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BBC Inside Science

HIV protective gene paper retraction, Imaging ancient Herculaneum scrolls, Bill Bryson's The Body

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In November 2018 news broke via YouTube that He Jiankui, then a professor at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China had created the world’s first gene-edited babies from two embryos. The edited gene was CCR5 delta 32 - a gene that conferred protection against HIV. Alongside the public, most of the scientific community were horrified. There was a spate of correspondence, not just on the ethics, but also on the science. One prominent paper was by Rasmus Nielsen and Xinzhu Wei’s of the University of California, Berkeley. They published a study in June 2019 in Nature Medicine that found an increased mortality rate in people with an HIV-preventing gene variant. It was another stick used to beat Jiankiu – had he put a gene in these babies that was not just not helpful, but actually harmful? However it now turns out that the study by Nielsen and Wei has a major flaw. In a series of tweets, Nielsen was notified of an error in the UK Biobank data and his analysis. Sean Harrison at the University of Bristol tried and failed to replicate the result using the UK Biobank data. He posted his findings on Twitter and communicated with Nielsen and Wei who have now requested a retraction. UCL's Helen O'Neill is intimately acquainted with the story and she chats to Adam Rutherford about the role of social media in the scientific process of this saga. The Herculaneum Library is perhaps the most remarkable collection of texts from the Roman era. Discovered two centuries ago in the villa of Julius Caesar’s father in law, many of the papyrus scrolls bear the writings of the house philosopher, Philodemus. Others are thought to be the works of the philosophers and poets he admired. However, the big drawback is that the villa was buried in the eruption that engulfed Pompeii, and the heat from the volcanic ash turned them all to charcoal. To make life even more difficult, the ink the scribes used was also made of carbon – think black on black. However, now a team from the University of Kentucky are hoping to decipher the texts using X-rays, and have just scanned two complete scrolls, and some fragments at the Diamond Synchrotron in near Oxford. When renowned author Bill Bryson decided to apply his unique eye for anecdote and trivia to the human body he thought he's start at the head and work down. But as he reveals to Adam, it's a lot more complicated and interconnected than that. His book "The Body - A Guide for Occupants" is an indispensable guide to the inner workings of ourselves. Producer: Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast

0:05.1

on the 3rd of October 2019 I'm Adam Rutherford

0:08.7

the diamond light syncretron has been fired up to read some ancient Greek papyrus scrolls that were carbonized and

0:15.2

embedded in cement-like concrete during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

0:20.9

And the mighty Bill Bryson has a brilliant new book, his first science book for 15 years, and we are super excited.

0:27.0

Bill popped in to give us a guided tour of the human body.

0:30.0

But first, the ongoing saga of gene-edited babies from China has kept us interested

0:36.6

and appalled for almost a year now with all of its twists and turns none of which

0:41.6

are particularly joyous.

0:43.0

It's a saga of the worst violations of the scientific process,

0:46.2

but today we've got a story that has emerged from this,

0:48.8

which is the scientific process working almost as it should. A bit of background first, this sorry saga began at the end of November

0:56.4

2018 when Chinese scientist Hejan Quay announced at the International Human Genome Editing Summit in Hong Kong,

1:03.6

that he had genetically engineered two human embryos

1:07.2

in a misguided attempt to grant them immunity to HIV infection.

1:11.3

He then implanted the embryos into their mother and two girls had been born.

1:16.6

Now we've discussed the astonishing levels of ethical violations in this endeavor a few times,

1:21.6

but another twist came in June this year when the geneticist

1:24.8

Rasmus Nielsen and Jinju Wei published study in the top tier journal Nature Medicine

1:30.0

suggesting that the gene editing that Hayjunankway had attempted may shorten lifespan as a result.

1:36.0

Well, this week, the authors requested that their paper is withdrawn and retract it.

1:41.0

We on Inside Science are committed to showing how science works,

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