Episode 50 - The Single Wrong Letter

Wow! Fifty Episodes Fifty strange bites of the universe. From the first quiet story to this one, tonight we mark a milestone. Fifty times we’ve sat together in the dark, turning real science into something a little more mysterious, a little more human. To every one of you who has listened, shared, questioned, or simply stayed strange with me… thank you. You’ve kept the signal alive. This is Strange Bites, Episode 50. In the endless library of you, three billion letters are stacked like stars in a dark sky. Most of them sit quietly. One of them, just one, is sometimes written wrong. And that single wrong letter almost erased a baby’s future before he ever learned to say his own name. This is the story of KJ Muldoon… and the night scientists decided the code of life itself could be rewritten for one child alone. Sources https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2504747 https://www.chop.edu/news/worlds-first-patient-treated-personalized-crispr-gene-editing-therapy-childrens-hospital https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/health/gene-editing-personalized-rare-disorders.html https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01496-z https://apnews.com/article/crispr-gene-editing-rare-disease-mutation-chop-penn-4ab95afadde97164ae6c2450d79acbf8 https://www.wired.com/story/a-baby-received-a-custom-crispr-treatment-in-record-time/ https://www.research.chop.edu/cornerstone-blog/a-year-after-first-in-world-gene-editing-therapy-chop-penn-team-aims-to-scale-the-science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KJ_Muldoon https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5389620/gene-editing-treatment-crispr-inherited https://www.statnews.com/2025/10/16/baby-kj-crispr-gene-editing-personalized-medicine-at-scale/