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

And instead, it's a lot more like find and replace, like if you're ever in Microsoft Word and you want to change all your commas into full stops or something like that.

So that's on the technology side.

Then on the actual biology of what we did, so we've just talked now a lot about the clinical and genome editing and how it could be used in treatment and patients.

But the project really started as a basic biological project.

We're very interested in my previous lab in early human embryology.

We want to understand how the one cell begins to lay down the foundation for the rest of human development.

We studied that in the first week of development.

So in that time, over seven days, embryo will become about 200 cells.

and it will create three major populations.

In general, this 200-cell structure, we call this a blastocyst.

Now, if you want to imagine a blastocyst, this is kind of like if you imagine a football.

Now, this football is smaller than the head of a pin.

It is only a few hundred micrometers in size.

And then if you imagine this football, then on the internal cavity of this football, you've got a small mass just there.

So just like that, the outer structure of a football, that is what's going to implant into the mother and that's what's going to go on to make the placenta.

Then that inner population, there's two populations inside that.

One of them is going to make what's called the yolk sac.

This is going to be how the embryo gets its early nutrition before the placenta forms.

And then the second one is called the epiblast.

The epiblast is the very highly potential population that will give rise to the entire embryo.

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