Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, and today we turn to CRISPR, the technology for editing

the gene code. Dr. Neil Baer is a lecturer on global health and social medicine at Harvard

Medical School, an award-winning television producer, an editor of a new book from Johns Hopkins

University Press called The Promise and Peril of CRISPR. He speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the full range of CRISPR from curing sickle cell disease to making devastating bio-weapons.

Let's listen.

Dr. Neil Baer, thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health on Call to talk about this new book that you edited called

The Promise and Peril of CRISPR. It's great to have you. Great to be here. Thanks.

So I want to start with maybe the obvious question. Could you explain what this genetic technology

CRISPR is? Sure. Essentially, it's a cut and paste program or an editing device for editing cells as opposed to, say, words on your word processor.

So if you make a mistake and you spell table T-A-B-E-L, you can either autocorrect it or in the past go back and take out the E&L and reverse it and

type in LE. Well, that's what CRISPR does. It homes in on a mutation, certain letters in the DNA,

and it cuts them out with an enzyme and then replaces them and paste them in to the correct sequence.

I mean, our genetic code is millions and millions of these essentially letters, different amino acids.

And CRISPR allows you to go to one specific spot and make that change, just as precisely as going into the works of William

Shakespeare and retyping a word. Exactly. So you can cut out, say the two letters, A and T are reversed.

You can cut out A and T and T and A and paste in T andA. And it can be designed to be exactly at that spot.

And we've gotten much better at it so that we don't have any what we call off-target effects.

So let's talk about first the promise of CRISPR, and then we'll get to the peril.

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