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

We did not see particular damage and scarring at the on-target sites.

This is just a major step forward compared to conventional CRISPR-Cas9.

I think that's one of the first aspects of it is in terms of like, is this ready for going forward in this?

I mean, this isn't what we set out to demonstrate.

This is basic biological study and it's also tool development at the same time.

The results are reassuring and promising, but the safety and assessment of this has been done at the level of a small team in an academic environment that was obsessed with a different question.

We weren't obsessed about safety.

We did a superficial pass and we can make some claims about the chromosomal or something like this, but this doesn't rule out that there are still a long way to go with this technology.

We still don't know the true extent of the off targets.

We did not look at every single genomic location.

And like I said, there's 20 base pair guide RNA.

This can also bind to other spots.

When you've got a 3 billion letter long code, there's a lot of areas where 20 base pairs overlap.

So I wouldn't say this is ready for anything clinical or for a ready to term embryo.

And I think that's the purpose now for companies to try to identify and look into that.

There is somewhat of a worry about publishing this sort of thing, but in the UK, for example, the work is highly regulated.

We were frequently audited by the Human Fertilization Embryology Authority.

All the embryos need to be processed and used before the 14-day rule, and

we're prone to a lot of scrutiny throughout it.

And I think for most jurisdictions in the world, there is a lot of scrutiny, especially after the He Zhang Kui affair.

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