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Speaker 1: This is the best of newts World coming up my

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Speaker 1: interview with Walter Isaacson on this episode of Nutsworld.

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Speaker 2: A few years ago, with my colleague Emmanuel Charpantier, I

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Speaker 2: invented a new technology for editing genomes.

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Speaker 3: It's called Crisper CAST nine.

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Speaker 2: The Crisper technology allows scientists to make changes to the

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Speaker 2: DNA in cells.

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Speaker 3: That could allow us to cure genetic disease.

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Speaker 2: It might be interested to know that the Crisper technology

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Speaker 2: came about through a basic research project that was aimed

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Speaker 2: at discovering how bacteria fight viral infections.

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Speaker 3: Bacteria have to deal with viruses.

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Speaker 2: In their environment, and we can think about a viral

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Speaker 2: infection like a ticking time bomb. A bacterium has only

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Speaker 2: a few minutes to diffuse the bomb before it gets destroyed.

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Speaker 2: So many bacteria have in their cells an adaptive immune

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Speaker 2: system called CRISPER that allows them to detect viral DNA

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Speaker 2: and destroy it. Part of the crisper system is a

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Speaker 2: protein called CAST nine that's able to seek out and

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Speaker 2: cut and eventually degrade viral DNA in a specific way.

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Speaker 2: And it was through our research to understand the activity

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Speaker 2: of this protein CAST nine that we realized that we

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Speaker 2: could harness its function as a genetic engineering technology, a

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Speaker 2: way for scientists to delete or insert specific bits of

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Speaker 2: DNA into cells with incredible precision that would offer opportunities

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Speaker 2: to do things that really haven't been possible in the past.

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Speaker 1: My guest today is Walter Isaacson, who's been a friend

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Speaker 1: for many, many years. He's the best selling author of

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Speaker 1: biographies about Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin.

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Speaker 4: Some have called him.

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Speaker 1: The biographer of geniuses, and now he has added Jennifer

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Speaker 1: Dudna to that list with his New York Times bestseller

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Speaker 1: The Codebreaker, Jennifer Doudna, gene Editing and the Future of

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Speaker 1: the human race. It is a gripping account of how

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Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Dudna and her colleagues launched a

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Speaker 1: revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses,

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Speaker 1: and have healthier babies. Walter, thank you for joining me.

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Speaker 1: It's great to talk with you. Let's start at the beginning.

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Speaker 1: What led you to decide to become a chronicler of

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Speaker 1: unique and genius personalities.

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Speaker 5: I think that humans can affect the course of history.

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Speaker 5: You and I have both been history professors, and we

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Speaker 5: know that sometimes in the academy people think it's all

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Speaker 5: these grand economic forces or whatever. But I like to

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Speaker 5: believe that every now and then a creative person comes

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Speaker 5: along and they're able to change things. And so whether

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Speaker 5: it's Steve Jobs or Henry Kissinger or Leonardo da Vinci

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Speaker 5: Ben Franklin, to me, I want to inspire people by saying,

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Speaker 5: here's how people affect history. And Jennifer Dowdener is the

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Speaker 5: latest subject because she's leading the third grade revolution of

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Speaker 5: our times in terms of science. So, first was a

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Speaker 5: physics revolution from Einstein that gave us the Adam Baum

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Speaker 5: in space travel. The second was a revolution and information

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Speaker 5: technology with Steve Jobs and others that gave us personal computers.

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Speaker 5: And now we're going to be able to treat our

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Speaker 5: own molecules as microchips. We're going to be able to

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Speaker 5: reprogram the genetic code in our body, and that's going

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Speaker 5: to have more consequences, I think than even the information

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Speaker 5: technology revolution.

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Speaker 1: So when you began looking at your next big book,

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Speaker 1: what drew you to her? I mean, in many different

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Speaker 1: ways to tell that story, and you picked in DEWDNA

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Speaker 1: a very unique way.

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Speaker 5: Yes, I had been interested in all the people who

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Speaker 5: are involved in the life science revolution and had a

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Speaker 5: really colorful cast of characters, all of whom we're in

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Speaker 5: the book, from George Church and Fung Jang to a

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Speaker 5: Manuel Sharpenchain. But the more I met with Jennifer Dowdner,

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Speaker 5: the more I realized that she was able to be

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Speaker 5: a narrative thread that would tie together all the themes

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Speaker 5: I wanted, starting with the discovery of the structure of DNA,

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Speaker 5: which she reads about as a young child and becomes

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Speaker 5: fascinated by the structure of molecules and also by the

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Speaker 5: role of somebody named Rosalind Franklin who hasn't gotten that

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Speaker 5: much acclaim in history, but taught Jennifer that a woman

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Speaker 5: could be a scientist. And then she goes and she

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Speaker 5: understands that RNA, rather than DNA, is the more important

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Speaker 5: molecule in our bodies, and she discovers how RNA can

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Speaker 5: be a guide to cut up our genes, but it

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Speaker 5: can also be a messenger to give us vaccines against

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Speaker 5: the coronavirus. It's also how life began on this planet.

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Speaker 5: Because she discovers how RNA can replicate itself, thus becoming

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Speaker 5: the first molecule that becomes a living organism. And finally

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Speaker 5: she starts wrestling with the moral issues of gene attiting.

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Speaker 5: So I like writing narrative history. You do it as well.

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Speaker 5: I've read your books, and narrative history usually benefits from

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Speaker 5: having a central character that we can follow that personalizes

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Speaker 5: what becomes a journey of discovery and a journey of invention.

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Speaker 5: And so the more I read about all the people

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Speaker 5: and met all the people in the life sciences, I said,

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Speaker 5: let me use Jennifer Dowdner as my central character.

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Speaker 1: I'm curious for a second, if we can take a

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Speaker 1: brief detour on behalf of those of us who don't

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Speaker 1: know nearly as much as you do. Would you walk

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Speaker 1: us just from it through the difference between DNA, which

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Speaker 1: is more popularly understood, and RNA. How should the average

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Speaker 1: person understand those two?

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Speaker 5: Yeah, DNA is the famous molecule, the one that gets

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Speaker 5: on magazine covers and becomes a metaphor for the DNA

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Speaker 5: in our society or whatever it may be. But like

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Speaker 5: a lot of famous siblings, it doesn't really do much work.

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Speaker 5: It just sits in the nucleus of our cells, and

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Speaker 5: it curates information. And you know, all it does is

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Speaker 5: guard our genetic information. RNA actually is a sibling that

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Speaker 5: does real work. It actually makes products. And so what

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Speaker 5: RNA does is it goes and takes a little bit

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Speaker 5: of the information from the DNA and moves to the

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Speaker 5: region in our cell where we manufacture proteins. And it

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Speaker 5: oversees the manufacturing of proteins, whether it's a hair follicle

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Speaker 5: or a fingernail, or a hormone or an enzyme or

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Speaker 5: whatever it's supposed to be in our body. And so

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Speaker 5: RNA is always in motion. It can act as a guide,

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Speaker 5: it can act as a messenger telling us, as in

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Speaker 5: the mRNA vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna, what proteins to build.

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Speaker 5: But they both use a four letter code to say,

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Speaker 5: here's all the information you need to build a human

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Speaker 5: orf of that matter, any other organism. In our case,

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Speaker 5: there three billion pairs of those lets in DNA, and

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Speaker 5: RNA gets to transcribe. I'm using a very similar code

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Speaker 5: to say, Okay, let me go do something with that information.

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Speaker 1: When you're going down this road and you're beginning to

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Speaker 1: learn all this what a track you did to Daeudna

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Speaker 1: as your sort of storyline.

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Speaker 5: I think she's a decent person who cares about the

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Speaker 5: ethical implications. Like all of the characters I've written about,

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Speaker 5: she stands with one foot in the humanities and one

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Speaker 5: foot in the sciences. That's what Steve Jobs did, That's

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Speaker 5: what Ben Franklin did, that's what Leonardo da Vinci's but

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Speaker 5: Truvian man drawing is all about. And so she can

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Speaker 5: help connect us to the technologies that we have. Secondly,

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Speaker 5: she was very creative. She was curious about basic science.

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Speaker 5: She enters into this field not trying to make an

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Speaker 5: invention that will edit our genes or give us vaccines.

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Speaker 5: She enters into it because she's curious about why do

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Speaker 5: bacteria have clustered repeated sequences, which we call crispers. And

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Speaker 5: so she and a group of other scientists were just

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Speaker 5: doing it driven by pure curiosity. But one day when

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Speaker 5: she figured out that here the components of the system

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Speaker 5: that can guide a scissors in our cell and enzyme

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Speaker 5: in our cell to cut our genes, she has an

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Speaker 5: Aha moment and it says, oh, I can repurpose that.

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Speaker 5: I can re engineer it to be a system that

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Speaker 5: edits our own genetic code.

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Speaker 1: In doing that, she helps develop the whole notion of

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Speaker 1: how you use Christopher almost as an engineering device. This

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Speaker 1: is my language, not yours. But it's almost like she's

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Speaker 1: taguing out the engineering that enables us to reshape the

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Speaker 1: relationships we did in RNA and DNA. And is that

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Speaker 1: a reasonable way to think of it.

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Speaker 5: I think what she's doing is she's using the power

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Speaker 5: of RNA to edit the genes in our body. Because

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Speaker 5: RNA knows how to target something. It's a good targeting tool.

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Speaker 5: It knows here's a piece of genetic code I want

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Speaker 5: to change. And so she's able to engineer a system

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Speaker 5: that bacteria used for one billion years, which is, when

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Speaker 5: bacteria get attacked by viruses, they take a little mugshot

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Speaker 5: of the virus that attacks them, and they keep a

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Speaker 5: little bit of the genetic code of that virus in

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Speaker 5: their own cluster repeated sequences known as crispers, and so

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Speaker 5: they can use the RNA to target that virus if

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Speaker 5: it attacks again. Now that's pretty useful in this day

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Speaker 5: and age when we keep getting attacked by viruses. But

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Speaker 5: she also made it useful because, say, oh, if we

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Speaker 5: can use RNA as a targeting tool. When it sees

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Speaker 5: a piece of genetic code it doesn't like, we can

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Speaker 5: make that into an editing tool that cuts an even

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Speaker 5: pace genetic code we don't like or do like.

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Speaker 1: So in principle, for example, you can use Crisper, at

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Speaker 1: least in theory to begin targeting say, cancer causing genes,

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Speaker 1: and to eliminate that which is dangerous.

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Speaker 5: Absolutely, and that's such a wonderful promise. It is not

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Speaker 5: just potentially last year in Mississippi. I'll pick one example.

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Speaker 5: A woman named Victoria Gray who suffered her whole life

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Speaker 5: from sickle cell is cured by Crisper. And sickle cell

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Speaker 5: is out of the three billion letters in your body.

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Speaker 5: If you get one letter wrong, it switches from one

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Speaker 5: letter to the other letter. Then you're going to have

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Speaker 5: sickled cells, meaning your blood cells are going to be

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Speaker 5: crumpled up. And so now with this Crisper gene editing tool,

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Speaker 5: we're able to fix that one letter mutation. We can

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Speaker 5: do it, as you just said, on cancer, because one

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Speaker 5: of the problems we have using immunotherapy, meaning using our

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Speaker 5: own immune system to fight cancer cells, is cancer is

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Speaker 5: pretty tricky and wildly and it knows how to turn

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Speaker 5: off our immune system. Well, using Crisper, you can make

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Speaker 5: it so it doesn't have the key to turn off

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Speaker 5: our immune une system. And it has been used to

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Speaker 5: fight congenital blindness up in Portland and in a couple

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Speaker 5: of other places. They are in clinical trials with that.

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Speaker 5: So the easiest use of Crisper, by far, the least

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Speaker 5: controversial use of Crisper is in living patients who have

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Speaker 5: very simple bad diseases that are caused by simple genetic mutations.

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Speaker 5: And they're almost seven thousand of those, meaning muscular dystrophe,

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Speaker 5: cystic fibrosis, tastes, Sacks, Huntington, sickle cell, many others.

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Speaker 1: So from the standpoint of the breakthrough she created, she's

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Speaker 1: sort of the engineer who provides the tools for the engineers.

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Speaker 5: Right right once you've created this tool called Crisper gene

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Speaker 5: editing tool. The great thing about is that it's all

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Speaker 5: done in code, So you can code the RNA to

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Speaker 5: go snip up something that involves sickle cell, but somebody

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Speaker 5: else can recode it and say, give me this scene

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Speaker 5: that causes congenital blindness and eye cells. And so there

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Speaker 5: are now hundreds of researchers around the world, and there

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Speaker 5: are these conferences called Christopher Conferences where they meet and

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Speaker 5: they say, let me use this tool, and I'm going

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Speaker 5: to reprogram it to fight cancer. I'm going to reprogram

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Speaker 5: it to fight muscular dystrophee. It's not just inventing a

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Speaker 5: cure for a disease. She invented a platform, a tool

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Speaker 5: that others can use to cure and recode it to

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Speaker 5: cure many diseases. When she wins the Nobel Prize with

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Speaker 5: a research partner Emanuel Sharpenthay this past October, the Nobel

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Speaker 5: Committee says it's not just for one discovery, it's for

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Speaker 5: bringing science into a whole new era. They are rewriting

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Speaker 5: the code of life. So, if you put your finger

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Speaker 5: on it, exactly, they've not just made a discovery. They've

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Speaker 5: made a platform of which they'll be thousands of discoveries

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Speaker 5: in the next decade or two.

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Speaker 1: You know, on the one that it sounds honestly science fiction.

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Speaker 1: On the other hand, if I understand correctly, yogurt's played

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Speaker 1: a role in all this, and two French food scientists

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Speaker 1: who actually were working in Wisconsin played a role on them.

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Speaker 1: I mean, how does one of the most ancient human

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Speaker 1: foods fit back into the most modern of scientific breakthroughs?

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Speaker 5: Was I said? It comes from a simple curiosity about nature,

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Speaker 5: which involves bacteria. Bacteria have been fighting viruses for a

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Speaker 5: billion years, and they developed this system to use an

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Speaker 5: RNA guide to chop up a virus that attacks them.

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Speaker 5: We'll name the industry that most depends on healthy bacteria. Well,

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Speaker 5: that's the cheese and yogurt industry for billion dollars a

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Speaker 5: year of creating starter cultures. Starter cultures are bacteria that

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Speaker 5: takes milk and turns it into cheese. Somehow it turns

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Speaker 5: it into yogurt. And you know, you've been in government,

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Speaker 5: and you know this interplay between basic science and applied science,

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Speaker 5: and so what happens is we have the basic scientists

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Speaker 5: who are looking at what the heck of bacteria doing

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Speaker 5: with all these repeated sequences in their DNA. And then

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Speaker 5: you get a group of yogurt scientists who work for Denisco,

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Speaker 5: a couple of them, and they have a history of

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Speaker 5: twenty years of the genetic sequences of all the bacteria

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Speaker 5: that have been used to make yogurts. And they got

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Speaker 5: a lot of money too, because Denisco is really really

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Speaker 5: eager to spend money to protect its yogurt cultures. And

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Speaker 5: so they go back through all twenty years of the

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Speaker 5: history of these bacteria genetic sequences and they discover that, oh,

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Speaker 5: I get it. Every time of new type of virus

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Speaker 5: hits our yogurt culture, the next year we see a

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Speaker 5: sequence that has this little clustered repeat with some of

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Speaker 5: the virus' genetic code. So that was one of the

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Speaker 5: initial discoveries that this was a virus fighting trick that

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Speaker 5: bacteria used, and so they patented it. And that's why

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Speaker 5: if you eat your yogurt, and a lot of people

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Speaker 5: are against GMOs or whatever, but then don't eat yogurt

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Speaker 5: or cheese. That's how we begin with gene editing so

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Speaker 5: that the yogurt culture doesn't get killed by viruses.

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Speaker 1: This is all sort of wild. I mean, here you

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Speaker 1: have things that had evolved in nature that create a

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Speaker 1: framework for things that we were trying to now evolve

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Speaker 1: in laboratories. And you can go back and you can

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Speaker 1: look at the way in which nature itself in some

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Speaker 1: areas had evolved and it's very striking to me that

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Speaker 1: part of what happens, and I think this is one

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Speaker 1: of the most complex parts of how science occurs, is

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Speaker 1: you have great individual scientists, but they're inevitably part of

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Speaker 1: a web of discovery that involves many other people and

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Speaker 1: may involve people who were working on projects that had

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Speaker 1: no relationship to what they ultimately affected. I mean, aren't

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Speaker 1: you sort of fascinated by the way both the formal

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Speaker 1: team and the informal network come together when you get

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Speaker 1: these great breakthroughs.

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Speaker 5: Absolutely, and what you have is basic science doing this

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Speaker 5: sort of dance with applied scientists, and that takes people

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Speaker 5: from around the world. It takes a lot of collaboration.

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Speaker 5: Jennifer Dowdner collaborated with the French scientists Emmanuel Sharpenjay. They

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Speaker 5: worked with the yogurt makers I told you about Phelipe

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Speaker 5: Barrenu and Horvath, and they had a team that helped

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Speaker 5: create this crisper tool. But also competition is involved. There

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Speaker 5: was another team at the Broad Institute of MIT and

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Speaker 5: Harvard led by Eric Lander who you know, and Fong

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Speaker 5: Jang one of his scientists, and they're competing to say

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Speaker 5: how can we use this in humans? And they're in

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Speaker 5: a battle still over the patent right for how do

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Speaker 5: we use this tool to edit human genes? And they're

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Speaker 5: in a race to win the prizes. Ends up that

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Speaker 5: Jennifer Dowdener, my main character and her partner won the

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Speaker 5: Nobel Prize, but Fong Jang and his team at MIT

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Speaker 5: have also won prizes. So you have the competition that's

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Speaker 5: spurred by patents and prizes and the priorities of publication

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Speaker 5: and getting the fame for doing things but you also

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Speaker 5: have the collaboration and collegiality of hundreds of scientists around

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Speaker 5: the world making little discoveries. I sometimes think that patents

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Speaker 5: are a little bit out moded because they have to

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Speaker 5: find one inventor or one clear set of inventors when

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Speaker 5: there may be one hundred people or a thousand people

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Speaker 5: contribute it. That's probably too complicated to write into patent law.

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Speaker 5: But certainly prizes like the Nobel can only be given

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Speaker 5: to three people. I think that distorts science a bit

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Speaker 5: because it makes it so you're not sharing your information

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Speaker 5: as much as you would. The interesting thing to me, though,

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Speaker 5: is when coronavirus struck, both the team at MIT and

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Speaker 5: then Jennifer dowdness team at Berkeley both turn their attention

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Speaker 5: to coronavirus and they quit trying to patent the use

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Speaker 5: of whatever they discovered. They just put it in the

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Speaker 5: public domain, instantly on Internet servers, not in peer reviewed journals,

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Speaker 5: to say, here's what we've discovered this week. Anybody fighting

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Speaker 5: COVID can use it. So I think maybe the pandemic

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Speaker 5: helped us write that balance between the competition that occurs

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Speaker 5: and the cooperation that occurs in basic science research.

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Speaker 1: I'm curious because you emphasize in your work on Steve

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Speaker 1: Jobs at the Jobs himself thought that creating teams was

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Speaker 1: sort of central to why Applehead worked. How did dowbtna

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Speaker 1: go about creating the team that ultimately we had such

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Speaker 1: great accomplishments?

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Speaker 5: Right when I asked Steve Jobs, what was his great

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Speaker 5: his discovery? I thought he'd say the iPhone of the Macintosh,

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Speaker 5: but he said, no, building products is hard, but what's

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Speaker 5: really hard is building a team that can continue to

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Speaker 5: build good products. And he built a team like Franklin

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Speaker 5: Roosevelt from your History Studies and to some extent, Lincoln

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Speaker 5: from dars Kurrn's Goodwin's Team of Rivals. He liked to

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Speaker 5: build people that had creative tension. He liked to have

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Speaker 5: teams of people that were always clashing with each other

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Speaker 5: because he thought that spurred creativity. It challenged people's thinking.

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Speaker 5: But there's no one correct way to build teams. And

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Speaker 5: Dowd was much more collegial. Whenever somebody was going to

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Speaker 5: join one of the companies she founded, or join the

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Speaker 5: team at her Berkeley lab, or become a postdoc studying

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Speaker 5: under her, she would invite them in and say you

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Speaker 5: talk to everybody in the lab, talk to everybody in

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Speaker 5: the company, and then they would all meet to make

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Speaker 5: sure the person fit in. So why aren't you losing

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Speaker 5: some of the value of creative tension if you do that?

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Speaker 5: And she says, maybe so. But different leaders form teams

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Speaker 5: in different ways, and my way is to emphasize working together,

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Speaker 5: really closely, staying up all night together to hack some problem,

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Speaker 5: and trusting everybody else on the team. And you can

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Speaker 5: look at Ben Franklin the book I did on him,

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Speaker 5: and he helped build that team of founders that was

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Speaker 5: probably the greatest team ever built, which is you needed

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Speaker 5: to have a man of great rectitude like George Washington.

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Speaker 5: You needed to have really smart people like Jefferson and Madison.

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Speaker 5: You need to have passionate people like Samuel Adams and

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Speaker 5: his cousin John Adams. But you also needed a Ben

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Speaker 5: Franklin who would be a glue that could bring them

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Speaker 5: all together and sort of, you know, wisely help reduce

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Speaker 5: the tensions.

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Speaker 1: I'm curious. One of the things I admire about your

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Speaker 1: works there's always a sense of ethical concern and a

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Speaker 1: sense of values beyond just the story. And with crispher

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Speaker 1: you get, I think into really at the cutting edge

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Speaker 1: of an almost godlike power that on the one hand

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Speaker 1: can be really good, but on the other hand, could

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Speaker 1: be really really dangerous. How on your own mind, as

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Speaker 1: you've read all this, and as you've interviewed these people

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Speaker 1: and been in their labs and watched them, how do

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Speaker 1: you work through the ethics of crisper whether it ends

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Speaker 1: up being used in a lab and Wu Hunter, it

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Speaker 1: ends up being used that a great hospital saving lives.

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Speaker 5: When Jennifer Dowdner invented this technology with her team, she

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Speaker 5: had a nightmare and it was that she gets called

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Speaker 5: into a room and somebody wants to know how to

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Speaker 5: use it, and when that person looks up, it's Hitler.

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Speaker 5: And so she has trouble sleeping for weeks after that,

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Speaker 5: and she starts gathering scientists and religious leaders and political

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Speaker 5: leaders and ethicists from around the world, including China. Somebody

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Speaker 5: I know they're daunching pay of the National Academy there,

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Speaker 5: but the Royal Academy in England, the Europeans, and the

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Speaker 5: Americans and Canadians, and they say, how are we going

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Speaker 5: to use this tool properly? Because we talked earlier about

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Speaker 5: the clearly great stuff you can do, like taking a

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Speaker 5: kid with sickle cell and saying you no longer have

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Speaker 5: sickled cells. But you could also make hereditary edits and

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Speaker 5: give your children traits. And you might say, well, that's

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Speaker 5: a good idea, let's give them the trade you know,

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Speaker 5: not to have sickle cell, and that makes some sense.

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Speaker 5: But in China a doctor did it and made inheritable

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Speaker 5: edits in early stage embryos so that you create designer children,

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Speaker 5: and there was a lot of upset because that was

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Speaker 5: crossing a line. It's almost like you know, Adam and

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Speaker 5: Eve biting into the apple or Prometheus snatching fire from

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Speaker 5: the gods. If you're going to snatch those powers, you're

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Speaker 5: gonna have to be careful of how you use that

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Speaker 5: tree of knowledge. On second thought, what that Chinese scientists

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Speaker 5: did was edit the children so they didn't have the

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Speaker 5: receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So you

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Speaker 5: have to say, well, maybe after this pandemic, using crisper

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Speaker 5: to make sure we don't have virus receptors. As long

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Speaker 5: as it's safe, which it wasn't when he did it,

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Speaker 5: and we know it's effective, maybe that's a good idea.

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Speaker 5: But what would you think about saying, all right, I

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Speaker 5: want my kids to be eight inches taller. That really

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Speaker 5: doesn't advantage all of humanity. If everybody were eight inches taller,

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Speaker 5: we wouldn't be better off, you know, especially given the

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Speaker 5: size of airline seats these days. So it's only an

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Speaker 5: advantage if you're wealthy and you can buy eight inches

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Speaker 5: for your kid, and then your kids off. And that

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Speaker 5: gets us back to the science fiction. Brave New World

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Speaker 5: is exactly about that. We create genetic elite with genetic

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Speaker 5: inequalities that people can pay for. Well, whatever you believe

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Speaker 5: about the free market system, you'd probably pause before you'd say, well,

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Speaker 5: let's take inequalities we have and allow people to encode it.

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Speaker 5: So certain families have an aristocracy. You know, they're taller,

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Speaker 5: and they have higher IQ points and all these things.

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Speaker 5: You could have a dystopian society if we got to

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Speaker 5: that brave New world where different parts of our species

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Speaker 5: were genetically elite or not. That's what the movie Gattica

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Speaker 5: is about.

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Speaker 1: Well, part of that which intrigues me is that we

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Speaker 1: don't fully understand why certain adaptee patterns occur. So, for example,

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Speaker 1: there may well have been a positive outcome from having

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Speaker 1: sickle cell Royal Africa, probably involving malaria. And it'll be

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Speaker 1: interesting because I think as smart as we are now

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Speaker 1: as a species, we still tend to ask pretty linear

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Speaker 1: questions and not necessarily understand all the permutations that make

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Speaker 1: it more dangerous to do certain things. I think, for example,

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Speaker 1: this whole issue of biological warfare, which I've been involved

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Speaker 1: with for over twenty years, and then a species which

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Speaker 1: has now invented hydrogen bombs, which has created extraordinary levels

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Speaker 1: of control capability through information. It's sort of hard to

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Speaker 1: say the next only worse, but there is something it

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Speaker 1: seems to me a little more frightening about a biological

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Speaker 1: weapon than about these other things. As you were going

435
00:26:52,040 --> 00:26:56,320
Speaker 1: through these labs that you were learning about the capabilities

436
00:26:56,359 --> 00:26:59,760
Speaker 1: and the possibilities to what extemble, you also just jarred

437
00:27:00,359 --> 00:27:04,280
Speaker 1: by this question of Shelley S. Frankenstein, or a terrorist

438
00:27:04,359 --> 00:27:08,240
Speaker 1: who pays somebody a lot of money to develop a

439
00:27:08,280 --> 00:27:11,760
Speaker 1: specific capacity and then on leashes that are threatens to

440
00:27:11,840 --> 00:27:14,000
Speaker 1: unleash it unless their demands.

441
00:27:13,640 --> 00:27:18,480
Speaker 5: Are absolutely I was worried about it in the coronavirus pandemic,

442
00:27:18,560 --> 00:27:21,200
Speaker 5: whatever the source of that virus and I don't think

443
00:27:21,240 --> 00:27:24,760
Speaker 5: we fully know yet, at least raises the specter that

444
00:27:24,840 --> 00:27:30,600
Speaker 5: people can create using genetic or biological tools, very bad weapons.

445
00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:35,520
Speaker 5: The largest funder right now of research at Jennifer Downer's

446
00:27:35,600 --> 00:27:39,240
Speaker 5: lab and at the lab Broad Institute on Uses of

447
00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:43,920
Speaker 5: Crisper is DARPA, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency,

448
00:27:44,160 --> 00:27:48,920
Speaker 5: and they've created and Jennifer's team helped create something called

449
00:27:49,200 --> 00:27:52,800
Speaker 5: anti crisper, which you can figure out. It's just what

450
00:27:52,880 --> 00:27:55,800
Speaker 5: it says, and it means just like you can have

451
00:27:55,840 --> 00:28:00,200
Speaker 5: ballistic missile systems, you can have anti ballistic missile system

452
00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:04,240
Speaker 5: So the military gets that quite well. And so one

453
00:28:04,240 --> 00:28:07,240
Speaker 5: of the worries I would have with gene editing is

454
00:28:07,280 --> 00:28:09,520
Speaker 5: not so much that you gene edited to a human.

455
00:28:10,520 --> 00:28:13,920
Speaker 5: That's something that's possible. It's that you gene edited the

456
00:28:14,040 --> 00:28:18,119
Speaker 5: whole wave of mosquitoes with a gene drive that would

457
00:28:18,119 --> 00:28:23,520
Speaker 5: make them able to carry incredibly dangerous pathogens and unleash

458
00:28:23,520 --> 00:28:26,560
Speaker 5: them on a population. I mean, that's a pretty simple

459
00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:30,640
Speaker 5: biological weapon that could be pretty destructive. And so anti

460
00:28:30,760 --> 00:28:34,600
Speaker 5: crisper is a way to make sure those mosquitoes crisper systems,

461
00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:38,400
Speaker 5: the edits of those get turned off. But Vladimir Putin

462
00:28:39,040 --> 00:28:42,000
Speaker 5: has said at a youth conference a couple of years ago,

463
00:28:42,320 --> 00:28:45,600
Speaker 5: he was extolling the virtues of this tool that Dawn

464
00:28:45,800 --> 00:28:49,480
Speaker 5: had helped create, and he said, Crisper may someday be

465
00:28:49,520 --> 00:28:54,360
Speaker 5: able to make us create soldiers that are impervious to radiation.

466
00:28:54,840 --> 00:28:57,840
Speaker 5: They don't get radiation signals, and they may be impervious

467
00:28:57,880 --> 00:29:02,200
Speaker 5: to pain or even impervious to fear. So you can

468
00:29:02,280 --> 00:29:05,880
Speaker 5: see what an autocrat or a person interested in military

469
00:29:06,000 --> 00:29:09,720
Speaker 5: uses could think of doing. I do think that it's

470
00:29:09,800 --> 00:29:14,080
Speaker 5: a possibility that it can become the subject for cooperation.

471
00:29:14,840 --> 00:29:18,920
Speaker 5: I take heart that the Chinese or the Ones pretty

472
00:29:18,920 --> 00:29:22,160
Speaker 5: far ahead of this game. They've done it in cancer,

473
00:29:22,560 --> 00:29:26,600
Speaker 5: and after one of their scientists, a kind of young

474
00:29:26,760 --> 00:29:31,960
Speaker 5: scientists and one of the provinces edited embryos, they decided

475
00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:35,560
Speaker 5: it was against the international and their own national regulations.

476
00:29:35,560 --> 00:29:38,960
Speaker 5: He's put on trial and he's in jail for three years.

477
00:29:39,360 --> 00:29:42,960
Speaker 5: And they started coming to meetings with their American counterparts

478
00:29:43,280 --> 00:29:45,480
Speaker 5: to saying, all right, what are the limits and how

479
00:29:45,480 --> 00:29:49,040
Speaker 5: are we going to have detection to make sure people

480
00:29:49,080 --> 00:29:53,640
Speaker 5: don't make inheritable genetic edits. So, as you know from

481
00:29:53,800 --> 00:29:56,239
Speaker 5: studies of the Cold War and anything else we're going

482
00:29:56,320 --> 00:29:59,720
Speaker 5: to be in a struggle with China. And when Tony

483
00:29:59,720 --> 00:30:02,920
Speaker 5: Blair and Jake Sullivan meet their counterparts in Alaska a

484
00:30:02,960 --> 00:30:05,240
Speaker 5: couple of weeks ago, there was a long list of

485
00:30:05,320 --> 00:30:08,840
Speaker 5: things they fought about. But even Kissinger, when he is

486
00:30:08,920 --> 00:30:12,200
Speaker 5: doing daytaut with Russia, says, well, maybe here's a list

487
00:30:12,320 --> 00:30:15,360
Speaker 5: that we can try to cooperate on, and that would

488
00:30:15,360 --> 00:30:19,960
Speaker 5: be cultural and scientific exchanges. And at the moment we're

489
00:30:19,960 --> 00:30:23,040
Speaker 5: now doing that with chrispur Not that I necessarily trust

490
00:30:23,200 --> 00:30:25,800
Speaker 5: all other countries, but I think it's good to be

491
00:30:25,880 --> 00:30:30,320
Speaker 5: discussing with China and the Europeans and the British and

492
00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:33,320
Speaker 5: hopefully someday the Russians will come in on it. Ways

493
00:30:33,360 --> 00:30:35,720
Speaker 5: that we're going to control genetic editing.

494
00:30:36,280 --> 00:30:37,960
Speaker 1: I have to ask you, because you sort of remind

495
00:30:38,000 --> 00:30:41,080
Speaker 1: me of a wonderful gourmet shopper who goes through this

496
00:30:41,720 --> 00:30:45,240
Speaker 1: grocery store of life, and you pluck up Benjamin Franklin

497
00:30:45,240 --> 00:30:48,680
Speaker 1: out and then you pluck out with somebody else. In

498
00:30:48,760 --> 00:30:54,160
Speaker 1: almost every case, they're unique personalities with fascinating life stories

499
00:30:54,520 --> 00:30:58,160
Speaker 1: who've had a significant impact on history. So I have

500
00:30:58,240 --> 00:31:00,880
Speaker 1: to ask what part of the growth restore. Are you

501
00:31:00,960 --> 00:31:04,360
Speaker 1: drifting towards now as you think about your next big project.

502
00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:10,200
Speaker 5: That's a good question, because I was surprised how amazing

503
00:31:10,240 --> 00:31:13,960
Speaker 5: it was to stumble across the grocery aisle that involved

504
00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:18,240
Speaker 5: the life sciences, something I had not thought about too

505
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:20,640
Speaker 5: much before. And I thought this was going to be

506
00:31:20,680 --> 00:31:23,640
Speaker 5: a rich and interesting grocery aisle to use your metaphor,

507
00:31:24,120 --> 00:31:29,960
Speaker 5: filled with amazing characters and colorful things. And then when

508
00:31:29,960 --> 00:31:32,800
Speaker 5: I studied Crisper and the coronavirus hit, I realized I'd

509
00:31:32,840 --> 00:31:38,640
Speaker 5: been understating how amazing this field is. I'm interested in

510
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:44,400
Speaker 5: science and technology, but I'm particularly like you, interested in

511
00:31:44,480 --> 00:31:48,600
Speaker 5: people I'll call them the Ben Franklins and Leonardo da

512
00:31:48,640 --> 00:31:52,280
Speaker 5: Vinci's who try to connect everything. They are poly mass.

513
00:31:52,640 --> 00:31:55,240
Speaker 5: I mean, I started out in a news magazine where

514
00:31:55,240 --> 00:31:57,760
Speaker 5: I would write about music one week, in medicine the

515
00:31:57,800 --> 00:32:01,200
Speaker 5: next week, in foreign policy the next business the fourth week.

516
00:32:01,760 --> 00:32:04,360
Speaker 5: So I became interested in different fields. So I'm going

517
00:32:04,440 --> 00:32:10,760
Speaker 5: to try to find somebody who, like Leonardo da Vinci did,

518
00:32:10,880 --> 00:32:14,760
Speaker 5: and maybe Aristotle did, but somebody who tries to connect

519
00:32:14,800 --> 00:32:20,440
Speaker 5: all the fields. Because patterns ripple across nature and if

520
00:32:20,440 --> 00:32:23,800
Speaker 5: you see how spirals work when water running past the rock,

521
00:32:23,840 --> 00:32:26,280
Speaker 5: as Leonardo did as a kid, you're going to end

522
00:32:26,360 --> 00:32:29,840
Speaker 5: up understanding the math of spirals and then maybe painting

523
00:32:29,880 --> 00:32:32,600
Speaker 5: the curls of the Mona Lisa. And so if you're

524
00:32:32,640 --> 00:32:37,280
Speaker 5: interested in everything from anatomy to art to zoology, you

525
00:32:37,280 --> 00:32:39,400
Speaker 5: have a feel for those patterns. So I'm looking for

526
00:32:39,520 --> 00:32:42,400
Speaker 5: great what I would call renaissance people.

527
00:32:43,560 --> 00:32:45,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the sense that was the original meaning of

528
00:32:45,880 --> 00:32:50,920
Speaker 1: a renaissance person. The question was, in part, was knowledge

529
00:32:50,960 --> 00:32:54,960
Speaker 1: sufficiently limited and at the same time being infused with

530
00:32:55,160 --> 00:32:58,680
Speaker 1: enough new things being imported from the Arab world and

531
00:32:58,720 --> 00:33:02,480
Speaker 1: being imported from the discovery of the Greek and Roman

532
00:33:02,520 --> 00:33:05,760
Speaker 1: world that you suddenly at this intersection. And I think

533
00:33:05,800 --> 00:33:09,640
Speaker 1: part of what you've proven is that in every century

534
00:33:09,680 --> 00:33:13,880
Speaker 1: you can find people who have common characteristics and who

535
00:33:13,960 --> 00:33:17,320
Speaker 1: leave behind a bigger footprint than you would imagine.

536
00:33:17,560 --> 00:33:20,840
Speaker 5: Yeah, it happens in Florence, as you say, in the

537
00:33:20,920 --> 00:33:25,120
Speaker 5: late fourteen hundreds, when Constantinople is falling and people from

538
00:33:25,120 --> 00:33:29,160
Speaker 5: the our world are coming and bringing amazing things like algebra.

539
00:33:29,400 --> 00:33:32,520
Speaker 5: And I think we sometimes forget how amazing algebra is.

540
00:33:32,800 --> 00:33:36,040
Speaker 5: If you want to understand this world, or people coming

541
00:33:36,040 --> 00:33:39,440
Speaker 5: in from Germany and bringing the printing press at Gutenberg

542
00:33:39,920 --> 00:33:43,800
Speaker 5: has just invented, and people coming in from Asia on

543
00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:46,840
Speaker 5: the Silk Road in other places, and it all fuses

544
00:33:46,880 --> 00:33:49,719
Speaker 5: together in Florence, and you have these cradles of creativity

545
00:33:49,760 --> 00:33:53,560
Speaker 5: throughout history. I would put Philadelphia in the seventeen seventies

546
00:33:53,680 --> 00:33:58,440
Speaker 5: in that category because unlike other places in the colony,

547
00:33:58,520 --> 00:34:02,320
Speaker 5: it wasn't a Puritan the artocracy like Boston, or wasn't

548
00:34:02,360 --> 00:34:04,600
Speaker 5: like Virginia, had had all sorts of people in it

549
00:34:04,600 --> 00:34:09,040
Speaker 5: had had you know, Anglicans and Protestants and Catholics and

550
00:34:09,120 --> 00:34:13,000
Speaker 5: slaves and freed slaves, and Jews and Moravians and loyalists

551
00:34:13,080 --> 00:34:17,480
Speaker 5: and anti monarchists and everything else. And that ferment allows

552
00:34:17,480 --> 00:34:20,120
Speaker 5: you of Ben Franklin and a group of founders coming

553
00:34:20,160 --> 00:34:24,879
Speaker 5: together creating the greatest document ever written, which is our Constitution.

554
00:34:25,600 --> 00:34:28,160
Speaker 5: So you have to look for those cradles of creativity

555
00:34:28,760 --> 00:34:32,080
Speaker 5: where just different ideas, as you put it, you know,

556
00:34:32,239 --> 00:34:34,800
Speaker 5: come together into a ferment. You know.

557
00:34:35,040 --> 00:34:39,080
Speaker 1: Peter Drucker once wrote that the key to genius wasn't

558
00:34:39,120 --> 00:34:42,680
Speaker 1: how smart you were or how hard you worked, It

559
00:34:42,840 --> 00:34:45,600
Speaker 1: was the size of the question you ask, and that

560
00:34:45,719 --> 00:34:48,480
Speaker 1: people who ask a certain size question sort of have

561
00:34:48,560 --> 00:34:51,240
Speaker 1: to grow into genius status to just find the answer.

562
00:34:51,880 --> 00:34:54,120
Speaker 5: You know, this happened to Jennifer Dowd and my main

563
00:34:54,239 --> 00:34:57,680
Speaker 5: character in the nineteen nineties. She was a graduate student

564
00:34:57,800 --> 00:35:02,200
Speaker 5: and most of the men in biology then we're on

565
00:35:02,239 --> 00:35:05,280
Speaker 5: the Human Genome Project, which was sort of an alpha

566
00:35:05,280 --> 00:35:08,320
Speaker 5: male project. You know, the people involved from Craig Vennor

567
00:35:08,440 --> 00:35:12,160
Speaker 5: to Eric Lander to Francis Collins, and so there were

568
00:35:12,160 --> 00:35:14,560
Speaker 5: a couple of women who said, all right, I'm not

569
00:35:14,600 --> 00:35:16,600
Speaker 5: going to run with a soccer ball is I'm going

570
00:35:16,640 --> 00:35:18,799
Speaker 5: to play the rest of the field. And they're the

571
00:35:18,840 --> 00:35:22,040
Speaker 5: ones who focus not on sequencing the DNA, but on

572
00:35:22,120 --> 00:35:24,560
Speaker 5: figuring out the role of the RNA, which, as we

573
00:35:24,560 --> 00:35:27,200
Speaker 5: said at the very beginning, turns out, if you're going

574
00:35:27,239 --> 00:35:28,560
Speaker 5: to make a vaccine, if you're going to make a

575
00:35:28,600 --> 00:35:31,759
Speaker 5: gene editing tool, the RNA is the molecule that you

576
00:35:31,840 --> 00:35:35,879
Speaker 5: want to understand. And she's doing it with a professor

577
00:35:36,160 --> 00:35:40,360
Speaker 5: at Harvard named Jack shows Stack, and she's just in

578
00:35:40,440 --> 00:35:45,600
Speaker 5: the minute details of exactly the shape and the structure

579
00:35:45,640 --> 00:35:49,839
Speaker 5: of RNA and how maybe that allows RNA to edit

580
00:35:49,880 --> 00:35:53,680
Speaker 5: its own self and to create copies of itself, and

581
00:35:53,800 --> 00:35:58,240
Speaker 5: Jack Showstack says, all right, but what's the big picture,

582
00:35:58,480 --> 00:36:01,880
Speaker 5: what's the big idea? I mean, this is fine. What

583
00:36:01,960 --> 00:36:04,759
Speaker 5: are you pursuing? And she has a few answers he

584
00:36:04,800 --> 00:36:07,560
Speaker 5: touched on the things. He says, No, the big question

585
00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:12,320
Speaker 5: is how did life begin? And nobody's figured it out yet.

586
00:36:12,400 --> 00:36:16,440
Speaker 5: But if you can discover how RNA can come together

587
00:36:16,520 --> 00:36:19,360
Speaker 5: with just a pool of three or four chemicals in

588
00:36:19,400 --> 00:36:23,160
Speaker 5: some primordial stew four billion years ago, and then you

589
00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:27,120
Speaker 5: can show how just in that mix of chemicals four

590
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:32,120
Speaker 5: billion years ago, it learned to replicate itself, then you've

591
00:36:32,360 --> 00:36:37,320
Speaker 5: helped discover the secret of how life began. And indeed

592
00:36:37,480 --> 00:36:40,799
Speaker 5: that's now our theory called the RNA World of how

593
00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:43,960
Speaker 5: life began on the planet. And Jennifer Dowden it told me.

594
00:36:44,000 --> 00:36:47,960
Speaker 5: It taught me two related things, which is, always look

595
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:51,560
Speaker 5: at the big picture. And number two, never forget that

596
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:54,880
Speaker 5: God is in the details. So it's a tiny detail

597
00:36:55,120 --> 00:36:58,120
Speaker 5: of how that molecule folds and twists, but it's a

598
00:36:58,120 --> 00:36:59,600
Speaker 5: big picture that drives you.

599
00:37:00,160 --> 00:37:03,960
Speaker 1: That's amazing. Listen, you are such a polymath yourself, and

600
00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:08,000
Speaker 1: you have been so extraordinarily productive that we're going to

601
00:37:08,040 --> 00:37:11,279
Speaker 1: list all of your books on our show page, and

602
00:37:11,360 --> 00:37:14,480
Speaker 1: people could actually go through the University of Isaacson to

603
00:37:14,600 --> 00:37:17,120
Speaker 1: have read your books should be the equivalent of getting

604
00:37:17,120 --> 00:37:18,239
Speaker 1: a graduate degree.

605
00:37:18,719 --> 00:37:21,560
Speaker 5: Well, let me turn the compliment back, you too, are

606
00:37:21,600 --> 00:37:25,040
Speaker 5: a polymath. I've never ceased to be amazed in the

607
00:37:25,120 --> 00:37:28,160
Speaker 5: thirty or forty years in which our passive cross or

608
00:37:28,160 --> 00:37:31,279
Speaker 5: you've come to conferences, or I've been with you, that

609
00:37:31,680 --> 00:37:34,800
Speaker 5: you have some new ideas about everything at all times,

610
00:37:34,840 --> 00:37:37,439
Speaker 5: and that's what we should aspire to do. It keeps

611
00:37:37,480 --> 00:37:40,839
Speaker 5: our minds nimble, it keeps our minds open, and it

612
00:37:40,960 --> 00:37:46,000
Speaker 5: reminds us that curiosity, just pure curiosity, is the key

613
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:47,200
Speaker 5: to creativity.

614
00:37:47,920 --> 00:37:50,239
Speaker 1: I think that's right. I've also tried to follow the

615
00:37:50,280 --> 00:37:55,440
Speaker 1: principle of asking questions large enough that it's worth the

616
00:37:55,480 --> 00:37:57,960
Speaker 1: effort to learn them, and that turns out to be

617
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:00,640
Speaker 1: an endless process, because, as you well know from you

618
00:38:00,680 --> 00:38:05,440
Speaker 1: own experience, the world is amazingly complex and constantly evolving.

619
00:38:06,160 --> 00:38:10,000
Speaker 1: And your life has reflected that, both professionally and geographically,

620
00:38:10,400 --> 00:38:13,080
Speaker 1: and I think to something said, probably mine has too.

621
00:38:13,200 --> 00:38:16,200
Speaker 1: So it's always great to be with you, and it's

622
00:38:16,880 --> 00:38:21,279
Speaker 1: remarkable to watch your career and your ability to keep

623
00:38:21,320 --> 00:38:24,440
Speaker 1: absorbing new things and keep teaching the rest of us

624
00:38:24,480 --> 00:38:27,120
Speaker 1: new things. So I'm very grateful you take this time

625
00:38:27,200 --> 00:38:28,040
Speaker 1: and be with us.

626
00:38:28,480 --> 00:38:31,839
Speaker 5: It's always good to be somebody who stays curious. Thank you, Ded,

627
00:38:35,320 --> 00:38:35,719
Speaker 5: Thank you.

628
00:38:35,680 --> 00:38:38,680
Speaker 1: To my guest Walter Rizinson. You can read more about

629
00:38:38,760 --> 00:38:42,080
Speaker 1: Jennifer Dudna and get a link to order the Codebreaker

630
00:38:42,480 --> 00:38:46,120
Speaker 1: on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is

631
00:38:46,160 --> 00:38:50,960
Speaker 1: produced by Ginger three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer

632
00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:55,160
Speaker 1: is Guarnsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The

633
00:38:55,280 --> 00:38:59,000
Speaker 1: artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special

634
00:38:59,080 --> 00:39:02,319
Speaker 1: thanks to the team Ingrish three sixty. If you've been

635
00:39:02,360 --> 00:39:05,880
Speaker 1: enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and

636
00:39:05,960 --> 00:39:08,600
Speaker 1: both rate us with five stars and give us a

637
00:39:08,640 --> 00:39:13,240
Speaker 1: review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now,

638
00:39:13,480 --> 00:39:16,560
Speaker 1: listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free

639
00:39:16,600 --> 00:39:22,160
Speaker 1: weekly columns at gingristhree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm

640
00:39:22,239 --> 00:39:24,360
Speaker 1: newt gingrichh. This is Newtsworld