Unnatural Selection

Chill out.

I'm a dog breeder.

I knew a little bit about genetics,

but not about genetic engineering.

I'm not a PhD,

or I have no degree, actually. I have a GED.

I had assumed that getting DNA

and making changes and stuff cost millions of dollars

and that you needed a huge lab and research team and all this sort of stuff,

but you'd be surprised what there is on YouTube.

Just selective breeding isn't enough.

Big dogs age fast and die young.

Can we make dogs that have even better noses?

Get a dog who, um... who's healthy,

but he's also what you intended him to be.

These are the bacteria...

that I'm using.

This is bioluminescence.

They produce their own light chemically.

This is my first experiment on the dogs.

I started thinking about,

"What do I need to do so nobody's gonna doubt it?"

I need to do something that's obviously completely unnatural.

No dogs glow, so if I make a dog that glows,

nobody's gonna doubt it was genetic engineering.

We're on the verge of a technological breakthrough

that could change the future of mankind.

Most people have no idea how rapidly things are changing.

We're now changing the DNA, the code of life.

It's amazing, the sorts of things that we could do with this.

The question is, should we?

What happens if diseases were just eradicated?

All technology is inherently about changing away from what is natural.

You can't really see it. It's a frozen, uh, sample.

I don't know if you can see that liquid frozen in the bottom there.

It's, uh, basically a protein that can be used for genome editing.

It can alter the DNA in any cell in any organism,

including animal and plant cells, even human cells.

So, here I am holding this little tube, and it looks so simple,

but it will have profound implications for the future.

We are about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science,

the science that deals with the nature of living things.

Our story is about you and me.

The story is the same for all living things.

Animals, plants,

even the lowliest creature.

Using physical and chemical clues,

scientists have been able to figure out how the DNA molecule looks in detail.

We don't have a map of the human chromosomes yet,

but we know the genes are there.

We know that they determine what our cells will do

and what we will be like.

You think they'll ever see what those units look like?

Well, they're getting warm.

And the road they're taking

is leading them close to the secret of life itself.

A revolutionary technology that can edit genetic mistakes

is getting attention and scrutiny this morning.

It's very exciting.

This is a molecule that can change one of the three billion letters of DNA.

This is the future.

It'd be a major change in our ability to transform genes.

It allows us to potentially make uh, designer plants,

designer animals,

correct diseases.

For years we debated it,

but we couldn't do it.

Now we can do it.

Working with evolution a lot does make you think about...

"Why are we here?"

and "What should we be doing?"

We think it's tragic when evolution makes something beautiful...

and then it goes away forever.

But evolution doesn't care.

Evolution is always interested in what can be better.

It does not care about suffering.

The interesting question in my mind is to what extent we should defy evolution

in service to our morality.

What life has explored in all of this incredible diversity

is still the tiniest of tiny fractions of what is actually possible.

What's different now

is that we can read the DNA of every species in this room.

We're learning how to intervene

in the process that has been going on since the beginning of life.

It's amazing the sorts of things that we could do with this.

But...

the question is...

should we, and who gets a say?

A genome is DNA that consists of a code

of four different letters: A, C, G, and T.

In the early 2000s, there was that sort of catalytic event

when we created the first draft sequence of the human genome.

...hoping it's gonna be the best year all of us have ever had.

Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.

This is the most important, most wondrous map

ever produced by humankind.

Gathering together

all that information about the human genome

allowed unprecedented insight

into the evolutionary mechanisms that created humans.

And having that parts list allows us to understand

how that code makes people,

how it is broken in people with diseases.

This piece of paper has 6,400 letters, front and back.

Given the size of the genome,

it would take one million

of these pieces of paper, printed front and back,

to print out the entire genome.

One letter change in the 6.4 billion bases

can cause a serious disease.

Where are you?

I know you're somewhere.

- Which one are you looking for? - I'm looking for the...

other two planes that I did not...

Oh, I found one.

There's one, and your other big one's over here.

- What's this? - It's your rocket, buddy.

Where's the button on this thing?

- I got it. - Oh, you got it.

Can you help me put these back on, Mom?

Coolest thing about space is black holes.

Basically a giant thing that pulls everything into it, even light.

Every single little molecule gets torn apart.

Ten, nine...

And this is called spaghettify.

I'm not joking.

It's called "spaghettify."

It's what it's called.

- ...one... - Science is a crazy thing.

...zero. Live connect. Liftoff!

I want to be the first person to ever go to Mars.

What I can see is...

I can't really explain it. It's hard. It's hard to explain.

You can't... You can't know something that you don't know.

Main menu. Folder name.

Re... Li... Cradle. Document to open.

Everyone.

"Everyone...

else is headed...

toward..."

Space. Exclamation mark, double quote.

When he was very little,

I noticed he wasn't looking at our faces.

Doctors suggested that he...

was on the spectrum, um, of having autism.

Um... put you up here.

Wait, wait.

Look out, there. Put you right there.

Ha ha!

I'm the most powerful person in the whole world!

Nothing can stop me now!

"You are wrong, Jafar.

There is one person who is still mightier than you:

the Genie."

Insurance wouldn't pay for genetic testing.

They said that there was no benefit for a young child to have genetic testing.

"We won't pay for it."

"The l-law is the law."

We ended up seeing a low-vision specialist.

And then, we finally got the answer.

He's missing both copies of the RPE65 gene.

One from me, one from his father.

He will eventually go completely blind.

One of the most significant developments

in this field is the newly discovered ability to modify

the very genes in our DNA.

The technique is known by the acronym CRISPR.

CRISPR is a technique that allows scientists to go into the DNA

of a plant or an animal, or even a human being,

and remove or replace a small part of that organism's genetic code.

- How big of a breakthrough is this? - Wow!

The potential of what can be done here.

CRISPR has generated immense excitement.

It's fast, cheap,

and can cut and paste genetic code with great precision.

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley,

Jennifer Doudna, who helped develop this breakthrough...

What is CRISPR-Cas9?

We found a protein in bacteria,

and that led to a...

fundamental change in the technology for gene editing.

It really works like a molecular scalpel,

but it's programmable.

We can control where it makes a change in a DNA sequence.

Chemical cleavers in the protein

swing into position and cut the DNA

so that you get a clean break,

and in the process, introduce a change.

Could it cure virtually any disease?

- Any disease that has a genetic basis. - That's incredible.

If you had asked me whether it would be possible,

even a few years ago,

I would have laughed.

I would have said that's going to take maybe a long time

to get to the point where science can do that.

And here we are, a few years later,

and we're in possession of a tool

that gives scientists remarkable control over the code of life.

What is the dark side of this technology?

We're talking about something that would affect human evolution.