From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the

college to listeners across the country. As a treatment for things like cancer, genetic disease,

heritable illnesses, Christopher represents a really cool revolutionary tool that could revolutionize

how we do medicine. This is your host, Scott Bertrand, and that's Dr. Silas Johnson, our first guest

on today's program. Dr. Johnson is Associate Professor of Biology at Hillsdale College. We talked at length

with Dr. Johnson about CRISPR, what it is and what it could mean for the sciences. Dr. Johnson,

thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Scott. Recently, you gave a public lecture here at Hillsdale College about CRISPR, and I've read a few things about it over the past year or two. What is CRISPR? We should say it's spelled without the second E, or the E, right? It's a C-R-I-S-P-R. That's right. So what does that stand for? What are we talking about? Yeah. So the big picture is

genetic engineering. So CRISPR is a tool that scientists use to do genetic engineering and living

cells and organisms. And that acronym, CRISPR, stands for clustered, regularly interspers,

short palindromic repeats.

So that's kind of a mouthful.

So I think CRISPR, I like the shortened version.

That works pretty well.

But that term itself, CRISPR, it actually describes some genetic sequences that were originally identified in bacteria in the late 80s and early 90s.

And so these short palindromic repeat sequences were first observed when scientists were

studying the function of genes and they were doing some gene sequencing.

And I just identified these weird palindromic sequences, the same forward and back in bacteria.

And over the course of the next five, ten years or so, scientists kept seeing these weird

sequences in bacteria and like, what do these sequences do?

And between maybe about the year 2000 and 2010, it came out that these sequences were being used by bacteria

to fight infection by viruses.

So they represent a component of basically a simple immune system for a bacteria.

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