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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
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And I'm Michael Stevens. Today I want to tell you about something I've discovered.
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A
Go on.
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B
A new way to make twins.
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A
Is it ethical?
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B
Oh, it's ethical. It's not easy.
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A
Okay.
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B
There's two ways to make twins.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And the first way is the normal way. You and your partner just really hope that that zygote splits into two babies.
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Genetically identical.
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Genetically identical individuals. The second way is for you and your partner to have about 70 trillion children.
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A
Okay, that sounds like quite a lot of work.
- [00:38]
B
It's not that bad. All it requires is birthing 70,000 children a second.
- [00:44]
A
What, for your entire fertile life?
- [00:46]
B
Well, I mean, for your entire fertile life. Not mine. My partner's. Luckily, you're not gonna get much else done. No, no. But wouldn't it be cool? I'll talk about how this works in a moment.
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A
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [01:06]
B
Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses, and st as junk.
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A
But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.
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It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.
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A
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereestiscience.
- [02:07]
B
No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more@m365copilot.com Work ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer all day play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and Put your summer on track. Red Bull summer all day play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.
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A
That, I mean, I think, for all of us, went in a different direction than we were expecting.
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B
Well, there's two kinds of twins. There's the fraternal twin, which is also called the dizygotic twin. And what happens there is that two zygotes form. What's a zygote? When the sperm and the egg mix, they make a zygote. That's the very first stage, and it contains the unique genetic sequence for an individual. Now, if two eggs happen to get fertilized by two different sperm, you get two zygotes dizygotic, and they're both in the womb, and they both become kids who have, like, the same birthday but are like siblings to each other genetically.
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A
Yeah. However, you just so happen to be
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B
sharing a womb, you just so happen to be sharing a womb with no view. Well, limited view.
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A
Well, you can see each other.
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B
You can see each other. That's kind of cute. But if one zygote forms, okay, one genetic sequence for one individual, and then that zygote splits into two. You now have two of the same individual that gestate and get born and have the same DNA, more or less. Of course, over time, through epigenetics, their DNA will diverge. But that's what we call monozygotic twins. And they are identical twins.
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A
Mono meaning one, monozygo meaning one.
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B
But what I'm interested in is a kind of twin that I invented that I call not dizygotic, not monozygotic, but doppel. Zygotic.
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Doppelzygotic, as in, like, doppelganger.
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B
We've doubled a zygote, so we have two zygotes that are identical, but not because one split at the same time into two, but because at two different times, the same zygote randomly happened to be made.
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A
So hold on. Where did you get this 70 trillion number from? Is it because you take two parents, right? Mother, father, and the number of different combinations of ways that you can combine the genes?
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B
More or less, yes. We don't know enough about genetic science and reproduction to give really concrete numbers. So 70 trillion is within a degree of magnitude or so one way or the other. What I'm getting at is how many different genetic variations can two parents make
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A
because they have to come from the same individual. Two parents.
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B
That's right. But when you have a kid with someone else. Exactly. Which half they get from the mom and the dad is up to chance. And how the chromosomes change during that conception process is up to chance. But there are only so many, many variations, and there are only so many that are viable. There are only so many combinations that will turn into a kid, and there are only so many that will turn into a human. Like, some of these variations might be, like a different species for all we know. But 70 trillion is a pretty good estimate, based on my important research on Reddit, for how many viable, unique progeny two people could have.
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A
I wonder how many siblings there have ever been. You know, like, how. How close are we to 70 trillion?
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B
I mean, no, nowhere near. There have only been about 110 billion humans to have ever been born in the history of our species. But we can also grab onto the birthday problem. You don't actually need to have 70 trillion kids in order to get a specific possible kid. You'll have to try, like, 70 trillion times. Yeah, but to get kids such that you can find a pair that match, you only need to have about 10 million kids.
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A
Oh, hang on. Suddenly this sounds achievable?
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Suddenly it's looking like it's gonna happen. 10 million children. The chance that there will be a pair that have the same genome is about 50%. So it's like a coin flip.
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A
Yeah. Now, okay, you can't compare that 10 million number to 110 billion, right?
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No, because this is 10 million children from the same parents. Right.
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But even so, actually, suddenly, the chances of two siblings being essentially very, at least very, very, very close, if not completely identical, despite not having come from a single zygote, I mean, starting to look quite likely.
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B
It's. But here's the thing that makes it even more complicated. I'm talking about people sharing their genome, but really, when it comes to looking at them, it's the phenotype that makes them unique. It's the expression, the behavior, the things that we can observe. And someone can have a very different genome than someone else, and yet their nose, their eyes, their hair, all that stuff can be really similar. And that's why siblings so often look alike, even though we can genetically tell them apart.
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A
I can open my sister's face ID on her phone.
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B
Are you serious?
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She finds it extremely annoying, by the way. Not that I'm opening her phone all the time, just that she shares my face.
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B
I would not confuse you two, though.
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No, no, you wouldn't confuse us, but in, like, our mannerisms and face id yeah, Face id. Because face ID is a lot of it is about your. Your orbital bone.
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Oh, is it?
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Yeah, because it's a structure that doesn't change.
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My sister, I don't think she looks anything like me, but I think our mannerisms, like you said, very similar. My daughter picks that up. She only wants me or my sister to read her bedtime stories because she says that we deliver them in the same way. I guess so.
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Or is it.
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B
Or is it says my sister and me. But the point I'm getting at here is that randomly conceiving a child who is genetically identical to a child you've already had, not impossible in principle, in theory, but practically, it's never going to happen. Okay. We all share DNA for the most part, because a lot of the genesis that we have do the same thing in all of us, and they don't cause a noticeable difference. We've heard this before, that like 99.9% of our DNA is the same amongst every human. But it's.
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A
That's the marginal difference.
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B
Yeah, it's that 0.1% that really codes for the things that make me recognizably a unique individual. I can pass some of that to my children and some of that might appear in my grandchildren, but it decreases very quickly. And it's not an amount that just keeps getting cut in half and therefore it never becomes zero. My grandkids aren't going to have a quarter of my DNA, even though mathematically you could easily kind of hand wave into that. Grandchildren have anywhere from 23 to 27% of their grandparents, each grandparent's DNA.
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A
And this is because even though you get 50, 50 of your mother and your father, there's Nothing saying which 50% of your mother and father you're getting.
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Exactly.
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So you're not definitely getting 25% of their mother and their father.
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Exactly. You're getting somewhere between 23 and 27%. The half you get from your mom could be like a little weighted towards her dad and less her mom. For example, your great grandchildren will only have between 9 and 14% of what makes you unique. By seven generations, your seven great, great, great, great grandchild is statistically no more like you are right now than a stranger on the street.
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A
No. By which, how many generations did you say? Seven.
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Really? By seven. After seven generations, we reach a point where it's possible for your progeny to have absolutely none of your personal genetic variation.
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A
That's so interesting.
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B
Yeah.
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You know, I've thought this quite a few times, actually, about Ancestors. Right. So if you go seven generations back, because I've done some work in the past where I've tried to find their names and try to find out where they're from and all of this kind of thing. Let's think seven generations back, so we're talking about 1700s or so, maybe a little bit earlier.
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B
I guess it'd be like almost 200 plus years ago.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I don't feel like I have an emotional connection to those people, you know, like, I can hear about their story, but I don't feel emotionally connected to their plight in the same way as I do, you know, when I look back to sort of my great grandparents, for instance. But now what you're saying is, I mean, that's fine because I don't even have a sort of genetic connection to them either.
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B
I mean, you might, but it's going to be small, but it could very potentially be zero. Seven generations is the first distance, the closest distance at which we can expect 0% of the personal genetic variation to have persisted. But if you go back 11 generations, 70% of your ancestors from 11 generations ago are not in you at all. So when you think about your legacy being about your genes passing on, it's a temporary extension of your life, and it's a. It's a very quickly shrinking one.
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A
This does make sense, though, as well, because I think if you. If you imagine, okay, you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on and so on and so on, and that number is essentially doubling every generation you go back. What that means is if you sort of turn that upside down, there comes a point where the number of potential ancestors you have is more than the number of people who are alive. And thus there was some crossover, of course. And if you. If you do this calculation, you can work out that there's a point where you go back far enough in history where there are some people who are essentially, everyone alive in modern Britain, for instance, is descended from that person, Charlemagne being one example. Right. But not just because Charlemagne's special. Everybody who was around at that time, there's so much folding over and overlapping of our ancestors that essentially there's an inevitability that you're related to everybody who was around at that point. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense then, because otherwise we just all look the same. Right. If Charlamagne's DNA really persisted for a much longer time, then we would all look like Charlemagne.
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B
Yeah, that's right. And there would be literally Doppelzygotic twins everywhere, Everywhere. But that doesn't happen. And so the more you think about it, the more it feels like your genetic sequence is really arguably very much yours. And if anyone randomly had it, like
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A
found a way to sort of profit
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off it just by chance, right? The chromosomes all contained and it happened to be the exact same sequence of base pairs that you had, wouldn't be impossible. It could happen. It could happen from some parents that aren't even my parents, but probably not on this planet. The planet couldn't even support the amount of people required for us to feel like this would happen. But if we colonized other planets and we found a way for the species to last for trillions of years, it could happen. So something to look forward to that
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feels like a quite far fetched reason to not say that it's not yours. You know what I mean? Like, as a sort of philosophical discussion, I'm comfortable with accepting that that's not gonna happen.
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B
So to what extent do we own our genetic sequence if it is so uniquely mine and it's so unlikely to naturally happen again, what kind of claim do I have to own it?
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But it belongs to you. Surely, surely this is a one and done. This is a, this is open. Shut case, Michael.
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It. See, it seems that way. However, it's theoretically possible that another human could be born with my exact sequence. And I wouldn't, I clearly wouldn't have any right to say, hey, I had that first, give it back.
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I mean, the twin thing, you're right though. You do get natural twins. And you can't have one twin that owns it more than the other.
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B
Yeah, that's right. And again, twins don't share their DNA. Exactly. This is like a fun little party thing to bring up if you want to be pedantic. Because of mutations that happen epigenetically through life, they're not going to be exactly identical. Also, they have different fingerprints. We've talked about this before. Fingerprints are not designed by your DNA. They're not coded by a gene. They just form randomly in the womb. It's a process so you can tell twins apart by their fingerprints. Twins make for a really interesting case because which twin can claim that they own the genome? When would this even come up legally? Like if one set of a twin was like, hey, I want to sell the personally unique part of my genome for this company to create digital versions or even real flesh and blood versions, like clones of me, would the other twin be like, uh, but I don't want that. And I'm the Same in appearance in many ways. People are gonna confuse me with all these, like, clones that you're allowing to have made. I feel like courts would have a pretty easy time with that one.
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A
What, saying no, you're not allowed to.
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I think veto power would be given. But what can they do with. Let's start with just cells. What can they do with my cells? We've already talked about body parts. People can do a lot with my body parts after I'm dead. But what about while I'm alive? They don't take a body part, they just take some cells from me.
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A
What could they do with it?
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What could they do with it?
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Would they still belong to you?
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B
Would they still belong to me?
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Well, the thing you're describing has actually happened, right? In the case of Henrietta Lacks.
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That's right.
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Very famous story. And we'll come to it after the break.
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I live 7,636 km away from Hanna, so we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us, and maybe for you too, because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live on stage at Gullhanger's inaugural festival. It's gonna be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in in the flesh. The rest is fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre. General sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10am so get some tickets and get ready for some fun, some serious fun. Go to southbankcenter.co.uk to find out more.
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A
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [17:12]
B
We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lungvax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer.
- [17:28]
A
It builds on Tracer X, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lungvax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops.
- [17:47]
B
So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year. Focusing on people at higher risk, it
- [17:59]
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shows what long term research makes possible.
- [18:01]
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For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org thereest ISS
- [18:14]
A
when you need to build up your team to Handle the growing chaos at work. Use indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who Check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed Sponsored jobs. Welcome back. Okay, Henrietta Lacks. It's quite a dark story in a lot of ways. I mean, not in a lot of ways. In almost every.
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B
In the way.
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A
In the way. This is the 1950s, and up until this point in history, people had tried to grow human cells in a lab and really struggled with doing so. They would die after a couple of days. And there was this, this one surgeon, this is at John Hopkins Hospital in America, where unusually, they would treat black patients, poor black patients in particular. But they, they did so in these really segregated wards. I mean, as you say, in the way. This is a really dark story. And the, the unspoken really un rule in all of this was that these patients were essentially paying for their free medical care by, by unknowingly acting as clinical research patients. Right. Yeah. As subjects, effectively. So this, this Dr. Richard Talindi, he was called, he was trying to understand the causes of cervical cancer. And so he ordered that every patient who came into the hospital and was treated for cervical cancer, he would take a sample from their bodies and would send it off to his lab assistant who would then try and either experiment on the cells or try and get them to grow. So this is 1951. There was a young mother, she was called Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from, from America. And she had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer. So during her treatment, during her, you know, when they sort of cut her open and tried to remove the tumor, as was standard under this doctor's care, they took this about a dime sized piece of tissue and they sent it off to the lab to. From her cervix, but specifically from the cancerous part of her cervix.
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Okay.
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What was really strange when they took it to the lab was that whereas normally these cells would, you know, die after 24 hours, 48 hours, something like that. There was something about Henrietta's cells that meant that they actually just kept replicating. They just kept replicating and kept replicating and kept replicating. It didn't matter how many generations of replication they would go through. They just didn't. They were essentially immortal. Henrietta's cancer cells were essentially immortal.
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Immortal outside of her body, outside in the hospital.
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A
Yeah. Now, really tragically, Henrietta died of this, this cancer really soon after all of this happened. But her cells remained in the laboratory. And the scientists there really understood how strange and unusual this. This thing was. Initially they were interested in this from a sort of really scientific perspective. Like, what is it about these cells that. That makes them so unusual? And it turns out that it all comes down to something called telomeres. So the way that I've had this described, my friend Adam Rutherford's geneticist is really good on this stuff. And he describes telomeres as, you know, when you have a shoelace, the very end of a shoelace, that sort of caps it and stops it from fraying. And this is like the idea of telomeres that every single time that you have your cells dividing, that degrades ever so slightly. Right. You get, you get your. Your. There's a limit to how short the shoelace can get. Right. Before the cells just. Just end up dying. And what had happened in this, I mean, it really was a sort of one in a billion fluke chance that the way that the cancer had interacted with Henrietta. Henrietta lacks cells meant that she had had that the viral DNA, human Pavlova virus, which is the thing that causes cervical cancer in the most part, had sort of invaded her own DNA next to this incredibly sensitive point along along the DNA chain and so next to the bit that essentially acts as the master growth switch for regular cell division and replication. So it altered her DNA in a way that meant that it could carry on forever, that it would end up being immortal. So, okay, initially it's like this, this. This scientific interest, but very soon they realized that if they have these immortal cells, there is profit to be made from this. And so a company was started which essentially sold Henrietta lacks cells, like literally
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a portion of the culture, literally a
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portion of her cells. Her name was stripped from it. It's now called hela. I don't know whether you say it like that, but it's gla.
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Yeah.
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And this stuff is all over the world, right.
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B
And it wasn't sold as a curiosity. It was sold to other researchers, to universities to also learn from and study,
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A
and to pharmaceutical companies particularly, because. Because the thing about this is that so many drugs have been tested on her cells. Her cells have been sold and sold and sold and sold again. I mean, we're really talking probably billions of dollars of profit had been made purely from the kind of unusualness of
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her well, her family must have made a killing.
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A
How nice it would be if that were the case. Her family didn't even know that this had happened until many years later when researchers started calling up and asking for additional blood tests just to work out what was going on with the body. It's estimated that scientists since 1951 have grown at 50 million metric tons of her biological material laboratories around the world.
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B
My gosh. So we keep calling them her cells. If these are her cells, they're part of her, then at this point, her existence has mainly been as these cells.
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A
Yeah, I mean, her actual existence as a human body is sort of a statistical anomaly.
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B
A continuous human that can drive a car and eat breakfast. That was a blip of her existence. She is immortal in the form of these tons and tons and tons of cells of hers whose genetic sequence is basically hers. With the difference, of course, that they don't die.
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A
Right, exactly. Exactly. But the genetic sequence is exactly hers. Now I need to tell you, right. That the difference that her cells have made to the world is. You can't understate this. You know, the polio vaccine was tested on her cells. The COVID 19 vaccine was tested on her cells. You know, her cells have been using CRISPR gene editing in sickle cell anemia. I mean every. I, I don't think this is an overstatement to say this, but pretty much every major advance that has happened with genetics and you know, with, with, with this sort of type of biology has in some, somewhere along the line, had Henrietta lacks his cells to thank. But yeah, as you say, the family just completely cut out of this altogether.
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B
So in so many ways she is a hero.
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A
Totally.
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B
And our health and well being has been because of her. And yet she didn't know any of this was happening. She had no consent in the matter, no knowledge it was even happening until later her family finds out.
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A
Well, because this is the thing. She's given this incredible gift to the world without knowing it. I mean, it was taken from her.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But meanwhile, her family were unable to pay for health insurance. You know, like all of us, all of our health has increased thanks to, thanks to her cells. But her own family were. Were left unable to pay for health insurance. So yeah, this, this big court case, there's. There's actually been a. Another couple that have gone through just this year with different pharmaceutical companies. No one knows that they settled for an undisclosed amount.
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B
Okay.
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A
But the family, when they initially sued, they sued for all of the net profits that were gained directly by selling her cells I mean, who knows what they actually got in the end? The law came down very firmly on the family side that actually the ownership of that intellectual property, I mean, I'm not sure how to even really describe it, that sort of owned the property side of her cells, belonged to her family and that.
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B
I love trying to figure out what word to use because it's. Her cells are uniquely hers because they have the same genome in them. But I guess it's not intellectual property. She didn't think it up. In a way, I would say it's almost like abandoned property. Like, when you're born, you have been given this whole new kind of genome, and slowly your consciousness matures and you're like, oh, hey, look, I found this and it's mine, Binders keepers. So, you know, she, I think, should have that right to herself. Well, her property was then taken against her knowledge and without her knowledge, and then used. Now, the family got a settlement from at least one, maybe more companies. But has the court actually decided or has. Has any legislation come down to help us with future cases?
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A
I don't know if it has, you know, because the other thing on the flip side of this is, you know, we did the episode last week that was about whether you still own something that was a part of your body after you died. The answer was no. I mean, it was a resounding no. If it's your skeleton, it can be. It can be bought and sold and pushed around and, you know, posed in funny poses, and someone could put a hat on it and drink out of it if they want to. And so why is this different? Because these cells. Look, I think that her and her family were treated appallingly. That's really clear. But I think you could also say, well, the cells never actually belonged to her body. And even if they did, well, then doesn't the same thing apply about skeletons? I guess perhaps the difference is that it's the information within the cells. Right.
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B
Well, I know that in 1990, there was a big California Supreme Court case, Moore versus the Regents of the University of California, where a guy who back in the late 70s, had a form of cancer, had his spleen removed, and then without his knowledge, cells from that spleen were also cultured. And then this whole cell line began, and it was sold to other universities to do tests and studies on. And I think a lot of really important medical knowledge came from it.
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A
Similar in a lot of ways to.
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Very similar. But in this case, what happened is, in 1990, he sued the university for not telling him exactly what they were going to be doing with his cells. And then for profiting off of them, he went to court and the first case was decided that, like, no, you know, nothing happened here. Wrong. Like, they have the right to do this. Right. He appealed it. The appeals court was like, oh, my gosh, no, you're totally in the right. They went on his side and they argued that he deserved to know, first of all, that all this was happening and should be paid. The California Supreme Court took it on and they said, no, these cells are the property of the university and you don't deserve anything from it. One of the reasons they gave is that if we decide otherwise, then medical innovation gets slowed down.
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Right.
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Because now researchers can't work on a cell line without having to constantly work with and do everything at the direction of the person the cells came from.
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A
Right. Because you have to work on human cells in a. In a petri dish. And those human cells, you can't just manufacture them out of nowhere. They have to come from a human. Right. And if you are continually asking for permission from the person who gave them, I can see that argument.
- [30:39]
B
Yes. I think part of it was the idea that, like, yes, the cells that are in your body right now, they're totally yours, but if you consent to having some of them removed. In Moore's case, it was his spleen in order to prolong his life. And that did help him, by the way, like, his cancer went into remission because they removed the spleen. It was a white blood cell cancer, and they're stored in the spleen. I'm not a doctor, but blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I'm not going to be removing spleens from anyone who asks. But. But he consented to that surgery. And then in the process of removing cells, and I don't know if culturing is the right word, but in creating this cell line, a new thing was invented as far as the California Supreme Court was concerned. And that new thing did not belong to the original human whose genome and life was responsible for its existence at first.
- [31:38]
A
Is that where things stand now, then?
- [31:41]
B
Well, I mean, that was in the 90s. 90s.
- [31:44]
A
But so this. I mean, this must be. Because I know that the Henrietta Lacks settlements are just, I mean, fascinating to legal scholars because I think you're right that the law says, hey, it's not yours, no big deal, but if you're a pharmaceutical company and this is dodgy, dodgy dealing.
- [32:03]
B
Well, I think in the case of Henrietta Lacks and in the case of more, there wasn't enough Information given to the patients about what exactly they were signing away today. I think a lot of that is told to be people because we use cell lines, especially from fetuses, a lot, and we test different medications on them. And so the fact that it's definitely happening today more than ever, means that, I mean, it probably has. Has fallen on the side of the university can own it. Other people can own your cells even long after you've died and while you're alive, so long as you've given them permission to.
- [32:45]
A
What about your DNA, though?
- [32:47]
B
Yeah, can they clone me?
- [32:50]
A
Right. If they have your DNA sequence, can that be owned?
- [32:53]
B
Without you, that's still very much unexplored. So while I could certainly donate some cells to a research hospital and tell them, hey, do whatever you want with these for as long as you want.
- [33:08]
A
Pose them with a silly hat.
- [33:10]
B
Well, yeah, put silly hats on them, insult them, whatever. And in some ways, I might think that that's really worth it. If this is gonna really help medicine advance, then I'm all for it. But at a certain point, they could start to say, hey, technology's advancing. We can take some of this DNA and we can literally create a zygote that matches Michael's genome, plant that in a womb. Boom, we got a new Michael. And would I be okay with little baby D source, a little baby bee sauce?
- [33:39]
A
Would you be okay with that?
- [33:41]
B
I think that I would not be so okay with it for two reasons. One is the selfish right to publicity that I want to have. I want to be in control of myself and my personality, my image, and Michael.
- [33:54]
A
I think it'd be pretty good publicity to have a mini you, like a literal mini. I think that's pretty good publicity.
- [33:59]
B
But that brings me to the second problem I have with it, which is that the mini me deserves their own life.
- [34:04]
A
Yeah.
- [34:05]
B
They would live their whole life as, whoa, you're like. You're just like Michael. Hey, do some of his catchphrases. No, that wouldn't be fair to them.
- [34:14]
A
Raise your eyebrow.
- [34:15]
B
Yeah. Can you raise your. Oh, he can't raise his eyebrows yet. Whoa, Whoa. And then the person's like, why do I have to live up to this thing? Why can't I be an individual? The thing is, I don't know if the paperwork that's signed by people who donate cells even includes the possibility of future things like cloning. It might circumscribe what can be done with the cells actually, quite finely to not include cloning. But when it comes to cloning, I Looked into the legality of it, and there's two different types of cloning. One is therapeutic cloning, where I clone someone's cells in order to make them new tissue or a new organ for transplant. And that is legal in the uk it's legal in much of the United States. There are parts of the US where it's illegal, but it's very different country by country. Reproductive cloning is a whole different measure. This is where you don't just create tissue that matches. This is where you obviously create a person who can be born and is now a baby with the same genome as someone else. So I guess this is a third way of cloning.
- [35:21]
A
Yeah.
- [35:21]
B
This, by the way, is the doppelzygotic twin that I was joking about earlier. Not created by chance and a lot of attempts, but through science. And cloning for reproductive purposes is actually, surprisingly, not illegal everywhere. It's illegal here in the United States. It depends what state you live in, really.
- [35:44]
A
What's human cloning?
- [35:45]
B
Human cloning?
- [35:46]
A
No.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah. So as it turns out, there are many states have made it illegal, but most states don't have a statute one way or the other. They just haven't decided it. Idaho has no law against it, but they do have a law saying that if you are a health care worker, you can, due to your own conscience, not be forced to participate in human cloning should it happen, if it happens. You can't lose your job because you don't want to be a part of it. Louisiana made human cloning illegal, but it recently expired that prohibition. So legally, you can go clone humans in Louisiana.
- [36:27]
A
No one's actually done this, though, have they?
- [36:29]
B
Well, no. No one's done this for reproductive. No one's done reproductive cloning.
- [36:34]
A
Yeah.
- [36:35]
B
As far as we know. Right. You can imagine that some scientists, where we're not looking, are like, hey, guys, like, we created this zygote out of Hannah's DNA, and we're gonna put it into a mother, and it's gonna be born, and it will be a doppelzygotic twin. It will be identical genetically to Hannah Fry, Though, of course, it's a newborn baby.
- [36:56]
A
I think this is one of the things that is so difficult when it comes to creating legislation for future scientific advances. I mean, cloning has felt like science fiction for a really. I mean, for a really long time. Right. People have written stories about this idea, but actually now, especially with things like, you know, gene editing, and there was a really big news story last year, I think, of where you could create a New baby using three parents, essentially combining the genes of three different parents. You know, we are really at the stage where you can technically do this. You know, you can technically do this, but how are you supposed to create legislation to carve off every potential future scientific advance before it even actually happens?
- [37:38]
B
I don't think you should, because you don't really know exactly what the context will be for future scientific applications. I think you just have to kind of deal with it as it happens. But that means there will always be this vanguard of a few people who are stuck in the middle. We don't have laws yet, but we need them. And it's gonna be my court case that decides the precedent. Interestingly, reproductive cloning, here's where it is not prohibited. Besides the US States I mentioned, it's allowed in Iran, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Ukraine, and New Zealand.
- [38:10]
A
Okay, well, of that list, two of them Donald Trump's invaded. So maybe, Maybe we found a separate reason.
- [38:17]
B
Is that what's going on? J.D. vance wants so many more mini versions of himself. What do you think?
- [38:25]
A
A J.D. vance army. We promised we would not be topical in this show.
- [38:29]
B
We promised we wouldn't be topical, and yet here we are talking about the most epic, accurate, and likely current event, which is JD Vance creating JD Vance. 2, 3, 4, 5.
- [38:42]
A
Up to 70 trillion.
- [38:44]
B
It's really surprising that human cloning isn't as illegal as I thought it was. I just think that it hasn't come up enough that anyone's really ready to say, yep, we're gonna pass legislation on this, I guess, whether or not there are laws against human cloning, there are already laws about who owns genetic sequences. So you might say, hey, it's not against the law for our company to clone a human. It's like, technically, yeah, that's true, but what human are you going to clone? Because as decided by the Supreme Court in 2013 in a case called the association for Molecular Pathology versus Myriad Genetics, human genes and DNA sequences cannot be patented. They are products of nature, not inventions. Okay, prior to that court case, a company, a biotech company, could literally patent a gene that they had found in nature that's in all of our bodies.
- [39:39]
A
Really?
- [39:39]
B
The reason was to advance scientific progress.
- [39:42]
A
Well, so you could say, for example, MC1R gene, right? The gene that makes people ginger. You could say, okay, I found it, I own it now.
- [39:50]
B
Yes, you could do that. Why was that allowed? The idea was that, first of all, isolating the gene responsible for ginger hair was not easy, and it cost a lot of money and took a Lot of time. And so if a company's gonna try to find it, why would a company do that? That sounds like a government would do it. A company's only gonna do it if they can then recoup all the money that it took, all the resources it took for them to find it. And that means that they need to be able to have rights to study and try different therapies on it or whatever. Whatever they want to do with the gene for red hair, give it to everybody. Give it to everybody. Right. Whatever they want. They want the exclusive rights to pursue that research and sell such therapies and products. And so governments around the world said, fine, you can do that. We'll give you a patent on that gene. And that doesn't mean that they owned the red hair gene and that they could go up to redheaded people and like, take it, it's mine. But it meant that they were the only company who could study it, work on it, do all that kind of stuff. But in 2013, in the US and then I think later on in other countries, they've made similar decisions, which is to say, okay, that's over. Like, we all did a good job. Thanks for finding so many genes. But, like, this is weird, and it's potentially like, very unethical, so you can no longer patent them.
- [41:07]
A
But okay, then, in conclusion, if you can't patent a gene, if somebody can't own a genetic sequence, a company can't own a genetic sequence. And from that Moore case, it sort of looks like the cells that have left your body kind of don't belong to you. I mean, don't belong to you. They belong to the university. Then we're back in the same place as skeletons then, right? You don't own your own anything.
- [41:30]
B
Here's the thing. You don't own your skeleton. You don't own your cells. You don't. Because of that, you don't really own your genome. It can't be patented, but someone could still have it. They could put physically possess it in
- [41:45]
A
cells and buy it.
- [41:46]
B
Yeah, but here's what you do own, and we have celebrities to thank for this. You own your right to publicity. Someone could totally have Hannah Fry sells and they could do whatever they wanted with them. They could sell them so long as you had given them consent in the first place. Yeah, in the first place. They could have these long after your death, and they could sell them to universities and make billions of dollars and never give a sent to your children or your grandchildren or whatever.
- [42:15]
A
Let's say you actually do it. Then you go to one of these places where it's technically not illegal. I mean, could just everybody, could all of these different people just have their own, I don't know, mini David Bowie?
- [42:27]
B
Only if David Bowie, before he died or the people who run his estate give someone permission to do that. Not just to create the clone and to use his genome, but also to create new publicity around him, to use his likeness to, you know, do things in the world looking like him. However, I think that if you're going to create a human non reproductively, like completely sci fi future style in a lab where you have like a little machine that puts the base pairs together, one thing that would be interesting to do would be to just make your own brand new person and not clone an individual like David Bowie, but literally say, hmm, let's make the orbital of the eye this shape and you put in the little base pairs the way you want. And here's what's cool. If you do it that way, not only is it your kid, but it's your thing.
- [43:21]
A
It's a thing you can own intellectual property.
- [43:23]
B
You have invented their genome.
- [43:25]
A
Oh, I know, that's horrible.
- [43:26]
B
In 2013, it was decided by the US Supreme Court that a gene cannot be patented. However, there have been companies that have taken genes and they've gone in and they've like changed a few of the pieces of it into a thing that doesn't naturally appear. And it's been decided that they can patent and own those.
- [43:45]
A
But at the same time you're not allowed to go in and edit the genome of a baby because that happened in China, you remember that? Ah, so this is once this became possible with crispr, which is where I mean, you can literally go in and you have like, you have your DNA sequence and you can just go in and you can say, right, snip that bit out, snip that bit out. Insert this instead. I mean that's literally what you're able to do. And there was a case in China, let me get these details up actually, but a case in China where basically a rogue doctor decided to do this, to edit the genome of an embryo in advance of its birth.
- [44:20]
B
Right.
- [44:21]
A
And the. There's like very strict global rules about this and the entire scientific community really came down very hard about it. You're not allowed to do that.
- [44:33]
B
If you as a scientist edit a gene into something that's now considered an invention of yours, that's one thing. But if it becomes part of an individual who has their own like consciousness and Rights, then they own it, which is kind of obvious. Like, I own the rights to my genome. However, my parents don't, even though they're the ones who invented it.
- [45:00]
A
Yeah. Or if you're doing ivf, you own your embryo until it's born, right?
- [45:05]
B
That's right. That's right. And if you have embryos created, you and your partner have to make a lot of decisions before those embryos are even made about what's going to happen, because those embryos contain the genetic sequence for an individual. And if both of you die and that embryo is left, you need to decide ahead of time what you want to have happen with it. And you could just decide, thaw and discard, or if both of us are gone, donate them to a couple who can't have kids. And in cases like that, where only one partner dies, you also have to decide what happens. For example, I think in general, veto power rules. So if one partner is like, yeah, I want to use them, and the other one's like, no, the one who said no gets their way.
- [45:53]
A
Yeah.
- [45:53]
B
So you can own and patent a gene so long as it's not part of a conscious living human. As soon as it is, it becomes theirs. And like, sorry, it's been public domain or it's been transferred. Rights have been transferred, and you can't own them if they already naturally exist, because then it's just a part of nature that you found. It wasn't actually that long ago that as soon as a person died, they lost all rights to their personality. Like, literally when Marilyn Monroe died, Marilyn Monroe became public domain. Okay, not her movies, but her likeness. You could make posters of her and not give any money to her family.
- [46:32]
A
Many people did.
- [46:33]
B
Many people did. And I think she's still public domain in that sense because she died before the law was passed, saying that for at first, 50 years after death, now it's 70 years after death. The right to your likeness is an actual thing that passes on to your estate, to your family, and they can make decisions about how your image is replicated.
- [46:55]
A
Is that really where we are?
- [46:57]
B
That's where we are, actually in the
- [46:59]
A
great battle of unethical uses of science and technology that are extremely dystopian, such as cloning. The people we have to thank for protecting us from vastly overpowerful companies are celebs. That's basically where we are.
- [47:16]
B
That's the truth. And it's either what you said or it's the celebs that are holding down our ability to just do crazy cloning experiments.
- [47:25]
A
Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much, celebs.
- [47:29]
B
They're just like us.
- [47:30]
A
They're just. They're just like us.
- [47:34]
B
And we'll see you next time.
- [47:36]
A
Certainly will. Next time.
- [47:48]
B
You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.