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

So in this way, the editing system alone is very good for targeting DNA, but for making precision edits, this is the main challenge.

So there's two major mechanisms here.

So typically what will happen is when the cell fuses them together, this is a process called non-homologous end joining, which is a scary term, but basically it will just fuse the two strands back together.

And often when it does this, there's quite a high chance it'll introduce errors because this is just a quick thing that cells do a lot of the time because there's always double strand breaks happening throughout the DNA.

Yeah, you won't remove the entire gene sequence, but it will get rid of a few bases in that sort of neighboring area.

And then another one is called homology directed repair.

So often this is one where after it performs the cut, you can then introduce a template that you want to override in that cut.

So you'll have your template on the left and right hand sides, you'll have overlapping bases with the existing sequence, and then a small inserting DNA that you want to modify that.

But this is also again, a very inefficient process.

So all this together, the cutting is great, but what comes after the cut?

This is the problem.

Yes.

So first of all, I'll introduce the base editing technology.

So the base editing technology builds on conventional CRISPR-Cas9.

So it still makes use of that Cas9 enzyme.

So it still makes use of that programming and directing it to the DNA.

But instead of cutting apart the strands completely, what this does is it takes the Cas9 enzyme and it fuses it to another enzyme.

And this enzyme is called a base editing enzyme.

What this does is when it's bound to that locus, when it's bound to that 20 base pair sequence, this base editing enzyme will then kick in and it will bind to specific letters and seamlessly convert them to act like another letter very simply.

So in that way, you're avoiding this catastrophic cut and paste.

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