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Unexpected Elements

CRISPR babies scandal – more details

Unexpected Elements

BBC

Science

4.4570 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2019

⏱️ 72 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Extracts from unpublished papers on the methods used by a Chinese scientist to genetically modify the embryos of two girls reveal a series of potentially dangerous problems with the procedure and ethical shortcomings.

We look at the mechanism behind the formation of our facial features and how this is linked to our evolution, scrutinise the impact of current emissions on global climates and see why lithium, used in batteries and medicines, is now a potentially widespread pollutant.

66 million years ago, a huge asteroid hit the earth, wiping out most of the dinosaurs that roamed the land. It would still be tens of millions of years before the first humans appeared - but what if those dinosaurs hadn’t died out? Would we ever have evolved?

CrowdScience listener Sunil was struck by this thought as he passed a Jurassic fossil site: if dinosaurs were still around, would I be here now? We dive back into the past to see how our distant mammal ancestors managed to live alongside huge, fierce dinosaurs; and why the disappearance of those dinosaurs was great news for mammals. They invaded the spaces left behind, biodiversity flourished, and that led – eventually – to humans evolving. It looks like our existence depends on that big dinosaur extinction.

But we explore a big ‘what if?’: if the asteroid hadn’t hit, could our primate ancestors still have found a niche – somewhere, somehow - to evolve into humans? Or would evolution have taken a radically different path: would dinosaurs have developed human levels of intelligence? Is highly intelligent life inevitable, if you give it long enough to develop? We look to modern day birds - descendants of certain small dinosaurs who survived the asteroid strike - to glean some clues.

(Photo: He Jiankui, Chinese scientist and professor at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. Credit:Reuters)

Transcript

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0:00.0

In 2019, we began investigating the disappearance of Dr. Ruzha Ignatva.

0:08.0

I believe we are a very special network.

0:10.0

A scammer who stole billions from investors around the world.

0:15.0

She's on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

0:18.0

And now, we have some unmissable updates. She has money and when you have

0:23.0

money you have power. Join me, Jamie Bartlett, as the hunt for the missing crypto queen continues.

0:29.5

Listen first on BBC Sounds. I'm Roland Peas. This is The Science Hour from the BBC World Service.

0:36.8

The extinction of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, paved the way for us humans to evolve.

0:42.8

But in half an hour, the crowd science team will be asking the experts if our arrival would have been any different if the extinction had never happened.

0:51.0

With the sort of heavy predation that was going on, it was unlikely that you're going

0:54.7

to see something like a human evolving alongside dinosaurs. But I guess evolution has time and time again

1:01.5

shown itself to be completely crazy. And there's some crazy speculation about our place on the planet

1:07.7

in 30 minutes from the crowd science team. Before that, on science and action,

1:12.2

we're talking global warming and the CO2 that drives it. I come in this program pretty much every

1:18.4

year and most years the emissions keep going up and we're still in that position now,

1:25.0

although this year they are going up more slowly.

1:30.1

But it also looks like the lithium in the batteries helping us to avoid global warming

1:34.5

is also ending up polluting rivers. So to keep you cheerful, how about the gene that gave

1:40.5

you a friendly face? This gene controls many other genes that shapes the function of a very specific kind of cells,

1:49.4

which then unleashes another number of cell types, which basically make up the features of our face.

1:55.4

Keep smiling. It's more or less a year since Chinese biophysicist Herzang Kui scandalised an international genetics conference

2:03.8

informing them he'd genetically engineered twin girls to confer them with, he claimed, resistance to HIV.

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