Humanity’s Awesome, Terrifying Takeover of Evolution

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For years now, I’ve had the same recurring worry: Am I focusing on the trivial? When future generations look back on this moment in history, will they remember the daily political fights — or will everything just look like a sideshow compared to humans being able to edit genetic code? The technology I’m referring to, known as CRISPR, could cure genetic diseases like sickle-cell anemia and Huntington’s. It could let us regulate height, hair color, and vulnerabilities in our children. And, one day, it has the potential to imbue human beings with superhuman characteristics — making us stronger, faster, smarter. Nor is it just us. CRISPR lets us edit other animals and plants, with all kinds of beckoning possibilities, some wonderful, some terrible. We cannot do all this yet. But it’s coming, and soon. Walter Isaacson is the former editor of Time magazine, the former head of CNN, and author of biographies of everyone from Albert Einstein to Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs. However, his newest book, “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” is much more than a biography of Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who was essential to developing CRISPR. It’s a biography of the scientific process that led to CRISPR, and the people trying to understand its moral, political and human implications. In this conversation, I get to ask Isaacson the questions I’ve wanted to focus on myself: Is it wrong to edit your kid’s genes? Is it cruel not to? What happens when CRISPR and capitalism collide? Will we witness the rise of a superhuman genetic elite? And what kind of political and economic systems do we need to start building to ensure this technology is used in just ways? Recommendations: "The Bully Pulpit" by Doris Kearns Goodwin "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy "The Eighth Day of Creation" by Horace Freeland Judson "Winnie the Pooh" by A.A. Milne You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mr. Clan and this is the Ezra Clancho.
0:18.1	So over the past couple of years, there's been this worry stalking my own work.
0:22.5	But if I'm just wasting my time covering taxes and public options and Donald Trump and
0:26.7	the only thing that really matters right now is CRISPR that everything else comparatively
0:32.7	is just a side show.
0:34.5	CRISPR.
0:35.5	Over the past few decades, scientists have studied this enzyme, bacteria used to recognize
0:40.5	viruses and just cut them apart, is wild how this works.
0:45.3	So bacteria, they fight off viruses by snatching fragments of the virus's own DNA and then
0:50.3	loading the sequences into these enzymes.
0:53.3	And these sequences, they then program the enzymes to patrol the cell looking for a viral
0:58.8	match, like looking for that virus again.
1:01.5	And when it finds it, the enzyme cuts the viral DNA and saves the cell from infection.
1:07.5	But here's the thing that one Jennifer Daoudna and Emmanuel Scharpenty, a Nobel Prize in
1:12.2	Chemistry in 2020, they figured out, along with many, many other scientists, how to code
1:17.9	these enzymes with whatever genetic sequence we want.
1:21.1	And then we can make these incredibly precise cuts wherever that sequence is located.
1:27.2	And we can actually replace that sequence.
1:28.8	We're going to replace it with new genetic information of our choice.
1:32.5	We can make these very precise edits in genetic code and not just our code, but the code
1:37.5	of mice, of plants, of pigs, of mosquitoes.
1:41.1	We're learning how to take control of not just human evolution, but arguably every species
	...

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