Name: Mixing human + animal DNA and the future of gene editing | Big Think
Uploaded: 2022-08-23T18:27:08.000Z
Duration: 14 min 14 s
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does get to the central issue of what makes us tick.

It's perhaps too determinist to say that your genes determine everything you do.

They don't, but, if you like, it's like the deck of cards that you're dealt at birth.

What you do with that deck, like any card game, depends a lot on your choices, but it

is influenced by those cards, those genes that you got when you were born.

What I've enjoyed about genetics is looking to see what it tells us about where we've

come from because those pieces of DNA, they came from somewhere.

They weren't just sort of plucked out of the air.

And it's a very good way of finding out about your ancestors, not only who they are, but

You're made up of DNA from thousands and millions of ancestors who've lived in the past, most

of them now dead, but they've survived, they've got through, they've passed their DNA onto

their children, and it's come down to you.

You could be the head of a big corporation.

You could be someone who lives on the street.

I can see a time, long after I've gone but when, in fact, everyone will know their relationship

It is possible, if anybody wants to do it or can afford it, you could actually, I think,

draw the family tree of the entire world by linking up the segments of DNA.

So you could find out in what way everyone was related to everybody else.

No doubt, most of the funding for the advances in genetics, for example, the complete sequencing

of the human genome, has come from ambition to learn more about health issues.

The technology for exploring that, which is making leaps and bounds, has come through

Those are the two main things that people are learning about themselves and who they're

And that does, and I know from experience, that does add a lot to people's sense of identity.

It's not for everybody, not everyone's very interested in it, but a lot of people are

FRANCIS COLLINS: It's too bad that you can't actually see DNA easily under a microscope

and scan across the double-helix and read out of the sequence of bases that amounts

to the information content because it would be easier, I think, to explain then how a

geneticist goes about tracking down the molecular bases of a disease at the DNA level.

They're very powerful, they're very highly accurate, but they're not as visual as you

We do have methods though now that allow you to read out with high accuracy all 3 billion

of the letters of the DNA instruction book.

Those letters are actually these chemical bases.

The chemical language of DNA is a simple one.

There's only four letters in the alphabet.

Those bases that we abbreviate, A, C, G, and T. And we have methods of being able to compare

then the DNA sequence of people who have a disease versus people who don't and look for

the critical differences in order to nail down something that might be the cause.

Well, since, however, we all differ in our DNA sequence by about a half of 1%, you wouldn't

get very far if you basically sequenced my DNA and the DNA of somebody with Parkinson's

disease trying to figure out what the differences were because there would be way too many of

But if you're willing to do that for a large number of people, you kind of average out

all the noise and the difference that matters begins to be more and more clear.

That's an overly-simplified description of how a geneticist goes about zeroing in on

the actual molecular cause of a complex or a simple disease.

This worked most readily for diseases that are highly heritable, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's

Those are conditions where a single mutation very reproducibly results in the disease.

It's been a lot tougher for diseases where the inheritance is muddy.

If you take diabetes for instance, which is what my lab primarily works on, or you take

asthma or high blood pressure, that is not a set of conditions where one gene is involved

There are dozens of genes involved in that and no single one of them contributes very

much, but you put it all together and the consequences to that individual may tip them

over the threshold into having the illness.

We are experiencing right now a remarkable deluge of discovery in terms of the causes

of disease, much of it coming out of genomics, the ability to pinpoint at the molecular level

what pathway has gone awry in causing a particular medical condition.

And that in itself is exciting because it's new information, but what you really want

to do is to take that and push that forward into clinical benefit.

Some of that can be in prevention by identifying people at highest risk and trying to be sure

they're having the right preventative strategy.

But people are still going to get sick and so you want to come up with also better treatments

And some of it is the ability through personalized medicine to begin to identify individual risks

for future illness to get us beyond the-one-size-fits all approach to prevention, which has been

People haven't necessarily warmed to these recommendations about what you should do about

diet, exercise, colonoscopies, mammograms, and so on because it all sounds very much

But if you could provide people with information about their personal risks and allow them,

therefore, to come up with a personalized plan for maintaining health, that seems to

Personalized medicine is a term that gets used differently by different people.

In my view, this is an effort to try to take diagnosis, prevention, and treatment and,

when possible, factor into that individual information about that person in order to

I think in some instances, we're not very far along with that.

Take, for instance, the effort to try to choose the right drug at the right dose for the right

There are now more than 10% of FDA-approved drugs that have some mention in the label

about the importance of paying attention to genetic differences in order to optimize the

Take, for instance, the drug Abacavir, which is used to treat HIV-AIDS, a very powerful

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Mixing human + animal DNA and the future of gene editing | Big Think

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