Ben Bradford

It is.

Hi, Emily.

I think they're gross and I think they're rude.

And you mentioned, Emily, new gene editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially saving millions of lives.

Yeah, thank you.

And it would be amazing.

But also in that technology is something inherently more dangerous.

I talked to Kevin Esvelt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab.

So what does it mean to try to change an entire species?

Who gets to decide what might the ripple effects be?

How do you test it?

How do you protect it?

Easy questions, you know.

Yeah.

So let's go back to early last decade.

Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR.

It's this way of scalping out a tiny strand of DNA and you kind of like suture in a new trait.

It doesn't quite look like that, but that's essentially what's happening.

And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs.

But Kevin Esfeld,