This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jaffsan Du, and something unusual happened on last week's show. Listeners actually liked it, and faced with that kind of confusion, CollegeBob's Met Amatage will usually double down and return to his dark side with more tales of death and destruction. But nope, it seems that Life Springs eternal, and he's going to give positivity one last shot, and it's time we met Splaind Biotech.
Hey Matt. Hey Jeff, how are you doing? Very good. Biotech then, it's one of those words that's often thrown around.
It's a bit like blockchain, but it actually means very little to most people though. Well, I think that analogy is actually a really good one. People often imagine when we talk about things like Biotech and blockchain, that they're easily definable, like say, artificial intelligence or the internet. But Biotechnology especially is a really, really broad area of science.
That's one of the reasons that we don't talk about it here on the show too often, because it tends to pop up more on the Geeksquark's show, because there'll be a news item about a specific piece of Biotech, but that technology may not be big enough for us to consider for a whole maths way. Presumably that means there is some enormous breakthrough in the Biotech sphere that you actually want to talk about today. Well, that would be the way that we normally go about it. But people seem to respond very well to the hit and run format of last week's show.
So I thought that today we could try and explain a little about what Biotechnology is, and then have a look at some of the stories and breakthroughs that we've seen in the sector over the past year or two. So just to be clear, we aren't going to be talking about really intelligent machines that start building organic bodies to host their minds while they just wipe out humanity. No. Or enhancement technologies that create a race of super humans who will enslave everyone else?
No, not that either. But every technology does have its dark side, and often when we hear reports about Biotechnology, it's those negative aspects that seem to get stressed. So we'll hear stories about the dangers of, say, CRISPR or DNA editing, or the pitfalls of cloning or stem cell research. Or as we tend to talk about a lot on the show, this kind of gradual convergence of intelligent machines and human beings.
You mean where humans have so many mechanical replacement parts and machine have so many organic parts that it's kind of difficult to tell which is which? Yeah, and that's potentially a future that we're heading towards. Now, one reason that I generally take this kind of nightmarish and negative tone is because I'm trying to demonstrate how extreme the results of this technology could be if we allow them to spread unchecked. But that might actually be the future that you would want to choose.
As we mentioned on a previous show, a billionaire's nightmare is quite possibly a poor person's paradigm. You know, we all have very different expectations. So if I come onto the show and paint a picture of a future of teddy bears and cotton candy and infinite episodes of Star Trek, then people may look at the world and think that the future is going to be really, really great and stop bothering to look around them. And with Biotechnology, we often see that negative portrayal rather than the positive one.
And we kind of miss the truly incredible advances in the sector. They just kind of get overlooked. Before you feel our joy cups do the brim, why don't you explain a little bit more about what biotechnology means? Well, I think that's the thing.
I think a lot of people get confused by the term biotechnology. We assume that it's something new. But in reality, we've been using biotechnology for thousands of years. So when we talk about domesticating animals or cultivating breeding plants to develop the strains of food crops that sustain us, those are all examples of biotechnology.
When you talk about biotechnology and food, the first thing a lot of people think about is lab-grown meat or chicken nuggets. And that's kind of weird, you know, because lab-grown meat is lean, it's nutritious, it's environmentally sustainable. It's all of the things that chicken nuggets aren't. But when you talk about the two of them, which of the two of them gets you reaching for the dipping source?
So to paraphrase Wikipedia, biotechnology is any technological application that uses biological systems or living organisms to make or modify things. Yeah. And as I said, that might be as simple as the domestication of animals or the hybridization of plants. We use this kind of technology all the time in every sector of our lives.
It would be really weird if we said that a piece of technology, say, inventing the plow is this really amazing thing. But developing higher yielding strains of wheat is for some reason a bad thing. Without the strains of wheat that we can actually cultivate what's the point in having the plow, these technologies are absolutely essential to each other. Presumably you're going to be arguing that by technology is good and it's something we shouldn't fear.
Well, hopefully we're going to be a little bit more nuanced than that. You know, as I said, we kind of get hung up on the biopart. I think it's healthier to focus on the technology. Some technology is good.
Some technology is bad. Most technology falls somewhere in the middle. And it's exactly the same for biotech. Your magic fork?
I'm not going to use the magic fork analogy this way. I'm not going to stab anyone with it. I'm going to change the analogy. I'm going to use guns, firearms as an example.
It's still about violence. Yeah, I know. One track mind. So whether you are using a gun for kind of hunting or target shooting or offensive or defensive purposes, that thing is still designed to kill or seriously injure.
But most guns don't kill people because their owners don't try to kill people with them, but they still have that potential. And in fact, it's that potential is the reason that they exist in the first place. And this relates to biotech, how? Well, when we see reports about gene modification or DNA manipulation, we, you know, our first reaction is just to get scared.
So whatever you've used on the rights of individuals to own guns, you probably wouldn't want to ban them completely. There would always be some people in society, whether it's the police, the armed forces, me, that you would prefer to have access to that kind of weaponry. And the same thing goes for biotechnology. We should allow people to use the technology to, you know, develop amazing things with living organisms.
But at the same time, we should probably be preventing people from doing the really creepy things with the technology to living all kinds of organisms. But it's a really fine line though. Like, let me, it's creepy for me, but amazing for you. And there are always going to be those areas which is why we have to talk about them.
And society has to decide what is acceptable. So for me, the idea of changing a bunch of DNA so that chickens have six legs instead of two so that they yield more meat. That's way weirder and far more disgusting than growing it in a lab. You know, we have to allow people to experiment, but we also have to have that set of ethics in place that places limits on that experimentation.
I'm not seeing the joy. Okay. I mean, we're just looking at the fundamentals here. And we should be rejoicing in all of these kind of biotechnology achievements.
Every time you sit down and have a sandwich or you eat a place of rice, you know, you're enjoying the results of biotechnology. So let's chuck the fear in the fried chicken bucket. And get on with the cool stuff. Okay.
So what incredible life-changing breakthroughs do you have for us? Well, I think that's another one of the fundamental areas we make with biotechnology. We assume that every development has to be enormous, that it has to be as morally challenging as CRISPR or as society-altering as, you know, changing DNA. Sometimes it's actually those small developments and discoveries that can have enormous consequences.
All right. All right. So let me rephrase my question. Then what tiny life-changing breakthroughs do you have for us?
You know, I don't get the sarcasm and backchat when Richard stems in for you, you know. Well, you're a novelty when it's once in a while. I'm you all the time. Yeah.
Well, Richard's going to be here next week. Yes. So I think we'll move on. If you're eating right now, you might want to put that spoon down.
You know, we talk quite often on the show about the antibiotic scare that we're facing, the increasing drug-resistant bacteria and infections, and that within a couple of decades, you could potentially die from, say, cutting your finger while chopping garlic. But why does all your cool stories start with people dying? Well, this one is actually about somebody not dying. Okay.
So earlier this year in Arizona, a woman developed an infection in her armpit. So it was determined that it was a voracious form of the streptococcus bacteria. And I'm going to say two words that make most people wince now. And that's why I ask people to put their food down.
It's that family-favorite infection, necrotizing fasciitis, the skin-eating bacteria. So this woman in Arizona was infected and it quickly spread, and it had basically eaten up the skin on about a third of her body. And they weren't able to use skin grafts? No.
I mean, at least only partially, because so much skin had already been eaten. There genuinely wasn't much to spare. And I can see a horrible look on your face, right? I'm just visualizing this.
Right. Exactly. I mean, it's horrible. Yes.
So this is why biotechnology is cool. So some listeners might remember that we talked about a wound spray on Geeks last year that's being developed called resale. Now, because of the danger to this woman's life, her doctors rather, petitioned the FDA to allow them to use the spray, even though it hadn't cleared all its approvals yet. And how does it work?
Well, normally when a wound heals, it heals from the edges in, so everything goes towards the center. So with resale, they take a small sample of healthy tissue, and they treat it with an enzyme that breaks it down into individual cells. You then spray those individual cells over the wound. And what happens is the cells divide and they spread.
So instead of working from the outside in, which means that it can take months and months for a wound to heal, the healing happens everywhere at once. And all the skin cells are spreading outward and eventually joined together. Well, importantly, did it cure the woman? Well, they used in collaboration with a graph technology called MESH Autograft, which uses a piece of finely stretched skin.
And the results were absolutely incredible. When the dressings were removed a week later, the wound was 95% healed. So you start to think about the implications of this kind of technology. You can start to treat antibiotic resistant wounds.
It speeds up the recovery time. It's a technology that can be quickly and relatively easily implemented because once you use the enzyme, it's a spray, so that it can be used pretty easily. And I'm conjecturing here, but I imagine that it will also help to reduce scaring because you have that regrowth happening all over at the same time. So the impact for people with serious skin or burn injuries could be really phenomenal.
When we come back, biotechnology and the brain, so maybe you just want to put on hold that food that you're using. This one we do discuss in the same case. So you can start eating again. It's a fun Friday.
Yeah, we'll be right back. We'll be right back. 89.9. Building first world mindsets.
BFM 89.9. And we're back. My name is Jazandu. Now, before the break, we were talking about reasons to embrace rather than fear biotechnology.
We promised you the brain and delving into the grey goo is something that Matt has never been afraid to do. It is true. I am fascinated with the way that the brain works. I saw a fantastic TED talk this week, which was by a cognitive scientist called Leira Bruditsky and about the way that language shapes the way we think.
She pointed out that in language that have a masculine and feminine case, the adjectives we use to describe objects tend to reflect their gender. Now, I know that doesn't sound like much, but as a result, it means different languages describe the same objects in very, very different ways. So we see that our perception of them is actually different. So she used the example of a bridge in languages where the word for bridge is feminine.
It's usually described with terms like beautiful. In languages where bridges masculine work, you see bridges being described in stereotypically masculine ways, strong, powerful, dominating. So even though our brains are all the same, culture still has this really strong impact on the way we visualize and think. So is that biotechnology?
No, but it helps to understand the way that different cultures respond to science and technology. So whether it's viewed as something positive or whether it's viewed with suspicion. And of course, when it comes to introducing technology actually into our brains, that's one of the areas where we start worrying. We start thinking it's kind of invasive.
But biotechnology has had a relationship with our brains for much longer than you might imagine. You mean deep brain stimulation? Yeah, deep brain stimulation for people who don't know about it is when you have wires implanted in your brain that send electrical signals to specific sites. And it's used to treat various neurological disorders.
And as a technology, it's been around since 1997. So we've been using it for the past two decades. It's used to treat Parkinson's disease, things like essential tremors, can also be used for obsessive compulsive disorder. And it's hope that in the future that it will help people with chronic pain, major depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorders.
And it may also help in conditions like Alzheimer's disease. How does it work? Well, we don't really know. It's one of those things that we have ideas why it works.
We're not sure exactly why. But the improvements in patients are measurable and provable. Nearly as important as the fact that it's effective is the fact that it's reversible, which is different to most forms of brain surgery. If you cut things out, obviously, you've changed them.
And that's really important because we still don't really understand the brain. Or rather, we only have this incomplete picture of how it works. Although that picture kind of similar to the resale technology we talked about before the break. That knowledge is expanding all the time as different parts of the research link up to give us that kind of much bigger picture, that wider perspective.
So having treatments that are controllable and reversible when we're working in the semi-dark market of our minds is actually really important. And it's the same for Alzheimer's? Well, maybe a small and very limited test on three people by team at Ohio State University suggests that it may be useful in some patients. By restoring their memory.
Well, one of the reasons that Alzheimer's is hard to treat is because we don't actually know what causes it. We know what it does to people. And people with the various types of the disease broadly follow the kind of same degenerative pattern. But we don't know exactly how or why or when those degenerations start.
So some of the more recent research into the disease suggests that it may be present for many, many years before any of the symptoms or effects actually manifest themselves. So if we go back to your question, they've tried to restore memory. But the tests that have been run on it using deep brain stimulation have proven ineffective because we don't really have a good enough knowledge of those parts of the brain. So the Ohio research team is looking at other aspects of Alzheimer's?
Yeah, they're actually looking at the problem solving and decision-making areas of the brain. Because those are also areas that are lost to the disease. And improving those areas can increase the quality of life of Alzheimer's patients. It can able them to dress themselves or even to prepare their own meals.
Because we take a lot of very simple things for granted, such as putting your underwear on underneath your clothes rather than over it. And those are the kind of things that confuse people with diseases or outsiders. But three patients isn't really a study. No, of course not.
But there will be further studies. And those three people scored a slower rate of degeneration when it was compared against a comparable group of 96 other Alzheimer's sufferers. More research needs to be done. Obviously they need much larger groups of subjects.
And of course there are risks. There's a placebo effect. So people expect to be better. So they are.
The researchers may have inadvertently picked three subjects who are naturally more resistant to the disease. But the larger point I think is that we don't need to fear this kind of biotechnology just because it's invasive and involves the brain. It's not a form of my control. Well, exactly.
Normally when we talk about biotechnology and the brain, we talk about all the scary stuff. So linking your brain to Wi-Fi, mind control, designing a more submissive race of people. And it's true that there are some biotechnology brain developments that could be used in all sorts of ways. Because that's a huge amount of research going on in this area.
I think you've mentioned that the ultimate goal of creating chips that can store all our memories and just archive them like an on-demand service like Netflix. Well, yeah, I mean, depending on how you look at that, that could be an incredible future or it could be your worst nightmare. I mean, literally you can't forget anything. But anyone who had that implant would have a huge advantage over anyone who didn't.
So say a colleague at work who didn't have that kind of enhancement, that enhanced person would probably get the promotion of the person who isn't. But for someone who'd suffered traumatic brain injury or a stroke, that kind of technology could genuinely give them their life back. And how close are we to that kind of scenario? Well, you probably won't be surprised to hear that our old friends are darker.
Yes, of course. The US military research agency have been funding a lot of technology in this area, because traumatic brain injury is something that soldiers suffer from. In April this year, the Journal of Engineering published a military funded study into a prosthetic memory system. And again, this was really small study.
It was about 15 patients. Now, the patients played simple computer games while the system recorded the activity of the neurons in the hippocampus. And as the trial progressed, the delay between the images that they saw on screen and then having to recall them was increased. So it went from a few seconds all the way up to about 75 minutes, having to see an image.
And remember what it was 75 minutes later. This allowed the system to really monitor what was happening inside each patient's brain as they were making use of their short-term memories, writing those short-term memories down. And how do you get from that to actually improving their memory? Well, in some ways, it's kind of similar to that idea of deep brain stimulation.
You're getting a chart of the electrical activity related to that short-term memory recall, and it's specific to that person. So it's almost like a key or a password. So you use that code to stimulate the person's hippocampus by stimulating the areas of the brain that light up for his or her individual short-term memory. And the trial was pretty good.
It showed an improvement in recall in all of the groups going from a few seconds up to 75 minutes. They were all above 30%. So it ranged from around 35 to 37% for the recall. And that's quite significant.
But still a long way before we actually have a memory chip. It is. And how long it'll take for us to get there is impossible to say. Some apparently simple problems like during the cold are really strangely intractable.
Other things that seem far more complex, like sending a probe to journey outside our solar system is something that we've done. I guess the broader point is that we tend to focus on what we imagine as the negative consequences of this kind of technology. But if you look at deep brain stimulation, as I said, that's a technology that we've had for over 20 years. But we haven't seen any rush from people over those 20 years to have brain implants for whatever cosmetic reason.
Well, that's true. But we are seeing people using CRISPR technology to hack into the R1DNE. Well, yes. And that goes back to what we were saying about complicated things being easy and easy things being complicated.
I think while we're on the subject, there was a story that came out in the middle of last month, July, that suggests that the results or actually hacking your DNA may be a lot more unpredictable than was at first thought. And that kind of strikes at the very core of what CRISPR is. One of the things that most excites scientists about CRISPR is that it's very precise. You're editing the genetic code in a specific cell.
So when the cell repairs itself, it will just be missing a few letters. And that's how we disable genes and remove diseases or we promote certain properties or qualities over others. Are we seeing mutations in those cells? Well, what a team at the UK's Welcome Sanger Institute has been researching is whether those deletions are actually more widespread than we think.
So they've found that in as much as 20% of the people and test animals that they tracked, the deletions were actually much larger and wider. So rather than just deleting or editing a few letters of the code, those changes were actually hundreds and in some cases, thousands of letters long. And there's a chance that with those much longer changes, there could be a cancer risk because every cell that you alter, there's that chance of mutation. So we could potentially be bringing harmful changes to that cell by altering it.
Is it an actual risk or is it just more like a theoretical one? Because the kind of editing that CRISPR is currently used by is actually very narrow and very specific. Well, for sure. I'm looking at where we are now.
There doesn't seem to be much risk for those reasons because it's very narrow and very specific. But it goes back to what we were talking about last week, that we shouldn't plan for the technology that we have today. We have to look at whether technology is going to be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Scientists are already trying to develop treatments that could involve editing billions of cells.
And when you're looking at things at that scale, even a tiny percentage of mutations could manifest itself as a serious cancer risk. And why hasn't anyone found this before? Precisely because the work is so narrow and targeted. So researchers have generally focused on DNA and cell changes around the target site.
The welcome team looked far more broadly and they found that the changes have an impact beyond the cell that was changed. So you can think of it a bit like deleting a paragraph in a Word document. If you give the document a quick scan read afterwards, you might not notice that that section is missing. But by emitting that section, you could actually be completely changing the content and meaning of that entire document.
With DNA, if you've deleted the information, you won't be able to see that it's triggered a mutation because you've deleted it. So you actually have to look beyond that target region to see if there's been any kind of knock-on effect. You do know that you're supposed to end with good news. It is good news because it shows how robust and adaptable that this biotechnology industry is.
Lots of variations of CRISPR editing are currently being developed. Those include methods that don't alter a gene's DNA but instead control how active the gene is. So instead of switching it on or off, you're using it a bit like a dimmer switch for a light bulb. You can increase or decrease the intensity of the gene.
And the fact that this technology is so new is one of the reasons that you shouldn't rush to use this kind of technology as a cure-all for improving intelligence or muscle tone or any of the cosmetic purposes that get people's imaginations firing up over this. And that kind of sums up the state of the biotechnology industry for me. It's exciting. There's enormous potential, but we still need to know a lot more about what using it actually means before we can widen it beyond these very specific and generally medical applications.
I still don't know where the good news is, but then again, my definition of fun Friday and your definitely. It's making our lives better. Yeah, by scaring us with one of those ampere kind of disease. You can cure it.
I just lost it when you're talking about this. Necrotizing fashionitis kills nearly 25% of the people that get it. Everyone is about that. I know and as we run out of antibiotics, it's getting even harder to cure these things.
So if you have something that is essentially like a spray you can have in your pocket and you can go, hey, I've lost all my skin. It's back again. Fun Friday. Fun Friday.
Fun Friday indeed. Anyways, I'm in out of this. We'll be back after this with geeksquack. The 89.9.