SHAPE-CHANGERS OF TOMORROW: 2/4: The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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SHAPE-CHANGERS OF TOMORROW: 2/4: The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086SCVGS5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, or by cataclysmic war, or when the sun runs out of fuel in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, will we have to find a new home planet, perhaps even a new solar system, to inhabit? In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do just that. Because we are the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of lifeforms--not only for our species but for all species on which we depend and for those still to come (by accidental or designed evolution). Mason argues that the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life in other worlds
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Shopify. |
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| 0:30.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Dr. Christopher Mason of the Wild Cornel Medicine School. |
| 0:39.0 | He's a professor. He's also a geneticist and a computational biologist and an author. |
| 0:44.0 | The book is the next 500 years engineering life to reach new worlds. |
| 0:49.0 | We've started with the generational ship in the 23rd century way back here in the beginning of the 21st century. |
| 0:55.0 | What Chris does with his colleagues routinely is they edit DNA and Chris has given me permission to use the metaphor edit like a document. |
| 1:05.0 | Like I pull up word document and cut and paste. |
| 1:09.0 | Chris, what is CRISPR? What does it do? |
| 1:13.0 | Yeah, I think many in your audience has probably heard of CRISPR or read about it. |
| 1:17.0 | And CRISPR, it stands for a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. |
| 1:24.0 | And that's a big mouthful. But what it really is is basically a bacterial immune system. |
| 1:29.0 | It's kind of like a system that keeps track of what viruses have bacteria encountered and then remembers. |
| 1:34.0 | And then part of the process is cutting DNA and embedding DNA and replacing it to remember viruses that a bacteria has seen. |
| 1:42.0 | And this has been used by many people including Jennifer Daugna and Sherpentier. |
| 1:47.0 | The people just won the Nobel Prize last year to discover it really a couple of decades ago. |
| 1:52.0 | But then also to think how do we use this in human cells or perfect this system, including work by those like Feng Zheng. |
| 1:59.0 | It basically is these kind of these immune systems where you can go in and snip and cut and copy and paste. |
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