105. Jennifer Doudna (Geneticist) - Intelligent Redesign?

Think Again - a Big Think Podcast

Big Think / Panoply

Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 594 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2017

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. Since 2015, the Think Again podcast has been taking us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Think’s interview archives. Jennifer Doudna is a Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the UC Berkeley, and until around 2012 she was quietly and contentedly studying the three dimensional structure of RNA molecules. Then she and her colleagues started looking into a thing called CRISPR-Cas9. It’s a kind of bacterial immune system, and it led to an invention that will change everything for all of humanity, forever. In this episode Jennifer and Jason discuss the implications of the gene editing tool her lab created, and how humanity should (and likely will) yield the power to rewrite our own evolutionary destiny. Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode: Richard A Clarke on averting global catastrophes, Deepak Chopra on secular spirituality (clip not available online) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again a Big Think podcast.
0:08.0	Started in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most creative thinkers on the planet.
0:16.0	On the podcast, we revisit these ideas in new and different ways.
0:20.0	Our producer surprised me and my guests
0:21.8	with short interview clips from Big Things archives, ideas that we didn't come here expecting to
0:26.2	discuss. I'm very, very happy to be here today with Jennifer Dowdna. She's a professor of chemistry
0:31.9	and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. And until around 2012,
0:37.4	she was quietly and contentedly studying the three-dimensional structure
0:41.3	of RNA molecules, then she and her colleagues started looking into a thing called CRISPR
0:46.3	CAS9. It is a kind of bacterial immune system, and it led to an invention that will change
0:52.3	everything for all of humanity forever, pretty much.
0:55.0	Welcome to think again, Jennifer.
0:57.0	Thank you, Jason. Great to be here.
0:59.0	Great to have you.
1:00.0	So, four words for you. What have you done?
1:04.0	Well, I'm still trying to figure that out, honestly.
1:10.0	But in a very, very briefly, what has been done is to harness a bacterial immune system
1:20.6	as a gene editing technology, a way that scientists can precisely and accurately alter the DNA in cells.
1:30.3	Yeah, so it turned out like, so let's talk through that a little bit because, yeah, I want to get, I want to nerd out a little and get a bit technical here.
1:38.3	So like, so CRISPR, what exactly does that stand for again?
1:43.3	Clusters of regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats.
1:49.0	Right. And so these are sections of genes, yeah?
	...

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