Hi, I'm Cody Gough with the award-winning curiosity.com, and today we're going to talk about the future of the human race.

I'm Ashley Hamer, and yes, today's topic really is that big of a deal.

What if you could customize your children?

Pick their eye in hair color or eliminate genetic diseases?

Or what if you could rewrite DNA

to improve intelligence or athletic ability both in humans and in animals?

Science fiction is becoming reality thanks to a technique called CRISPR-CAS-9 and today we'll talk to a

leading expert about what's next for that cutting-edge science.

Every week we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.

This is the Curiosity Podcast. Today we're going to talk with Dr. Sam Sternberg, an assistant professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular

Biophysics department at Columbia University, and we're going to be talking about

CRISPR-KAS9 technology, which is one of his specialties.

But before we dive into today's interview, I was hoping that Ashley can help us understand

a little bit about what CRISPR-KAS9 is to set the stage.

Yeah, it's really exciting stuff, but it's also really complex.

So CRISPR is a technique for editing DNA, which is the blueprint behind every cell in your body.

When you can edit DNA, you can potentially change anything about an organism, whether that's making a

potato healthier or reducing an embryo's risk of genetic diseases or even fighting cancer

in a living human.

So when you edit DNA, does that edit every cell in your body's DNA or just certain cells?

So that depends on what you're doing it to.

If you do it to an embryo, you can potentially change every single cell in that embryo's body.

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