Name: A Brief History of Gene Editing
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T16:22:59.000Z
Duration: 5 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

we can transfer heredity through the substance of DNA.

It's possible for a lot of people to become successful.

For the first time, scientists have successfully repaired a faulty gene in human embryos.

They used a process known as gene editing.

It could help eliminate deadly genetic diseases but some say it's too much like playing God

If this was going to be your baby would you have gone ahead with this?

This story begins in the 1850s in a small monastery.

While he's experimenting with pea plants, he identifies that traits like color and height

He's the first to establish the principle of inheritance.

After Mendel dies the other monks in the abbey take the notes of his astonishing discovery,

Well there's no question that Mendel was ahead of his time.

I guess you'd say the scientific community was not ready to hear what he was saying.

It's fraught with anxiety because there's this idea that you may be playing God

you may be trying to determine the future and taking control of things that people should

So other scientists rediscover what Mendel already knew and in 1905 the word 'genetics'

Research on DNA is one of the great new challenges in science.

Skip forward to 1953 and scientists at Cambridge University

discover that DNA has a double helix structure.

The structure of DNA showed exactly how that code was put together.

Once you knew what the structure was, you could begin to introduce other chemicals

you could take things apart, you could put them back together.

All those types of things you could suddenly start studying.

In the 1970s American biochemist Paul Berg isolates DNA from different sources

"potential biohazards" of what he's just discovered.

All gene editing experiments stop until 1975

and the Asilomar Conference in California.

A group of around 140 scientists, physicians and lawyers

come up with practical and ethical guidelines.

It was almost like a nuclear treaty for biotechnology.

Scientists were looking at recombinant DNA with the idea of doing positive things.

Somebody else could take these and start using them

to make poisons to make  bioterrorist weapons.

So they felt like the time it was time to take a step back, create some rules

By 1994 the first genetically engineered food hits the shelves.

Controversy is swirling around an updated variety of the humble tomato.

2012 is the year of a landmark discovery.

There's a dispute about who actually discovered this tool for editing the human genome.

But now scientists can cut out faulty sections of DNA and replace them with healthy ones.

I've watched people use CRISPR in a neighborhood laboratory

and these were folks that were no more scientists than you and I.

That that's exciting because that gives you all kinds of power to do experimentation.

The concerns are that people might use this say to increase the strength of their offspring

or to choose eye color, to try to affect personality.

The number of gene editing advances using CRISPR is growing worldwide

and soon China steps up its efforts  to dominate the biotechnology sphere.

Irresponsible, disturbing, inappropriate, that's how two of the inventors of a

gene editing tool are describing a Chinese scientist's experiment

that helped create genetically edited babies.

From what I've read he had relatively high-minded ideals about what he was doing and I think

his impression was that it was going to be welcomed.

The audience that he sat in front of was really pretty horrified and eventually

the Chinese government really started to turn against him.

The interesting thing is that every time a new technology comes along everybody talks

and that these evils are going to fly out with a good.

There's always risk but that's the story of science.

The whole idea is to open up these boxes and to see what's inside.

And each time you open up a box,  there's another box inside of it.

And that's going, what's going to happen with CRISPR is the revelations will continue and