Oliver Bower

speaker

104 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Oliver Bower’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Extra: Could base editing lead to designer babies? · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

Sure thing.

So CRISPR-Cas9 is effectively a pair of molecular scissors.

So it uses two components, the CRISPR component and the Cas9 component.

So CRISPRs are basically a form of genetic sequences that are used to program the enzyme Cas9.

So the evolutionary history of this is that bacteria and viruses are constantly at battle with one another.

and to do this viruses inject their DNA into bacteria and then they seek to hijack their machinery and make more copies of themselves.

So the bacteria's defense mechanism is to try to take some of these viral sequences and then insert them into their own genome.

That way when they're attacked again they can start producing all these sequences

And then these sequences are a template used to latch onto other viral sequences.

And then that works in complement with the Cas9 enzyme.

So Cas9 enzyme, it is an enzyme, a biological catalyst, speeds up chemical reactions.

So when given a given guide sequence, it will bind to that DNA and cut it apart.

That's the general process that works.

So it works kind of like a cut and paste mechanism, like a pair of molecular scissors.

So overall, the genetic sequence, you've got your four letters, your A, G, C, and T. And then the guide RNA itself, so this short section of material that you provide it, is usually about 20 base pairs in length.

So in this way, this can be programmed almost without fail to any sequence that you can give it, whether that would be a human gene or a cow gene or a bacterial gene.

Yeah, so the real challenge with it is that while it is this highly programmable system, I mean, this is the pure beauty of it, you can give it really any 20 base pair sequence and it will find and identify that locus.

The problem is, as I described, this is a bacterial defense mechanism used to target and destroy viral DNA.

In this way, it is very good at cutting DNA, but the cell's response to this, especially a human cell, its response to this, and for its purpose of doing precision genome editing, this is not how it's designed.

It's designed to be a perfect cutter, but what follows after that cutting and to seamlessly bring these strands together or introduce edits, this is much more down to error-prone cell machinery.

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