CRISPR

And it's the same thing we're suffering from now.

in our world with the advent of AI and the biotech stuff that happens in China behind closed doors with CRISPR, with them not adhering to international rules about how gene editing should go.

It's man's ambition that is the true villain.

and finishing up Wayward Pines.

And it certainly shuts down psychic abilities.

What's interesting is that You know, if you affect your DNA and splice the chromosomes with, and it's called CRISPR technology, spike protein.

It's in the lipid nanoparticle.

It's fired through the cell, and then it goes in and splices the chromosomes.

Now you also get the spike protein lipid nanoparticle, which has four HIV, what they call microinserts.

So it's got HIV in it.

And that's the thing that, you know, the part of the CRISPR technology.

And then you've got glycoethylene.

I have a parent, my father has vascular dementia, and I can really relate to this topic just in terms of Lewy body dementia not getting as much attention or research dollars.

And when they were talking about the CRISPR technology and when is it going to kind of come in and And the system, it's, you know, vascular dementia is the dementia that affects African-Americans the most.

My father's African-American.

And it's just it's really heartbreaking when you see.

And I think brain health with dementia will wind up becoming topic A as well.

Yeah.

How promising is CRISPR as a way to forestall symptoms in a genetic form of dementia?

CRISPR is incredibly promising, but it has two big issues.

in monkeys and, you know, and then you kind of infer that maybe it might be happening the same way in humans.

So what they did was that they, I think, just, you know, very, very similar to even how CRISPR was discovered, right? The whole mechanism of how we now use CRISPR was actually discovered.

This is a natural way how bacteria kind of keeps a record of its infections.

So these scientists were studying this algae and they wanted to see, well, how does the algae move around and how does it control that process? And so through those studies, then they were able to find these special proteins called opsins, O-P-S-I-N.

So they take stem cells out of your own bone marrow.

They then edit them outside your body using CRISPR, C-R-I-S-P-R, which is a tool that works like a pair of molecular scissors with a GPS attached.

cutting at one exact address in the genome.

But they don't cut the sickle mutation.

So can you tell us about, you know, what does gene editing actually, how does it actually work? How does gene editing work? And where is it, where is the technology headed?

It is probably my favorite topic to talk about within genetics because it's groundbreaking that the main genetic editing technology that people are using now is called CRISPR.

And how this works is if you think about our DNA like a ribbon, We can use these like molecular scissors to go in and cut a part of the ribbon out and then put a different color ribbon in and then tape it back up and fix it.

And basically swapping out that little piece of ribbon would be like swapping out a gene where you're taking out the gene that has a mutation or somehow that gene's not working the way it needs to and putting in a copy of the gene that does work, that does work.

properly work in the human body.

And it's amazing that in the course of me podcasting, we went from a landmark paper in 2012 when DNA Today launched of CRISPR and the potentials and how this could change the field.

to about 10 years later, having the first FDA approved treatment for a genetic condition using CRISPR, this genetic editing.

And so when I say FDA approved for people worldwide, that's basically the US government, a branch of the United States government said, hey, this is safe.

It also reflects contemporary concerns about biotech and genetic engineering.

A person turning into plant matter feels eerily relevant to debates about CRISPR and synthetic biology.

I find it intriguing that the costume, while rooted in science fiction, actually taps into real historical practices of botanical research labs in Victorian England, where they would grow rare specimens inside glasshouses.

Those glasshouses were like living laboratories, and the mad botanist costume brings that to life, literally.