I'm going to be talking about the science of CRISPR because I'm not quite sure how much science you know with regards to CRISPR,

what exactly CRISPR is, and how we would use it to edit genomes, including human genomes.

I'm then going to move on to discuss three distinctions.

And distinctions are contrasts that help us to think through

the entire intellectual,

conceptual scheme that we're going to use

when we get to the ethics.

And the ethics here is, you know, I am a molecular biologist,

but I'm a Catholic priest and I'm a moral theologian,

but I'm so used now to talking to secular audiences

so that in this ethics talk, I'd like to also compare in contrast

a secular approach to bioethics as well as a Christian or a Catholic one.

So you get a sense of the similarities in difference

and why these two ethical approaches can often reach diametrically opposed

conclusions and claims about what should or should not be done with a particular technology.

So I'm going to begin with the science of CRISPR. And I have to start with just simply by defining the genome

because I'm not quite sure how many of you are familiar with genomic science.

So the genome consists of all the genetic information of an organism,

and so here's a human being, here's a human cell,

and this is the nucleus of the cell,

this is kind of like the control center of the cell, and you have the nuclear genome composed of

in our species of 46 chromosomes, 23 from dad and 23 from mom. You also have a small genome actually from the mitochondrial genome.

...