Germline Modification
Let's Know Things
Colin Wright
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2018
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
This week we talk about insulin, genetic engineering, and rogue scientists.
We also discuss CRISPR/Cas9, assisted reproductive technology, and gene editing ethics.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Artificial insulin was first produced in 1978 by a scientist named Herbert Boyer, who inserted a version of the human |
| 0:23.2 | insulin producing gene into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which then, as a byproduct of |
| 0:30.4 | its normal behaviors, produced human insulin. |
| 0:34.2 | The only reason we're able to manufacture insulin at this scale, in fact, is because we've been |
| 0:39.1 | able to tweak various bacterium and yeasts in the years since, so that instead of their usual |
| 0:44.7 | output, their usual waste, in other words, they produce the peptide hormone we humans usually |
| 0:51.7 | produce in our pancreas, a hormone that allows us to regulate our metabolism, |
| 0:57.0 | promotes the absorption of important things, and keeps in various ways essentially every part of our body, |
| 1:04.0 | operating as it should, because of how integral it is to our synthesizing proteins and secreting of glucose. |
| 1:11.6 | It's pretty rad that we can do this, and that Boyer had the creative insight to think, well, this bacterium is churning along in this way, no matter what? |
| 1:21.6 | So what if I tweaked that process a little to make that churning productive for us. One way to look at this is that it is an |
| 1:29.7 | aberration of nature and ethically questionable. Another way to look at it is that Boyer, using what |
| 1:36.2 | at the time were new scientific tools, created a novel symbiosis in nature. Ashericia coli flourished because of this adjustment. Its species was |
| 1:48.1 | suddenly incredibly valuable to us and we made sure that there was a lot of that species in the |
| 1:54.1 | world. And in turn, it helped some of us, particularly people who suffered from diabetes, to |
| 1:59.6 | acquire a new lease on life. |
| 2:02.2 | The top science of the day before we had an understanding of and reliable source of insulin |
| 2:07.6 | to distribute to diabetes patients was the starvation diet. |
| 2:11.9 | And I'm not talking about intermittent fasting here. |
| 2:14.2 | Many people who were put on this diet, which was considered to be the only |
| 2:18.0 | hope that they had of prolonging their lives, actually starved to death. It was severe |
| 2:24.0 | fasting and undernutrition, meant to give these patients a little more time, if obviously not, |
... |
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