8 | Carl Zimmer on Heredity, DNA, and Editing Genes

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2018

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our understanding of heredity and genetics is improving at blinding speed. It was only in the year 2000 that scientists obtained the first rough map of the human genome: 3 billion base pairs of DNA with about 20,000 functional genes. Today, you can send a bit of your DNA to companies such as 23andMe and get a report on your personal genome (ancestry, health risks) for about $200. Technologies like CRISPR are allowing scientists to edit genes, not just map them. Science writer Carl Zimmer has been following these advances for years, and has recently written a comprehensive book about heredity: She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. We talk about how our understanding of heredity has changed over the years, how there is much more to inheritance than simply listing all the information we pass down in our DNA, and what the future might hold in a world where genetic manipulation becomes widespread. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/carl-zimmer.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carl Zimmer is a leading science writer whose work regularly appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He is the author of thirteen books, including a university-level textbook on evolutionary biology. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He teaches as an adjunct professor at Yale University. Home page Matter column in The New York Times Yale home page Wikipedia page Amazon author page Talk on Science, Journalism, and Democracy Twitter Download Episode

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.4	I'm your host, Tron Carroll, and today we're going to be talking about heredity.
0:08.2	This is of course a very old idea, the idea that there's something inside us, some properties,
0:14.0	some features that get passed down through the generations, so we inherited something from
0:19.6	our ancestors and we send something down to our descendants.
0:23.8	Back in the day there used to be the thought that royal blood was handed down, that the
0:27.6	right to be the king or the queen or the emperor, depended on who your parents were.
0:32.8	I suppose there's still countries in which that is the case.
0:36.6	But we know a lot more about how heredity really works now than we used to.
0:40.8	We know that all of our cells have a little molecule in them called DNA, and that DNA is
0:46.6	a little code.
0:47.6	It's a chain of letters, AGCT, that the arrangement of those letters tells us what makes
0:53.9	up who we are.
0:55.4	Or at least there's a simplistic version of it, where you think of DNA as kind of like
0:59.5	a blueprint, that if you knew what the DNA was, you could predict exactly what the organism
1:04.0	was going to be, maybe even what kind of food they would like or what kind of occupation
1:08.7	they would have later in life.
1:10.8	Today we know it's a little bit more complicated than that.
1:13.6	There's more going on than just our DNA to make up who we are, and not only nature versus
1:18.6	nurture, but even the nature part is very complicated.
1:22.9	There's epigenetics and development factors.
1:25.5	There's mitochondrial DNA.
	...

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