MSP48 [] How Tech Works [CRISPR Blockchain]

This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's one Friday, my name is Jeff Sundoo. Here on Matt's plane, Matt and I are often asked how stuff works. Usually people aren't asking for a technical explanation, complete with mathematical expressions, on the precise reasons that a black hole has so much mass.

I can tell you if you tweet me... Alright, Matt, this is the last time I'm gonna let you write the intro. I'm sorry, folks, I can tell you a lot of things about the black holes, but you'll need an astrophysicist for the Matt's. We talk a lot of complicated subjects on this show, and we take it for granted that people understand the broad strokes of what we're talking about.

In case you don't always know what Matt is talking about, let's face it, who does? We're going to go into the background of some. Yes, it's time to decrypt his tomb and ask Matt Amatage to Matt's plane. Matt, you're looking very decomposed today.

Why is that? Hey, Jeff, well, I don't really spend much time in this temporal reality. Of course you don't, you spend most of your time propping up a bar and practicing your lies, or why don't you tell us about the black holes? Gosh, you're a bit grumpy this morning, aren't you?

They aren't lies so much as alternative truths. As for the black holes, that's actually really straightforward. So you look at the velocity of the light that's coming from a dying star, then you account for the friction of gravity and the density of the planet's gases, then you account for how they multiply as the star is pulled into the hole, and the matter is compressed. Did you just make that up?

Yeah, I'm very good at pretending to know what I'm talking about. Usually, if I'm speaking, it's a fairly good indication that I'm lying. Once again, an episode with very few expectations. So where would you like to start today, Matt?

It really does sound like I've knocked all of the hope out of you. Should we start with Chris? We've been talking about genetic modification and awful lot on the show recently, and we've been talking about editing out the genes that create certain diseases, or the conditions, or hacking your body even to try and create those enhancements. And then on the show, we keep saying that tools like CRISPR are actually incredibly cheap.

If you don't really understand what CRISPR is, then it doesn't really matter how expensive is it or isn't. Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of people think that CRISPR is the part of your refrigerator where you store leafy vegetables, and that's not wrong. It's not the best analogy, but we can use CRISPR kind of in the same way to extend the life of things. So why don't you tell everyone what it means?

Well, it really is kind of incredible what we take for granted, isn't it? We use this terminology like CRISPR all the time, and it's become part of our lexicon. But how many of us actually know what those initials stand for, other than making it sound cool and futuristic? Yeah, it does sound like a Silicon Valley starter.

Yeah, I mean, you can imagine some valley bros saying it, right? Oh, I'd like to get CRISPR with her or maybe something more obscene. Maybe it's even on a Judge Kavanaugh's yearbook. Probably.

It sounds a lot less valley bro and a lot more sciencey when you actually spell out what it stands for. It stands for clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats, which actually makes a lot less sense than calling it CRISPR. It's one of those times where what it means takes you further away from understanding what it actually is. But that doesn't mean people don't want to know how it works.

Well, before we get into how it works, let's talk a bit more about what it is. Because like I said on the show, we often zip straight into things and we assume that people know what things like CRISPR are and what they do. So sorry, CRISPR is a bit like a scalpel for DNA. It's actually really elegant.

It's a protein that has the ability to cut bits out of a gene sequence, and it has homing properties a bit like GPS. So you can target it at the right place. Because the last thing you want, if you're editing genes, is a tool that acts like a drunk surgeon and amputates the left leg rather than the right leg. These tools only work when the correct sequences are edited in very precise ways.

How did we figure this stuff out? It's actually very similar to the way our bodies fight viruses. So when viruses invade the body, they take over cells, they multiply until that cell bursts. Certain bacteria in our body have actually evolved to use DNA-snipping proteins.

The one that we typically use in CRISPR is an enzyme that's called Cas9. Although there are other Cas enzymes, they all have different properties. But these kind of Cas9 proteins also occur in our bodies. And they actively fight viruses.

They chop them to pieces before they have time to destroy the cell. So what was even more important was figuring out that our bodies actually keep a copy of those viruses on file. So in a way, you can kind of think of the DNA and the RNA a bit like being our operating systems. Really?

You're comparing the human body to smartphones? Well, if it makes it easier for people to understand, you know, when we see the operating system of our phone, we don't see that it contains thousands or millions or billions of lines of code. Consequently, we don't think of ourselves in that way. Either we have this sense of self and consciousness that gives us our identity and that sense that we're a unique individual.

And that's not real. Our sense of individuality is a myth. That's entirely different to what is consciousness, which we make over in a few weeks time, if we go back to the phone analogy, you and your friend might have the same model of phone. But as soon as you pick the phone up, you know which belongs to you, which belongs to her.

Unless it's an iPhone because they all look alike, you can't really change that. But that's why I mean, but even when you pick it up, you know, there's something about the field, even if it's identical to all the others. And just like the iPhone, in terms of data, we're all remarkably similar to one another. So the personalization comes from those tiny elements, like how you arrange the apps on the home screen or the kind of protective case you put around the phone.

And that's the same as us. Each human is practically identical to every other human. But those minute differences have a colossal impact. It's why it's hard to believe that as an average, decent human being that Donald Trump is the same species as me.

Wow. So DNA and RNA are the codes that we run on. Well, it's not for nothing that we say computers are infected by viruses. When we get ill, our data is being corrupted.

It's not that we're like the machines. It's that the machines are actually like us. We've taken analogies from our biology to explain the machines. And that's possibly why we expect machine intelligence to be like our own, which again is something we'll say more about later in the show.

So how does CRISPR and Cas9 actually work? Well, go back to that name, clustered regularly into space, palindromic, repeat. The gene sequences encoded in our DNA and RNA are essentially a series of letters. I think I probably should have started the show with what our DNA and RNA.

But you know, we're way too far gone now. So if you're not sure and you're listening to us on podcast, you can help me cheat, just hit pause and go and wiki what DNA and RNA are. If you don't know, okay, you're back. I hope that didn't take too long.

So let's pretend that I explained what DNA and RNA are and apologize to everyone listening to some really good binary for the body. Yes, let's go with binary for the body. We'll leave it at that. Binary, of course, only has a one and a zero.

In DNA and RNA, there are a few more characters and those characters are essentially the ingredients for proteins. So if you can imagine a string of binary and how a computer processes that information, try and imagine the information in our body being encoded and processed in a similar way. Let's go back to viruses. Well, as I mentioned, our body already has its own CRISPR to fight viruses.

So if you think about the antivirus software on your computer, essentially it checks every file on the system against a huge database of known viruses in malware. And that's kind of the same for our body. All of this information is coded into a database in our DNA and RNA. So it's a bit like cutting piece.

Yes, scientists are able to recreate those surgical proteins. So like you do with a Word document, you highlight part of the sentence, or in this case, a gene sequence, you can delete that sentence, you can add a few more words, you can add some more characters, you can move it about. And of course, when you move words around in a sentence or you move sentences around in a paragraph, you change the meaning. So you can knock a gene out, you can build in a redundancy, you can replace it, or you can enhance it in much the same way that you structure a sentence.

Which is why CRISPR isn't just relevant to people. No, I mean, we talked about it a bit on episode 46 when we talked about evolution. We can edit genes to enhance yeast, create algae that function as biofuel. We can make crops that are more resistant to fluctuations in weather and climate.

We have really only scratching the surface of what this technology can do. And that's without discussing the ethics of what we should actually do with it. And one thing that we often hear in the media is, what makes CRISPR so cheap and easy to use? Well, that's something that I always got quite confused about as well, because you're talking about this, it's really complicated, how can it be cheap and easy?

DNA research used to require sophisticated lab facilities, technicians with years of experience, huge amounts of money to run everything. You can buy an RNA fragment for as little as $10, and the chemicals and enzymes you need to make CRISPR work will set you back about another $30, which is, lastly, cheap, that's incredibly cheap. And as for how, well, there are loads of videos on YouTube that will help you get started editing genes in your garage or your spare room. Whether you should be doing that is, again, a completely different question.

And it is something that we covered a little bit on episodes 41 and 46. Anyways, when we come back more code and this time, Matt will tackle the ever confusing blockchain. BfM, 89.9. And we're back.

It's fun Friday. My name is Justin Duhl. Man, I'm a teacher from CulturePop this year. This is part of your promise from episode 45 that we would start talking about cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

Yes, and have you ever known me to be anything except a man of my world? I don't know where to begin with that one. I could write a dissertation and I wouldn't even begin to answer that question. CRISPR really is easier to comprehend than that question.

Matt, you chatted a panel on blockchain a few weeks ago, I remember. And it was great because I got to talk to people who understand blockchain, people who are actually using it in their businesses and people who are researching how other companies are using blockchain technology. So I'd like to say a sincere thank you to Shah Muhammad Ali at MDEC, Professor Mahindranar at Monash University and Zickri Khalil at Insightment for educating me and giving me a lot of the information that I'm about to share with you. Also, what's the first mistake that people make?

Well, that Bitcoin and blockchain are the same thing. Now, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency or if you prefer a money substitute. Now, we talked about that a little bit on episode 45, where we talk about the future of money, whereas blockchain is the infrastructure that a cryptocurrency or any other blockchain solution actually runs on. Like the foundations?

Yeah, exactly that. So we will go back to our smartphone analogy again. You can think about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as an app. So the operating system of your phone powers the app and allows it to run so that you get to use it.

In this case, the operating system is the blockchain. So a blockchain is essentially a piece of software that allows specific apps, programs or routines to run on top of it. Which is why? Well, this is the bit where most people's eyes tend to glaze over.

The blockchain is often described as a distributed ledger. And this is possibly not the most exciting way to describe anything. Normally, when we think about information in the digital space, we tend to think about that information as being stored in a database. And usually, that database is centrally located and it's owned by someone.

And you only have access to that database if you are the owner or the owner grants you access. But some databases seem to be quite public. Facebook, for example, yeah, use the database. Yeah, I think that's probably another show in and of itself.

So we won't go into that one. We will get to some of the things you can use blockchain for in a little while. But let's stick with the currency for a minute. Let's say you buy something with my new cryptocurrency, Culturecoin.

That's two Ks, by the way. One coin currently equates to a thousand US dollars. That's a rate I made up this morning. Every time you make a purchase with Culturecoin, the information about that money transfer is added to the database and passed on.

So the database is actually included in the transaction? Yes, it's public. So now the database might be really enormous. So you may only have a recent part of it, but it includes all the movements of that coin up and to that point.

And more importantly, it contains information about all the other coins as well. That's what the distributed part of distributed legend means. All the participants in the chain can see that information. And that's something I think confuses some people.

Is there a blockchain or are there multiple blockchains? There are multiple loads and loads of blockchain systems. Companies are competing with different systems and builds for specific purposes. So let's say you buy one off the shelf, let's say to run inventory management in a car servicing business.

Or if you want a kind of a sexier version of that, a spy agency might decide to run its spies on the blockchain. It's up to the person or company that operates it to decide who has access to it. And one of the other misconceptions about blockchain currencies, like Bitcoin especially, is that they are secretive. And when you talk about the dark web and cyber criminals, it's not long before cryptocurrencies get mentioned.

Yeah, there's quite a lot to unpack this. I'll try and be a bit methodical about it. The blockchain is actually about transparency and about promoting that transparency. I'm not going to jump too far into the details of it because I want to dedicate another show to talking about what we can do with blockchain.

So I thought we'd cover how it works today and more about what it can do on another show. Where it gets a little bit complicated is in how we define that word transparency. And like you said earlier with College Point that's with two case transparent, so that everyone can see all the transactions. Yeah, and this is where we get into one of those situations like Mark Zuckerberg testifying before the US Congress.

When Facebook talks about privacy, their definition is very different from the one that the politicians had. So transparent doesn't mean that everyone in the whole wide world gets to see it. I can go and pull up a Bitcoin log even though I don't have a Bitcoin account, because the currency has committed to being open to all. Not everyone is as open though.

No, when you buy a build a blockchain system, you can choose who access is it and the levels of access privilege that individual users have. The banking sector is excited about blockchain because it can be used to speed up transactions, it can reduce costs, and they can use it to settle into bank debts. It's still sometimes hard to believe, but when we send money from a banking one country to a different bank in another country, there are loads of complicated international multilateral agreements that slow that money down. Agreements between countries on exchange rates, agreements between banks on how to settle those debts, trusted guarantors who sit in between all of those things.

So in an age where you can send an email to pretty much anyone on the planet in seconds, it's really weird that it can take money days and days to make that same journey, even though the money is travelling electronically as well. And a bank doesn't want everyone to be able to see all the transactions? No, they would probably only want certain people within other banks that they transact with to have access to that information. So it's transparent in the sense that it reduces barriers and it speeds up the transactions, and the main actors can see how, where and when that money has moved at any point in time.

If you think about a national currency being built in blockchain, it might be the only employees of the central bank who would have access to the information in the ledger. So it could actually be used as a form of financial surveillance. So we do have to be careful about how we use words like transparent. And what about the cybercrime aspect?

Well, currencies like Bitcoin are attractive because they aren't centrally controlled by a bank or a country rather than because they guarantee anonymity. Where it gets confusing is that both the public and some of the criminals thinks that their transactions with Bitcoin are secret. I'm sure there are plenty of people embroiled in the one MDB scandal who were wishing that money hadn't been denominated in USD and used US exchanges, because that attracted the attention of the US Treasury and Justice Department in the process. So for example, you can peer through a Bitcoin ledger.

You can see that a certain coin or fragment of a coin was used on a black market site at a certain date and time. And you can use those identifiers to identify the buyer and seller. So then why is it so hard to track criminals down? Well, that's what separates the real crims from the amateurs.

For a forensic accountant, it's a matter of minutes or hours to identify most people from a cryptocurrency transaction. Why so? Because of the e-wallet. The money is moving from one place to another.

It has a start point, it has a destination. It might move on from there afterwards, but it lands. And every time it lands, it leaves this digital fingerprint. And of course, most people sign up for that e-wallet with an email address and an IP address.

And all of this information that can be used to identify you. So obviously, really organized criminals have this whole money laundering machine behind them. Because it's the same as with any dut money in cash, not with digital cash, you have to find a way to hide it. And of course, even if you're transacting in a digital currency, at some point, you're probably going to want to change that digital cash into a real world currency like US dollars or Malaysian Ringgit.

And to do that, you're going to need a currency exchange where you leave yet another digital trail because that US dollar or that Ringgit has to actually go somewhere. Can't you just do a crisper and re-edit your version of the ledger and add money to your own account? You can, but nothing will happen because there are so many versions of the ledgers. Your attempts to re-write it will simply be overwritten as well because all the other copies of the ledger will have different information on them.

And there's also a reconciliation mechanism built in. So all of the other versions of the ledger show the money as being in a different location. So it's a bit like writing $10 on a blank sheet of paper and claiming it's money. It just isn't, you can't do it.

I know we're going to come back to this, but let's end with this. Why do people get so excited about blockchain? I know, it can sound like this esoteric accounting school. And it can be, but it is so much more.

So we will come back to this. You can use blockchain to verify elections because all the votes are tallied and carried in the chain. It's public, so the results are very hard to falsify. And the information travels really fast.

So potentially you can get results faster. In music and film and the arts, blockchain can be used to protect copyright. So artists can sell their work directly without needing any third parties. The ledger attached to the work provides a tracking mechanism for royalties and payments.

It can also help to identify where fraud or illegal sharing is taking place because the illegally shared copy of the work would identify where the ledger was broken and identify the sources of that breach. You can use it in CSR and charity work. Sometimes it can be hard to track how money and charities are spent. Blockchain can make that transparent, either publicly or to donors, depending on how you set it up.

So it makes it much harder for money to be misappropriated or misspent. And it makes sure that both the agencies and the donors are acting ethically and legally. And finally, well, not finally. I mean, a final example.

It can be used to bring people out of the dark economy. So blockchain could simplify banking services. It could make them a lot more accessible. Because there are actually hundreds of millions of people around the world who don't have access to any banking services.

And that empowers people who are in the informal employment sector because they can get access to regulatory protections from the governments. It becomes harder for employers to shortchange them or to delay payments. So it brings exploited people out of that informal sector. It normalizes them and it gives them access to the kind of financial services and transactions that we take for granted.

Before I go, I just wanted to do a quick plug for myself. Go ahead. If you're free, head down to the Kulin on Professor at Publica this weekend. So Saturday the 6th for me.

I'm on a couple of panels. Both will be at Publica's Black Box. At 6 p.m. I'll be a guest with Malaysian music legend and journalist, Daryl Go.

On a panel called Where Have All Our Record Shops Gone. I think that's probably quite self-explanatory. At 7.30 I'll be moderating a discussion called Hear Me Now, The Power of Voice in a Digital Age where we'll be talking about radio and podcasting and the power of storytelling. So head over to kulolomba.com for more details.

And please come and say hello. Heckle me if it makes you happy. Please do. Yes.

And whatever you do, don't try to get hold of me on Twitter. Go on and check it out. kulololomba.com. That's happening.

Also check out kulolomba.com. If you want to get the transcript of this show, this has been HowStuffWorks. We talked about CRISPR and blockchain. We'll be back with Geeksbox after this.

BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, The Business Station.