Video content for background during talk
- Want a new way to fight cancer?
- Want to guarantee your future child won't carry on that weird genetic condition you have?
- Want to play with a live wooly mammoth or a chihuahua-sized doberman?
- Thirty years ago, some Japanese scientists mapped a bunch of bacterial DNA and found these strange code repetitions with weird, unexplained junk code between the repeated spots
- Some time later, after more genomes had been mapped and modern computing made the sharing of this information easier, other scientists looked at this junk code, and searched for it in the big database o’ mapped genomes.
- Turns out, that junk was actually snippets of virus DNA
- MIND BLOWN
- What you say?! Yeah, one type of organism (bacteria) has these storage lockers for DNA of other organisms out to kill it.
- Scientists didn’t know what was going on until one Russian American super genius, Eugene Koonin, theorized that this was actually a mechanism for an immune system.
- He was right.
- MIND BLOWN
- There’s a protein called CAS-9 that’s basically a perfect setting of molecular scissors. It uses the virus DNA like a mugshot to hunt down and destroy anything it finds that matches the mugshot.
- Another genius scientist, Jennifer Doudna, learned about this and thought that maybe you could use the amazing cutting accuracy of CAS-9 to do something even cooler than kill DNA.
- Turns out she was right too.
- This CRISPR stuff isn’t limited to bacteria. It works on pretty much any organism.
- You can take some CAS-9 and give it your own bad-guy mugshot, like that of a disease you want to cut out of your DNA. It’ll take that mugshot, find the thing you want to get rid of, and cut it out.
- Then there’s this other cool thing about cells. They have ways to repair damaged DNA. You can give the cell an example of what the removed gene should look like without the disease, and it’ll replace the recently removed bad stuff with the good stuff.
- Bada bing, bada boom, you’ve got a healthy cell!
- OMG, MIND TOTALLY BLOWN
- What makes this really awesome is that, relative to other genetic modification tool they had in the past, this CRISPR stuff is way cheaper and more precise.
- Of course, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t always work, but it’s real. They’ve actually used this to remove hemophilia from a mouse embryo and watched it grow up without hemophilia.
- So, although you can’t order up a tall, dark, handsome, and disease-free baby just yet, the possibility is totally real.
- There are ethical concerns about that sort of thing, sure, but some scientists have already tried it, and I doubt doubt this sort of gene therapy will be a real thing in our future.
- When I first heard about this, my jaw was basically on the floor. This is the kind of science that makes the stuff we see in sci-fi movies seem possible. It’s what leaps us forward as a species. It’s what bridges the gap between reality and magic.