after generation... it's kind of profound." – Jennifer Doudna (27:41)

• Line is quickly crossed: Chinese researchers announce editing of human embryos with CRISPR (28:01)
• Results not perfect: success only in 28/86 embryos, with errors present (30:37)
• Stresses that while not ready for use in humans, the technology is advancing fast and could soon be “guaranteed safe” (30:55)
• Societal acceptance likely, given precedent with IVF and gene selection (32:07)
• Irresistible logic of genetic upgrades, e.g., for disease resistance:

  "If you'd like, for an extra thousand dollars, we will... use CRISPR to give them the Alzheimer protecting variant. Would you like that?" – Carl Zimmer (32:26)

• Hosts acknowledge “we've already answered the question” about whether humanity will use this tool (33:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• CRISPR’s Name and Branding:

  “It’s like a furniture manufacturer or something.” – Jad Abumrad (04:58)

• Mechanism Metaphor:

  "It's like little Polaroid shots of the enemy." – Robert Krulwich (08:08) “Imagine Pac man, but kind of misshapen and rough.” – Jennifer Doudna (11:25)

• First Use in Human Embryos (China):

  "It's a way of hacking evolution itself." – Alex Honl (28:09)

• The Unstoppable Progression:

  "Who's going to say no to that?" – Jad Abumrad (33:41)

• Cultural & Ethical Reflections:

  "I think we should cringe a little as opposed to just having a big party." – Robert Krulwich (26:18)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Main story begins/party anecdote — 01:23
• CRISPR’s bacterial origin & function — 03:04 to 14:44
• CRISPR as a tool, advantages over old methods — 15:02–17:30
• Speculative uses: de-extincting species, designer babies — 21:41–23:41
• Ethical debate: Should we do this? — 24:38–27:47
• Crossing ethical lines: First human embryo edits in China — 27:55–30:47
• Comparisons to IVF and likely future acceptance — 32:07–33:46

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Conclusion

Radiolab’s “Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR” navigates from the roots of CRISPR as a microbial “memory” system to its sudden arrival as the world’s most potent, accessible, and controversial gene editing tool. With playful banter, vivid metaphors, and growing unease, the episode foreshadows the profound choices and challenges humanity now faces—from curing diseases and resurrecting mammoths, to editing human destiny itself. The conversation closes on a sober recognition: the future of CRISPR is not just a scientific question, but an ethical and societal test already underway.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Jennifer Doudna]

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[Molly Webster]

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[Jennifer Doudna]

Huh.

[Carl Zimmer]

That sounds easier than I thought.

[Jennifer Doudna]

You got this?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?

[Jennifer Doudna]

You will find them where you left them.

[Robert Krulwich]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Carl Zimmer]

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[Jad Abumrad]

We help you save valid through 123 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC.

[Jennifer Doudna]

And npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, so let me explain to you how I got started with this.

[Robert Krulwich]

You were some kind of an affair.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So I'll tell you how. I was at a party.

[Robert Krulwich]

Party.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was a conference where they had a lot of different people of different disciplines come together. You know, one of those. There are panel discussions of various things. And so we were at one of the, like, functions, and it was a situation where, like, dinner hadn't yet been served and there was a lot of booze being served, so everybody was, like, drunk on an empty stomach. So I was standing there with some biologists.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, they're the fun ones, the junk biologists.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, as my people, apparently. And they. They started to lose their shit, like, genuinely lose their shit about this thing called crispr. And, like, I have never seen scientists this excited about anything. So I was like, what is this thing? What is crispr? And they were trying to explain it to me, but they couldn't slow down enough for me to get it. I gathered it had something to do with genetics. And then at one point, one of the biologists turned to me and he was like, I'll tell you what it is. I can use CRISPR to take a little dog and poof, make it into a big dog. Give me a Chihuahua, I could turn it into the size of a Great Dane. And I was like, no, you can't. He's like, yes, I can. I could do it with crispr. I was like, what the hell is this thing?

[Carl Zimmer]

You want me to sit Here, as usual. Yeah. If you sit here, I will get out.

[Jad Abumrad]

I didn't mean to imply anything.

[Carl Zimmer]

No, no, no, no, no. We'd be sitting here together.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what happened was I came back, and I immediately called science writer Carl Zimmer, because I just figured for this kind of thing, this is a Carl thing. I gotta talk to Carl. So I basically asked him, like, why all the fuss? Maybe it was just the alcohol or. But maybe there's something really happening here.

[Carl Zimmer]

Oh, there's something totally happening here. I mean, it's big.

[Jad Abumrad]

He started at the beginning.

[Carl Zimmer]

So you can actually find, like, the first reference to CRISPR in a 1987 paper from some Japanese scientists. They basically described something weird in E. Coli. And they said, we don't know what this is.

[Jad Abumrad]

E. Coli are bacteria inside humans. And like all living things, E. Coli is made up of DNA. A's and T's and C's and G's. And what happened was that these scientists were reading a chunk of that genetic.

[Carl Zimmer]

Code when they found this really strange stretch of DNA.

[Jad Abumrad]

Strange how?

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, so basically what it was was five identical sequences. In a row, and then they were separated by very short sequences in between them that were all different from each other. These.

[Jad Abumrad]

These little blurps would be like.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they looked at this, and they're like, what? This is nothing like we've seen before.

[Jennifer Doudna]

Repeated sequences in bacterial genomes are kind of unusual.

[Carl Zimmer]

Seems very strange.

[Jennifer Doudna]

Some biologists felt that, you know, there must be a purpose for these. Among those purpose seekers, Jennifer Doudna, University of California, Berkeley.

[Jad Abumrad]

She's a cell biologist.

[Jennifer Doudna]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's Doudna, not Dudna.

[Jennifer Doudna]

It's Doudna. I used to be called the dude sometimes in school, but in the movie.

[Robert Krulwich]

She will be played by Jeff Bridges.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. Anyhow, as time goes on, scientists start seeing these little repeat blurp repeats everywhere.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Or at least some bacteria.

[Carl Zimmer]

Lots and lots and lots of species of bacteria, they say. Hmm. Okay, wait a minute.

[Jennifer Doudna]

That's kind of cool.

[Carl Zimmer]

They're finding it so often that they decided they had to give it a name.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this where the name CRISPR comes from?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes, the. The full official name is clustered regularly.

[Jennifer Doudna]

Interspaced short palindromic repeats.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God.

[Carl Zimmer]

I don't know why they called it crispr. It's kind of a crispr.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's like a furniture manufacturer or something.

[Carl Zimmer]

It sounds like an app.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

Crispr, crispr.

[Jad Abumrad]

But now scientists have this puzzle.

[Robert Krulwich]

If nature at this level preserves something intact here and here and here and here and here. And here. And some of these heres are. Are creatures that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. You figure, well, whatever this is, it's doing something. It's doing something.

[Jad Abumrad]

But what?

[Carl Zimmer]

It doesn't take very long before the first big clue comes up.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, fast forward 2005. Now, scientists have these big searchable databases of DNA sequences. So some scientists think, well, let's do a search. Let's see if these repeating patterns we keep finding match anything else that's out there in the world.

[Carl Zimmer]

And these scientists are using computers to just line up these stretches of DNA with thousands upon thousands of different species, and then click, all of a sudden.

[Jad Abumrad]

They discover that those bits of DNA between the repeats, the stuff in the.

[Carl Zimmer]

Middle, those blurps, these are matching virus DNA. Like you can find viruses with genes where these little, you know, these little.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the bacteria had virus inside of them?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

Does that mean that a virus brought it into these cells? Does it tell you anything about the origin of it?

[Carl Zimmer]

The first recognition was, this is virus DNA. Somehow all these bacteria have little snippets of virus DNA wedged in these particular places in their genome, which is a.

[Jad Abumrad]

Little weird if you think about it. I mean, these are totally different creatures. It would be like inside a human finding a little bit of mosquito DNA.

[Robert Krulwich]

How do we interpret this?

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, actually, there was one scientist, his name is Eugene Koonin, who looked at these results and just said, okay, I get it. It's a defense system.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[Robert Krulwich]

Why would he think that?

[Carl Zimmer]

Because he's a brilliant man.

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean? If I went to a large sanitation dump and I found a teeny bit of human hair, why would I think, oh, I get it, It's a defense mechanism? I wouldn't know. It's just like a bit of human.

[Carl Zimmer]

Right. Well, you see, that metaphor might sort of betray your lack of skill in microbiology. I'm just saying, like, this is not a dump, all right?

[Molly Webster]

This is.

[Carl Zimmer]

Bacteria are not gonna just let virus DNA get into their genes willy nilly, okay? Remember, viruses are the big enemy. If you're bacteria, viruses make your life a nightmare. Think about in the ocean, okay? The ocean is full of viruses, and viruses kill up to 40% of all of those bacteria every day.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Carl Zimmer]

Every day? Yeah. And we know that they have defenses. What Eugene Koonin said was, okay, I'm gonna bet that these bacteria are somehow grabbing pieces of DNA from viruses, and then they're storing it, and now they have a way of recognizing that they. Those viruses, if they come in later.

[Robert Krulwich]

It'S like little Polaroid shots of the enemy, right? Know thy enemy.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah, like a most wanted poster. What you call the mugshot.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Eugene Koonin, leader of the.

[Carl Zimmer]

Evolutionary genomics group at the national center for biotechnology Information.

[Jad Abumrad]

He's the guy that Carl referenced who thunk up the whole idea that maybe these bits of virus DNA inside the bacteria is. Is the bacteria trying to defend itself.

[Carl Zimmer]

But really, if I would credit myself with anything here, it was not so much guessing this, because, you know, when you see these identical sequences, that gets pretty obvious. It is figuring out how the mechanism was likely to work.

[Jad Abumrad]

So can you walk us through how the mechanism is likely to work?

[Carl Zimmer]

All right. What happens is, you know, when a virus comes in to a cell, it just kind of explodes and just kind of releases naked genes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Basically, if you're this bacteria, these things might take over your cell. So you've got to respond.

[Carl Zimmer]

Most of the time, you have multiple weapons of defense.

[Jad Abumrad]

If you've never seen this virus before, usually the first thing you do, says Eugene, is you send out these enzymes to attack the viruses. They're sort of like the ground troops.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they fight really hard, but much of the time. They fail. And then no one will hear about you again.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're not terribly sophisticated fighters. So very often the virus takes over, the bacteria dies.

[Carl Zimmer]

But there is some non zero probability that you actually survive the attack.

[Jad Abumrad]

If you do, then what the bacteria will do is send in some new enzymes to basically clean up, to go out, find any stray viruses, and then.

[Carl Zimmer]

Cut the enemy DNA into suitable small pieces.

[Jad Abumrad]

And here, he says, is where you get to the storage part. Those enzymes will then take those little bits of virus and shove them into the bacteria's own own DNA, Right in those little spaces between the repeats right.

[Carl Zimmer]

There and nowhere else.

[Robert Krulwich]

So I use those spaces in my own DNA as a storage facility?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes, if you will, you use it as a memory device, because here's what.

[Jad Abumrad]

Happens next time that virus shows up. Sprays its genes everywhere. Now you are prepared. And this is where the CRISPR story really gets going. Because instead of sending out the ground troops, who are probably going to get their asses beat, now you can actually send out the big guns. And in fact, what the cell does is it will manufacture these special molecular assassins, and it'll give those assassins a copy of that little bit of virus DNA it has in storage, basically saying, here, take. Take this mugshot. If you see anything that matches this pattern, kill it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ew. And these attackers, do we know what one of them looks like?

[Jennifer Doudna]

Yep. So we know what the protein looks like. It actually looks. I would describe it a little bit.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like a clamshell sort of imagine Pac man, but kind of misshapen and rough. And each one of these guys, what.

[Carl Zimmer]

It has is a copy of that virus DNA. It's got the mugshot that it's kind of waving around.

[Jad Abumrad]

What then happens is that whenever the Pac man bumps into some virus DNA.

[Carl Zimmer]

It pulls apart the DNA, unzips it reads it.

[Jad Abumrad]

If it's not the right one, it goes on. Nope.

[Molly Webster]

Mm.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mm.

[Carl Zimmer]

And if that RNA has the same sequence, then click, click, it. It just locks in.

[Jennifer Doudna]

And if that happens, then the DNA is trapped and molecular blades come out.

[Carl Zimmer]

And chop, Cutting its head with a mighty blow. Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow. So this is smart scissors.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's like, are you like the thing I got? Are you like the thing I got? You're like the thing I got. Snip, snip.

[Carl Zimmer]

All right, now we're gonna kill.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, I see.

[Carl Zimmer]

And it has to be exact. It has to be an exact match.

[Jad Abumrad]

When scientists first discovered this whole system, they were fascinated.

[Carl Zimmer]

They were like. They were working it out. They were like, oh, okay. Then this happens. And this happens. This happens. Cool.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then in walks the dude. Jennifer Doudna with a crazy idea. I don't know if it's crazy, but radical.

[Jennifer Doudna]

This could be an amazing technology.

[Carl Zimmer]

This is a tool.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is a tool.

[Jennifer Doudna]

Yeah, right?

[Carl Zimmer]

This is a tool that we can use to cut DNA where we want to cut DNA.

[Jad Abumrad]

Her basic thought was, why don't we turn this defense into offense? Because these things, they seem to be really good at cutting, and yet they only seem to cut the things that are on their mug shot. So maybe I could just replace what's on their mugshot. So instead of them going after viruses, maybe they could go after a gene that causes Huntington's disease or hemophilia, for example. And this is actually something that's been done. Say you got a mouse with something like hemophilia, okay? This is a disease that's caused by one bad gene. So what you do is you take these little surgeons, you give them the mug shot for the bad gene, then you stick the surgeon with the new mugshot in a mouse, then you set it loose, and just like it's programmed to, it will find that gene, and click, click, chop.

[Carl Zimmer]

The scissors will end up cutting exactly the gene you wanted to cut.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the bad gene's gone. Now the question is, how do you put in the good gene? Right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

It turns out, actually, according To Jennifer Dowd. Now, that. That's actually not as hard as you would think.

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Apparently what you do is just throw this new good gene Kind of in the neighborhood of where the old gene used to be, Just in the general vicinity.

[Jennifer Doudna]

You don't have to get super precise. I mean, it turns out that, you know, there are repair enzymes that are probably continually surveying and checking for breaks.

[Jad Abumrad]

And she says what'll happen is that inside the cell, these repair crews, they'll come along, they'll see the break, they'll see the good gene just sitting there next to the break. They'll be like, all right, I'll just stick it in.

[Robert Krulwich]

Put the pretty guy into space.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly.

[Jennifer Doudna]

So we take advantage of a natural repair pathway that cells have.

[Jad Abumrad]

They trick both the cutters and the fixers.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah. Now we're not assassinating anymore. Now we're actually engineering. We've gone from killing to ref. Fashioning.

[Robert Krulwich]

Although haven't we been designing genes, doing genetic. A form of genetic engineering for, I don't know, like, 30 years?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, but not like this.

[Beth Shapiro]

Genome editing technologies have been around for a long time, but none of them have been as powerful as crispr.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Beth Shapiro from UC Santa Cruz. She was actually one of the biologists that I drunkenly talked to at that thing.

[Beth Shapiro]

Was it a modern art museum? I can't even really remember.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't remember either.

[Robert Krulwich]

Must have been quite an evening to have the setting be so vague.

[Jad Abumrad]

Anyhow, here's how she put it to us. Back in the day, this was just like two years ago. You would have these gene editor things. You would take one, put it in.

[Beth Shapiro]

A cell, and what happened before was you would give it some instructions about where to go, and it might go there, but it might go to somewhere that's kind of related to where that was.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's like, take a right at staten island, but it takes a left.

[Beth Shapiro]

And not only would it take a left at staten island and not find there, but it would have cost you a fortune and taken up six months of your time to get that thing. And now, you know, it's really easy.

[Jad Abumrad]

You just give it that mugshot, and.

[Beth Shapiro]

It goes, I'm gonna find that guy.

[Molly Webster]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it seems to be pretty precise. And it's cheap. Like, the old tools would set you back about five grand just to use them once crisper, about 75 bucks. And here's the kicker, says Carl. It seems at the moment that you can take these things out of bacteria, stick them into almost any other creature, and it still works.

[Carl Zimmer]

You can use the same CRISPR system on anything.

[Robert Krulwich]

Can you like, do it? If corn is vulnerable to certain pests, do you can do it in corn.

[Carl Zimmer]

Do it in corn, do it in anything. I have not. I'm waiting for someone to say CRISPR doesn't work in species X and I have not heard of that.

[Jad Abumrad]

So basically what you have for the first time in science is this gene editing technology that is cheap, precise and possibly universal. And Jennifer Doudna says the moment the full impact of that landed on her.

[Jennifer Doudna]

I really, I literally had, you know, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. Just processing the fact that this thing exists, you know, and that you could actually program it to cut DNA and just like this molecular scissors and I can just program it and it cuts DNA wherever I want.

[Robert Krulwich]

It is amazing unless you think about it further, which we will do in just a moment. I feel a cloud coming in over the horizon just over there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you see?

[Robert Krulwich]

I see it's getting sort of dark over there, but we'll be right back.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi, this is Lauren from Atlanta, Georgia.

[Carl Zimmer]

Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

[Carl Zimmer]

More information about [e-mail].

[Jennifer Doudna]

Radiolab is supported by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, Bilt works to make it more worthwhile. By paying rent through Bilt, you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines. A future rent payment, your next Lyft ride and. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points. Get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios and enjoy exclusive experiences just for built members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbuilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab.

[Alex Honl]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service, that's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control by uniting employees teams and departments in one system. Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at RIP P L-I N G.com/radiolab. Terms and conditions apply.

[Molly Webster]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this is an ad by BetterHelp. So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter, and basically once it becomes dark outside of my window, I feel like the rest of the world disappears and I'm just alone and there's nothing left to do but watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon. And yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I haven't responded to, and you know what? I'm gonna write them back right now. Hi, sorry I've been missing. How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner? Therapy is the same way. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire and they find a licensed therapist who they think you'll like. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Alex Honl]

Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm Alex Honl, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so clearly the possibilities are there to use CRISPR to treat disease, right? But what if you could get a little more fanciful, right? Like, what if you could actually go back in time and resurrect long lost creatures? I mean, this is something that Beth Shapiro has talked about a lot.

[Beth Shapiro]

We could reconstruct using a computer what the genome sequence of the ancestor of all birds was. And that would have been a kind of dinosaur. And then we could use CRISPRs to turn a chicken into that thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Or what if you could take an elephant and snip, snip, snip, gradually turn it into its long lost relative, the woolly mammoth. No, because they're related. But if you're.

[Robert Krulwich]

But the woolly mammoth is over well.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. But if you know the woolly mammoth genome, which they do because they apparently got it off some bone or some hair, then you could compare the number of differences. Use crispr to crispr out the different parts of the elephant and put in woolly mammoth instead.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you can, in effect go backwards in time and make changes, then obviously I think you can go the other way too, right? I mean, humans are good at design. We're designing animals. So if it doesn't seem to me to be a crazy notion to imagine parents all over the world wanting, I don't know, taller children, so silencing the short genes and favoring the taller genes, getting rid of weak muscles and going for stronger ones and on and on and on, and I don't know where the designing stops.

[Jad Abumrad]

We sort of got into all this with Carl Zimmer, science writer.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you can be very, very gene specific and you learn more and more about genes over time, why couldn't you invent a creature? Why couldn't you make a pig with wings? You might one day get sophisticated enough to do that.

[Carl Zimmer]

There's no winged pig lab. You know, the best you're going to hope for right now is a woolly mammoth lab. And that's down the hall from where the real action is.

[Robert Krulwich]

But now there's a hall, and at the end of the hall is a winged pig lab. It hasn't been built yet. It may be 20 years from now, but that's what you're looking at.

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, I think. But the thing is that.

[Robert Krulwich]

What's wrong with this, though? Why shouldn't anyone realize that that's really.

[Carl Zimmer]

What we're talking about, make winged pigs just because of sort of evolutionary barriers. Okay, well, there's no real reason for.

[Robert Krulwich]

Pigs to fly, except for the joke.

[Carl Zimmer]

Calm down, calm down.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm just joking.

[Carl Zimmer]

I mean, okay, I don't think that we need a federal Department of Homeland pig with wing security. I think we're okay there. All right. What we do need is like, we do need to, like, figure out what are we going to do about CRISPR in humans? I mean, they're going to be using CRISPR for cancer. Okay. They're going to take people's immune cells out of their body, and they're going to use CRISPR to basically allow them to make proteins, are going to be able to grab onto cancer cells and attack their own cancer. Yeah, but you have to be for that.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean, you have to be.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, I don't know. I mean, are you. For all your.

[Carl Zimmer]

You are tinkering with someone's own body, you are altering their own cells. You know, dude, where do I.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's just. I tell you, this is me. I don't know if it's a religious thought or just the thought of a conservative person, but, I mean, I grew up in the test tube baby era. I now know many wonderful adult formerly test tube babies. And I remember being astonished that no, so I can't. I don't know where the sacred begins and ends anymore on that particular turf. I guess what I'm instead on is I'm on a Hobbesian view of human beings. That there is something about human beings, including scientist human beings, all human beings, that there is a darkness and a light. There's an angelic side to being human, and there's a very, very difficult side. And as the human beings get more and more power to create and design and essentially create a future, that future will include the imaginations, both light and dark, of humans. And that will be new in the world.

[Carl Zimmer]

I don't think it is new because if you go back to the start of the scientific revolution, something like Francis Bacon would say explicitly, like, science is going to be both about learning about how the world works and using that knowledge to control it. You know, this has been discovered. This has been published. Everybody knows it exists. If you're gonna say like, okay, now we're gonna all. We're gonna outlaw this.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm not suggesting that.

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, what are you suggesting then?

[Robert Krulwich]

I think we should cringe a little as opposed to just having a big party.

[Carl Zimmer]

All right, let's all cringe. Ready? One, two, three.

[Jad Abumrad]

Don't make fun of it.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, that's not true.

[Carl Zimmer]

We've cringed. Now what? What do we do now?

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't know.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, we all cringed if that's what you're arguing.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, you cringe. You cringed. You cringed meanly. And you cringe. You cringe with attitude. I'm cringing with.

[Jad Abumrad]

I would like to.

[Carl Zimmer]

Because you're afraid of, like, dragons. You're saying you're saying, oh my God.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, I'm afraid of dragons.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so that conversation with Carl was four months ago and a lot has happened in that time because to the question that you asked, like where does the sacred begin and end? Well, one of the lines that had been drawn by Jennifer Doudna and others was that we should not use this technology on humans who haven't been born yet, meaning not on sperm cells or egg cells. Because if you, crispr, say an embryo.

[Jennifer Doudna]

That is a permanent change, right? That is a change to the DNA that will be passed on to their.

[Jad Abumrad]

Children and their children's children and their children's children's children.

[Jennifer Doudna]

And you can't ask the person if that's okay because you're doing it before they're born.

[Jad Abumrad]

Consent becomes a real issue. And if you imagine making these changes and they cascade through generation after generation.

[Jennifer Doudna]

You could affect the evolution of organisms. And it's, I don't want to say trivial, but it's, you know, it's fairly easy to do it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Jennifer Doudna]

It's kind of profound. I feel it's really profound.

[Jad Abumrad]

Profound. But it was just an idea. That is until.

[Jennifer Doudna]

For the first time in history, researchers.

[Molly Webster]

In China have successfully edited the human genome in an embryo.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just two months ago, it was announced that a Chinese team from Sun Yatsin.

[Jennifer Doudna]

University used a technique called CRISPR to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Edit DNA in human embryos.

[Alex Honl]

It's a way of hacking evolution itself.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, this is hugely controversial. Now these embryos the Chinese team had edited, they were created through IVF and they were not viable.

[Jennifer Doudna]

These are embryos that are not going to actually develop into a person, so they're going to be discarded anyway.

[Jad Abumrad]

But still, if they could figure it out with those embryos, what's to stop any of us from going further? Biologists and bioethicists are sounding an alarm.

[Robert Krulwich]

The scientists face accusations that they crossed.

[Jad Abumrad]

An ethical lie, that this sort of.

[Carl Zimmer]

Thing could be sort of a slippery slope towards designer babies, essentially genetically engineering.

[Jad Abumrad]

The human race.

[Carl Zimmer]

To kind of test your levels.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. Now that the cringe party had spread and Robert didn't seem like such a loon, we called up Carl again.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, we have to revisit. We have to revisit because in our Armageddon conversation, in which I believe I was extremely alarmist and you were extremely down putting, I feel that I should do a small little parade called the. Remember the Alamo. It's like, remember, remember China. And you have to. So you should just begin anytime you want, like getting on your knees and saying how Sorry, you are. And we can start from there.

[Carl Zimmer]

I'm sorry. So are we actually surrounded by an army of clones with superpowers?

[Robert Krulwich]

Not yet. Not yet, but I think the dike has been open. I believe I'm going to quote somebody who said maybe a few weeks ago, I think he wrote. Maybe it was last week. Even writing for National Geographic, I think it was. Maybe it was somebody named Carl who said that the news from China and that news was probably the beginning of an entire new era.

[Carl Zimmer]

I think I actually said it was a historical moment.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's right, yes.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes. And I still stand by that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you feel differently now than the first time we talked?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, that's really the question.

[Carl Zimmer]

I don't feel different, actually, because there's really no scientific surprise here.

[Jad Abumrad]

He says people have been doing all these CRISPR experiments on all these different mammals.

[Carl Zimmer]

We're mammals.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is bound to happen. And in fact, it may be happening more than we think. One account in the journal Nature said that four other Chinese labs are doing this kind of work as we speak. But Carl also told us, which he said was unsurprising, too. But I actually find it kind of surprising that the CRISPR work this Chinese team did didn't work very well.

[Carl Zimmer]

It worked kind of. I mean, in only a few of the cases did they really get exactly what they wanted.

[Jad Abumrad]

They tried using CRISPR in about 86 embryos, and they only got to work right in maybe 28. And in a lot of them, CRISPRs made the wrong cuts and screwed up the cells.

[Jennifer Doudna]

And that led them to conclude that this is a technology that's not ready right now for application in the human germline. And I agree.

[Carl Zimmer]

Oh, we're sort of. We still are in this kind of fortunate position where we can say, oh, well, it's dangerous, so we shouldn't use it on human embryos. I just don't think that we're going to be able to sort of find refuge there in, like, 10 or 20 years. In 10 or 20 years, you know, CRISPR will be so sophisticated that people will be able to say, I can get you the change you want, and I can do it safely. I can guarantee you that you will have human embryos that have the alteration in the particular gene you want. So then what?

[Jad Abumrad]

In fact, Jennifer Doudna told us that this experiment or similar experiments have been repeated in mice with more advanced CRISPR systems, because apparently there are many different kinds. And there it was done with almost no errors.

[Carl Zimmer]

Sometimes I feel like we're sort of displacing all our ethical concerns onto something that hasn't happened yet. If we really are concerned about what we're doing to the human gene pool, you know, it's already here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Take as an example, in vitro fertilization. About 60,000 kids are born a year through IVF, and it's probable that some of those parents chose whether they wanted a boy or a girl.

[Carl Zimmer]

And when people started doing ivf, there was a huge controversy. People said this was dangerous, this was unnatural. I don't see people who are unable to sleep at night because of the existence of ivf.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

You know, now I'm going to sound like I'm on Robert's side of this. I mean. Okay, so. So it won't hurt.

[Robert Krulwich]

It won't. It won't. It will.

[Carl Zimmer]

Okay. All right, here we go. So. Okay, so. So you guys know about all the stuff going on in Iceland where they're looking at people's DNA and, you know, they're looking for disease genes and so on. And when they were looking at these Icelandic people, they found that some people had a gene that protects them against Alzheimer's. It reduces their odds of getting Alzheimer's. Let's imagine your doctor said, now, if you'd like, for an extra thousand dollars, we will take these IVF embryos and we will use CRISPR to give them the Alzheimer protecting variant. Would you like that? Do you want to add that to your. To your procedure?

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

Or would you like your child to face a future of Alzheimer's? Your choice.

[Jad Abumrad]

See, here's my thing. Here's my thing with this whole. With this whole thing. I'm a little bit haunted by the thing you said, which is that when it's not dangerous anymore, what will we do? And I'm afraid we've already answered that question, that it's not a question that's open anymore. Because if we're already doing this kind of stuff and who's going to say no to that? Who's going to say no to that?

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what he just was demonstrating. Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, we've already answered the question.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah, we may have.

[Jad Abumrad]

Many thanks to science writer Carl Zimmer, who's written many books. You can check them [e-mail] [e-mail] this piece was produced by Molly Webster. We had original music this hour by Eric Kowalski, otherwise known as Casino versus Japan.

[Robert Krulwich]

Special thanks to Anna Rasquet, Paz Lee.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maguire, Dr. Blake Wiedenhalf, Dr. Luciano Maraffini, Dr. Sean Burgess, and Dr. Jun Wei Shi. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulowicz.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[Beth Shapiro]

To hear the message again, press 2 to delete it. Start of message. Hello, this is carl zimmer. Hi, this is beth shapiro. Hello, this is jennifer doudna. Radiolab is produced by judd attenbrad.

[Carl Zimmer]

Our staff includes brenda farrell, ellen horn.

[Beth Shapiro]

Dylan keefe, matt kilty, lynn levy, andy mills, lateef nusser, melissa o', donnell, kelsey padgett, arianne wack, molly webster, sean wheeler and jamie york.

[Carl Zimmer]

I think I said wabster. Let me try it again.

[Beth Shapiro]

With help from danny lewis, kelly prime and damiano marchetti.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our fact checkers are eva dasher and michelle harris.

[Beth Shapiro]

Awesome. Thank you much.

[Jad Abumrad]

See you later.

[Beth Shapiro]

End.