CRISPR: Can we control it? | Jennifer Doudna, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, & more | Big Think

CRISPR: Can we control it?

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CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On the one hand, this tool could mean the elimination of certain diseases. On the other, there are concerns (both ethical and practical) about its misuse and the yet-unknown consequences of such experimentation.

"The technique could be misused in horrible ways," says counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke. Clarke lists biological weapons as one of the potential threats, "Threats for which we don't have any known antidote." CRISPR co-inventor, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, echos the concern, recounting a nightmare involving the technology, eugenics, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler.

Should humanity even have access to this type of tool? Do the positives outweigh the potential dangers? How could something like this ever be regulated, and should it be? These questions and more are considered by Doudna, Clarke, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker, and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee.

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TRANSCRIPT:

- Our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful.

- This is going to revolutionize human life.

- Would the consequences be bad? And they might be.

- Every time you monkey with the genome you are taking a chance that something will go wrong.

- The technique could be misused in horrible ways.

- When I started this research project, I've kind of had this initial feeling of what have I done.

JENNIFER DOUDNA: CRISPR gene-editing technology is a tool that scientists can use to change the letters of DNA in cells in precise ways. So I like to use the analogy of a word processor on a computer. So we have a document, you can think about the DNA in a cell, like the text of a document that has the instructions to tell the cell how to grow and divide and become a brain cell or a liver cell, or develop into an entire organism. And just like in a document, the CRISPR technology gives scientists a way to go in and edit the letters of DNA. Just like we might cut and paste text in our document or replace whole sentences, even whole paragraphs or chapters. We can now do that using the CRISPR technology in the DNA of cells. CRISPR is an acronym that actually represents a sequence of DNA letters in the genomes of cells. It's found in bacteria and it was interesting to scientists originally because it's a bacterial immune system, a way that bacteria can fight viral infection. For scientists this is sort of really a gift that allows research to proceed very quickly in terms of understanding the genetics of cells and organisms but also provides a very practical way to solve problems. In clinical medicine, the opportunity to make changes to blood cells that would cure diseases like sickle cell anemia, a disease where we've understood the genetic cause for a long time. But until now there hasn't been a way to actually think about treating patients. And now with this technology, it's possible in principle to remove stem cells that give rise to blood cells in a person's body, make edits to those cells that would correct the mutation causing a sickle cell disease and then replace those cells to essentially give a patient a new set of cells that don't have the defect. It's one thing to talk about being able to remove mutations from the human population that cause genetic disease. And I think for many people that would be a desirable thing to do. On the other hand, I think it's a very different discussion to think about using a technology like this to create enhanced human beings. People that are taller or have a certain eye color or other kinds of physical or intellectual traits that might be considered desirable. And it sort of immediately brings up sort of the the whole area of eugenics and sort of access to technology. Who gets access, who pays for it, who decides, who decides whether or not to do such a thing, should companies be allowed to offer this as a service to parents who want to do this and if so, should they be regulated in some way? There's a lot of very interesting and challenging questions, I think that go along with that.

RICHARD CLARKE: The technique could be misused in horrible ways. It could be...

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