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Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

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us at to mystic institute.org. This morning I have the privilege of talking to you about CRISPR.

We're going to talk about the science of CRISPR. I'm not quite sure what your background is,

so I want to make sure that all of us here have a basic foundation on the science of CRISPR. And then we're going to be

talking about ethics. Now, it's interesting. So for many years, I did science here in the United States.

But last year, after COVID, I got involved in COVID management in my homeland in the Philippines.

I was in 2020. I went home for spring break to give a talk at the University of Santo

Thomas and to visit my mother for what was supposed to be a five-day trip. But I landed

there on March 10th and on March 15th, the world locked down. So it was a 100-day lockdown

in the Philippines. You could not leave your gate, except for once a

week you had to get a Barangai quarantine pass and you'd go to the supermarket for a couple of hours.

And so I ended up teaching my classes on Zoom. But what was striking too is that I had nothing

else to do. And so MIT at that point had developed, scientists here at MIT

had developed a model for the pandemic spread. And so what ended up happening is I ended up just

downloading that and tweaking it here and there. We used it for pandemic management in Manila.

And then I ended up just getting sucked into the entire pandemic management process.

And after two and a half years, first of all, I just learned so much about human beings

and the struggle to make vaccines. And so what ended up happening is in the course of

the pandemic, I decided to pivot my research from cancer biology to vaccines. So we are developing

...