Sam Webster-Harris
speaker
698 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Sam Webster-Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In 2019, Victoria became the first American to ever receive CRISPR gene editing therapy.
It wasn't to manage her symptoms, but to literally fix the code in her DNA.
Six months later, she was pain-free, and today, six years later, she is alive and healthy.
Following some more medical trials, the FDA approved CasGV in 2023, making it the first CRISPR therapy available in the United States.
If you haven't heard much about CRISPR, they are molecular scissors that cut DNA at precise locations and you can use them to replace genes.
It's a process that once required PhD teams, five years, maybe more, and millions of dollars.
And it can now be done by high school students in a few months using standardized biological parts called biobricks.
But there is so much innovation yet to happen in this area.
CRISPR is being tested on cancers, HIV, cardiovascular disease, diabetes.
Instead of solving one disease, we're trying to build a toolkit for creatively solving all sorts of things.
Companies like Colossal Biosciences have even resurrected dire wolves using CRISPR, and one day they hope to bring back the woolly mammoth.
As an industry, we are still incredibly early.
There's huge volumes of work, mapping what every gene does and how proteins fold and interact, essentially learning the programming language of life, along with making standard toolkits with how to speak it.
In the future, a budding scientist might cure a new disease on a Monday and on a Tuesday decide to build a new life form in the same way that IKEA designers can build a new piece of furniture.
And if that doesn't sound like playing God, well, let's talk about space.
The push to build giant rockets isn't sexy because humans like big things.
What's revolutionary about ideas like Starship or New Glenn is that they are attempting to bring reusability and very low cost to send large amounts of mass into space.
And most importantly, establish the concept of refueling in space.
Even the fastest car was completely useless for a long journey without the humble gas station.
Well, getting to Mars requires an enormous amount of fuel.
Showing 281–300 of 698 · page 15 of 35
← Previous
Next →