Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But that's because scientists have mapped the DNA of Neanderthals with one sample taken from a 38,000 year old Neanderthal in Croatia. And great, great, great grandma may not have kissed and told, but the DNA doesn't lie. Humans and Neanderthals bred with each other around 65,000 years ago.
That's pretty damn fascinating, actually. Yeah, DNA is pretty damn fascinating. Our understanding and ability to manipulate it is a game changer. For instance, genetic engineers can modify the DNA of the plants we eat to improve diets and food distribution. So GMOs, basically. Yeah, look, obviously that is its own episode, but everything was genetically modified long before we had a word for it.
That's what farmers have been doing for thousands of years. Bottom line, as we look ahead at the changes our planet is undergoing, we are going to need this technology to create drought and disease resistant crops.
And plus, through DNA, doctors can create truly personalized care for patients based on their individual DNA. Because we're all genetically different. Well... Technically, we're actually pretty darn similar. Humans are 99% genetically the same. But that little 1% does a lot of work to make us unique. But even that could change as we face the realities of gene splicing through CRISPR.
It made the cover of magazines, newspapers, and won the Nobel Prize for the two scientists who discovered it. And I only mention this because we talked about how Rosalind Franklin was initially denied credit for her contribution to our understanding of DNA. These two scientists were both women, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.
And like so often in science, they made this discovery by accident.
They were studying how bacteria protects themselves from viruses. This also blew my mind. Bacteria can get sick. Really? How ironic is that?
Yeah, it's gene splicing or gene editing. In short, while studying bacteria, these scientists discovered that bacteria have a part of their DNA called CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Palindromic? Like a palindrome? Like the word race car? I think so. And just as a total aside, my favorite palindrome is go hang a salami.
You talked about these very specific kind of nerds that celebrate Mitochondrial Eve. I think palindromes are probably discovered by a different kind of very specific nerd. I think you might be right. Yeah. So this CRISPR stores a tiny piece of a virus's DNA. And the next time the virus comes back, this CRISPR snips out a piece of the DNA and destroys it.
So these two scientists wondered, why can't we use that technique to cut out genes that are unwanted and replace them with ones that are wanted?
As I said, this is a huge leap forward, and as such, this technology comes with a huge ethical concerns. Have you seen the film Gattaca?
It's a dystopian, futuristic tale in which society is divided not by race or nationality or religion, the classic dividing line, but rather by genetically enhanced humans and non-genetically enhanced humans.
No, yeah, it's a great movie. I love the film. Thanks to CRISPR, that future is now. That's what this technology could, and I emphasize could, do. How? Scientists could manipulate an embryo and turn off the genes for genetic diseases and turn on the genes for intelligence, athleticism, and a myriad of other desirable traits. This is where the debate comes in.
You see, there are two kinds of cells in the human body. There are somatic cells and germ cells. Altering one or the other has different ethical implications. So you're going to need to explain that to me.
Okay, if you go to an adult and change their somatic cells, these are genetic changes done to an adult with their consent, and the changes you make to them genetically cannot be passed on to their offspring. Okay, I think I'm following so far. Right, so changes to somatic cells in an adult come with no real ethical dilemmas. In fact, it's already been done. Take the case of Victoria Gray.
Victoria was born with a blood disease called sickle cell. It's a pretty brutal disease that both compromises the quality of a person's life and can dramatically shorten it. For the first time ever, doctors used CRISPR to treat the disease. Doctors infused Victoria with more than 2 billion of her own bone marrow cells that had been edited with CRISPR.
That is to say, they had cut out the gene for the disease. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, and it worked. Almost all of her symptoms are gone. Victoria is enjoying her life in ways she never could have hoped for before CRISPR.
I'm so curious. Right. I wish I had an answer for you on that one. Although I do know that in my research that blood diseases are one that they're really optimistic that CRISPR can be a game changer for. So there's something about blood diseases that they think is particularly optimal for using CRISPR.
I have a list of four reasons why blood diseases are particularly easy to treat with CRISPR. Number one, accessibility of blood. Number two, well-characterized genetics. Many blood diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, are caused by a single gene mutation, established transplant procedures, and rapid cell turnover.
The dilemma comes from the other changes that could be made, changes to the germ cells, which are changes made to an embryo. That procedure comes with a host of issues.
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