Professor David Farrier

Huge canary in the coal mine.

Exactly.

And we're not moving quickly enough to, you know, in terms of our infrastructure, fossil fuels to, you know, to change that.

So could anything from assisted evolution, which is a suite of techniques that most people, which look like domestication, you know, manually, you know, moving, you know, genes from one population to another and so on, just to kind of cultivate a sense of

of heat-resistant traits, for example, in coral.

We've been doing this for millennia, so could we do that in coral?

But the next, perhaps much bigger step, is intervening in the gene or editing these genes using technologies like CRISPR, which is like a pair of molecular scissors that can introduce

Yes, yeah, it is an editing tool.

What a geneticist called Kevin Esvelt realised about 10 years ago or so was that you could combine CRISPR cut and paste tools with something that are called gene drives, which to create a heritable edit.

Now, gene drives are just parts of our genome that have a greater propensity to be

inherited.

A synthetic gene drive introduces a kind of CRISPR edit that is heritable.

And so you can do extraordinary things with that.

You could create a change that would run forever.

you could create an extinction machine because you could introduce something that's called a kind of last litter approach where, you know, every male that is produced in the lineage is sterile or more and more males are sterile so that it becomes, you know, that the species runs into the ground.

It's an extraordinarily powerful tool, possibly one of the most powerful we've ever created.

So it's up there.

And so Kevin Esvelt was very, very worried about the possibility of this.

So first, he introduced what's called a kind of daisy chain drive.

So basically, the gene drive architecture is assembled in such a way that its components are distributed.