human embryo. we will hear from the author of "a crack in creation." the professor is calling on a moratorium on the use of the technology called crisper, which she helped to create. she sat down at the aspen institute to talk about some of the moral implications. >> welcome everybody. i am walter isaacson, and you're about to enjoy the most important session you will hear at the aspen ideas festival this [laughter] walter: it is about the most important technology that will affect our lives, crisper technology -- crispr technology

that will allow the editing of the human genome. it is about the most important moral question you and your children will face, which is to what extent should we allow this technology to edit human genome. with me is the author of "a crack in creation." more importantly she is author of a 2012, scientific paper that is basically explaining how crispr or crisper cas-9 -- crispr test nine, can be used -- cas-9 can be used in the human genome. we will talk about the implication of what that means, especially as we edit the human germline, and allow it to be passed on to our children. but before we get to the ethical implications i thought we should start a little bit with the narrative of how you got there.

i think on this stage, some of you remember, we had dr. james watson, and francis crick of the double helix dna, and one of the main things he did was he wrote a book about how he got there. and i think of that when you were 12 years old your father but that by your bedside. >> yes, to read first of all, good morning everyone. it is a pleasure to be here and an honor to be here with you all. yes, that story was for me, the beginning of my interest in molecular science. my dad was a professor at the university of hawaii, and in fact nobody in my family was a scientist. my father was someone who lets tip patrol around in used bookstores and he found this dogeared copy of the double helix. when i read it, i realized that this was a story -- a detective novel in a way, but it was actually real life. it was real science, how you

could figure out the structure of a molecule they doing investigative experiments. from that moment on i thought, that is the kind of thing i wanted to do in the future. >> and there is a fabulous scene in there, where francis crick, weighs into it, and says -- i have discovered the secret of life. xplain what he discovered. dr. doudna: how's that, better? well, he discovered the structure of the dna double helix. dna is the code of life, the molecule that holds all the information in cells that tells them how to grow, divide, how to become an organism or tissue, or hatever. they discovered that it look like literally to ribbons wrapped around each other. eight double helical structure. why was that important? it explained a lot of things about inheritance, about how

information could be stored inside the cell, and copied safely from generation to generation. because each strand of this double helix, includes a set of letters, of the dna code, which paired with another letter of another strand, it was a beautiful way to explain a lot of questions that scientists had until that point. it also in many ways, i think, ushered a modern era in biology, opening the door to many kinds of technology that we are now using including crispr. >> so you were a phd at harvard, went on to teach at yell, and you are now at berkeley. you are famous core -- you are famous for before crispr, understanding the structure of rna, which is i guess, the way that dna expresses itself in any organism. explain your rna research, because it is even before you came to the notion of crispr right?

dr. doudna: i collect dna's chemical cousin, and many people think that it actually came efore dna. it is a molecule, that unlike dna tends to exist in a single-stranded form, not a double helix although it conform very complex readable shapes. that was the question i set out to address when i was a younger scientist, what do those shapes look like an rna, and why -- it was an important question ecause, again, many people think that our night was the early primordial molecule that store that information and replicated it.

in my research as a younger scientists, it was to understand how that rna replication might have actually been catalyzed by rna, molecules that could both store genetic information and replicated and pass it on to new generations. >> so what is the function of rna that we know now? dr. doudna: lots of things. one of the fascinating things that happen in the last 20 years or so in biology, is that rna, when i was learning biology originally, without it was a boring molecule, kind of the intermediary between dna, which held the secret of life in a way, and protein molecules that conducted all of the activities in cells. now we understand that rna molecules do lots of things, to control the way that genetic information is deployed itself. that is really what i have been interested in in the study,, how that regulation worth best works n the dna. >> when you say it dnas xpressed in who we are, in

cells, what sort of things are determined by our dna, and what sort of things are sort of just guided by our dna, but are not completely determined by it? dr. doudna: that's the $64,000 question. [laughter] walter: yes? dr. doudna: people have been trying to understand the code of dna, what the genes are that make up a human being for example, and one of the great, i think it is great, things that come out of that, is that it is complicated, right? it is really come get it. it is not just a list of genes, but in fact, there are many layers to the way that the information is used. i think that what you are lluding to is something called peigenics, which sounds complicated but means making chemical changes to d.n.a. that don't alter the genes themselves but change the way the information is actually viewed.

walter : can you give us an example of something that is epigenetic, meaning that it is controlled by the environment, and what is purely genetic and encoded? dr. doudna: it is hard to give you a specific answer, but many people think that with our personalities, how we interact with our environments, things that are more hard to put our finger on, a particular gene that is impossible for intelligence for example, that a lot of that is really a consequence of not just of the genes in our dna, but the way that the genes are actually used. which is epigenetic's. walter: but things like obesity for example, diseases, those are more genetically determined? dr. doudna: yes, that is what people think. walter: so, you studied the atomic structure of it, and in the book, there was another great woman, a biochemist, who gives you a phone call out of the ball -- out of the blue, a

colleague of yours, and she says to you, we are doing crispr and we need to know how it relates to rna, july to be part of it? dr. doudna: yes, that was actually jill banfield who is a geo-biologist. she works on bacteria and where they grow in the environment and how they behave and interact with viruses. her research had uncovered a lot of examples of what we call crisper -- crispr which stands for a series of repeated the quizzes in dna. they are easy -- repeated sequences in dna. what was quite interesting about this pattern of sequences was that an included a series of unique sequences that were erived from viruses. and the question that jill had, she was not equipped to answer in her own laboratory, was whether those sequences stored

within these crispr elements, might in fact be copied into rna molecules in bacteria then used to protect the cell from viral nfections. walter: they first discovered that in spain? dr. doudna: right. several microbiology labs had very important early roles in his, for example francisco mojico was one of the people who coined the acronym crispr and there was a group, a yogurt company in denmark, actually, who worked on how to protect their yogurt cultures from viral infections and they had uncovered crispr and started harassing them in food preparation. -- started harnessing them in food preparation. walter: is it true that when you first started you thought it was spelled crisper, and i think you

looked it up, and you realized, ok, there is no e in it. and you decided, ok, i will take on this question of crispr, right? dr. doudna: yes, it seemed really interesting to try to pursue this. i have always been, i think there are two kind of scientists. broadly speaking to read there are those who dive into one area of biology and become the world expert in it, and then there are those who are more of a smorgasbord, making things and looking at all different things. i was always more in the second ategory, so when i heard about this i thought, that is so fascinating, i loved doing different experiments. walter: how did you then get to the most amazing discovery of our time, which is crispr can edit a genetic code or genomes? r. doudna: i think it is a

great example of small science, and curiosity driven research as well as international collaboration. all of the things that characterize my career over the last 25 years. i got together with a colleague, emmanuelle charpentier, we met in a conference, neither of us knew each other before hand. she was running a lab in sweden, at the time, working in different areas of science, she is a medical microbiologist, studying bacteria that in fact eople. one of those bacteria turned out to have a very interesting type of crispr system, in which a single gene, a gene known as cas-9, seemed to be required for those sales to protect themselves from viruses. using the crispr sequences. in the question was how does it work? and she was not a biochemist which i was. so we realized that we could get together and do some experiments to figure this out. the result of that club best ollaboration was the

publication in 2012 in which we -- the results of that was a collaboration in 2012 in which we describe that cells can be programmed with little pieces of rna, in a laboratory and change the sequence. and, what it does is use that piece of rna that it holds onto to find a matching sequence of letters, in a dna molecule. for example the dna of a cell, the promised son. when it finds that matching sequence -- the chromosome. when it finds a matching sequence, it can fix the break. >> as you would, cutting and pasting. yes, i like to use that ord. it is -- when he think about the dna code like the text of a document, this is the scissors that allows you to cut off something and change it. the cell takes over after the --

the dna is broken and makes the change at the site of the repair. >> lets make a little detour here, the three major characters in this narrative so far, jill, yourself, and emmanuelle charpentier, who are all women. i think back to the double helix when they kind of ignored the only woman involved, rosalind franklin. is this a change in science, i do not think we are seeing a major breakthrough like this let this way? or was this just coincidence? dr. doudna: i think it is an interesting serendipity. women are certainly making more ueries into the scientific world, as well as, obviously in biotechnology and business. it is still harder, i would say, for women, in my own its areas. but i think that this is a great example, none of us planned it that way, it just happened that all of us were running research laboratories that were doing highly complimentary kinds of

work. it made it easy for us to work together. walter : what is it like that for women? dr. doudna: i think it is just the ways that women are excluded, women, if you read the sheryl sandberg books, i think a lot of the things that she talks about in "lean in" resonate with e and with others. women are more reluctant to step forward and volunteer for things and they get volunteered for things that take them away from leadership roles and things like that. it's subtle things. walter: when you got to the notion of editing genetic sequences or -- what is that you are editing exactly. i know that it is a strand of dna, but what would you call that length of strand that you are editing? dr. doudna: i would call it a length of strand. i don't know. [laughter]

walter: to some extent in might have a gene -- >> it might have a gene, or a sequence that controls a gene. either the gene itself or the part of the dna that controls it. but yes, you can make changes that are very precise, imagine, imagine being able to make a single change to a single letter in the 3 billion base pairs of dna in a human cell. that is the kind of accuracy that we have with this technology. walter: explain to me the scientific and maybe we'll get to the moral difference, of doing that, in a human being or in a cell, or animals which is perhaps easier and doing it in the germ line. what does it mean to do it in the germ line. >> when we talk about doing it in an adult person, or anything or plant or animal, we're talking about making changes to the cell and ways that the dna changes are not heritable by future generations.

bat -- but, in the germ line, that is not changed. those changes become part of the entire organism, and the cells are allowed to develop into an embryo. and those changes can be passed on to future generations. it becomes a permanent alteration. it is sort of changing the evolution of the species at that point. walter: but our evolution is always change, right, so what is the difference here? dr. doudna: here, we are doing a targeted fashion, making decisions consciously about changing this one gene, or even a set of genes, to make something that we think is desirable. >> and the timescale is different? >> yes. something -- it is different. >> something that we would do in 10 years we could do in 20 minutes. [laughter] > well --

walter: start with the animals, give me a couple of examples like maybe pigs or whatever that science has already been able to use this to do. dr. doudna: there are a lot of examples. we know that mice are used very commonly and models for human disease. it is possible to make mice that have changes to their d.n.a. to make them more humanlike in certain ways and make it easier to study therapeutic drugs on them. similarly, while you mentioned picks, pigs, one of the attractive things with pigs right now, is the idea that engineering them so that they are better organ donors for humans. this is already being actively worked on those in research labs them up but also in companies. walter: so you basically create pigs that become forms for organs for humans. r. doudna: that is the

idea. walter: the what happens to the picks, how do you change genetic coding? dr. doudna: you can literally program the dna so that their organs or certain molecular properties, their immune system for example, looks more humanlike. so you can actually transplant genes that are altering or making subtle alterations to their dna, so that on the molecular level they behave in a more humanlike way. walter: what about mosquitoes, that transmit zika or something to read what can you do about hat? dr. doudna: that is another one, the idea of jean drive. basically means that you have a way of altering dna, and you can use it and set it up in a way that it will drive the genetic trait more quickly through a population, for example in a

population of insects. it is already being worked on in mosquitoes, in principle one could create types of mosquitoes that are resistant to viruses, and therefore cannot transmit he zika virus. walter: you could also create them as easily in mosquitoes that do not reproduce the same way, let's say, cutting back a population of mosquitoes -- >> bats right. >> is that being -- that is right. >> are you doing this to take on the the mosquitoes? dr. doudna: well, i'm not doing it, but groups are doing it. this is an active area of research, i think many people imagine this could be an effective way to control insects that would otherwise be spreading disease. walter: that passes along to mosquitoes from here on out, right? it is not just into one line of mosquitoes. dr. doudna: that is correct. walter: when i was young, i read rich el carson and we were able

to get rid of moss ski toe well, did it with deform d.t. and a generation later there were no pell tan -- pelicans in my home state of louisiana. we didn't know the consequences of that how do we know the consequence of doing this to the mosquito population now? dr. doudna: i think that is -- i would argue that we don't. i was at a talk recently and someone was talking about jean drives work with you does them -- gene drives, and trying to come up with the way, xperiments in a controlled environment to see what would happens when you have a gene drive. walter: we can tell you what happens when off tent that's supposed to contain mosquitoes. [laughter] who is in charge of saying stop?

dr. doudna: right now, there are various, obviously government regulatory agencies which are in charge of controlling the environmental release of organisms that are modified this way. but i would say that right now, it is an interesting time to read the thing about this technology is that it is moving incredibly fast. to give you a sense, this technology is barely five years old right now, and already, we do not talk about this, but it is already in clinical trials for cancer treatment in china. you know, it is sort of mind-boggling, the pace of scientific research has picked up with this tool. i am seeing the early, a dozen or more papers for week in the scientific literature using the crispr technology. one of the big challenges is how you keep government regulatory groups up to speed with this, how you make sure they are aware of how fast things are moving and the pace of governments is

not that fast. walter: i will give you an example of it from yesterday, which will either be reassuring or not. tom price, the secretary of health and human services, as you know, was here on this stage. he says he is worried about the the aed forable care act but, this is something in his wheelhouse, he saw your book in i my office, i said actually, you know, this will be even more important 50 years or 100 years from now what you do on this than what you do on the affordable care act. it'll affect the world more. he said maybe i ought to read the book. so i gave him a copy. we'll see. [laughter] you can send him a signed copy. so, let's start talking about humans, if we may. tell me, i have looked at the

pictures, longer hair on sheep, viruses that are killed, host: allergenic eggs. then we get to the part where you can start changing the human gee gnome. where will we start on that? what will we do first? i mean, blood diseases, cancers, what? dr. doudna: i think the kind of treatment that are in focus right now in research are not, first of all not in the germ line. we're talking about somatic cell changes, changes to adults or ids but not heritable. like i said, it is very attractive to be able to cure diseases that have a known single mutation that's pozz sieve. for example, sickle cell disease is one that's talked about a lot, it's attractive for something like this because it's

in the blood so it's possible to take blood stem cells from a patient, do the editing outside the body and replace the correctly edited cells so they repopulate the blood supply and the sickle cell mutation has been known far long time. it's a severe disease we have no treatment for it right now and there's a fairly large group of people that are affected. so i think that will likely be one of the early targets of gene editing. walter: as we do our moral spectrum, that's pretty solidly in the yeah, let's do that won't affect the germ line, won't affect children but will save people from a bad disease. in guangzhou, china is apparently ahead of us in this, we'll get to the fact that we're not spending enough on research so china takes the lead. but they're using it for what? >> i think, in china, they have

actually been using it in embryos. they have been working on asking the question, does this technology work in developing human brie bro owes? could we actually imagine someday using it, maybe we want to correct the sickle cre mutation but do it not in someone who already has this disease as an adult but we want to do it at the stage of embryo genesis. so the first paper, and now there are several published, that was about this topic, was published in the spring of 2015, using nonviable human embryos. it really sparked, attracted a huge amount of attention, because it really brought to the forefront the idea that this technology is really at our doorstep and we have to make a decision as a society on how to proceed with this kind of -- walter: when you say the embryos, you meant that it would be all future generations would have this specs.

>> if those embryos were viable and implanted, then in principle, yes. walter: and the fact that they were nonviable, was just a small choice. they could've chosen to use viable ones -- dr. doudna: correct. yes. walter: so this is ready to go? doudna: well -- walter: in phi to 10 years? that time yes, in period yes. walter: if you were thinking of doing it, what would be the thing that you would say, i want to apply it to this? embryos? : in walter: yes. dr. doudna: i think there needs to be a broad societal consensus concerning whether that type of use of gene editing should proceed. there obviously hasn't been the opportunity -- >> so if you knew that somebody, genetically an embryo, was going to get a fatal blood disease, ou would not fix it? dr.

dr. doudna: i would advise other approaches, i think, today. i think the use of it in somatic cell application should happen first and you know, partly for safety reasons but really frankly also to give us some time to grapple with this issue. are we going to start editing the germ line. i think once it begins it will be very hard to stop it, very hard to say, i will do this thing that not that thing. everybody's feelings about this will be different. and who decides? who pays for it? walter: so you're saying that we, the responsible people should pause. not do it until we grapple. your co-author, i think a fwradge watt student of yours, sam sternberg, i sume it's a woman by the pseudonym christina, who i sume is an

entrepreneur type, this is very recently, comes to him and says, let's do it. and she is trying to commercialize this, and she would i assume, make of our children taller and smarter -- it is pretty easy to do, let's take a specific example of something you could do with the ene. which i think is have stronger bones. that's a pretty simple thing. dr. doudna: or bigger muscles. walter: yes, things that people would say they would want in their children. bigger or stronger. that is scientifically conceivable, those are truly things that you can find on the genome that you can change, right? dr. doudna: yes. walter: so christina goes to your partner and says, let's market this. what happens? dr. doudna: that's a true story.

walter: you're not going to tell us who she is? dr. doudna: you want her last name? i'll tell you later. walter: i will not go there, but this is something that ought to be talked about more. if there are silicon valley entrepreneurs trying to valley you and your students to market this, trash trying to hire you and your students to market this, to make children who are stronger -- there should be more by policity. dr. doudna: that to my knowledge that's not happening today but that's not to say it won't happen in the future. walter: but that is what happened to sam, right? dr. doudna: yes, this person came to my student, and she said that she herself wanted to first -- to have the first crispr baby. she wanted to commercialize the technology and offer this service to parents and allow them a menu of options. wow. we were pretty shocked at the time, sam and i, not so much now

given all that's gone on. i think it really illustrates a couple of different points. you are bringing up the idea there is a commercial aspect to all of this that is something i think people are all grappling with and secondly, it really does -- does get to the moral and ethical challenges around this technology. christina could not do that today in the united states, right, it would not be possible for her to do that, but could she do it in other parts of the world, potentially? yes. walter: do you suspect christina or someone like her is in china trying to make that deal? dr. doudna: i wouldn't be surprised. walter: so people, who are wealthy enough, could go to a company in the foreseeable future, say in 10 years, and they, here's the menu, i want my baby. dr. doudna: i think it could happen, yes.

walter: [whistles] let's start talking about the moral thing. suppose in the genetic line of a family, they've got a blood disease, whatever it may be. would that be ok to say, let's turn that one off? dr. doudna: are you asking me my personal opinion? alter: yeah. dr. doudna: i think, it comes down to, to me, with any technology, first and foremost you have to have a risk versus benefit approach. i would want to know, does this even works, does the company have any credentials or evidence, what is the safety of his. then you have to decide, is the risk, because there was always risk, is the risk worth the benefit? are there alternatives that would be better or just good that i would consider?

you should do that with any technology. walter: and suppose the benefit is better than the risk? dr. doudna: well then, i think at some point in might be something that we have to consider. we had an interesting meeting in early january of 2015, i think we talk about it in the book, where a group of scientists, of about 20 people, including paul berg and david baltimore who had been involved in the discussions in the 1970's around the ethics of mo elect collar cloning. walter: let's pause there. there's something on clone, they say a moratorium on cloning this kind of failed. dr. doudna: well, it's two different things. mo elect collar cloning is making copies of little pieces of dven in bacteria. that's been shown to be quite safe to do. that's done widely now across the world in biology labs. walter: so, flash forward to today. would you all have a moratorium,

if you scientists get together, or was that wishful thinking? dr. doudna: i think we could and i think that was the idea of the early meeting, to ask would it be possible to build a consensus globally among the scientific and clinical communities about the way to proceed with this very powerful technology. and that's what many people are now working to do. but the point i wanted to make about that meeting is, i thought it was interesting that even in that small group of scientists who one could argue in some ways cut from the same cloth in a way, we were sthrg conversation and it was quite a heated conversation and at one point somebody lean aid cross the table and said, you know, at some point we may decide it's not ethical to not use it in the germ line. for certain things and that made everybody sit back and think about it a little bit differently. so i think you know, there's still a lot of work to be done to develop the technology to the point where it would be in principle even safe enough to do that in my opinion.

walter: but five years from now, we might as well start the moral thought now. so the question is, as i asked ou earlier but you had at that meet, wouldn't it be immoral to say to a family, your kid has this genetic, easily marked bloodthat's going to -- a disorder. dr. doudna: if there was no other treatment. walter: suppose the kid was going to be born deaf would you fix that? dr. doudna: that's an interesting one, i've had conversations with people in that community. they don't feel defenseness is a problem they would fix. walter: suppose two parents were deaf, they felt it was not a

defect and they were about to have a child that was not deaf. could they ask to fix it so their child would be deaf? dr. doudna: whoa. walter: michael asked that question in his class. i didn't come up with it. dr. doudna: this gets into the rem of who decides. should the parents decide? should they be told they can't do that? if they want to do it, should they be told they can but only if they want to pay for it? i think it's a tricky issue. walter: but it's not just their decision, if it's going to the germ line. one has to think about the interest of the child too. so as you go through the spectrum of things you could do, certainly as we said bone mass, muscle, perhaps even height. , some extent other traits where -- is there some moral

line, or is this a big slippery slope? dr. doudna: that's question we're all fwrappling with, is there a line and if there is, where is it? i think it's hard. you look at what's happened in in vote row fertilization over the last couple of decades. i'm old enough to remember before and after. there was a lot of controversy when in vote row fertilization first became available. a lot of people said that seems wrong smu. i remember my own parents say, that seems wrong. test tube babies seems really wrong. and then there was obviously demand for it from infer tile couples and it was shown over time to be apparently safe to do, you know, it's become accepted, at least largely, and now, you know if you go to different in vote row fertilization clinics in different state they offer different things. some offer the possibility for

parents to select the sex of their child. some do, some don't. it's a funny thing. the regulation about this is a bit nebulous. so will that happen also with gene editing? walter: when you say you're trying to pull together consensus on it, did you bring in cly cheese researchers? dr. d; oudna: we did. they acknowledged the controversy around the work they were doing. but they frankly -- they were very frank and honest. they said in our society, our culture, there's a very different view about human life and about early embryos than sort of the western christian judeo tradition. it's a different culture. i think that's -- it's shotgun we have to grapple with. walter: i'm going to quote from your book. the argument that germ line editing is somehow unnatural doesn't carry much weight with e anymore.

what happened? dr. doudna: i found my own attitudes about editing the germ lines changing over time because, you know, for many reasons. i guess i started thinking about the fact that, you know, after all, we pick our partners and we have kids so that at some level we're affecting our kids just by our choice of part for the. actually these days you can, believe it or not you can buy eggs, you can go to a sperm bank and look in a catalog and decide who do i want the father of my child to be from a sperm bank if you want to. and, you can go to countries like israel, that actually pay for couples to have up to two kids by in vote toe

fertilization if they want to, and they pay for genetic diagnosis to remove embryos that have de-stating genetic disease associated with them. walter: germany did that in the 1930's. dr. doudna: exactly. it's not a straightforward thing at all. but it does go on. and the other thing that happened is that, here i am, a biochemist, and i have always done very fundamental research on molecules. i do not do anything with embryos or even animals in my laboratory, and yet i was getting contacted and this happens routinely by patients, families, parents who reach out and say, i have this disease in my family and want to send pictures of their children, beautiful children, and they're facing a devastating disease. and you know, that hits you very deeply you start to ask, is this -- if this technology were

available in a way that prevented that kind of suffering, why would we not want to use it? walter: so can we draw not a sharp line but try to put a line in the sand between fixing things that are diseases, very harmful to people, versus creating enhancements, like making children taller, muscles, smarter, blonder, people say, i want to change race, i want my children to be a different race, that's not a disease, that's something -- can we draw a line between that type of thick and saying, i've got a genetic disorder that's going to destroy my blood, or is there no line to be drawn? dr. doudna: let's say that i told you that we could make a change to an embryo that would remove a single gene that if left in place would make a person susceptible to cardiovascular disease when they

get older. and there's no deleterious effect to removing this gene. o it's a good idea to do it. walter: or bad cholesterol, you can do that -- you can ask crispr to take out, not mine, but somebody's that cholesterol? in a whole germ line? dr. doudna: exactly. walter: and you are saying that that is a borderline on disease enhancement. dr. doudna: is that enhancement or disease prevention? i don't know. walter: will somebody decide that or will bit a global free for all? dr. doudna: i think in the end it may be regulated differently in different jurisdictions. because peoples values and opinions are different. walter: one thing that fascinates me, you can get rid

of armpit odor. s that something we should do? dr. doudna: it would be very useful. [laughter] walter: one of the things in a broader sense, when talking to secretary price and others, people question the value of basic science. they want to get rid of n.i.h. and the national science foundation. and yet it seems to me that everything from the sequencing of the human je people to the aility to etch transistors on piece of semiconductor material comes out of basic research labs like yours. what would happen to a lab like yours which is a wonderful group of people doing research if the government quit funding basic research? dr. doudna: it would be a disaster. we would probably mostly fold up

our operation and go do something else. i think, we have been facing in the united states for the last decade at least, this push toward -- initially it was a push toward translational research. people say, why are we working on fruit flies and fungi when really what we want to be doing is curing cancer and curing alzheimer's? well, i don't think anybody would argue that of course we want to deal with cancer and alzheimer's and other diseases but the question is how do you get there? what's happened if you look back over some of the history of modern medical science, a lot of the fundamental discoverries and the technologies that enable those discoveries have come about through curiosity-driven research. projects that are not aimed in any particular direction. they're a group of smart people, often a small group of smart people that are just, you know, asking, gee, i wonder how this works, they do experiments, this was true with the crispr project that lead in a very unexpected

direction. there has to be a balance. it's not that we don't need people working in targeted ways on disease, we need that too, but we need both. the danger right now, witness stand you alluded to this earlier network united states really cuts back on funding for that kind of fundamental curiosity-driven research a lot of it done in small, you know, laboratory, inwe're going to find ourselves falling behind other countries and already we're on the cusp of that happening because countries like china are investing huge amounts of money. walter: china, i once read is investing 20 times more than the u.s. in basic research in genetic technology. does that sound right? dr. doudna: that sounds right my own colleague, we struggle here in the united states, i'm at berkeley, one of the top research universities, but we

struggle to put together money to buy equipment like electron microscopes, another field that's gone through a huge explosion over the last few years in advances of the technology and meanwhile we see our colleagues in china buying up, you know 20 at a time. and you know, it's really astounding. walter: and you need that microscope to figure out r.n.a. dr. doudna: absolutely. walter: suppose we had cone this , years ago and stopped eisenhower had not done it and we hadn't invented the transcystor, had not invented the microchip, has not -- had not invented the laser, had noten invented the internet, had not been able to do circumstance, g.p.s. that sort of thing, that's what would have happened if we hadn't done the basic research on semiconducting materials, those things. and someplace like russia or

china had actually invented everything from the microchip to the internet to the personal computer to g.p.s. you could imagine russia being the dominant economy in the world, right? so can you imagine china being the dominant economy in the world if we cut back basic research? dr. doudna: yeah. we all wonder about it in the scientific community. we joke that someday we'll all be working somewhere in china, running a lab there if we're lucky. but it's a very real question, i think, for many of us. what is the future of scientific research in this country? are we going to maintain our predominance in that area or are we going to let it slip away. walter: this will be the last question i'm going to ask, so think what you want to do with your grandchildren's je people or germ line and i'll let the audience talk. a lot of research in the field is very collaborative and then

it's also competitive. almost like any other, whether it's amazon and google or whatever, there's competition and collaboration. but in science there's certain things that tend to, it seems to me, i want you to push back if i'm wrong, promote a little more competition than they do collaboration. for example, in your field there's been some controversy where you have george church and others at harvard who have done things at their lab. you all have been even battling over patents that deal with this. eric wrote a piece called the heroes of crispr that got a lot of criticism because it minimized your role and he was hit both for being ungenerous scientifically and also perhaps sexist, i think he got hit for too. part of this competition seems to me to be driven by two

things. one a patent office that needs to find something that is hard to find in science these days, who gets the credit for this amazing thing. and secondly a noble prize committee that can only award it to three people. does this bother you? is this a problem in science now? dr. doudna: i think it is a problem. yovepb how one softs this problem. the truth is, i think science always has included elements of both collaboration and competition. you need both in a way. competition can be very good. spurs people on. walter: the double helix. dr. doudna: yeah, and the challenge is how to get the balance right. one thing i think about a lot is how to attract younger scientist into our field. i think we want to draw in, because they're the ones honestly that are driving the work right now. m i in my lab actually

pipetting? no, i'm talking to you. but people in my lab are doing it. they're the ones driving the next results that'll be coming out. so how do we ensure they continue to be attracted to our field and drawn into it? i think that one runs if there's a danger of, you know, especially certain types of people feeling excluded, if there's a feeling of unfairness somehow, that that can be very detrimental to attracting younger scientists. same with prizes. the problem with prizes is that they -- it's very difficult and i now sit on various prize committees, as you can imagine so just thinking about when you want to give a prize in a certain area, you want to recognize scientist that was done the work but you appreciate that, you know, at some level everybody's work is built on other people's and involves the work of a lot of younger scientists in the laboratories who aren't being, sort of named in particular by these prizes. so how do you deal with that? walter: how much would you say

you had to depend on even though you're competing against george church or the institute or others, how would that be made better? in your book you don't talk about them. in his article he opportunity talk about you. it feels to me that, if i may, i could tell a story about what happened in technology with the microchip where both texas instruments and bob noise at intel co-invent around the same time. it's a 20-year patent battle and noble prize battle or whatever but finally noyes calls kilby and said, let's share the that thent and they do. prize lby gets the noble because noyes died he said, he'd be here with me if he were still alive. would you like to make a phone call and bring everybody together at some point? dr. doudna: it sounds lovely

when you put it that way. life is always more complicated. i don't own any patents. they're all owned by my university. and so it's my university that's making decisions about what to do with intellectual property. they are the ones hiring lawyers and decide though pursue things. the same is true, i would imagine as the brode and m.i.t. if it were up to the scientists it might be better but -- or maybe not. walter: we do have some lawyers in the room. so you don't have to keep criticizing and blaming them. thank you. let me open it up, if i may. way in the back. >> dan perlman, i'm a scientist, i've been following a crispr story. i'd like you to imagine we live in an age with no ice cream and you invent ice cream. and your friends come over and you say, how do you like it they

say, we love it. and then you say, well it causes cholesterol elevation and it may be dangerous and it has some hazardous side effects maybe we shouldn't do anything about this. well, maybe we should publish it on the internet. i think crispr is like that. the cat is out of the hat and capitalism is here to stay and i don't understand in what walter alluded to, the free for all, how we'll have any control over it if patent offices are going to be irrelevant, etc., what's your scenario for the future, say over five to 10 years? dr. doudna: you bring up a good point. one of the things thatst so, on one hand wonderful, but also very challenging, about the technology is that it's widely available. whether -- patent offices notwithstanding, anybody doing academic or commercial research right now can get ahold of the

crispr molecules and tools for doing gene editing and they can do it. that's happening. there's absolutely no way to put this back in a wag. i was at an ethics meeting and a philosopher got up and said, if i could i would throw away crispr. i thought well, you know, you can't. so you know, it's sort of a moot point. we can't do that. so i think you're right. it's forging ahead. we have to grapple with the -- sort of within the system we're in. and we have to deal with this technology in that context. so this is why i guess i've been encouraging, you know, an international discussion about, i think the worst thing we can do is try to ignore it or for scientists not to get involved in helping to educate people about it, helping make those decisions. >> we know chemotherapy came out of experimenting with germ

warfare. mustard gas. are we going to have gene warfare? walter: and i guess you could talk about james clapper, the director of national intelligence, you were surprised to read it in the top 10 threat assessments to our country. dr. doudna: will we see gene warfare going on? i hope not. but it's something that has to be carefully considered. and yes, you know, it was listed weapons of top mass destruction recently. why is that -- walter: by the c.i.a. dr. doudna: it's widely available, accessible, easy to use and misuse. so i don't have any easy answers to that. i think it's a big challenge we face, for sure. walter: give me the nightmare snaree of a rogue regime or

nonstate actor. dr. doudna: you could imagine misuse of this to, you know, spread genetic traits in, you know, whatever, humans or something else, that would have either deleterious effects or deleterious effects on other species. but honestly do i worry about that more than i worry about other things? dangerous viruses that one can synthesize, toxins that are well known how to make them, there's a lot of ways to do bad things, right? so i think this is another way to do bad things but i'm not sure that it really is you know, that much different than other technologies that one could isuse. walter: let's go here. >> i'm 18 years old, and i find your story very inspiring, especially for young women and

my question was, have you ever experienced discrimination based on your gender and how do you deal wit in fields like science, technology, business, etc.? dr. doudna: when i was in high school, my high school guidance counselor asked me what did i want to do when i grew up, i said, i want to be a scientist. he laughed and said, girls don't do science. maybe that's -- walter: where is he now? can we send him a link to this? dr. doudna: that's probably the only really overt time i remember something like that happening. i have to say i have been fortunate in my career. i am really grate to feel many people that have supported me, helped me out, men and women, who have given me encouragement at moments when i thought about quitting, which, you know, happens not -- has happened many times.

i have to say i've been fortunate that way. but i talk to a lot of women who do feel held back in various ways. again, in my experience, in many cases, it's kind of unintentional. -- unintentional discrimination. it's not trying to actively prevent women moving ahead, it's just not doing things that would be beneficial to them. whether it's at earlier stages to encourage them do go into stem fields. stick with the stem fields. or whether it's at the level of, you know, becoming a prfsor or c.e.o. of a company and needing things like child care and to arrange your schedule to accommodate your personal life as well. so i just think there's more work to be done in that area. we have to do it, you know, at your generation, frankly. encourage people to think about enabling women in ways that will be effective for them.

>> there have been so many medical advances over the last 50 to 100 years. this is stunning but how is it -- walter: why is this one different? from all the other medical advances. dr. doudna: is this different and if so why is it different? well, i think it is different. first of all, it's enabling in a way that most things are not. it's enabling not just in medical science and clinical applications but for everything. so we didn't talk too much about this but it's also being very widely used now in agriculture for animal husbandry, for synthetic biology. it's just really anything you can think of that has to do with biology, you know, this technology touches upon. so it's very widely, you know,

impactful in that sense and it's also relatively straightforward to use. so an example of that is india go go sells a kit you can buy crispr,, hey, kids, use make your own altered back tieria. alter: bad idea. >> my name is jada, i'm a recent high school fradge watt, 2017, from berkeley high, actually. d so to get tissue to give concept for the question, the concept of wanting young scientists to be interested and excited about this but there -- be concerns about

secondly i'm part of a community at's been historically repressed from the idea of genetic inferiority and still there's many discriminations we face. so my question is, how do we make sure and is there any way that you can encourage us to allow our compassionate evolution in our evolution of our moral conscience to evolve at the same rate as our technology. walter:s that the best question of the day. and it's great because it'll be the final question. but i know in your book you talk about making it equitable, making it fair, making it so it's nondiscriminatory. why don't you end with that. dr. doudna: a great question, and something i think about a lot. i've been working with a group at harvard medical school, run called derful professor personal genetics education. pged.

what they do is they actually outreach to groups that have been traditionally excluded from genetics, you know, understanding what is genetics all about, how does it affect me personally? and i think what she's doing is very important because her -- really, her mission is to be inclusive. i think the only way we can proceed is to have, you know, an open community of people where we invite everyone get involved. it can't be just the elites doing something and everybody else, you know, sort of trying to figure it out and how it's affecting them. it has to be a societal and global effort. i think pged is doing a great job of that outreach. walter: in the history of science there's been almost no example of advances in technology and science outrunning moral processing power to deal with them. you could argue maybe the atom

bomb. there are few examples. this to me is one of the closest calls we're going to have in our lifetimes and i'm really glad that you're part of the discussion. thank you. dr. doudna: thank you, walter. [applause] walter: the book is available, she'll sign it, i say, assuming you will. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

journal" "washington live every day with news on policy issues that impact you, coming up, the national review columnist discusses the outlook for the donald trump presidency and the republican party's legislative agenda. and civil and human rights discussion ofen a the opioid crisis. washingtonn's journal at 7:00 a.m. this morning, join the discussion. and employer survey on health care benefit costs will be released this morning, the national business group on health will look at a projected cost increases for 2018 and how

health care is delivered and paid for. we will have live coverage on c-span starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern. halloween a brief house pro forma session, we will be at a forum at countering violent extremism live from the heritage foundation at 11:00 a.m. eastern . at noon eastern, a forum on oil companies and global corruption, we will hear from a pulitzer prize winner and follow coverage from the carnegie endowment for international peace on c-span, c-span.org, and with the c-span radio app. , islamic religious leaders and scholars discuss ways to counter violent extremism and muslim communities. the religious freedom center hosted this forum. [applause] thank you, brother.