Gadgetory

my name is Jennifer Doudna I'm a professor at University of California Berkeley and I work on something called gene editing I think in the future it will be possible to use gene editing to help species that are under tremendous pressure from the environment in different ways and you know the example that I like to think about actually is it's protecting trees trees that are under reeled arrest due to the bark beetle what if we could actually put protective genes into the trees that would protect them or possibly going the other way make modifications to the bark beetles so they don't have the capability to attack the trees I think scientists have been really tethered to a few model organisms that could be manipulated genetically and now with this tool we have a way to change the DNA in essentially any type of organism and so what we're seeing in the scientific world is that this is opening up opportunities to understand life in many new niches being able to make a single letter change in the DNA of the human genome in a way that would for example cure genetic disease the gene editing technology that is available today is already you know sufficient to cure the defect that causes sickle cell anemia in cells that are cultured in the laboratory by 2021 we will certainly see more clinical trials going forward right now the trials that are approved are all for cancer and they're for doing a particular type of editing that might be impactful in treating cancer namely being able to program a patient's own immune cells to target and destroy their cancer cells but I think that going forward we will see increasing efforts to address genetic diseases of the blood of the eye of the liver and then probably farther down the road diseases that affect other tissues the opportunities to really understand and we hope in the future to effectively treat or even cure genetic disease and humans is just you know there's a lot of interest in what's called de-extinction the idea that you could bring back an organism that is no longer walking the earth by using gene editing to make modifications to a genome of an existing organism let's say that it reintroduces genes that have been lost whether you could really bring back a dinosaur um you know that's much harder challenge we don't really know the DNA sequence that would encode a dinosaur and you know in Jurassic Park you may remember that the premise of Michael Crichton's story was that you know that there were insects trapped in resin that contained blood from dinosaurs that had DNA still available for sequencing and unfortunately DNA just is a chemical that doesn't last 65 million years so I think you know being able to do that is not so likely but you know maybe it's possible to by sort of bootstrapping piecing together information we have about amphibians about birds it might be possible to start sort of walking in that direction and I don't know how close you could get to a real dinosaur but certainly we'll learn a lot about the genetic traits that are encoded in DNA that give rise to some of the traits that we think dinosaurs had another area that is a little bit farther afield but I think again might intersect in interesting ways with gene editing is imaging being able to visualize cells at a level that has been impossible in the past so what if you could really look inside of a cell and see molecules watch them behaving watch them functioning I think this is going to be incredible and I think this will probably really again be a very transformative type of effort that will happen over the next few years is to really start allowing us to see the cellular world in ways that have been impossible before you you