Should We Genetically Edit Human Life? - Matthew Cobb

... Soviet researcher stabbed himself with a syringe containing one of the most dangerous and horrible viruses called Marburg virus, which is a bit like Ebola, but much more dangerous. Uh, he died horribly, but of course, you never let anything go to waste. And whilst he was dying horribly, the virus in his body was changing, was mutating. So they took blood samples and hey, presto, they ended up with a new, even more dangerous version of the virus.

(laughs)

So that was good.

Matthew Cobb, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Good to be here.

How do you describe what you do for work when someone comes up to you and says, "What do you, what do you do on a daily basis, Matthew?"

(laughs) Well, it-

What's your answer?

... depends on, on, uh, who they are (laughs) and what I've been doing recently. Uh, technically I'm a, I'm a lecturer, so I'll say I teach at the university. Uh, but I also write, I research, I do all sorts of things.

Recently, your fascination has been with The Genetic Age. You've called it a perilous quest to edit life. Why perilous?

Uh, because, uh, lots of things can and indeed have gone wrong. Uh, and part of the point of the book is to highlight three areas in particular of, uh, the application of genetic technology that I think are particularly concerning and I think the public needs to be aware of. And political regulatory solutions need to be found to respond to those dangers.

I had Rob Reed on the show a little while ago. You familiar with Rob?

Nope.

So he did a, a four-part series with Sam Harris about two or three years ago about the dangers of biotechnology, uh, bioweapons. Specifically, he was looking at, uh, is it BSG certified labs? Is that the... What's the acronym?

Don't know.

Uh, it's the something, something, something level of, uh, accreditation-

Yeah.

... that different labs have in terms of their security.

Yeah.

Uh, and he did this four-part series, and it was absolutely terrifying. He was talking about, you know, desktop, um, weapon creators basically, where you can synthesize particular sequences and it all goes up to a cloud. And I mean, that, that worried me quite a lot. So I was, uh, relatively prepared, I think, for more concern about it. And given the research that you've done, do you see gene editing as a net positive at this stage? Is it a dream or is it a nightmare?

Oh, well, in terms of what it can do, both for science and medicine, it's quite extraordinary. Uh, I mean, for the last 50 years, we've had the ability to precisely edit genes. I mean, humans have been altering, uh, genes primarily inadvertently, uh, simply by our presence o- on the planet and our actions as, uh, hunter-gatherers, as predators. We've changed the genes in animals and plants. Uh, and then later on with the development of agriculture and finally, uh, selective breeding, then we've deliberately changed characters, though we didn't actually know what we were doing. So, uh, genetic engineering develops 50 years ago this autumn, and involves the precise alteration of genes in a desired way. And that has been absolutely transformational. However, uh, there are these concerns and that's... They've been perpetual throughout the history of genetic engineering. That's what particularly interested me. So as I say, there are areas that I'm very concerned about and, uh, not, not so much bioweapons as more generally gain of function research, as it's called, which we can discuss later on, uh, of dangerous pathogens. That's one thing that particularly concerns me. But I'm aware that my worries are very similar to those that have been repeatedly raised over the last half century and have turned out to be unfounded. So it's partly to explore, uh, this consistent, uh, kind of promises and then fears and then dissipation of the fears, uh, that we can see over the last five decades and that I recognized in my own concerns today. That's one of the reasons why I wrote the book.