Hey folks, it's Quinn. Since we recorded this conversation, we've renamed the podcast. It used to be called important, non-important, which is what you'll hear in the episode and is still the name of the company. But now the podcast is called, The Most Important Question.
That is, what can I do? It's the question we get the most from all of you, and it turns out it's the question I've really been asking guests for almost 200 episodes now. So here we are, the most important question. Please enjoy this old conversation.
Thanks for listening and thanks for giving us shit. Welcome to important, not important. My name is Quinn Emmett. And I'm Brian Colbert Teddy.
And I forgot to bring Teddy to work today. That's true. I forgive you. I guess where we dive into a specific topic or question, affecting everyone on the planet right now or in the next 10 years.
Of course so. If it can kill us or turn us into CRISPR robots, we're into it. Our guests are scientists, doctors, engineers, politicians, astronauts, we had a reverend, and work together towards action steps that our listeners can take with their voice at their vote and their dollar. And Brian, this week's episode is, hey Brian, are we thinking about CRISPR all wrong?
Also, what the hell is CRISPR? This week's guest is Brandon Obunu. He's an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University. He's an evolutionary systems biologist and uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease across scales from the biophysics of proteins involved in drug resistance to these social determinants, determinants underlying disease, holy shit.
In doing so, he aims to develop theories that enrich our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological underpinnings of disease while contributing to practical solutions for clinical medicine and public health. I couldn't be happier than I made you read that entire thing. I was only asked if one word. No, more or less, it's just preposterous.
It's insane the amount of that. Would you say, and I know we've talked about this before, and it's weird and it's creepy how much the answer is yes, that that description more or less matches up with your day to day responsibilities here at important on-board. Exactly. 80%, right?
You would say you guys do the same stuff for 80% of the day? God. Yeah, super smart dude. I almost want to say that you're making some of that up, but you're not.
That's as description. Where'd I get those words? I have no idea. I have no idea.
I don't know those words. Yeah, not even close. I love talking to this guy. I just want to go take one of his classes immediately.
But I did college and it was fine and I barely escaped, so I'm not going to do it again, but I'll take it. I will just say this. I mean, he was just the perfect. Like this is who I want all my teachers to be.
I know. I know. I know. Perfect man to be an educator.
Everything is as great as really the sooner you leave. It's a really, really interesting thing for you. Everything. Everything.
Alright, Awesome. Let's go talk to Brandon. Cool. Our guest today is Professor Brandon Obunu.
And I should mention his Twitter handle is, unless I'm mangling this, and it's the wrong person, is big data cane. I cannot tell you as a big data loving, former Asmatic who cherishes tight lyrics in the gold native rap. How many boxes? That's track 4-made.
So I'm looking forward to it to me. Anyways, we are going to ask together. Are we thinking about Chris Burrell wrong and we're going to also tell you what Chris Burrell is because I have a I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
For you, you are very happy to have you. Quickly, just tell our teller listeners who you are and what you do. Great. So like you heard a little bit, I'm a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown.
And I'm a computational biologist that's interested in what I call diseases across scales. That means everything from the very molecular level, like how the genes and proteins interact in certain disease to the societal level, like how to kind of people in cities and the climate and all that influence the way diseases spread. Fascinating. That feels pretty timely with everything that's going on with the fight that the Congress still deal with with Ebola and things like that.
And all the measles outbreaks all over the world because people refuse to vaccinate the fucking children. Very interesting. That might be a different conversation. Awesome.
Awesome. So it's been a couple of minutes before we've been recording every step. As a reminder to everyone, our goal with this whole thing is to provide some quick context for the question that we are asking and then dig into some action oriented questions that get to the heart of why we should give a shit about it and what everyone out there can do about it. So if that sounds good, right now, we'll see that.
Let's make it happen. So Brandon, we'd like to start with one important question, sort of set the tone of things. So instead of saying, tell us your whole life story. We'd like to ask Brandon, why are you vital to the survival of the species?
Well, you know, I confess I cheated. I've heard a few people answer that question. And most people, you know, they do it thoughtfully and modestly and I'm not going to be modest. Yeah, get it.
I'm just playing. Now, I think what I'll say is, I mean, you know, I like the stuff that I do when I think I work on important issues. What I'll say is less me personally and just more people like me. I think who are unafraid of kind of walking into new disciplines and fields and being the dummy in the room and asking difficult questions, that's really, you know, what defines my career.
I think a question like this, you ask me two, three years from now, I have a different answer. I'll be working on different problems and different questions and I think my interest in gene editing, for example, is an example of that. So I think that's what I'd say. You've got to be courageous about entering new fields, asking difficult questions and, you know, moving on that.
I love that, man. Yeah. I think that's a word. Yeah.
Yeah. We need more of those for sure. All right. Awesome.
So we're going to set up some context for today. So I got some notes here to get everybody on the same page. Brian can ask questions. Brandon, you can tell me all the specific places why I'm wrong.
Yeah, you'll probably be fine. And that'll be great. What the hell is CRISPR stolen from Wired magazine? One of my favorites.
CRISPR is a quote unquote revolutionary new class of molecular tools that scientists can use to precisely target and cut any kind of genetic material. It's scissors for DNA. Thank you for that. Yeah, you're welcome.
How new is it? It's pretty fucking new to hard work and genius ladies. Jennifer, I'm going to make all this doodenate. I think Brandon do know which one and Emmanuelle to our entire publishing patent in the process in just 2012, which is not a long time ago.
And she has kind of gone off the rails since then and it good and maybe not so great way. So what does do CRISPR systems are the fastest and easiest and cheapest method? Scientists have ever had to manipulate the code of life in any organism on Earth. Humans included it is it is it's really a scissors for the code of life, right?
It's like search and replace on I mean, hopefully you're not using Microsoft Word, but whatever. Whatever. Right. So it's exciting.
Right. It's also terrifying. And it's obviously more complicated than it sounds as usual with science, which is great. We're finding out a lot of what we don't know, but what we think we can do with CRISPR.
Gosh, let's see, everything the dreams of biohackers everywhere, right? We can theoretically eliminate the disease of the germline forever in humans or mosquitoes. We can make plants and food more efficient and productive. We could bring back an extinct species.
Right. So the better question is what can we not do with it? We're finding out again what we don't know and again, that's science and that's important that there's stumbling blocks and finding out how the body interacts with itself. So we found that most people could basically be immunocryspers or not because our DNA, our species DNA specifically has spent a whole hell of a lot of time developing ways to defeat intruders or changes to the source code, which is what keeps you alive.
You're welcome. So I think what we're going to get in today is really is we haven't even made up of rules for using this stuff yet. And if you've watched anything with, for instance, the US Congress in the past year trying to just figure out what the fuck Facebook even is, you know, these old white people don't know what that is. So getting them to regulate CRISPR is an entirely different issue.
So because it's at least in some ways really simple and there's not a ton of rules, there's a lot of been a lot of chatter about how to make those rules and a lot of enterprising folks and future supervillains don't really care as much and are just trying to get out there and doing the damn thing. And obviously there's been some news about that recently that could really change the world one way or another. So so what I want to get into is Brandon, maybe you can offer a more concise description or an example, a specific example of how we could potentially use what we know about. And then we'll get it to our bigger question of are we thinking about CRISPR all wrong?
Are we asking the right questions at the right time? Yeah, I think I think your summary was, you know, was correct. Even at the detail level, you got most of it right. I think I think you go back to 2012 discovery and the other discoveries after that about how we were able to use it to do these very, you know, very cool and interesting things.
But I think it started with a discovery, right, a very basic science discovery in bacteria. And I think that's what makes CRISPR such an exciting thing. And it has this weird acronym. It's clustered regularly, interspaced, short, palindromic repeats.
Who cares? What the point is, the point is it's basically a primitive ancient immune system for bacteria against viruses, right? So this is something that kind of exists in nature already, right? That we're able to kind of wield for this practical purpose, right?
And I think that's kind of one of the unique things about it is evolution kind of optimized this thing for a different purpose. And we just kind of co-opted it rather than some of the other genetic modification technologies that we tried over the last 20 years or so, which were really a lot more artificial. This one is very, very particular in precise, because it kind of had a very particular precise function in a highly successful organism, like bacteria. So what you're saying is it was less typical humanity.
This was less invented and more discovered. It was something that already existed. Like you said, we're learning how to wield it. Is that correct?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not a patent attorney, right? So they wouldn't say that. You know, but I think the genius of it was in fact that it was a co-option of something that makes it used very intelligently already, right? So that doesn't make it less innovative.
That makes it more innovative. So, you know, yeah, I think that's kind of why it's been so effective and why the minute it was applied, the way it was applied initially, you know, we've been able to use it for all these different reasons. I love that. So for everybody out there, and I guess Brian, I asked Brandon.
So what's the question about CRISPR that keeps you up at night? And Brandon, maybe you can tell the people you told me and then we'll go from there. Well, many things about CRISPR and, you know, genetic modification writ large, keep me up at night. I think part of this, you know, has to do with my own ontogeny as a scientist and a thinker.
And I think, you know, I'm a, I think we're all influenced by different ideas that were around and, you know, whatever your major was, I'm sure there was a big controversy in your field. I think with me, you know, I'm a child of, you know, I'm a child of the AIDS era and I'm a child of the genetic, the first genomic modification era, which was gene therapy. And I think gene therapy was a big deal in the end of the 20th century and early 2000s, but more and more in the end of the 20th century, 1990s, 1990s. And that was supposed to transform everything.
And all of the stuff I hear, the confidence right about how we were able to eradicate genetic disease forever and we're going to, people were saying the exact same things. And I wasn't a kid. I was, you know, like, I was late in college or applying to graduate school at that, around that time. And I saw that movement come in essentially overnight disappear because they were things that people were not considering at the time.
So what happened was in 1999, there was a clinical trial where a patient in a clinical trial was killed in a gene therapy, you know, for a disease that the individual had. And I think overnight, there was like, whoa, wait a minute, having hindsight, you look at it. And I think the, you know, ethical review of that clinical trial, we're like, yeah, there's a lot of things that went wrong, but there were a lot of more than that particular clinical trial. You look at the whole field, just kind of had blinders, you know, on and didn't really tunnel vision and didn't really see the massive kind of potential scientific issues, right?
And the ethical issues. And I think there are analogies between that era and this era. And I think we're inclined that we might make some of the same mistakes, I think. Have we learned anything?
Yeah, does it feel like some of those mistakes won't be made this time? Well, so a couple of things. So, you know, I'm not apocalyptic about it. And I think, you know, I mean, I like, you know, I like my sci-fi apocalypse stuff with anybody, you know, you can talk about that later, you know, because I think those things are actually useful for thinking about a lot of these issues.
So let me, let me say something good, good stuff first. And that is the science is way better. Okay. I think the, I think the gene therapy technology where we deliver genes via a virus, I mean, it was just messy for a lot of reasons.
And I think that was the problem is you couldn't really control exactly where you put a mutation or sweet of mutations in. And I think there was a lot of kind of, you could, but not as precisely as you can with CRISPR. CRISPR is very, very good technology. I try to do this sometimes because I'm an ordinary reader about this and obviously you work on it.
But could you take a, you mentioned how precise CRISPR is. Could you just give a specific example of, again, dumb down for everyone here? Right. Exactly what you mean by how precise it is and what we can do with it?
I mean, there are experiments where, you know, you know, you have, right, the millions and millions of nucleosides, right? In the, in a genome of an organism, we can, we can exchange, you know, single, you know, nucleotides, more short, short kind of sections of a gene. We can, we can delete very, very short sections of a gene of like several nucleosides. There's that much resolution.
So it is very, very, very precise in terms of what it can do at the genome to the level. It's, it really is really a remarkable piece of technology. Wow. So it's understandable why there was, has been some excitement and the free train has moved in so fucking fast on this thing.
Well, no question. And I think there's a lot of reason to be excited about it. And I think that's kind of part of the concern, right? I mean, I think it can do a lot of wonderful things for a lot of people in the world.
And I know, you know, I don't know where you stand, you know, on the GM crop issue. I think that's part of the, this part of the problem is that, right, the issues with genetic modification are different depending on the organism you're talking about, right? Sure. So, so we can kind of make, you know, if we can make a better, you know, we can make a crop that can survive, right?
Rough conditions better. You can feel a lot of people, right? You can actually, you can do a lot of good in this world. Now again, ethics of that and economics of that and how we can patent this and that conversation.
That face value, right? Growing things is not easy in every part of the world, right? And that is actually a bottleneck in some places, so people being able to, you know, to eat and get, you know, nutrients. And it's getting harder in a lot of, I mean, you look at what's happening, right?
India. I mean, farmers are literally killing themselves by the thousands because they can't grow food anymore. Exactly. Exactly.
And you have a, you know, so you got a bunch of white people in Santa Monica who said, I don't eat GMO foods and farmers and India are going, please, let's some way grow food again. Exactly. Exactly. So on that end, there's a lot of promise.
It's funny. And I don't know if you all are beer drinkers, but like I just, you know, I read a manuscript where, you know, they're kind of like optimizing the yeast, right? To be able to make better pills and they're just a whisper. Sure.
Everybody on all levels, this has the potential to do a lot of good. So I think, you know, that's exciting. I think on the problematic side, right? There are a lot of concerns, even when in GM process, let's put aside the economics of our who owns what and patenting and all that and incorporate interest and all that at a basic level, right?
There's the scientific issue of, right? This is a science question. This is before we got into right and wrong. And you know, there's a science issue of how do you know that a given mutation or suite of mutations that you put into a genome of an organism that, right, confers phenotype A in this organism is going to do the same exact thing in all other organisms of its kind, right?
So I might have, I might have isolated a mutation that, you know, helps a tomato right faster, right? But if I take that same mutation and I put it in a, you know, let's just call it a cousin tomato, a related tomato, that's not exactly the same. How do I know that that's going to do the exact same thing, right? The answer is we don't.
You know, and I think that's a fundamental question of basic science evolutionary genetics that is very, very relevant. We call this like, we call these things when mutations off target effects. You can target this one thing here, but you could, it could have these other effects throughout the organism and genome, right? Because it's hard to know exactly how everything fits together, right?
The genome is not just this linear stretch of, right, information. These things are interacting with each other, right? So you mutate this one thing, thinking you're going to get this one phenotype and do it a this is a force, a process, an evolution we call, epistasis and who cares? But basically what that is, is it's the, it's the interaction between mutations at one site in a genome and kind of mutations at other sites in a genome.
And really this can make it difficult for us to predict very, very carefully how, I know this mutation is really going to make the beer better. It might, and it might do it 70% of the time. The issue is in beer, who cares, right? You get a really good beer, I get a lousy beer, who gives a crap, right?
You're talking about engineering homo sapiens, babies, slightly bigger. It's a slightly bigger deal, right? All of a sudden you got the fucking X-Men, which like, for better or worse, you know, it was complicated. And you're right.
I mean, we haven't even gotten to the ethics part of that, which is like, oh, all the handicap books are going. I understand why you think it's cool to get rid of my handicap, but also I live a whole life and there's a culture based around this and what you want to get rid of. Anyways, but you talk about the science. I mean, it comes back to like, despite all the technology and all the computing power and the machine learning we have and the ability to pick up on patterns and all the genomes we've scanned and things like that, even though they're mostly white people, you know, we can look at something like the microbiome, which it feels like every month, we're like, wow, we didn't know that or wow, we didn't know that.
And like you said, it would be great if we ask these questions or took some time to think about questions and apply them to a fucking tomato before we even consider doing this with humans. But unfortunately, that's not the way it's gone, has it? No, no. And I think we're finding now, right?
So there's not any big discovery. There's, you know, I think the news or the publication records so select for the good stories, right? The stories. And I think, you know, understandably so, right?
And I think there was a lot of excitement because it's really done some really, really cool things. But now we're starting to see we're getting, I don't know, there's their examples now where, you know, Christopher is causing, you know, double stranded ranks, particularly that don't matter, but it can cause kind of like mutations in other parts of the genome. It can cause these kind of unforeseen effects in other parts of the genome, which, you know, and that is legitimately frightening. I think this is actually at one part, at one point got the market, you know, when the market responds, right?
People are like, I know it's serious. Even if the CRISPR market was like, wait a minute, you know, what's going on with this? So there are these examples that have already happened. And these are actually starting to come up more and more now.
So say, for example, I Chris Bur, you know, I want to add this run of this set of nucleotides into one gene, I can cause deletions, right? And another gene, like somewhere else in the genome. And that's really, really bad. It feels like an understatement.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So, yeah.
That's crazy. And I mean, we just don't know the, and again, all the credit in the world of the people who have spent, like you said, the past 20 years working on genomics and things like that, and the human genome project and all that. But again, we just haven't made that much progress on it to be able to say like, oh, cool. Now we can cut you down and replace it with whatever we want.
We have no idea how that's going to affect, in most cases, we have no idea how that's going to affect other parts of the genome, which is so complicated. It's interesting because the problems with genetic modification, I think the good news is that a common problem, right? I mentioned earlier of what does, what does a given kind of mutation do in an organism? That problem is common throughout the genomic world.
It's not just about genetic modification. So for example, the question of the fears of genetic discrimination, right? You have a mutation that gives you a higher probability of acquiring a schizophrenia at some point. The fears that that will kind of lead, right, that you'll help a society where that's going to happen and the fears of genetic privacy, these are all based on that same problem.
We really don't know all that well how to tell for sure how a given mutation or run of mutations in a gene is going to do blank. There are very, very few examples in the history of medicine or biology where we are really, really sure that this mutation doesn't. So clap a bunch of you know, we know TASACs, we know sickle cell anemia, we know these very, right? There are some that are like, you get these mutations, you're going to have X-brite problem, usually it's these things that we've characterized that way.
But for the vast majority, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, the majority of phenotypes that we care about, it isn't that simple. It's kind of like most kind of traits that we care about, even, you know, morphological ones like height are dozens of different mutations and hundreds of different genes that are interacting in all these kind of messy ways. And so we're dealing with that problem now in the basic science of understanding of who we are. You take that problem and the genome modification problem kind of has all of those issues in it because we're just not very, very good at being able to disentangle what individual things you're doing within a gene.
And to me, again, it's so hard not to just bail right into the ethics questions of this. And obviously we're definitely going to get to Gatika at some point. But it does seem like, again, as quickly as this stream is moving scientifically, and as much as there's obviously been some slightly terrifying recent news about this, about the science actually being executed, it does seem like, though we have learned some lessons in what we should do, it does seem like ethicists are actually getting the chance to chime in on this, as opposed to, for instance, anything coming out of Silicon Valley these days, where the mantra of move fast and break things has truly broken everything. So maybe not enough or as much as we hope, but do you feel like there are, so again, let's stick with the science for just another minute.
Are there science questions we have answered? Where have we made progress since 2012? Well, I mean, so on the science front, yeah, I mean, I think this, you know, I'm not pessimistic necessarily about this. I mean, in the sense of, or rather, I don't know about my future, I'll think about my current outlook.
I feel like the science is doing, science is fantastic, you know, in a lot of ways. I think it has to do a lot of really good and cool things. I mean, even in a lot, even just sort of laboratory tests, I think the science is doing quite well. So I think since, even since 2012, we have kind of new ways to deliver CRISPR tests.
We can kind of, we can do it better. We can do it in more organisms. So I think, you know, we are developing better and better technology around CRISPR. So I'm pretty confident about that.
I think, and I think, you know, just generally speaking, like getting into the ethics and you know, we can talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I think we are, you know, trying to stay ahead of the science in a way that we once did not, right? So yeah, I mean, you know, there have been a lot of good conversations, I think, you know, the genetic privacy conversations, which at one point the technology got way out ahead of the law. I think the law is kind of caught up in them anyways.
And I think, not to say this is not going to be a problem moving forward. But I think the conversations are being had publicly in a way that, you know, you know, for what it's worth, I'm reasonably satisfied with. I mean, here's the thing though, you know, it's like, I'm glad we are. I'm glad we've clearly learned some lessons because it's the fucking Spider-Man quote, right?
Which you can attribute anything to great power comes, great responsibility and the species don't fucking do well with that very often, right? From, I mean, nukes backwards and forwards. But you look at what has happened. For instance, I mean, look, the inevitable, it seems like the inevitable outcome is there's going to, and it's the same way with the, you know, all these genome projects is we're going to attempt to use them for good.
And I'm not trying to be a pocketbook about this either at all. I'm just trying to, you know, I'm trying to illustrate the broad spectrum of where people should ask questions. And it just, I look at what is, I guess to be specific, I look at what has happened with data in the past 18 months, and you go, oh, if you apply this to that, then it's actually get at like maybe at best, right? And so again, yeah, I just, I'm curious, like, where are we having the success on the ethical fronts?
So I think it's fascinating the way you kind of articulated that and who's spotted me as fan. So, you know, that resonates. But I think here's the issue, right? I think with all things like CRISPR, all kind of big breakthroughs, be they technological, be they the algorithmization of everything like you're talking about in the data space.
I think there's kind of like three things about people, right, that are hard to distinguish and all three of them kind of went together, cause problems. People want to help people, right? Like, and not everybody wants to help people, but people often want to help people. There are a lot of people who want to do good in this world.
And I think there are people who wielded the original, right, gene therapy stuff that I told you, right? Ended up not working, who really, really wanted to help people. I think people want to be famous, people want to be rich. And I think those three things, when they get to, right, people aren't good at being able to kind of distinguish those things.
I think people who are wielding these technologies in blind, so for example, the, you know, the recent case in China, right, of the presumably, we don't know, we're sure, right? But the first CRISPR baby, which had a, has a deletion in a gene that confers resistance to HIV, if you read the comments from the scientists, he might be full of shit. But he sounds like he did something meaningful for someone, right? Like, so basically the parent, like the father, but the parent, one of the parents has HIV positive, okay?
And there's a lot of discrimination, right? And, you know, as there is in stigma against the HIV positive community there or as individuals from. So the notion is that I can have this child that will never have to face that stigma by virtue of them having essentially no chance of getting HIV, which is just kind of weird for a bunch of reasons, but there's a lot of ways to not get to be able to catch a cold, you know, just catch a cold, whatever. You know, there is an appeal to, right?
Emotion there, you know, and I think the scientists very well might think that he did something right. And his attitude with those people, right? That's right. Who maybe who are doing it from a sense of integrity, right?
In a sense of being progressive and thinking like, Oh my God, look what he can do. Why would we wait to do this to help these people? Right. Right.
But then again, I mentioned before, you know, there's been these discussions of, of, of, of, of you talk to, again, the handicap world, which is, which is huge and wide and varied. And these people are incredible. And they go, you know, let's talk about blindness, for example. Yeah.
And I think there's a lot of community there and these people are going, so wait, if you, if you cut out blindness or, you know, all the different degrees of blindness and variations on it, you lose that culture too. And someone just barrels ahead and says, Oh, look, I've cured blindness blindness and a couple girls from Iowa or whatever. All of a sudden you go, well, it's just so complicated. And that's, that's the fun and important of ethics, right?
But I, you know, I also think, and this might not be your ballgame and ready to maybe it is, you know, everyone rips on the Star Wars, see prequels, right? Right. And, and there's this, there's this great, the whole thing is like a Jedi is not supposed to fall in love and all this shit. And there's this great quote by Ryan Johnson, the guy who made the last one, the last Jedi where before it, like it was right when he got hired to make it.
And, and you know, everybody rips on the, on the prequels. And he gave this quote about him saying devil's advocate, the prequels are seven hour long kids movie about how fear of loss turns good people into fascists. And it's really interesting because it's, you know, Anakin who turned into Darth Vader didn't really fuck up shit in both that movie and then obviously going forward. But, but to him, I mean, maybe killing a bunch of kids, maybe wasn't a little concerned about the dark side, but again, people do things out of what they think is a good intention or a protective intention.
And, you know, what if a scientist who figures out how to cure blindness has a two year old blind daughter, you know, or what's the further extreme of that? And it's just, it's really complicated. I'm glad we're having these discussions, but yeah, yeah, the Chinese scientists didn't, from all I've read it doesn't seem to have any intention at all. He was just probably super excited about the fact that he could do it.
And unfortunately, did it without enough, you know, research, right? As opposed to asking, you know, how do we keep this from causing some terrible, just terribly awful shit, possibly, are there, are there innovative new ways to confront the ethical implications and science and the combination of the two? So yeah, I mean, to the Chinese scientists, you know, in particular, who did it, and I think it's a tremendous kind of biological feat, right? I think that there's some actual scientific problems with what was done and not even ethical.
Like, we think that the embryos are what we call mosaic, which means the different cells might have different kind of genetic information in them, which is not good. So there's even some scientific, that's kind of one of the reasons why it's unethical, because even what was carried out scientifically, it just looks like it might have been in some way sloppy because that's kind of where the technology is. But that kind of scientific fertility, I mean, you know, if you're doing in vitro fertilization, you don't put in mosaics, you know, they're graded in two ways, and you put those in, it's just like you said, it's just sloppy. That's right.
No, it's very, very sloppy. You know, to the point, you know, now that we're into the ethical things, and you know, it's part of the conversation, the point you made about the handicap community in particular was a very, very profound one, because this is one of the areas and one of the reasons that this technology, right, could cause us serious problems. We need to stop and think about why we want to modify certain things about who we are, right? So dammit, you have a right to like a Pilsner that's hoppy or whatever, like, there's no consequences there, right?
But again, to say that something needs to be eliminated from the species is to cast a very particular type of judgment about that thing, right? So, right, so like sickle salineemia sucks. It's awful, right? So it's tastes like certain things that we can kind of all mostly agree, right?
You know, to get rid of, right? But you know, speaking of gataca, right, there's a, I don't know if it's all alternative ending or an alternative trait. I think it's an alternative trait. You should watch this sometimes.
It's a very beautiful, beautiful trait. I've just showed it in class. And what it does, what it says is, it shows a picture of Albert Einstein and it says dyslexia, and it shows a picture of like Virginia wolf, and then it says something like, man, depression, right? I forgot what, Emily Dickinson, I forgot what it is, but my point is a famous writer, and it shows, it shows all of these kind of historically, you know, famous people, and it shows the afflictions that they had.
Now, we don't know for sure whether or not, right, that the source of that thing was genetic in that individual, but it's making the point that, right, it very well might be true, right? That certain things that we associate with a problem are only problems because we've made them a problem, right? So I think a very, very personal example, right? And something that is very, very personal and relevant to my experience as a scientist and a person in America is if you told me a mutation in homo sapiens that would be profoundly influenced with lifespan and where you lived and how you lived, really simple, even today, but by law until, right, half a century ago, it would be for black skin, right?
Right? And so in a situation, right, where you're like, well, I want to kind of engineer a child who has a better set of chances in life. Well, right? It's very, very obvious, right?
That the decision and that situation would be to an engineering child without black or the phenotypic features of being a black person in America, right? But as we've observed, that's entirely a human decision that we've made to certain people certain ways. And so if we're not careful and thoughtful about the things that we want to change about ourselves, and because some of these things are entirely about kind of the way society is engineered, I think this is the real problem with CRISPR, right? It's not like taking Tylenol, right?
So when you take Tylenol because you have you buy engineering or something like that, you take Tylenol, the pangos away, and then the Tylenol vanishes from the bloodstream and right, it never affects you again. When you change the genome of something, you have changed future generations. It's not there. And so you've kind of taken away the ability of human beings to be able to decide whether or not this thing is actually good or bad by virtue of the fact that society changes.
And I mean, let's talk about, again, let's say you have the quote unquote opportunity to genetically modify an embryo so that it comes out less black or it doesn't deal with those superficial things that we have used as instruments to just wreck the African-American race for 400 years, right? So that's part of you goes, I could see why that's an advantage. And then part of you goes, well, what about the things that we lose when that child doesn't get to have an experience or what could they not contribute to culture? And then the third question is, all we do as humans is look for the easy fix and maybe that's not the fix that this situation needs.
Maybe we could take a step back and go, are there other ways to address this problem so that this child doesn't have to experience this, but also gets to keep and inherit this incredible culture that he is going to come into or he or she's going to come into? Does it have to be snipping out this part of his genome and his skin color? We never get to the root of the breath. Never the root of the problem that we saw that's always how do we just fix it now?
Right, right, how do we just make them look different? Look, everything is all better and they don't have to do that. It's like, no, why don't we just treat them better? How about we find out how we start with that?
And you go, it applies to, let's look at autism. I mean, look, I'm not afraid to say, two of my kids are test two babies and they had to be. And so that's why I can speak about fertility and mosaics and all that shit all the time. I basically got like a PhD in that shit.
And you look at it and you go, oh, these are the genomic things that came up and we had hundreds of bad embryos, quote unquote bad ones that came up for different things where it didn't have an answer, which is almost just as bad as you find out later. And one of the things obviously you look for autism, but then you look at some of the ways, progressive and innovative people have looked and go, wait a minute, this autistic person might not fit into society in this way, but look at the specific, almost super power they have in other ways that can contribute to my cause or my mission or my company, whatever it might be. And again, you have to ask a question of like, what do we lose when we do that? I mean, I couldn't have said it better.
I mean, so on the autistic side, and particularly, I mean, that's a fascinating phenotype. That is a great example of how conversations about, right, so the neurodiversity movement is kind of one of the things where that's transformed the way school is structured and the way we're educating people in that, brains are different, minds are different. And just because somebody's a little bit different, whatever the heck that he means, right, doesn't mean that they're stepping from an affliction. I think the autism community has done a really nice job of that.
I think in the context of things like race, and in terms of things that, it's part of the problem in terms of us thinking there's a quick fix, goes back to why you ask me, why I'm vital to the species, whatever you ask me, right? I think it's because a lot of the people who are doing the CRISPR don't think about society, and they don't read that literature, and they're not thinking carefully about these things. And I think, right, so like, you know, interdisciplinarity, you know, there's a lot of phrases for that now are essential. So take me, for example, like, I mean, the reason that I'm a scientist now, unquestionably, even if you're talking about biological inheritance is because of my mother, right?
My mother would have been a scientist if she was born with more opportunities. No question about it, no issue, right? The reason that she was not is she experienced the tail in the gym crop, right? So it's one of those things where, because I understand the experience of how a phenotype, right, that can be arbitrarily, right?
I now enter these conversations like, you know what, maybe y'all need to think about why you want to edit that thing, right? Because I know somebody who was genetically equipping, she was a math teacher, which was about as high as you could go for that demographic, you know? I mean, black people have been experiencing radical for 400 fucking years, right? Right, you know, exactly, you know?
And so you gotta be, and I think, you're funny, man, I was on Twitter the other day, and it's been over 20, I mean, I feel I'm changing my life. I mean, it was a, I was on Twitter, somebody was talking about how, and I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I was like, whoa, you missed the point, gee, like, the movie's not about genetics. It's about, right, how, right, we, like you said, we look for these short-cutting, easy fixes for society, and we think that we have more control over fate than we tend to, and yeah, I think that's where we, I think that's where we're headed, if we don't, you don't have to get it. Hey guys, it's Quinn.
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Are there ethical questions that we have mostly agreed on? And then sadly, ones that were maybe too late on, for the most part? Yeah, for the most part, I think, I think there are very strict FDA regulations on, so number one, there was a ban on human and burellis, like pretty much right away, which was good. And I think there are very, very strict kind of limitations about, I mean, there's some kind of legal baseball about gene editing versus gene modification, and some things involves adding things, something about phones removing things.
So one thing is a little, I mean, we're sorting out kind of what the difference between that is because people are less afraid of deleting things, and adding things, even though it really doesn't really matter. Yeah, yeah, that's a rule, it's good for me. So glad this is still being sorted out. But my point is, the conferences are being had, and I think that's a good thing.
I think, frankly, I think the situation with the CRISPR baby, which we'll call this child for a better way to describe this individual, right? Well, I mean, it's how they're gonna be known for their title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First person in history, we've ever, yep, nah, they're gonna be, you know, screwed up.
Isn't there like, didn't he not even provide like evidence? Isn't it like, no, there's no evidence, right? He didn't publish the results of that, because this individual was trained with the best people in the world. So people are confident that he did it.
Right, right. It's just that nobody knows there's been no that hasn't verified. Very, very strange. So, you know, so I think part of the issue is that the same standards that are held here in the UK are held everywhere else, right?
So it's kind of universalizing, right? The ethics, I think is the challenge. I think in the UK and in the US, I think the conversations have been pretty good about regulating human activity or, you know, outright banning it. And even in crops, I think, you know, there's a, there's a, there are regulations on transparency that are good.
I think what's not being, I think, I think, so I feel good about that. I think the problems that we still have are the greater problems that we discuss regarding kind of what are the things that we deem as disease, like the autism example, and what are the ones that we don't. I think that's a conversation that needs to be had within the clinical community, and the psychological community, and the sense of educational community, and the sense of autism. I think those are ones that we were going to continue to have to have at a very, very detailed level, and we are having.
And they're so complicated, but I'm glad we are, you know, because as much as we say, like, oh, you know, they handicapped again, the blind of the deaf community might say, wait a minute, don't wipe out the sculpture we built. There might be, I'm sure there are people who go, yeah, I don't want to fucking be deaf. I'd rather live a more standardized full life. And of course, then you go further down the waterfall, oh, but that person's 14 and they're now legally amount to make decisions for themselves, but their parents want them to not be deaf or back and forth.
But as long as it seems like we're pushing these conversations, even if it's so hard to establish standards all the way down the grain, the conversations are what are vital. So I actually do, I want to move into sort of what I feel like we do best, which is, so as citizens who are either bystanders or could maybe quote unquote benefit from said science, what are questions you feel like now we should be asking of our representatives around this stuff? Yeah, so I think there's, you know, I think, I call citizen, citizen, scientists, because we're all involved in it, even when we're not in the lab, you know, I think you should ask, and we should ask, there's some scientific things we can ask, and then they're like policy things that we can ask. So from the scientific perspective, this is the thing that I study, right, fundamentally is how do we like this concept of epistasis, which I talked about, it's how do we know that we put a mutation in a given organism that it is doing the same thing in genetic background A versus genetic background B.
And the flat question is, when you see Chris before a great brand of beer, you know, this was brewed with GM, you don't have to get horrified by it, but a reasonable question is, well, what are the strains, right, of yeast that this Chris Chris man that we're carried out in, right, like, right, how, you know, or was it tested in one, verified one, and then kind of just thrown into a bunch of different strains without testing them, right? So you want to make sure that the thing that we're consuming, right, has specifically been tested. I think, right, across the different possible genetic backgrounds. So that's like a practical question.
It's like, you know, I think related to that is, right, one of the big other big things in modern genomics that kind of complicates the study of human genomes and who we are is the effect of the environment, okay? So if you test kind of an effect, you have a mutation, that's associated with really delicious beer, but only when it's, I don't know anything about brewing beer, but if you only do it either of you, whatever, I'm gonna say stupid, like if you brew it at room temperature or something like that, but room, right, at room, you know, but it's, but in certain places, you can't get it through, and you eat it up, you get a completely different effect of that mutation that's associated with the yeast being able to do something that's completely different in a different setting, or we add a different ingredient for something of that nature, right, that could completely change the flavor of the beer. So my point is, I use that kind of trivial example for a reason, but fundamentally, the questions are the same for that as they are for the Christmas baby, they are, all right, this mutation that we think is useful to humans or life or livestock for this reason, what environments did you test this mutation in? You tested across temperatures, did you test it across a bunch of different, I don't know, like in bacteria, it's like pH of the solution that is quite a bit.
Did you test it in a bunch of different culture conditions, whatever, so the point is you wanna make sure that anything being consumed or being offered to society via the CRISPR method that it was tested in a lot of different, we can just call them contexts. Did we test this CRISPR thing across a bunch of different contexts? Because this tomato that grows beautifully in the lab in this setting, what happens when I grow it in another setting, right? I think so, I think that's a practical question that citizen scientists can ask of their science, and I think anybody in this industry should be able to answer that.
And it's important too, because it seems silly to ask those to say like, oh, did you do it in a room next door? Where's five degrees warmer? And that might seem silly to some people, but it's like, this is shit we've known about quote unquote, I mean, this is so fucking lazy, regularly grown plants for thousands of years since agriculture, right? And we're trying to start from scratch with some of these things because you're making, if you're making germline edits to a plant, you're inherently changing the functions that have evolved into it for thousands and thousands of years.
So we do have to ask those. And then to me, I would again just come back to when they say, no, or they say yes, it's why or why not? Why didn't you test that there? Was it because of speed?
Was it because of money? Because you don't think it's necessary or relevant? Because that is actually, to me, gets to the heart of these things a little bit more. Yeah, and I think the good news is, and the bad news, but I look at it, is that in terms of what to ask, there is a blueprint in place, and you'll see why it's a good and bad news.
There is a blueprint in place from the pharmaceutical industry, right? And you're meaning a lot of the questions are actually rather similar, right? So when you have a kind of new drug on the market, right? The question is, who did you test this in?
What was the structure of the population? And as you know, right, things are pulled off the shelf all the time because the range of people that it was tested in was narrow, and they did or they didn't test it for long enough in the long term effects of this thing were negative, right? So my point is, it's a blueprint in place for how to ask that of kind of GM technology large. So that's the other blueprint, right?
It's good, because somewhere, again, for better words, like you said, the good and bad, there's an exhaustive list, which almost, it can't be exhaustive enough of did you test this everywhere? My uncle was one of the first guys to have, way back, one of the first guys to have LASIC. And at the time, he was doing stupid white people shit, he was climbing a bunch of mountains. And I remember, they were like, hey, could you go climb up to like 15,000 feet?
Cause we need to see if your eyeballs fucking explode. And he was like, well, we do have to find that out. So I might as well be a guy. And it was just fucking like climbing magazine or something.
It was just another box that they didn't need to check. Even as much as it's like a niche thing, this niche thing that'll apply to a lot of fucking people. I don't know. I don't know how these things are not happening.
And yet these procedures or drugs would ever go out anyway. And then after you get there because then you find out. Look, I mean, I might, you know, I might act like I'm well-rounded and well-read, but I'm a geneticist. I'm an evolutionary geneticist.
I'm on their side ultimately. So my point is, but I say that for a particular reason. The thing people my life's on, and the reason why I got good mind in my cupboard is because I can tell you that mutations, the effects of mutations change in different environments. That's the thing that I'm studying right now.
So my point is anybody should tell you, that's a super question. It's not a super question. I got data to show that. And I think a lot of people have data to show that.
So they lie, like I hate to snitch on my people, but like, you should be able to test these things across ranges. That's a reasonable and fair question to ask of the science. Well, and I think there's probably some of the fear that people have with like GMO foods and stuff like this is why we're so quickly to say like, and by the way, a lot of times, most of the time some regulation is great. But I think it's easy for people to go like, Montano didn't test this.
They don't know what this does this and this. And by the way, sometimes they might not have fucking done that. Yeah, I get that. I get that.
I mean, the thing is, I'm not anti-GM-prob it all. I think this thing has a number one. I think a lot of the fear of genetically modified crops in particular is based on an old, antiquated idea of, you call it the naturalist fallacy. Things that are in nature better, right?
And that ain't true, right? That ain't true at all. Nature comes up with all kind of screwed up bad, right? Awful things.
Bad simply because we engineered it. And I think that's why people hate it. So at the same time, I do emphasize like you just outlined with the notion that we should be able to answer the question of whether or not something was tested across the environment. Now I'm gonna ask you to use your wildest imagination here.
Imagine Brandon, me, I am a young scientist, and I actually wanna get into this work. What do I do and how do I have the most impact? Great question. So how, what stage are you, if am I gonna ask?
Let's say high school, right? These young people that are out there are gonna change the fucking world. I mean, basically anybody over 45 were done with, right? They've had the answer in the world.
Right, yeah. Great question. Yeah, great question. It's a great question because education, educating the public is a big part of who I am as an academic.
I think about this carefully. So, and it's also interesting because this has changed during my academic life. So what I would say is pay particular close attention in math class. And because biology as a whole has gotten a lot more quantitative in the last 15 years or so.
I think people who study math and computer science are really the ones in many ways who are kind of running these fields, even fields like CRISPR and maybe CRISPR was a very, very laboratory and empirical discovery. I think the field of bioinformatics and things of that nature, they're the ones, right, who are maybe even weird ones. I'm kind of of that ill. I'm a kind of a figure.
I'm a kind of a figure. So I think I pivoted at the right point, you know, so to speak. So I don't want to get really, really adept quantitative because you understand things like statistics, you understand computer science, you understand that. In addition to that, right, you should pay close attention in English class.
You should pay, the recommendation is kind of lame in the sense of I don't, listen, I was a lousy high school student. So I don't care. I'm not saying get A's in all your classes. Make sure you're reading broadly, right, and understand kind of what US history was and world history was so that when you enter these conversations, you can bring something else to it.
And I think this is really the problem, is that this under appreciation for how arbitrary things about the way we've structured society, we can be conflate that with solutions that can be provided by things like CRISPR. So that's what I'm telling young CRISPRs. I love that. And it is incredible.
And I imagine the computational side is only going to just keep exploding over the fact of five, 10, 20 years. Look at what groups like the Flatiron group like Jim Simons is doing in New York, it's just wild and hopefully for the better. But yeah, as a liberal arts major, I couldn't agree more. And again, come back to the Silicon Valley thing.
We have to have people who have not just asked these questions but know how to ask the right questions. And as they stop, we should think about this. Why are we doing this? Why or why not?
And if you can bring both of those things to the fold, that'll be even more impressive. And we will be thankful for you. This is so great. I wish that I gave a shit when I was in high school.
So I would have been just incredible. Monster. Brandon, we've only had you for almost an hour here. Thank you so much for being here, man.
We're going to wrap it up, ask some more questions, but really appreciate it. This is what we call the lightning round, Brandon. Yep. We've got some questions for you.
Give it. Yeah. Hey, so Brandon, when was the first time in your life when you realized you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful? It was probably my freshman year at college.
And I mean, not ironically, they same year I saw. I think I was the same year I saw Gaddaca. So I think that was the year when I was the first time I started really doing well in school. I knew I liked school.
It was easy for me to write school. But I think that's kind of an identity kind of thing. And awakening and I learned that, wow, I'm actually really good at this stuff. And people appreciate me for it.
And wow, these concepts connect to real problems in the world. And I think it's funny. I think, you know, yeah, I think Time Magazine had awarded a man of the year to an age researcher. And I think that was another kind of moment.
So I think it was in that window of time. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. It's amazing when and how things impact you.
Who is someone in your life that's positively impacted your work in the past six months? Oh, boy. I mean, I'm a collaborator, Supreme. I think there's a scholar.
Actually, you know, you leave these on the show. So Dr. Sam Scarpino. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, Dr. Scarpino has been really, really great for me. I think our work overlaps in some ways. And I think, you know, we kind of taught me kind of new ways to think about some of the problems that I work on.
And hopefully, I'll talk to him a few things. But I think kind of having cross-pollination with somebody relatively nearby, whose work I respect and admire, I think has been really, really important for me to being able to grow as a scientist. I love that. And even if you're working on slightly different things, it is amazing what can come from that sort of relative interdisciplinary approach, at least environment, you know?
I feel like history is littered with those type of interactions. So what do you do when you feel overwhelmed by everything, specifically? Things have been a little chaotic. So you mean all the time?
Yeah, right. What's your day to day? You know, you know, I love consuming. I mean, it's going to sound lame, but it's true.
I love consuming creative and dope ideas in different realms. Like, I love music. I love hip hop. I love film.
And I like to see kind of human creativity on display, which is why I have such a deep connection to kind of decide. So I always have your term, I would say I was not very strong opinions on all that. I mean, I agree with you. But my point is, you know, I think I love the human capacity to create.
And so whenever somebody's doing something interesting and cool, even if it's not something that I know about or I dig necessarily, you know, I want to at least experience it. So that kind of keeps me hopeful about where we are as a species. I love it. Anything you really doggling?
Yeah, I was just going to ask. Yeah, I mean, just in general, like just general things. Yeah, so I mean, I think I've been impressed with, you know, I saw a bunch of good films recently. You know, I saw a bunch of good films.
I've been enjoying films. I've been so recently, I just saw, you know, I saw, you see the new Spider-Man movie? Oh, yeah. Did you guys see that?
Is it so great? Oh, my gosh. It's beautiful. And I think that's a good example.
I'm glad you actually, I actually, I think about this. That's a good example. So that film was such a big impact on me that it got me thinking. And apparently, like the animator community is way bigger and richer and more wonderful.
And I don't draw shit, man. I don't give any of that. I don't, you know, I don't, you know, I don't, you know, but like this whole wonderful diverse world of like animators. And they got their own culture.
And they like, you know, so I'm not on social media all that much. But like, you know, I've started following a few of them and just every day they post new little interesting things. And I'm like, wow, like here's this thing that I've kind of, you know, I've seen all these Pixar films that I like them. They've obviously been tremendously successful in these other animated films, but I've just taken it from Reddit, you know, it's a type of genius.
I was like, I had no idea. So frankly, you know, I'm looking for ways to kind of work that into my, you know, there's one, uh, drawer artists who drew his drawn sketches of my lab members for me and I'm trying to work this into kind of what I do as a scientist somehow. I don't know. But that's an example of like me being inspired by something and me following up on it and me trying to kind of work it into the things that I do.
Yeah, there's a hell of a lot to take away from that movie from from, yeah, from the art to the sci-fi side of it to the superhero stuff. It's, it's boiling. All right. No, man, go see it right after this.
Like I already googled the show time. Brandon, how do you consume the news? You know, I sit down and, you know, I really knew I'm trying to like a lot of people in my demographic, you know, they've had some issues recently, but you know, I think everybody has and I try to, you know, I haven't been great about consuming, you know, 10 and 15 different news sources. Yeah.
You know, I have friends who like, you know, some of the, some of the news is it's just so it affects me so deeply and so personally that I can't, I can't bring myself, I'm not even going to say I can, I can't, there's some stations, I just can't turn on because it's going to ruin my day, you know. So I think I think it's a balance between, I think the argument for consuming that poison is stuff is that it's important to know what the world with the world, with the world really thinks, right? Which I get, but I think not everyone is my day and it prevents me from being able to do the things that I have to do. So in some ways, I'm still sorting that out.
I think I try to stick to kind of publications and institutions that I have built much rest over the years and I try to remain critical of them as well. Nice. I love that, man. All right.
If you could Amazon Prime one book to Donald Trump, what would it be? Oh, shit. We have had full line of wide variety of shit. What a range.
We're going to include it in our Amazon book club. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, so it's tricky, right?
Because it's like, I mean, is he going to read it? We're assuming that he will read it or that somebody will read it to him. Yeah. Fair enough.
Fair enough. I think there's a great book about, you know, to give a perspective, you know, about how, you know, I try to re-brawly, you know, I've been sitting in mass incarceration the way a lot of people are these days. One of the big kind of social justice of our time. And there's a great book from the war in the poverty, from the war in crime, the making of mass incarceration in America.
You know, and I think it's by Elizabeth Hinton. And I think that book really, really, I think what really struck me about that book is that it kind of outlined specifically like the very practical political decisions that were made, that kind of led and created the policies, you know, the modern mass incarceration. So it kind of examines a bunch of presidential, you know, going back to Johnson and Nixon and it kind of, it's kind of, it's humbling and kind of like, wow, to kind of read how these decisions that are handful of people made really crafted, you know, our crime control policies today. I think it's one of those things where as a kid, you know, I was like, a conspiracy theorist, the way everybody is.
Of course, you know, I was a conspiracy theorist of anybody is, but it's a lot of things where you don't really need far out conspiracy theories. You have books like that. That just kind of articulated and a very intelligent. So yeah, the war poverty, the war on crime.
Yeah. That one in combo with the new Jim Crow by Michelle. Yeah, the two. I mean, those are the final ones.
Yeah, I love it, man. I love it. That's a good one. So Brandon, last last question.
If you want to use, obviously you talk to incredible students every day, but if you're going to use this podcast to speak to the truth, the power, anything last things you want to say get up there in the world before you let you go. Oh, wow. Truth to power. Anything.
Well, well, I mean, I think, how would I say this? I think that I think just that I speak, this is from my scientist hat, so to speak. That is that we cannot, you know, we we're a species just like everybody else, or, you know, unlike everybody else in some ways, but like everybody else, in the sense that we're not kind of there's nothing guaranteeing our existence. And so I think we should kind of treat our time on this planet as a very tenuous and sensitive thing.