Beth Shapiro

It's the, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad.

Second of all, it's a decision.

And to think that that decision has no consequences is naive.

We know what the consequences are.

The rate of extinction today is thousands to tens of thousands times higher than it is across the history of the fossil record.

And a lot of that is because of us.

But we have the capacity to slow that rate.

We have the capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to the rapid changes in their habitat.

What if we could make Hawaiian honeycreepers resistant to avian malaria, which we introduced by introducing mosquitoes into their habitat and save them from becoming extinct?

Figure out how to transfer resistance to bleaching to corals around the world or anything that we could do to save some of these habitats that we know are in trouble because of this combination of people expanding and natural change to the ecosystem that we just don't like.

You know, we don't want to see spruce forests disappearing because it's getting drier.

And that means that they can't make enough resin to fight off the beetles.

Right.

We have the capacity to use these tools or at least to think about how we might develop and deploy these tools to have a future that is both filled with people and biodiverse.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about, right?

And I think we're getting gradually more accustomed to using these technologies to cure genetic diseases, like the baby that was in the news over the last couple of weeks, baby KJ, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease.

He had a genetic change, just a single mutation that meant that he couldn't digest protein.

And people came together and mounted this incredible, like, collaborative effort to find a cure using the tools of genome engineering for this child.

And he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing, having gone into his own body to cure this particular disease.

Wild.