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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

If you gene added and

You've got a mosaicism, you can take a single cell from that embryo, but it might still be the wrong part of the mosaic.

Yeah, it might be the wrong part of the mosaic, so you can't be sure.

So this is a huge problem for it.

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I was a an expert on investments and and things like that.

But but what I can say is is that fertility treatments are are it's a huge business.

I mean globally I I I checked it and it's something like forty billion dollars a year around the world.

So if you think and if you can add something on top of that that parents if you know you can persuade w would be couples who want to be parents if you can persuade them

to p p pay a sort of few thousand more dollars in order to edit an embryo and have something extra which I think a lot o of parents do want, then uh there's a there's a potential h potentially huge market there.

Which is the right thing.

Yeah, so the reason why you get mosaicism is you put your gene editor into an egg after it's been fertilized and it may not act until after the embryo starts dividing or in the case of this recent study they would the embryo had already divided and they were trying to edit it at a later stage.

So the way you can avoid that i if you can

sort of gene edit the egg before it's fertilized or the sperm before it's fertilized, then that change is already there and it's gonna be in all those cells.

Now, we can't do that at the moment, but there's a company which has just announced that it succeeded in um taking sperm stem cells from people's testes and growing them into sperm in the lab.

Now if you can do that

If that's true, and we don't know that it is yet, they haven't provided any evidence, but if it's true, then they should be able to gene edit those um sperm stem cells and um create gene edited sperm.

And of course, there's a potentially a good reason for doing this because one one thing you could do with this would be to treat infertility.

So there's some men who have mutations that prevent any sperm developing, but they still have sperm stem cells in their testes.

So potentially you can take those out, gene edit them so they can now turn into sperm and you then have a child that's completely normal except that you've corrected the mutation that's causing infertility in the father.

Absolutely.

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