1105: DNA | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Michael Regilio. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers.
On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday where a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Topics such as fast fashion, weddings, the death industry, homeopathy, hypnosis, diet pills, and more.
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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, or almost everything. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.
Today, DNA and genes are everywhere, both figuratively and literally. Get your mind out of the gutter, folks.
Not only are they the building blocks of every living thing, but they also hold the secrets to our ancestry, unlock the mysteries of unsolved crimes, and help doctors predict and treat potential health conditions. Even Maury Povich famously used DNA to determine if somebody is or is not the father.
You are not. But as technology advances, we're now capable of manipulating DNA, raising profound questions about what it means to be human.
Are we on the brink of a beautiful new age or stepping into a dystopian sci-fi nightmare? To help us navigate this microscopic landscape, skeptic Michael Regilio is here to help us unravel the double helix of ethical dilemmas and excitement around DNA. Hey, Jordan.
If I may lay a quick compliment on you, you seem quite healthy and smart. Thank you.
I do what I can. Sure, it's important to stay fit and sharp, but the fact of the matter is you had little to do with being healthy and smart.
In fact, you had no say in the matter at all. You were predetermined to be those things.
You just made the most of it. So you're talking about my genetic predisposition, right? Yep.
It's in your genes and it's in your DNA. So I think we all have some sense of what our DNA and genes are, but why don't you break it down for us? I don't actually know the difference.
Okay, sure. DNA or deoxyribribonucleic acid, is a molecule, and a molecule is a bunch of atoms stuck together.
This particular molecule, DNA, is coiled up in the nucleus of every cell in our body, and each coiled up strand of DNA is the complete blueprint to make, uh, you. Yes, I've seen Jurassic Park, but I'm still mind-blown by all this.
Cells are really small, and the idea that a cell can replicate itself is pretty wild. But the fact that each cell also holds the blueprint to make another entire me is just crazy.
Yeah, cells are really small. And to illustrate this, let me hit you with this fact.
Every time you scratch your nose or rub your arm, dead skin cells fall off your body. Humans shed about 600,000 skin cells per day.
You'd think you'd notice if you lost 600,000 of pretty much anything, but no, I've never noticed this generally. So we're talking tiny here, and the DNA strand in each cell isn't just coiled up in the cell.
It's actually coiled up in a much smaller part of the cell, the nucleus. Aha.
Okay. So seventh grade science class coming in handy here.
DNA is obviously extra tiny if it's all curled up in the nucleus of the cell. Actually, only kinda.
Kinda sounds a little bit less scientific than we like to be on Skeptical Sunday, but I'm going to roll with it. Okay.
Look, if uncoiled, a single strand of DNA would stretch to about six feet, five inches long. So it sounds like we're packed pretty tight up in there.
Right, right. Now consider that there are about 50 trillion cells in your body.
So if you laid end-to-end all the DNA strands in your body, that would stretch to the sun, and not just once, but 600 times. Okay, so that's obviously incredible, but I can't really wrap my head around it because the sun is super far away.
Look, science and reality do not care what makes sense to you and I, or even to scientists. To put it in modern parlance, facts don't care about your feelings.
The function of DNA is to tell amino acids how to line up into the correct protein shapes. Proteins combine to make cells.
Cells combine to make up tissues. Tissues make up organs.
And organs make up living creatures. The entire process, as magical as it seems, is all just chemistry.
It can be studied. It can be understood.
And that understanding took many people over a hundred years since we first spotted DNA to really figure out. And of course, there's still a lot to be explored.
So when was this all first discovered? When did people find out that we even had DNA? DNA was first discovered in 1869 by a Swiss biologist named Friedrich Miescher. Miescher was studying white blood cells and he had a nice supply of white blood cells because he would collect all the used bandages from a nearby hospital.
Ah, that's disgusting. Okay, so collecting used bandages from strangers in a hospital.
This guy, he must have really loved science. Or used bandages.
Oh, man, that is super gross. Okay, well, it's about to get grosser because Misha was studying white blood cells, which were hard to extract from a healthy person, but were in great abundance in the pus on used bandages.
Oh, wow. Now I'm glad I didn't eat before this.
Apologies to anybody who's listening to this during lunch right now as we talk about this dude's pus collection. So he wasn't really collecting used bandages as much as he was collecting the pus on used bandages.
And in studying the pus, he experimented and isolated a new molecule he called nucleon and studied it using now from pus to salmon sperm, which might not be exactly as gross as the pussy bandages. Pus caviar, anyone? And so today we call nucleon nucleic acid.
This is one of the building blocks of life. Almost 100 years later in London, a scientist named Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix shape that we're so familiar with of DNA.
So hold on, I thought I remembered that Watson and Crick discovered the double helix thing. Franklin, although she was appreciated in her day, was largely overlooked for her contributions to the understanding of DNA.
And most of the credit went to Watson and Crick because men. Right.
They say history repeats itself. And I will say that whenever the question of why was this woman or these women overlooked, their accomplishments were overlooked.
The answer is almost always because her work just didn't count until a dude came along and took credit for it, which is not cool. Yeah, look, let's not overlook Watson and Crick now.
These

were also good scientists doing good work. Anybody that watches crime shows or likes a good detective novel knows that the understanding of DNA has been an absolute game changer for solving crimes.
Exactly. Before DNA, law enforcement had a few tools at their disposal, but they were actually pretty imprecise.
Starting in the 1920s with blood typing, Scientists identified four different types of blood, A, A, B, B, and O. This was huge for doctors because they could now safely perform blood transfusions, but it also came in handy for law enforcement.
So to catch the bad guys, yeah? No, actually just the opposite, to free the good guys. You could prove somebody definitely was not the crook if there was a blood sample and the suspect did not have that type of blood, but law enforcement could not use it to help identify a suspect beyond a reasonable doubt.
Right, because there are only four blood types, you couldn't do any better than to say that there's a certain percent chance that somebody's the bad guy. And that's far from enough evidence to convict somebody of a crime.
But DNA testing has turned that percentage up, like way up, like 99% accurate and higher. And this time, not just for exonerating, but I'm guessing also for convicting? Exactly.
In fact, the first use of DNA evidence in a crime did both. It all started with Alec Jeffries, a professor and geneticist in the UK in the 1980s.
In his research, Jeffries' study of the human family revealed that children had a composite of both their mother and father's DNA. And this finding was widely reported in the press.
A lawyer read about it, and he was working on an immigration case and saw the story, and he thought it would be helpful with a client who was having trouble proving his identity. Professor Jeffries, using the mother's DNA, was able to prove his client was who he said he was, and police took note of this.
So that was, at the time, quite a breakthrough, I'm guessing. Yeah, and it opened the doors for criminal investigations.
So in 1986, investigators asked Jeffries to help with a murder case. Two 15-year-old girls had been sexually assaulted and murdered.
A teenage boy with learning disabilities had been arrested and had confessed to one of the murders, but not the other. The police wanted help pinning both murders on the boy and went to Jeffries, and guess what happened? Based on the fact that you already said this first case both in a bad guy and exonerated an innocent person, I'm going to guess the DNA proved that this kid was not the murderer.
And now with no suspects, the cops and Jeffreys began to collect DNA samples from local men, but they came up with no matches. You can tell this was the UK because I'm pretty sure in America, the police can't just run around demanding everyone's DNA until they find the right guy.
Oh yeah. That gets us into all the ethical questions that we're going to get into in a second surrounding DNA.
But yes, this was the UK in the 80s and there were no laws around DNA sampling yet. The cops had no leads in this murder case until someone overheard a local baker named Colin Pitchfork bragging that he had submitted a friend's DNA.
So the cops grabbed the dude and he was the perfect match. Wow.
Okay. I'm glad they caught him.
Right. But what a freaking moron.
And his last name was Pitchfork, which is kind of on the nose for a villain. Yeah.
They brought out the torches and pitchforks for Pitchfork and he went down and DNA evidence became a thing because in truth, it actually took years for American courts to figure out how and when it was acceptable to use DNA evidence. There were ethical questions that needed to be addressed if they're going to be databases of people's DNA.
Then those databases and laboratories had to then meet the standards that were established. But there was no getting around it.
This was a huge leap forward as DNA evidence enabled law enforcement to solve cases that had gone cold decades ago. The DNA Identification Act of 1994 authorized the FBI to create a national DNA database that compares DNA found in crime scenes to the DNA of violent offenders.
I understand the ethical questions that come with DNA evidence, but on the whole, I mean, that kind of seems like a win, right? You're a violent off defender, you put your DNA in a database, and then they find all the other people that you killed or attacked or whatever. Yeah, it was a huge win.
And TV writers everywhere rejoiced and mic drop moments were unleashed on a hungry public. Yes, it sounds like Professor Jeffries should basically be getting royalty checks for every episode of Law & Order or NCIS or whatever.
Yeah, TV writers had plenty more to write about as real science continued to catch up with science fiction. The next big achievement came with the mapping of the human genome in 1990.
I remember that that was a really big deal, and it really doesn't sound like that long ago, but again, as always, I'm old now. Yeah, and it was a really big project.
Like, a really big project. The project was headed by Francis Collins, and it took 13 years and sequenced 3 billion chemical pairs and mapped all the genes encoded in human DNA.
Okay, so it seems like a pretty good time to ask, what's the difference between DNA and genes? Short answer, genes are segments of your DNA. Those segments, genes, are responsible for our unique physical characteristics.
In short, genes are the units of hereditary traits and contribute to the traits an organism inherits from its parents. DNA is the complete string of these segments all strung together in a double helix.
Okay, so stop me if this is derailing us too much, but what is cloning? I know I've heard of that when it comes to DNA. Okay, let's start by differentiating between cloning plants and animals.
Many plant cells are totipotent, meaning each cell has the potential to regenerate into a whole new plant. Very often, cloning a plant requires little more than just snipping a branch and allowing it to grow into a whole new plant.
Cloning animals is different. That is when scientists make an exact copy of something using its DNA, that is to say no sex needed.
Some organisms already do this in nature, like starfish, which can regenerate an entire new body from just an arm. Most animals can't do this.
But with the scientist's help, just about any living thing can make an exact copy of itself. In 1996, scientists in Scotland successfully cloned a sheep named Dolly.
Oh, I remember that too. That was huge news.
Dolly was the only lamb to survive out of 277 attempts. I mean, that sounds like cloning is pretty hard.
You got to hand it to them for not giving up, though. After 200 dead lambs, I might be like, hey, this is not working.
Yeah. In fact, until Dolly, many scientists believe mammals just couldn't be cloned, but they can.
In fact, right now, there are companies that can clone a pet for you. So if your favorite kitty dies, you can literally get them back.
And once again, a panoply of ethical questions have arisen. Oh, yeah.
I don't know how I feel about that. So can humans be cloned? That's the obvious next question here.
In truth, the bigger question is, should humans be cloned? And the answer is yes. We think primates have already been cloned and researchers in South Korea and Michigan have cloned a human embryo, but that was only for research purposes.
Countries are passing laws about human cloning. Like all things DNA is mired in ethical questions.
You know, it's almost as tasty as a collection of pussy used bandages. The fine products and services that support this show.
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All hilarious dad jokes aside about how I could use a clone of myself, it does seem really dicey and hard to put that genie back in the bottle. But I kind of assume places like China are doing this and in a way, actually, I hope they are because I'm dying to know how this all plays out.
Yeah, look, we'll get to China in a minute because they are players here. But each of these developments raises a new set of ethical questions.
Genealogical databases, that's where tons of private health information is stored. They could be hacked by bad actors.
And I don't mean like Nick Cage. I mean, somebody leaks your DNA on the internet

and now insurers don't want to cover you

because you're prone to cancer or whatever.

To be fair, Michael,

that does sound like the plot of a movie

with a script that Nick Cage

would say yes to.

That is so true.

And you know what?

I saw his movie Pig recently

and it was really weird and good.

It's about... I haven't seen it.
I haven't watched anything since my kids were born other than Cocoa Melon. Okay, I haven't heard of Cocoa Melon yet.
Yeah, don't worry about it. It's a cartoon that repeats SingSong-y stuff over in, yeah, I don't want to talk about it.
Yeah, look, Nick Cage basically just shrugs and says sure to every script that slides across his desk. That's,'m convinced.
Yeah. You know, if he's working that hard, maybe he could use a clone of himself.
But look back to the ethical questions like the genetic counseling, which could arise as we enter this brave new world back a turn easily into eugenics. And eugenics, in case anyone doesn't know, is an attempt to create a superior gene pool.
And it is widely condemned as racist, ableist, and in violation of human rights. And if you needed any more evidence that it's a bad idea, the most famous champions of eugenics were, of course, the Nazis.
Okay, got it. So eugenics, bad idea.
Right. And I don't know if this company is a sponsor, but I have to say my jaw was on the ground

when I first saw a commercial for a company that has a product called Nugenics.

So definitely, Nugenics, bad.

Don't even talk about it.

So personalized medicine, look, as we head into this brave slash weird new world, personalized

medicine could then eventually equal one quality of care for the rich and another one for the poor. You mean like health care is right now in America, basically? True.
And here's a really scary one. How about biological weapons that target individuals? Whoa, that's sci-fi crazy talk.
Is that actually possible? That's actually, yeah, that's a real possibility. And the idea here is to use DNA to create weapons that exploit the genetic differences between ethnicities.
Obviously, most weapons research is secret, but rest assured, DNA targeting as a weapon of war is something that's being developed. Yes, everyone, rest easy knowing that DNA bombs or whatever, they can wipe out entire population groups, might be in your future.
Let's take a little break from the dark stuff and talk about the fun aspects of DNA. Figuring out who our great-grandparents banged.
Yeah, everybody loves to find out about their ancestry. Maybe almost everyone.
There's definitely some exceptions to this rule, for sure. Yeah, like racists who find out that they're not quite as white as they thought they were.
Oh, yeah. No, but that's rich, though.
Everyone's straight into my veins with that one. Yeah, but it is fun.
In fact, tracing the old family tree through home genetic tests is so fun that it's a $3 billion a year industry. And I have to ask, have you done it? I have.
I've done, I won't say the name because when they get hacked, I don't want people looking for my DNA or whatever. But I've done one of those or a few of those.
I also hired somebody else to trace my family way back. And you get messages on the website sometimes where it's like, I think we're related.
And I'll tell my mom and she's like, don't reply. They're probably nuts, just like everybody else on our side of the family.
And we did find out that my grandfather on my dad's side basically had a secret family before he had my dad's family. But I guess back then, when you got divorced, you just never talked to that family ever again and pretended they didn't exist.
That was what you did. Wow.
Yeah, I mean, that's what DNA does. It's uncovering family secrets.
In fact, there's a really interesting story. There's an actress, Kerry Washington, and she tells this really heartwarming story of when she was asked to be on the show Finding Your Roots.
Do you know the show? I think I've seen it's like an airport lounge watch. Yes.
They run DNA tests on celebrities and then reveal their true roots. And it's fun and surprisingly not trashy.
Yeah. So was asked to be on the show.
And as such, she needed her parents to also take a DNA test. And her parents freaked out.
She comes to find out that her father couldn't have children. And her parents used a sperm donor, but never told her.
Ah, OK. That must have caused a little bit of strife.
No, actually, the way she tells it, it's like it strengthened her relationship with her father as she realized that her dad really wanted to be her dad. Like, he chose to go through the hurdles and emotions of using a sperm donor.
It actually made her feel closer to him. So it's a sweet story.
Yes, but DNA home tests aren't all sweet stories, as we've talked about. There are so many concerns.
Yeah, I heard, as we mentioned earlier, that there are risks involved in having your DNA just out there in a database floating around waiting to be hacked or used by bad actors like Nicolas Cage. Yeah, for sure.
Although the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, yes, Obamacare, makes it illegal for health insurance companies to deny you coverage or charge a different rate, they can still ask about the health of a customer.
But health insurance isn't the only insurance or even the only institution interested in what's in a person's genetic code. Like life insurance, I'm guessing? Sure.
And there's also disability insurance, not to mention banks might be very curious about the health of the person they're about to give a loan to. Yeah, that makes me even more hesitant to take a test, although I'm probably too late for having done a couple of these already.
So how secure is this data? Okay, so these companies are aware of these threats. In fact, in 2018, MyHeritage.com experienced a breach affecting email addresses and passwords, but not genetic data thanks to their separation practices.
That is to say, the customer's name and information is in a different database as the genetic information. Genetic testing companies claim they all take extra care to separate the customer's identity from their genetic information.
But once it's in the customer's hands, the onus is on you to protect it. When I think of how often my laptop says it's detected spyware, it just doesn't leave me with a lot of confidence.
Yeah, here's the thing, Jordan. You could never take a genetic test and your genetic info could still get out there.
How? How is that possible? Because you're not the only one walking around with this hereditary data in your cells. Everyone you're related to has the same info to varying degrees.
Oh, yeah, I did not think of that. So if both my parents took a test, they basically say, well, smash these together.
There's Jordan. Yeah.
Or how about a sibling who has the exact same two parents and therefore the exact same hereditary information? You can learn a lot about someone by studying relatives' DNA. Just ask the Golden State Killer.
That's how they nabbed him. They found a close relative of his through a genetic database and found him almost immediately.
That's right. We did an episode with Paul Holes, one of the guys that caught him.
And that's episode 725.

And they basically, yeah, I think they found his brother or something like that. And he was a close match, but it couldn't have been him.
And they were like, wait a minute, this person is so close. Who else could it be? It's got to be related to him.
Oh, he's got a brother who's a police officer. And that was the Golden State Killer.
Not exactly the poster child for genetic privacy rights, but it does illustrate the risk. Yeah.
In fact, prospective employers might also like to know who they're about to offer the big job to. Is he a notorious most wanted serial killer or not? Or just is he going to get really sick in the next couple of years and maybe he's not the guy to give the job to? This is scary stuff.
It's almost like having a crystal ball. It's definitely not something that you want out there in the world.
It is private information. So brave slash weird new world.
Brave old world, too, because genealogists can now trace our earliest ancestors' diaspora from Africa to the furthest corners of the world. Turns out that we didn't need written records of the ancient past.
The story of the human species is written in our DNA. That's how scientists discovered mitochondrial Eve.
Mitochondrial Eve sounds like a holiday for a very specific type of nerd. I love that joke.
Mitochondrial Eve refers to the most recent common ancestor of all living humans traced through maternal lineage. A single woman estimated to have lived in Africa around 200,000 years ago.
And because mitochondria is only passed through the mother, we can trace everyone's existence back to this one woman. Wow, that is wild.
So we all have the same great whatever grandmother. So the best history books really

are written inside ourselves. How cool is that? Yep.
See, it's even written in the DNA of our hominid brothers and sisters that didn't make it. So I was going to make a joke about dump poor 40 out.
OK, never mind. Poor 300 million 40s out for our homies.
But that's because Scientists have mapped the DNA of Neanderthals with one sample taken from a 38,000 year old Neanderthal in Croatia. And great, great, great grandma may not have kissed and told, but the DNA doesn't lie.
Humans and Neanderthals bred with each other around 65,000 years ago. Oh, man, I guess calling somebody a Neanderthal is not the insult that we thought it was.

It's got a kernel of truth.

Right.

Exactly.

You might just be being accurate

if you call somebody that.

That's pretty damn fascinating, actually.

Yeah.

DNA is pretty damn fascinating.

Our understanding and ability to manipulate it

is a game changer.

For instance, genetic engineers can modify the DNA

of the plants we eat to improve diets and food distribution. So GMOs, basically.
Yeah, look, obviously that is its own episode, but everything was genetically modified long before we had a word for it. That's what farmers have been doing for thousands of years.
Bottom line, as we look ahead at the changes our planet is undergoing, we are going to need this technology to create drought and disease-resistant crops. Or the world could come together and implement meaningful changes to stem the worst effects of climate change.
Yeah, I'm kidding. That'll probably never happen, and we should probably be open to technology that solves parts of this for us.
And plus, through DNA, doctors can create truly personalized care for patients based on their individual DNA. Because we're all genetically different.
Well, technically we're actually pretty darn similar. Humans are 99% genetically the same, but that little 1% does a lot of work to make us unique.
But even that could change as we face the realities of gene splicing through CRISPR. So tell us what CRISPR is again.
I think a lot of people have heard of it. A lot of folks might not know what that is.
It was a massive leap forward for humanity. It made the cover of magazines, newspapers, and won the Nobel Prize for the two scientists who discovered it.
And I only mention this because we talked about how Rosalind Franklin was initially denied credit for her contribution to our understanding of DNA. These two scientists were both women, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.
And like so often in science, they made this discovery by accident. I always find that so interesting.
Many scientific discoveries are just made by accident. It doesn't happen as often in other fields.
You know, a random accountant was not doing some dry cleaner's taxes and is like, oh, look, I've invented cryptocurrency. So what was the happy accident that ended up with us getting the ability to edit DNA? They were studying how bacteria protects themselves from viruses.
This also blew my mind. Bacteria can get sick.
Really? How ironic is that? Yeah, I'm just telling you what I learned. So basically, my infection can get an infection, which is crazy.
Okay, so you said CRISPR is gene splicing. Tell us what that is exactly.
Yeah, it's gene splicing or gene editing. In short, while studying bacteria, these scientists discovered that bacteria have a part of their DNA called CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
Palindromic? Like a palindrome? Like the word race car? I think so. And just as a total aside, my favorite palindrome is go hang a salami on a lasagna hog.
So palindromes are when it's the same, when it reads the same backwards and forwards. A race car is the same backwards and forwards.
And apparently so is go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog, which is, you got to wonder how they figured that one out. That's almost as impressive as discovering the ability to edit genes while looking for something else.
You talked about these very specific kind of nerds that celebrate mitochondrial Eve. I think palindromes are probably discovered by a different kind of very specific nerd.
I think you might be right. Yeah, so this CRISPR stores a tiny piece of a virus's DNA, and the next time the virus comes back, this CRISPR snips out a piece of the DNA and destroys it.
So these two scientists wondered, why can't we use that

technique to cut out genes that are unwanted and replace them with ones that are wanted?

You know, it comes with absolutely no ethical dilemmas. Supporting the fine products and

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This is fascinating because I always thought, oh, gene editing, it's like some machine that does a bunch of specific things. And I'm sure there's machinery involved.
But really, this is a natural process. They're using a natural process to edit DNA, which is wild to me.
Okay, so they're cutting out genes that are unwanted, replacing them with genes that aren't wanted. And do you mean in humans? In anything.
As I said, this is a huge leap forward. And as such, this technology comes with a huge ethical concerns.
Have you seen the film Gattaca? Yes, a classic Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. I love that movie.
It's a dystopian, futuristic tale in which society is divided not by race or nationality or religion, the classic dividing line, but rather by genetically enhanced humans and non-genetically enhanced humans. Yeah, such a good movie.
It's got a super cool aesthetic that I can't really describe because I don't know anything about movies, But it's sort of like it's 1939, but it's also 100 years ahead in the future at the same time. No, yeah, it's a great movie.
I love the film. Thanks to CRISPR, that future is now.
That's what this technology could, and I emphasize, could do. How? Scientists could manipulate an embryo and turn off the genes for genetic diseases and turn on the genes for intelligence, athleticism, and a myriad of other desirable traits.
This is where the debate comes in. You see, there are two kinds of cells in the human body.
There are somatic cells and germ cells. Altering one or the other has different ethical implications.
So you're going to need to explain that to me. Okay, if you go to an adult and change their somatic cells, these are genetic changes done to an adult with their consent, and the changes you make to them genetically cannot be passed on to their offspring.
Okay, I think I'm following so far. Right, so changes to somatic cells in an adult come with no real ethical dilemmas.
In fact, it's already been done. Take the case of Victoria Gray.
Victoria was born with a blood disease called sickle cell. It's a pretty brutal disease that both compromises the quality of a person's life and can dramatically shorten it.
For the first time ever, doctors use CRISPR to treat the disease. Doctors infused Victoria with more than 2 billion of her own bone marrow cells that had been edited with CRISPR.
That is to say, they had cut out the gene for the disease. Wow, that's amazing.
Yeah, and it worked. Almost all of her symptoms are gone.
Victoria is enjoying her life in ways she never could have hoped for before CRISPR. Okay, so no ethical dilemma there.
And by the way, I'm so curious, how do you know if the DNA is in every cell in your body, how do you know which DNA you have to change to get it to work? There's got to be some sort of chain reaction. Oh, if we change one bit of DNA in some cells here, it just spreads and then you don't have this anymore.
I'm so curious. Right.
I wish I had an answer for you on that one. Although I do know that in my research that blood diseases are one that they're really optimistic that CRISPR can be a game changer for.
So there's something about blood diseases that they think is particularly optimal for using CRISPR. I have no idea how long it takes to refresh all your blood cells.
I know it's different for different types of cells and some never completely refresh like fat cells, but it makes sense that blood would be something where they can reasonably say, hey, by the way, your defective blood is going to be largely gone within a few weeks, months, or whatever. I have a list of four reasons why blood diseases are particularly easy to treat with CRISPR.
Number one, accessibility of blood. Number two, well-characterized genetics.
Many blood diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, are caused by a single gene mutation, established transplant procedures, and rapid cell turnover. So basically because of rapid cell turnover, and again, I have no idea what I'm even talking about here, so let's continue.
The dilemma comes from the other changes that could be made, changes to the germ cells, which are changes made to an embryo. That procedure comes with a host of issues.
I'm guessing one issue in this case is that the person being altered has absolutely no say in the matter because they're not born yet. You nailed it.
The other is that these changes can be passed on to offspring.

Since this technology is new, scientists can't be sure what unforeseen consequences might arise.

To do it is to literally experiment on people who had no say in whether or not they wanted to be experimented on.

That seems like an issue that requires a bunch more research before it should be done at all.

But, and this is a huge but, it's already been done. It has.
Yep. This is the tale of He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher who stunned the world when he announced that he had produced genetically edited babies.
Babies? Like the plural of babies. So more than one baby has been genetically edited by this guy in China.
Yep. Three babies, a set of twin girls and another child.
In November 2018, he announced that he had genetically altered a number of human embryos in a way he believed would give them resistance to HIV. He made the announcement at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong.
And I'm not sure what he thought the reception would be, but if he was hoping he'd be heralded as a hero, he was wrong. His colleagues went, and this

is a scientific term, apeshit. Yeah, I can only imagine talk about opening Pandora's box.
And see,

I told you the Chinese were probably doing something with this. Ethics aside, I'm actually still dying to hear how this shakes out.
And it's amazing, even if it is totally unethical from a medical, scientific, moral, whatever perspective.

Here are some of the problems. Fellow scientists pointed out that there are safer, less potentially disastrous methods for protecting people from HIV.
And of course, there's the whole issue that he just blasted right past the ethical concerns without so much as even conferring with his scientific peers. This was maddening.
It definitely seems like a strange move. Rogue scientists, they don't exactly have a great reputation in history or even freaking fiction for that matter.
You know, I'm something of a scientist myself. Yeah, the story of Dr.
Frankenstein isn't really a story of what to do. And the Chinese government wasn't exactly thrilled to have been embarrassed on the world stage by him, so they arrested him.
He was convicted of illegal medical practices and sentenced to three years in prison. I feel like if people were like, wow, this is amazing, China would have been like, yeah, cool.
Yeah, we did it. But since everybody was like, boo, they were like, oh, man, you're going to have to fall on the sword for this one, buddy.
Yeah. And look, in his trial, it was claimed that he had falsified paperwork, that he hadn't been completely honest with the people that were donating the embryos.
And the Chinese government has definitely distanced themselves and said, we've had nothing to do with this. But I also don't know that I trust

the Chinese government to be completely honest with us on everything.

So they arrested him and then what? Is he still in prison?

No, I think he's out.

What about the kids he experimented on? How are they doing?

That's not clear because understandably they are not in the public eye. But for better or worse,

the Chinese government now has three test studies on the long-term effects of designer babies. And now we've entered a brave or at least a weird new world.
Hopefully for the better. What's really gross and scary to me, and I really hope I'm wrong about this, there's kind of only one real foolproof way to test if a baby that is supposed to be resistant to HIV is actually resistant to HIV.
And that is to try to infect them repeatedly and deliberately with HIV. And I really hope those babies in China are not being jabbed with HIV needles on a regular basis just to see if they get a horrible, potentially fatal disease.
legit. That is a legit concern.
But in this case, what happened was the father donor,

actually, because I looked into this, he was HIV positive. The mother wasn't.
So what the scientist was trying to do was create them resistant from the get-go. They kind of were exposed to HIV in the womb.
There's another thing where when the cells separate, as we do when you have an embryo and it begins separating, where scientists were concerned that some of the cells could be genetically altered and others could not be. And so you could end up with a person whose half their organs or half of their cells are genetically resistant and the other half aren't.
Again, he jumped the gun. He should not have been doing this.
There was way more research to do. In addition, there are people who are born with a natural resistance to HIV, so this scientist was simply turning on the genes in these babies that some people already have.
Look, 75 countries already prohibit the use of CRISPR in human reproduction, but I think we'd be naive to think we can put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. Do we really think Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin are going to be restrained by ethical questions in the face of making an army of super soldiers? Yeah, I think those super soldiers would first need working weapons, ammunition.
And if they make them really smart, they might be like, I am not going to fight for this authoritarian nonsense regime. And in the case of North Korea, they need food.
But yeah, see your point. Yeah, it's a totally legit concern.
Authoritarian states could potentially misuse DNA data on their citizens, like for surveillance and tracking. We mentioned Gattaca.
In that film, there was technology that vacuums up all the dead skin cells we leave everywhere. Yeah, 600,000 a day.
And I do definitely remember Ethan Hawke furiously vacuuming his computer keyboard at the end of every workday and then opening a vial and sprinkling other skin cells on it so that they would find them. Yeah.
In fact, he started every day by like using a pumice stone to get all those dead skin cells off of him or as many as possible so that he wasn't leaving a trail of skin cells because that's just what we do. We leave a dead skin cell trail everywhere we go.
In the film, the technology is such that they can instantly identify whose cells they found. That speed of identification is not a science reality yet, but it is a reality that that identification can be done.
And as to the speed, it's coming. Yeah.
Why is it always the scary tech in sci-fi movies that becomes reality? And we still don't freaking have hoverboards, man. Come on.
Yeah, I hear you on that one. Totalitarian states could use DNA to discriminate against certain ethnic groups.
This can lead to a systemic exclusion, detention, or worse. Plus, DNA data might be used to create profiles of individuals deemed likely to commit crimes based on their genetic markers.
Yeah, so see, that's really scary. It reminds me of Minority Report with Tom Cruise, but instead of ESP, they're using DNA.
And either way, they're using an acronym to oppress people. Yes.
Look, welcome to the future. These potential uses illustrate the importance of strict regulations and safeguards to protect genetic data and prevent its misuse.
Then again, when has there ever been a technology that someone, somewhere, wasn't willing to mess with no matter how dangerous? And here I was killing good about the promise of CRISPR. Me too.
Look, progress always comes with questions in scary worst-case scenarios, including the human race gaining access to the blueprints of life and developing the ability to mess with them. Who knows what the distant future may hold? Maybe people will become genetically altered to live on Mars or a moon of Saturn.
Maybe we can remove the genes for mental illness or cancer. I'm an optimist, a skeptical optimist.
This understanding of DNA and how to manipulate it has already done so much good. I agree.
Hey, we talked about the kid who was exonerated in that first case of DNA evidence, but he was just the first of many. Lots and lots of innocent people have been freed from wrongful convictions from DNA evidence.
Plus, millions of people now get to add a whole ton of new ethnicities to their dating profiles. Yes, that's right.
Those are the real heroes of the podcast. I'm 0.4% yakut, by the way.
That's true. Wow, them are some bragging rights.
It's clear we stand on the brink of unprecedented possibilities, from curing genetic disorders and enhancing human capabilities to ethical dilemmas and unforeseen consequences. The power to edit our genetic code opens a Pandora's box of opportunities and challenges.
As we move forward, it's super important that we balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring that the benefits of genetic advancements are accessible and equitable. Let's stay informed, engaged, and thoughtful as we navigate this brave slash weird new world.
Thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday.
Show notes on the website as well. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
I'm at jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Michael at Michael Regilio on Instagram.
We'll put that in the show notes as well, because as always, nobody can spell Regilio. Comedy tour dates now up as well.
This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, and I'm no DNA geneticist expert of any kind, so do your own research before implementing things that you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday, so if you think we've really dropped the ball on something, let us know.
We're usually pretty receptive to that. Y'all know how to reach me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com.
Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love.
And hey, if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out here today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.
And we'll see you next time. Are you intrigued by the mind of a psychopath? Join us on episode 879 to explore the fine line

between psychopathy and genius, and why being labeled a psychopath might not be the curse it

seems. Going back to the good psychopath question, I think the key here is how you dial those up.

It's exactly like mixing a soundtrack in a studio, right? It depends on the combination

in which you dial those traits up. It depends on the level.
And it also depends on the intention that you're going to use them for. If you've got ruthlessness, fearlessness, no conscience, no empathy, all turned up to max and it's stuck there, you're likely going to be a bad psychopath.
However, if you can twiddle those dials in various combinations, depending on the circumstances that you might happen to find yourself in, ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, self-confidence, coolness under pressure, emotional detachment, lack of conscience, lack of empathy, those kinds of things. Now, none of those characteristics that I've just outlined is necessarily a problem in itself in isolation.
All of them in the right context and kind of dialed up at the right levels can actually prove pretty useful. What I call rather controversially some precision engineer psychology.
So you're going to be what I call a good psychopath. Great quote by the famous British writer George Orwell, good men sleep soundly in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Good psychopaths do exist, but it all depends on those dials. It's a very unpalatable sentiment, but unfortunately, some people might say, happens to be true.
Discover the unexpected benefits of psychopathic traits, how they influence career choices, and take a revealing two-minute quiz on the episode to see where you stand episode 879 of the jordan harbinger show you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed.
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