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 we're interested in understanding over these seven days how you get 200 cells, how do you get this football structure, how do you get these three lineages, and how are they starting to lay down the foundation

their development.

And we looked at a specific transcription factor, which is a type of protein.

It binds onto DNA and unlocks and turns on and off other genes.

So we were looking at a factor called nanog.

We wanted to use gene editing systems.

We wanted to use the base editing system to target this gene nanog

to turn it off and then when it's turned off to see the effect that's having on those early cell populations.

So kind of like if you were in a company and you were an alien from another planet or something and you want to understand why are light bulbs so important and you could get rid of all the light bulbs in this company and then you'd look around and everyone can't see very well, you can't see in the dark and you can quickly assume from this or this is very important for people's correct function.

So in the same way, if we take this base editing system and introduce these edits into this nanogen, then we can see the downstream effects it has on the formation of these three lineages.

Yeah, no, no, no.

None of this went to live animals.

All of the, yeah, so especially when you talked about He Zhonghui at the start, none of this was done for reproductive or fertility processes.

It was all done just to understand this first week of development, and then the embryos were terminated with.

So yeah, this was the second major aspect of the paper, the technological aspect, build

on this existing CRISPR-Cas9 technologies, which had already been used before in embryos to try and characterize and understand this thing.

This is where we understand that a good portion of the time that this cutting and pasting mechanism just results in sections of the DNA being lost or damaged, destroyed, or just otherwise not how it's supposed to be.

So the base editing system we found to be highly efficient.

We found a tremendous high rate of editing in all of our samples.

And most importantly, we did see that there was none of this chromosome and material loss.

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