Michael Le Page

speaker

580 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5d ago

Michael Le Page’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The World, the Universe and Us · Breakthrough Synthetic Cell Has Just Reproduced - But Is It Alive? · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

You can think this is going to be a really defenseless organism that is probably not going to be able to survive outside a sort of lab or a factory.

The World, the Universe and Us · If We Can Make Genetically Engineered Designer Babies - Should We? · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, so just standing back there are these two big questions about gene editing children, which the first of all is can we do it safely?

And then the second of course is if we can do it safely, should we do it at all?

Now, up until this point, there's just been no doubt that it's not safe at all.

When th those kids were created in China, uh the main objections were not necessarily that trying to make them HIV resistant was wrong, but that the technology wasn't there to do it safely.

So that was a big problem and of course but this was done using an older form of CRISPR and now people are starting to use, you know, more updated and better forms of CRISPR.

Yeah, so the the original form of CRISPO was actually more like uh a sort of targeted destruction rather than precise editing.

So uh try not to go into too many details, but basically, you know, we've got these strands of DNA in our cells, yeah, these sort of double-stranded bits of DNA.

And the original form of CRISPR cut right through them, so you had two Ns floating around, and then when the cell tries to repair them, it

Can introduce these mutations and you know there might be a sort of a couple of letters changed which would sort of knock out a gene, which is what you want to do.

But then also what can happen is those ends of DNA, they can be joined up to the wrong things, and then you get these big rearrangements.

And of course the other issue is that that DNA can be cut in the wrong place, and then you you get these unwanted mutations.

So there are all these things that can go wrong.

Mm.

Now if you

you just sort of you know, trying to sort of edit a plant and you can do it as many times as you like to get it right, that's fine.

If you try to do it.

If you're trying to edit children, you don't have that luxury.

No.

Showing 441–460 of 580 · page 23 of 29