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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Appearances
The other is that these changes can be passed on to offspring. Since this technology is new, scientists can't be sure what unforeseen consequences might arise. To do it is to literally experiment on people who had no say in whether or not they wanted to be experimented on.
But, and this is a huge but, it's already been done. It has. Yep. This is the tale of He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher who stunned the world when he announced that he had produced genetically edited babies.
Yep, three babies, a set of twin girls, and another child. In November 2018, he announced that he had genetically altered a number of human embryos in a way he believed would give them resistance to HIV. He made the announcement at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong.
And I'm not sure what he thought the reception would be, but if he was hoping he'd be heralded as a hero, he was wrong. His colleagues went, and this is a scientific term, Ape shit.
Here are some of the problems. Fellow scientists pointed out that there are safer, less potentially disastrous methods for protecting people from HIV. And of course, there's the whole issue that he just blasted right past the ethical concerns without so much as even conferring with his scientific peers. This was maddening.
Yeah, the story of Dr. Frankenstein isn't really a story of what to do. And the Chinese government wasn't exactly thrilled to have been embarrassed on the world stage by him, so they arrested him. He was convicted of illegal medical practices and sentenced to three years in prison.
Yeah. And look, in his trial, it was claimed that he had falsified paperwork, that he hadn't been completely honest with the people that were donating the embryos. And the Chinese government has definitely distanced themselves and said, we've had nothing to do with this. But I also don't know that I trust the Chinese government to be completely honest with us on everything.
That's not clear, because understandably, they are not in the public eye. But for better or worse, the Chinese government now has three test studies on the long-term effects of designer babies. And now we've entered a brave or at least a weird new world.
Legit. That is a legit concern. But in this case, what happened was the father donor, actually, because I looked into this, he was HIV positive. The mother wasn't. So what the scientist was trying to do was create them resistant from the get-go. They kind of were exposed to HIV in the womb.
There's another thing where when the cells separate, as we do when you have an embryo and it begins separating, where scientists were concerned that some of the cells could be genetically altered and others could not be. And so you could end up with a person who's half their organs or half of their cells are genetically resistant and the other half aren't. Again, he jumped the gun.
He should not have been doing this. There was way more research to do. In addition, there are people who are born with a natural resistance to HIV. So this scientist was simply turning on the genes in these babies that some people already have. Look, 75 countries already prohibit the use of CRISPR in human reproduction.
But I think we'd be naive to think we can put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. Do we really think Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin are going to be restrained by ethical questions in the face of making an army of super soldiers?
Yeah, it's a totally legit concern. Authoritarian states could potentially misuse DNA data on their citizens, like for surveillance and tracking. We mentioned Gattaca. In that film, there was technology that vacuums up all the dead skin cells we leave everywhere.
In fact, he started every day by using a pumice stone to get all those dead skin cells off of him, or as many as possible, so that he wasn't leaving a trail of skin cells. Because that's just what we do. We leave a dead skin cell trail everywhere we go. In the film, the technology is such that they can instantly identify whose cells they found.
That speed of identification is not a science reality yet, but it is a reality that that identification can be done, and as to the speed, it's coming.
Yeah, I hear you on that one. Totalitarian states could use DNA to discriminate against certain ethnic groups. This can lead to a systemic exclusion, detention or worse. Plus, DNA data might be used to create profiles of individuals deemed likely to commit crimes based on their genetic markers.
Yes. Look, welcome to the future. These potential uses illustrate the importance of strict regulations and safeguards to protect genetic data and prevent its misuse. Then again... When has there ever been a technology that someone, somewhere, wasn't willing to mess with no matter how dangerous? And here I was feeling good about the promise of CRISPR. Me too.
Look, progress always comes with questions and scary worst-case scenarios, including the human race gaining access to the blueprints of life and developing the ability to mess with them. Who knows what the distant future may hold? Maybe people will become genetically altered to live on Mars or a moon of Saturn. Maybe we can remove the genes for mental illness or cancer. I'm an optimist.
A skeptical optimist. This understanding of DNA and how to manipulate it has already done so much good.
Plus, millions of people now get to add a whole ton of new ethnicities to their dating profiles. Yes, that's right.
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