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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. You know, I haven't even noted that my standard intro says germs over and over and over again that may be a bit of foreshadowing for some of our discussion today. Nonetheless. My job normally is to interview world-class performers of all different types and in some cases better still to interview people who have studied
Many world-class performers and that is certainly the case today. My guest is for the second time on the podcast Walter Isaacson Walter is a professor of history at Tulane has been CEO of the Aspen Institute chair of Cen and editor of time. He is the author of many books. You will no doubt recognize Leonardo DaVinci the innovators Steve Jobs Einstein subtitle his life and universe Benjamin Franklin and American life and Kissinger subtitle a biography his co-author of the wise men.
Six friends and the world they made his new book is the Codebreaker subtitle Jennifer doudna believe I'm getting that right dou DNA Gene editing and the future of the human race. You can find our first conversation from 2017 at teamed up blog forward slash Walter. He did a spectacular job and you can find much more about him at Isaacson is a a CSO n dot Tulane dot edu Walter, welcome back.
The show hey, it's great to be back with you Tim. And
I have no shortage of material as usual. We covered a lot of your personal biographical information many of your practices writing process Etc and our last conversation. So I won't spend a lot of time on that people can listen to our first chat if they want to dive into those topics, but I'm going to ask a few questions before we get into talking about crispr and
Jennifer and so many other things and the three questions are going to be and these are my shorthand notes in front of me bio of Louis Armstrong. Why not? Then the second is professor and I may have asked you this already, but I want to ask again because I'm curious Professor. Why meaning how did you decide to on top of and in addition to everything else that you do become a professor of history and then third just because I want to give people a teaser Chinese crisper babies.
How so there's the why not the why and the how so how do you have so many books you have completed? I honestly just am constantly impressed at how much not just work but high quality writing you produce so I'm curious about the survivorship bias, right? So could you please speak to the bio of Louis Armstrong or the the would be bio of
Louis
Armstrong, well any performance I have it comes from reading your books Tim. So thanks for having me on that shelf. Learn Peak Performance and I try hard to get up to about 10% of what you say. I should be able to do but sometimes you have to put something aside Leonardo da Vinci knew that because he only finished 12 full paintings and put ones aside that he couldn't get perfect and I had to do that once with the biography of Louis Armstrong. I'm here in New Orleans my home.
Out I wanted to write about the birth of jazz and Louis Armstrong race and growing up in New Orleans in the early 20th century. And I listen to all of the recordings. He did the tapes. He did of discussions a read all of his notes and his letters. I went to Corona Queens with as a Louis Armstrong Museum and after a while I felt I knew everything there was to know about Louis Armstrong except for who he was and why he was smiling.
I didn't know if he's happy. I didn't know if he really liked white people or you know, whether his best friend. Do you know was his white manager or somebody didn't like and I realize that if you cannot crack the code you're better off not writing the book.
Are there other subjects you've considered. I'm sure there must be and begun to work on only to put aside like so many paintings of
DaVinci's. Well, you know, I did a tally
Lovelace who in the 1840s and 1850s comes up with the concept of the computer Olga Rhythm and she's the first chapter in the last chapter of my book The innovators and I had tried or considered making an entire biography of her. I went up Oxford University were her letters. She was the daughter of Lord Byron tour letters apart of the Byron papers there, but unfortunately there just wasn't enough to make a full-length biography. So I
used her as the framing device for the innovators.
We're going to come back to Ada because I want to use that as a device for perhaps introducing a number of topics that will will will revisit later. But so we've checked the why not on Louis Armstrong in the bayou there of Professor. I'd love to just take a few minutes to chat about this. This is probably not where people are going to start.
Has they chat with you about the new book, but I would just love to know the thought process. How did that come to be since you have so many options on the table. You have so many things you could do and I'm not saying it's a bad choice.
I love students. I love teaching I feel I learn more from them than they can learn from me. I have this incredible class at Tulane of students who study the history of the digital Revolution and by the end of the class, they're teaching me.
More as I try to figure out. All right. Do I want to join Clubhouse? What do we do on Discord? How come you create a social network for gamers? So I love the stimulation you get from teaching students secondly and this will happen to a lot of people. I was ready to go home. I was born and raised in New Orleans my parents. My grandparents went to Tulane. I wanted to go back where I could you know, be part of my roots get a little bit grounded again after all.
Life of being you know, it's CNN or Aspen Institute. And the way for me was to go home where I've known kids since kindergarten who are my close friends to teach their kids and grandkids at Tulane and to help that process of saying how can we make things better for the next Generation?
What is home? I know you answered this in part already, but what does home mean to you? Because for some people
home is say the first city outside of their birth place where they reside for an extended period after college for instance home can mean different things to different people. What is it? What is it that keeps drawing you back?
Well, I'm extraordinarily lucky because some people don't have a particular birthplace or home that they're deeply connected to but I wake up every morning with a sense of gratitude in a way that I
The community where I was born and raised that's still here in New Orleans and you know, they've known me since I was a kid, I've got a lot of family here and New Orleans is a city that is extraordinarily creative as you know, I mean, this is what your podcast is about. It's also got challenges like every city. It's an incredibly diverse City. And so I found myself coming home, especially after Hurricane Katrina where I was asked to be the vice.
Vice chair of the recovery Authority after that storm and I realized how badly I miss New Orleans, but also how immersing yourself in a place of great diversity with people who have some frictions and challenge you but also people have known you your whole life. So you can't you know, he got to be true to who you are because they'll cut you right down if you're not all of that gave me a sense of grounding and
And it also gave me the sense which I think is probably the most important lesson and you've written about it. But so many other people have which is if you wake up every morning and realize how lucky you are you will be a happier and more creative person and that can extend even to people who've had a whole lot of challenges in their life and for me when I wake up in New Orleans, I think man, you know, I'm lucky.
The where of Happiness the wear of feeling at home as obvious as that might seem is just so under estimated. I feel at least I underestimated it for decades. Certainly. I felt like I should be able to be fill in the blank fill in the blank in any
location. Where do you call
home? You know, my home is not too far from you it is now.
Austin Texas has been for the last three to four years now probably closer to four years and when we when we managed to navigate through this this current pandemic and get to some semblance of the other side of the tunnel, then we should have a proper cup of coffee in person and is
very close to New Orleans both spiritually and physically in the sense that the both places with great music great University towns.
Great diversity and great creativity. So I love going to Austin I go there all the time my brother went to UT and certainly during the Hurricane Katrina. We all evacuated there for a while.
Well you and I have if I may be so bold she'll have shall have should have may have I would love to have a coffee or lunch at some point a cup of coffee. It's been a it's been a while. It's been a while and I'm glad you brought up music because New Orleans
Showcases a beautiful art form that many know as Jazz and that is in a sense a byproduct of diversity of one might say randomness of one might say mutation. So as a metaphor, I think that that will also play into a lot of what we discuss and that is my attempt at a segue to Chinese crispr babies. What on Earth am I
I talking about what do I mean by Chinese crispr babies? Are we cook are we cooking babies? What is this? Which is Chris. So
two years ago in China a doctor who had been to some of the seminars by my the hero of my new book Jennifer doudna had decided to use this technique that Jennifer doudna and her partner Emanuel sharp and J invented for which they won the Nobel Prize and October and that that technique is called.
crispr and it's based on something bacteria have been doing for a billion years, which is keeping track of viruses that attack them and then using a scissors to cut up those viruses if they attack again where you can imagine that's pretty useful in these days of pandemic, but what Jennifer doudna did was figure out a way to turn that into a tool that could edit our own genes in other words if you wanted to edit yourself, so,
that you didn't have sickle cell anemia that could be done with this tool called crispr and it's already been done the interesting thing somewhat controversial but in some ways very promising is we can edit our children we can create what is sometimes called designer babies by saying when their embryos early-stage embryos or even reproductive cells we can say let's take out the gene that would allow you to get sickle cell anemia
Hunting disease or cystic fibrosis so that our children will be genetically healthier what happened two years ago. Is that for the very first time in a way that was unauthorized a scientist in China did that he edited the embryos were turned out to be two twin girls and edited out the receptor that allows them to get the virus that causes AIDS
and there was an immediate Outburst of all and then some Shock because the world wasn't quite ready. It's like Prometheus snatching fire from the gods or Adam and Eve fighting until the apple or something. The world wasn't quite ready for us to be editing our children and creating designer babies, but that's what my book is about which is when should we be allowed to edit our children? When should we be allowed to add or take away?
Way genetic traits from the human species. And when would that be dangerous to do so or perhaps even immoral to do so,
I love interviewing you man. You're so good at this. I just really enjoy it and I as your self thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's a work in progress. Maybe after another 500 health.
Thank God I can edit my interviews. So that sound better move the double helix, the double helix. I want to talk about a little bit of your history first. And then we're going to make a very easy transition to the protagonist of your story. When did you first get exposed to the double? Helix the book and what is this book for those who don't know
when I was in Middle School my father gave
Me a copy of James Watson's book The Double Helix. I just found it recently down here in New Orleans. It has the pale red cover was published in the early 1960s and it is a description of how James Watson and his partner Francis Crick use some of the data by Rosalind Franklin and raced against people like Linus Pauling to be able to discover the structure of DNA and it was like
A detective story it was about how does life work? What is the secret of life? How do genes work and I remember reading that and because I still look in the margins I could probably sell it on eBay at the first edition of the book but in the margin or all my you know, childhood scribblings defining words, I didn't know like biochemistry and I decided that's really cool. And ever since then I've had an interest in understanding the the joy of understanding.
Me how something works especially when that something is our own selves. So the
protagonist the main character as a were you've chosen to spend so much time on how did you choose her?
Well, Jennifer doudna was somebody I'd heard speak out at the Aspen Institute, which I know, you know, well and others about how they had developed this tool to edit.
In jeans and how powerful it would be and giving us, you know, healthier lives fighting cancer fighting coronavirus. It turns out and how it can make our species healthier, but there was some dangerous to that and it one point I was talking to her I said how did you get interested in and she said, you know, I was just in sixth grade growing up in Hilo Hawaii. I was sort of an outsider because I was she's a tall lanky blond girl, but it was in the small village.
Hawaii and everybody else was Polynesian and so she felt kind of a loner when she came home one day and she said my dad had left on my bed a copy of this book by James Watson called the double helix and went oh, wow. My dad did that as well and she said that's when I decided I wanted to become a scientist. I read about Rosalind Franklin in there and I thought wow I didn't realize women could become scientists and she asked her high school guidance.
ASL and the guidance counselor said no girls don't become scientists and that made Jennifer down and decide that she would be a scientist. It also made me decide. I was gonna write about Jennifer Dowd because she did what maybe I should have done after reading the double helix, was that say I want to be a research
scientist. So to to just allow a preview of the other side of the coin if we could and this is
How my mind works jumping around we've talked a bit about the possible Promises of crispr this Gene editing pair of scissors that allows you to do wondrous things previously unimaginable. What are some of the risks you alluded to that is there danger for instance of customized bio weapons that could be targeted at specific populations are there.
Other things that you could mention in brief as as real possible risks of this technology because it is as I understand at least a all things considered very inexpensive accessible technology. It is not something that is relegated to the best funded governments for instance
about a year after Jennifer doudna developed this crispr Gene editing tool. She had a nightmare and the nightmare was
Is that you've been asked to meet somebody who wanted to understand the tool and she walks into the room and the person looks up and it's Adolf Hitler and she realizes that if this technology like almost any technology falls into the wrong hands, it could be used for nefarious purposes. The ones you mentioned like military or obvious ones. You could make a virus, you know, using crispr or some bacteria using crispr that was even deadlier than the
coronavirus that pandemic were going through now you could create as Vladimir Putin said about a year ago super soldiers that are stronger and resistant to radiation if you want to fight Wars, so that's one thing that could happen. Another thing that could happen is that we decide to make designer babies and design our children and let's say that you and I decide we want to make sure our children don't have any bad genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or
Sclerosis or Tay-Sachs or Huntington's disease or Sickle Cell. That's pretty good you and I would say that's a good thing for us to be able to edit to make sure our children don't have that but let's say at the fertility clinic. They also say to you. What do you want to make them a little bit taller or have muscle mass as an easy Gene that had a certain point growing up start slowing down our growth of muscle mass. You could suppress that team and have children that were much stronger and then maybe you could affect their
Murray to have them have a much better memory or have them, you know have blue eyes. You could change a lot of things and that leads to a lot of questions one of which is should we let the rich by better genes for their kids because these offerings at the genetic Supermarket, they're not going to be free and what would that do to the diversity of our species you and I talked about the joy of wandering the streets of Austin Texas or New Orleans and we
See people tall and skinny, you know light and dark and gay and straight and trans and all sorts of traits that they have. It's hard to edit some complex traits but a few decades from now, we'll be able to edit out traits that somehow or another we feel a weird. We don't prefer having an our children. Well that could be dangerous for the species and for our society
at for people who want to get a visual.
On what it might look like to use crisper to enhance muscularity you can look up now. This is not crisper derive necessarily because breeding certainly can achieve what crisper does just takes a lot longer the Belgian Blue breed of beef cattle is bred for hyperplasia, which is increased number of muscle fibers. There may be some myostatin inhibition also, but people can look at that or bully whippet if you want to see a Whippet you might Envision a very skinny.
Tiny little dog very wiry pretty neurotic looking not saying they're neurotic. If you own one and then you add twice or three times the muscle mass. It's pretty shocking certainly impressive to see and it's very possible, you
know the gene for myostatin suppression after a while, you know, the myostatin reduces until you quit building more muscle mass. That's a pretty easy. Jean to knock out using
Crisper and that's indeed what happens with double muscling cattle, which you just described and so they're truly wondrous things we could do especially, you know, helping people who have some disabilities to make them stronger or better. So before we get scared about crispr, we have to realize it can do truly wonderful things. Just this past year a woman named Victoria gray living in, Mississippi.
I was cured of sickle cell anemia the first time you've had a pure cure using crispr.
This is a fantastic introduction in a sense connection to the question. I was going to ask because there are lots of athletes who listen to this and many trainers and coaches and so on and that was whether crispr can be applied to adults or if it has to be applied at the embryonic stage or
The very early stages of life and you seem to have just answered
that let me tell you about a guy named Jason zainer by the way, who lives in Austin now move from the bay area of California and he's a biohacker and he has able to use crisper and you know sort of cooked it up in his own lab. He's a PhD, but he does it, you know in his basement as a biohacker and he has created a way to use
Spur to suppress a bit of the myostatin issue and maybe increases muscles and he did it live on a live stream video injecting himself with now it didn't really work. You can't do it with just one shot. But he's one of those Pioneers that shows what citizen science can do and eventually yes athletes could be able to help increase their muscle mass or for that matter.
Matter that quick reflexes a twitch muscles all these sort of things. And so that's going to be interesting. You know, we put a little asterisk next to, you know McGuire or Canseco or people who use steroids, but what if your jeans give you better athletic ability do we go from admiring the athlete to admiring their genetic engineer and what if you could do that in your children, so they are born with genes. I'd give them faster muscle twitch.
Or higher muscles and they can bend steel with their bare hands. You know that's going to be both a great opportunity. But also a real
challenge good luck anti-doping committees. This is going to be very challenging. They're already resource-constrained. Do not envy that boy. Yes sports are going to get very also with gender identity. I mean not to get into that topic but sports are going to become very very complicated increasingly so over the over the next decade
and now I have in front of me a note and I'm just going to give you a fragment of it that I would love for you to expand upon and that is the three fundamental kernels of our existence the atom the bit and the gene could I give that to you as a cue and let you run with it
when I was writing my books. I thought of one of the great Innovation revolutions now been three of them and they start with those
Fundamental kernels of our existence that were sort of discovered around 1900 which is the atom and then the notion that all information can be encoded in binary digits We Now call bets and finally the Gene and so when I wrote about Einstein it was about innovation in the first half of the 20th century based on the theories about the atom everything from atom bombs to space travel to semiconductors. Do lasers all come.
That Innovation Revolution from that discoveries of physics the second half of the 20th century when you and I were growing up was the information technology Revolution the digital Revolution based on the encoding of all information in bits, the creation of computers that could manipulate those bits and the creation of an Internet or networks that could transmit those bit. The next great Revolution is now and it's based.
On the gene is based on the fact that all of us and our kids who had to learn digital coding will also have to learn genetic coding because the molecule is going to become the new microchip. It's going to allow us to innovate to fight coronavirus has to edit our own genes to fight cancer. I use Jennifer doudna as a central character to say what happens when we get to the third great revolution of our time.
I'm and it's based on us our own molecules. Our own cells our own genes.
Do you hope this book will inspire new generations of scientists in the way that the double helix did for Jennifer doudna? Is that one of the motivations? Absolutely.
I would hope that people read this book and they'll admire the nobility of what research scientists do of course. It was sort of a
A goal of mine for 5 years ago when I started working on it. Now after these scientists have created vaccines that are going to get us out of this coronavirus pandemic. I think people are primed to say hey, I admire people who are in the Life Sciences and figuring out how we can create a healthier species. But I also hope after reading the book they might leave it on the bed of you know, some student in high school and
and hope that they will be inspired to either love science or maybe even be a researcher in science because there's a joy in figuring out how something works especially when that something is ourselves. So I want people to feel more connected to science. I want them to feel less intimidated by science because sometimes when you're you know don't like vaccines or you don't like the internet or whatever it's because you don't you're intimidated by the mysteries of
Which I want to demystify and show that real people like Jennifer Dowd wake up in the morning and they do simple I mean Crispers pretty simple. It's just three components. They do simple experiments and they're able to do things that will affect our lives and I want people who are you know, kids are raising kids to say, you got to be part not only of the digital generation, but the biotech generation, even if you're not going to be a scientist you can have
To be part of the conversation that says how are we going to use these new technologies to create vaccines to fight cancers to make healthier babies. What are going to be the rules of the road? And in order to be part of that discussion, it's kind of helpful to know what it's all about.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. The new year is here and it marks a fresh start for your small business, whether you're shifting business hours or hiring more remote employees. One thing that remains unchanged is the importance of having the right people on your team when your business is ready to make that next higher LinkedIn jobs can help by matching Your Role with qualified candidates, so you can find the right person quickly and to lend a helping hand. Your first job post is free getting
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You mentioned just a moment ago. Are you you uttered a line that I wrote down because I quite like it and that is the molecule will become the new microchip and we're talking about biotech generations and perhaps the differences between what we consider coding education or even just passing coding familiarity knowing the the high-level Concepts, even if you are not a coder yourself and it makes me think of a conversation. I'm not going to mention this person by name because I don't think that
Is public but very well-known co-founder of a large company. Everyone would recognize who is very involved with conversations around the promises or potentials and threats of artificial intelligence. And before he has a conversation with anyone about AI he asks them if they have studied computer science question number one and number two if they have kids and if they can't answer yes to both of those who just refuses to have the conversation because and
the having kids is relevant because it I think forces in many people a longer-term perspective and just a longer time Horizon for considering the consequences of certain things. So if someone I'm just saying this, I hypothetically of now or five years ago would have been put into sort of computer science 101 with learning who knows what I'm not a coder but you know Ruby or
For all or God knows what language they end up learning at some point. What does the education look like for someone who wants to better understand the molecule as the new microchip
actually, I think it's even simpler. I think that the molecule in the life science or something. We all more intuitively understand certainly when you do computer science, it's not about Rubio Ruby on Rails or Perl script.
Thing like that. It's about the algorithm. It's about thinking sequentially step-by-step logically so that you can do a computer program. That's the important thing. You have to grok if you're going to understand how computers work, but with the life sciences with, you know, genetic coding. It's simply that you have to understand that we have 3 billion base pairs of letters in our DNA. You don't have to know them.
You don't have to read you know, the Human Genome Project study. You just have to know that certain segments of these encode what we call a gene. We're now able to map on our DNA a lot of those genes the genes that do simple things like cause sickle cell anemia or cause blue eyes and the question becomes logically, how can you do things that makes you
Of the molecules in our body to create things that we want such as antibodies to fight a virus or to stop your blood from creating Sickle cells that are dangerous. So I don't think you need to know the four letters of DNA or the similar but slightly different for letters of RNA, but you do need to know that DNA encodes our genes.
Yes, and then RNA is actually the cooler molecule. It actually does some work. It doesn't just curate information. It takes that information and goes to the manufacturing region of ourselves and builds a protein. And you say okay what type of proteins do we want antibodies for a virus? Let's build that proteins that will make our blood healthier. Let's do that. And so just this General concept of how our bodies work.
I think is useful whether you're an athlete or creative person or just somebody who wants to be part of society and is not that complicated. You don't need to know a whole lot of Boolean algebra or math in order to do Life Sciences. You just need to know this central dogma of biology that our genes turn RNA into worker bees that build proteins in ourselves. Okay. Now, what are we going to do with that?
Nothing many of these?
Toolkits right? Whether it's familiarity with the algorithms right in some respects the recipes of computer science or those types of Technologies and then sort of biochemical or genetic fluency. I think that those will very often go increasingly hand-in-hand right? I was looking at a list earlier today from 2007, which was it one of those list you see a lot right the 100 greatest living Geniuses and this is from 2007 one must keep in mind because
We have someone at least one has passed away. I think Tim berners-lee is still with us. But the first place this is from The Daily Telegraph. So think what you may have the Daily Telegraph, the the first place position was tied between Tim berners-lee who is suppose best known as a computer scientist who was one of the inventors of co-inventors of the World Wide Web brilliant, man, and yes, he is still living at just confirmed and Albert Hoffman.
A name people may not recognize who was the first person to synthesize lsd-25 also psilocybin and many other things like hydrogen which is used for cognitive function and age related. Dementia. See you have a computer scientist and a chemist side-by-side and I think that is just going to increasingly be the case. You mentioned proteins. We're going to have protein folding and how proteins fold is a big problem that computers do very well with but let's let's move to the person
Jennifer doudna their few phrases that I picked out of what you said and nobility of scientists. So there are noble scientists and then there are ignoble scientists simple experiments. What made what makes Jennifer special eye because there are a lot of scientists and just like in the field of medicine where like P equals mg is a joke among a lot of my doctor friends pass equals medical doctor. In other words. There's the kind of Good the Bad and the Ugly. So what makes her special
if
you know you write a lot about performance and creativity and I have found that the simplest component of it is curiosity, you know, Jennifer doudna was persistently obsessively and joyfully curious even growing up in Hawaii. She touch a piece of what's called sleeping grass and it would curl up and she kept wondering. Why does that happen? Why does it cost and she'd look at the spirals of the seashells and she'd say how does an animal create that
And when I saw that she was doing that. I realized Leonardo da Vinci did the same thing with Spirals and shells and corals and trying to figure it out and you can see it even in the Mona Lisa her curls so that Curiosity about everyday things like I'm looking out now in New Orleans and there's The Bluest of blue skies people who are curious say well, why is the sky blue Leonardo DaVinci? Ask that Einstein acid and Jennifer doudna, ask questions like that?
At so not outgrowing our Wonder Years being able to stay relentlessly curious. That's what caused Jennifer doudna to keep saying. All right. I've just seen this thing. But how does it really work? What's inside of our bodies of our molecules of our cells that causes this to work and she discovers some of the key clues of how things work one of which is the structure of molecules.
The structure of RNA allows it to build certain proteins. And so I think if I were to say, how can you be creative as a scientist or for that matter as a musician or athlete it would be be curious about everything all walks of life Arts and Sciences technology in the humanities. That's what Steve Jobs did. He had one foot in the Arts another foot in technology, and he did not make a distinction between
In those two that's what Leonardo's Vitruvian man is about. It's a work of art and it's a work of Science and he didn't make a distinction between those two and four Jennifer doudna. She doesn't make a great distinction between the life sciences and the humanities and by being curious about all things. She's able to see the patterns in
nature.
I'd love for you to to comment a bit more on this particular species of curiosity. And the reason I ask is that there are many scientists out there and there are many diligent hard-working scientists out there, but very few are able to achieve what Jennifer and her collaborators have been able to achieve furthermore. I would say that science.
Is great for a lot of things the scientific method is excellent for testing hypotheses. It doesn't really offer you a Fail-Safe way of generating good hypotheses, right? So was she just asking better questions that live to hear you comment on any or all of that.
She asked better questions, but most importantly she cared about curiosity driven science what we call Basic scientists sometimes scientists and for that matter people
In the world of tack are always keeping their eye on the application. How can I make something useful right? How can I make money out of it? My book is about a group of scientists who discover the natural phenomenon of crisper, which is just a basic science curiosity, which is hey, I've looked at bacteria and they have clustered repeated sequences in their DNA. That's hard to explain.
Plane those clustered repeated sequences get dubbed crisper. Nobody was looking to create a gene editing tool and initially they weren't looking for things. Like how do we protect yogurt cultures from being attacked by viruses? Although it turns out to be useful for that. They were driven by curiosity pure curiosity to pursue basic science, and then the applications follow one day Jennifer doudna has finally cracked.
Code of how crispr Works in bacteria to fight off viruses and she makes it work in a test tube so that it can cut a piece of DNA at a designated spot that experiment was done just out of basic science research curiosity, but the minute they succeeded they looked at themselves in the lab and they said this could be a tool to edit our genes. So the advice is
you don't always look for how it's going to be applied be curious about the basic science and at some point the usefulness and the applications will follow
you have written about profiled act as biographer of quite a few people if you had to compare Jennifer to previous subjects, who is she most similar to and and in what ways
She's most similar to Benjamin Franklin because she's curious about a wide variety of things. But then also and here's a key part of the book. All right about at a certain point after she has a nightmare about Adolf Hitler. She becomes amassed in understanding the moral and sand policy implications of what she's done. So like Benjamin Franklin, she's interested in basic science, but she's also interested in policy.
She's interested in governance and she connects science and let's remember Ben Franklin was a great scientist. I mean he discovers a single fluid theory of electricity but having understand the balances and checks and balances in Newtonian physics and in electricity and the plus minus is and ledgers. He helps create a constitution that will hold together for centuries based on checks and balances Jennifer doudna also,
Lies her science and her discoveries to how is it going to affect the human species and to our National Society? And so that's why I am. She's also just a good person. She's joyful. She really cares about other people. It's on the people have written about have been a bit strong Cups of Tea but I think Jennifer doudna and Ben Franklin would sit there over a glass of ale or a mug of beer.
And they would laugh and they would tell jokes and they would understand the foibles of their fellow human beings, but they would love them. And so I would love if I could have a dinner party to have Jennifer doudna and Ben Franklin. They're
all right. We're going to come back to that because I would like to know and this is just a bookmark. So we're going to come back to this. But if Jennifer is competitive in any particular way
The make her more similar to say a jobs than a Franklin. I don't know the answer to that, but I'd be curious to explore the nature of scientific competition and how that factors into the story. But before we do that, I have some cleanup to do we mentioned Ada Lovelace earlier. I said I was going to come back to her. So I do want to do that very quickly because it may relate to other things we talked about in our first conversation. I think the wording that came up was that Ada Lovelace pushed herself to
Stand that a mathematical equation is just Nature's brush stroke for painting something in reality. I think that is roughly the wording which is just incredible and what I don't think we talked about which may or may not be relevant to things in this conversation is Ada lovelace's objection and how it contrasts with say Alan Turing is is that something you could speak to?
Yeah, Alan Turing in his famous paper can machines think which was written a hundred years after Ada Lovelace published her notes on the analytical engine Ada Lovelace says machines will be able to do anything that can be notated in symbol. So be able to process music and words and numbers and patterns. They'll be able to do everything except for originated thought they won't be able to be
Native and the purpose will be to marry our machines to our own human creativity. So she didn't believe in the pursuit of what we call artificial intelligence. She didn't believe that would be as fruitful as a pursuit of what we now call augmented intelligence the symbiosis where we connect machines and humans more closely and I think that's because she was the daughter of Lord Byron, but she was a mathematician
She had a poetic sensibility where she could look at a line of her father's poetry like she Walks in Beauty like the night and visualize it but she could also look at an algorithm or mathematical sequence and visualize it as well. And so this ability to connect the humanities to technology. That's what she's the patron saint of so she feels we are going to get artificial intelligence. We're going to try to
get this symbiosis of human machines to create augmented intelligence. Alan Turing is the other school of thought he refers to that as lady lovelace's objection and his paper his famous paper. I think published maybe in 1950 in mind magazine is soon we'll have an imitation game test and we'll be able to show that machines can think in a way that's indistinguishable from the way humans can thank now you all can debate all your listeners can debate.
That I'm not sure we have an answer. I'm not sure if 50 years from now. We'll have a clean answer to those questions
all boy. That's that could be a whole another podcast. Maybe it will be thank you. Thank you for thank you for answering that and it does connect to Z switch cross-disciplinary interdisciplinary lens through which you have attributed to Jennifer.
Doudna and before we go specific to Jennifer and her story and talking about competition and we're sort of scientific races figure into this. I just want to ask a question more broadly about curiosity because it's one of those it's one of those words that I think can probably I haven't done this but it could probably be parsed into very different types of curiosity and you mentioned asking why and there are people who are very
Get it asking why and do it very productive ways. There are investors. I know who ask why three times just as a matter. Of course that is just their policy if they're talking to Startup founder to uncover assumptions. That's why they ask why then there are people who ask why from a not necessarily skeptical perspective but a cynical perspective and and those lines of argument don't often or I shouldn't say don't always lead to productive places and when you're speaking to Ada Lovelace and
Poetry I couldn't help but Wonder in this is a leading question. Of course does the common breed of curiosity that we observe and saying Ada or Jennifer work Ben Franklin entail unnecessary seeking of Wonder or aw. Is there a motivation behind the Curiosity? That is shared?
I think it's a seeking of Wonder as you said and most importantly it's an
In minded inquiry as Ben Franklin would say let the experiments be made as Jennifer doudna did it wasn't trying to prove some pre-existing hypothesis. It was let's follow the fact and then let each experiment. We do inform how we're going to test something out. We have lost that ability which is at the core of both the scientific method and of the
Lighten meant that helps create this country, which is be open-minded to don't have a preconceived hypothesis that you're trying to prove have a sense of wonder and a curiosity to see where the facts lead you and that's how Ben Franklin makes a list of all the facts. He discovered about Sparks and all the things he's observed about lightning and figures out the lightning rod and that's how Jennifer doudna looks at.
Mysterious way that bacteria fight virus attacks and says, let me figure out why does it work
and I want to underscore how important this is and I say that speaking of someone who has had to learn this overtime with respect to basic science. And as someone who funds A lot of science right now a lot of scientific research that maybe sometimes a mistake to be in a rush to
force the application or to insist on an application those applications some of the most important discoveries that have ever been made in human history and Gene editing crispr May certainly be one of them have come about as as emergent from basic science. I just think that's so important from a funding perspective from a scientific literacy perspective. So, I'm really glad we're talking about it. So let's talk about something a little more.
Don't call it crass but human competition Jennifer and is it a manual? Am I getting that right? I know show up until yes go from observation to in a sense having in their hand a tool and whether they are motivated or Not by Prestige or money. They're smart enough to realize that they are sitting on something.
Very very potentially important and massively impactful. Can you describe the race that it that
ensues? I love competition just like most of your listeners probably do and I think competition Spurs us to go faster aim higher do amazing things and part of competition is Raising both to get the credit for something and sometimes the get the intellectual property the patents for something so that you can fund your research so
In Jennifer doudna in the manual charpentier discover that this system bacteria have been using to fight viruses can be used as a tool by us to edit our own genes. They get into a race or Jennifer doudna gets into a race with other scientists to say. Okay. Let's show how we can do that in a living human cell because she had done it in a test tube. The question is will it actually work if we try
to do it in the cell of a living being like us and the strongest competitors are Jennifer doudna at Berkeley on one side and this wonderful guy named falling Jiang born in China, but raised in Iowa and has sort of a corn-fed smile and enthusiasm and he's at the broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and so for six months they along with some other scientists race.
To see who can be the first to prove that this amazing new tool will actually work in human cells and Fang Jang wins the race by about a couple of weeks all its he publishes in January 2013 and Jennifer doudna Publishers at the end of January 2013, and they've been locked in a patent battle ever since some people say in that horrible. I say no. This is what I competition Spurs us to do good things, but here's something
And cool, both of them have a turn their attention in the past year to using these Technologies to fight the coronavirus just like bacteria use it to fight viruses. They use it to detect the virus and this time around they're racing the published papers on it, but they're putting them in the public domain. They're allowing people to use whatever they discover if they're using it to fight the coronavirus so sometimes you have to be competitive.
Give sometimes you have to be cooperative. Sometimes you have to try to invent things that you get, you know, the patents to and sometimes you put things in the public domain. There's no one easy answer and I hate people have knee jerk reactions that they hate all patents or they think all patent should be enforced forever. It should be like and your town of Austin and all when Texas Instruments does the microchip and Bob noyce does a microchip eventually they shake hands and say let's
make this useful for the world.
So I'd love to just bring up a number of points. I think that surfaced in in what you just said one of them relates to Scientific funding for people who don't know performing science can be extremely expensive and very often is extremely expensive. It takes a lot of money and one of the mechanisms by which scientists can fund their research because it requires funding requires people requires space requires tools,
Often is with technology transfer So within universities many universities certainly at places like MIT Harvard etcetera. You will have technology transfer offices and the university will license Technologies and if the researchers involved have intellectual property, there are sometimes able to take a portion of those proceeds and use it to allow them to
Continue their research or do new expanded more ambitious studies and research such as fun to mention that profit is not always a bad thing money is not always a bad thing. In fact, it is most often a necessary component of of scientific breakthroughs in this day and age,
we would not have vaccines against coronavirus had there not been a race to understand how RNA can be a messenger in our body to
Protein something that everybody from Jennifer doudna to a group at the University of Pennsylvania did so well is figure these things out and figuring it out is not something you can do in a dorm room like inventing Facebook or inventing, you know and Olga Rhythm for Google or something. It's something that takes a lot of lab space and a lot of investment. So we have to have a system in which discoveries are used for the common good.
But also people can benefit from having made discoveries and use the proceeds in order to fund their
research. You hear humans present company included respond to incentives human behavior in a lot of ways is the study of incentives and in animal behavior any Behavior really and it's important to recognize that the scientists also need
resources. I try very hard to say, what are those motivations now look at
Jennifer doudna and Fang Jiang and the others who have done it and I don't think money is the main motivator but it does fund the research. I also think, you know a claim people just want people to say wow. Congratulations. You did something or better yet. Give them the Nobel Prize for having done something that motivates them as well. But the thing I've discovered about the scientists in this book is that they're also just motivated by curiosity and the
Belief, that science is a noble Endeavor. It will make our lives better. And I believe that sort of at the beginning of the book but then when I watch the coronavirus hit and I watch how people being cured of things like sickle cell anemia by crispr the gene editing tool. I realized that more than most people scientists have a whole group of motivations, but that Noble Endeavor of making the world
Better place is certainly one of the main ones. I'd love to
come back to covid or more accurately to pandemics for a moment. And so do a retrospective and then perhaps explore a bit of for looking subjects. So that the please correct me if I'm wrong. Have you interviewed the author of the great influenza subtitle the Epic story of the deadliest plague in history,
not only by interviewed.
I live here in the French Quarter. And if I trained my neck enough, I'd see John Barry's house. I'm on Royal Street. He's actually a couple blocks away. I think I'm booked on D Street, but I run into John all the time just ran into him and walking back from the gym in the French Quarter. So I love John berries work. It's great narrative history.
What have you learned from him or his his work and that's a very broad question. But what are some of the the insights or counterintuitive?
Learnings more memorable points that come to mind when I ask that
question when I read about the 1918 pandemic that epidemic that John Barry wrote about the first thing I Marvel at is how little things have changed. I mean there they are trying to call off parades and Philadelphia or wearing masks and getting people to wear masks and social distancing the same sort of things. We've been wrestling with for the past year, but the thing that impresses
Has me now is that we've invented a new type of vaccine back in 1918 vaccinations were pretty rudimentary. You know, they were done the same way that Edward Jenner did a century earlier which is to give you some fact simile of the virus or bacteria. You were trying to fight see if your antibodies would do. So, but now along with people like Jennifer doudna another code Breakers we've invented
Way to have RNA tell ourselves build these antigens that will fight the virus. So suddenly we've had a Quantum Leap so that the human species in its hundred thousand year war against viruses nail suddenly is taking the lead and might be able to beat back pandemics in the future.
Let's hop not to continue to bring it back to this, but two three
Moral concerns you mentioned doudna and her dream of Hitler and I mentioned Albert Hoffman earlier who synthesized LSD was the first to consume it as a synthetic at least and the title of one of his books was LSD subtitle my problem child and he had he had a lot of thoughts on the applications and misapplications. Certainly that's true for a lot of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and
Its nuclear weapons what scenarios?
or possible events
Keep Jennifer up at night or sit in her mind if you know or could speculate.
Yes, there's a whole part of my book the last quarter of my book besides dealing with fighting the coronavirus deals with Jennifer doudna and her friends and colleagues wrestling with what are the moral implications and as with any technology whether it be the atom bomb or Facebook, you know, how we use that technology can be for good or for bad.
And so Jennifer doudna is wrestling with how do we make rules of the road and guidelines that we can agree to internationally? She creates Summits of scientists internationally to say here's how we're going to use it for the time being at least and they've agreed to certain rules, which is you only can should use it when it's truly medically necessary in other words if it's the best possible way to fight Huntington's or
Sickle cell anemia and that's medically necessary. Then it makes sense to use it but you don't use it for Unnecessary enhancements. Like let's make our kids taller or let's change their hair color and I think as we go along we're going to have to feel our way which is why in the book I spend time looking step-by-step how they've gone through the different moral issues and then having our own thought.
That's all we can figure out what would happen if we went to a fertility clinic and they gave us a menu of things we could choose what would we choose and then think about the downsides if everybody gets or all rich people yet to make those choices. So it's not, you know a one-sentence answer for how should we use this technology? It's going to be something that over the next 20 years, we and our children and our grandchildren going to have to
Appreciate how cool and wonderful genetic editing can be but also how we have to have some guidelines.
Do you have any thoughts or have you heard any thoughts on how we can create guidelines that are actually enforceable in a sense? And you know, I don't want to say that you don't want to sound too much like Hobbes and Leviathan or anything like that but in contrast to some of my friends, I tend to have a skeptical view of the altruistic default of human nature and
I'm very interested in how we can create sort of systems instead of depending on best intentions because there's so many motivations that can warp best intentions. Even the best of intentions you have any thoughts on what maybe instead of guidelines guide rails can be established in any way?
I think it's going to be hard to enforce too many guidelines because unlike the atom bomb, which I could not make in my basement or
in in my Tulane University Labs or something crispr is something that is relatively easy to do as we said the Rogue scientists in China did it two years ago and edited the embryos of babies. And even I went to Berkeley to Jennifer doudna slab and have a chapter where I am taught how to edit the genes of a human cell now lest you worry about it. Once I finish we flushed it down.
A dream with a lot of chlorine so I didn't create some Frankenstein's monster, but it's something any graduate student in biology could do and eventually we'll find ways to deliver those edits more safely into human beings. So it's going to be hard to enforce it. But there are things that are hard to enforce whether it be the trafficking and elephant tusks or that matter sex trafficking or shoplifting or running red lights, but as
Oddities we find ways. Not that we can ban it entirely but we find ways to make it something that illegal to do is hard to do is shameful to do and a few people might break those laws, but at least we can keep it under control and I think that's what we're going to have to do with the bad uses of Gene editing technology. And that's what Jennifer doudna rustles with how do we create those guidelines and try to find some ways we can have
Some good enforcement of them.
If you had to choose an aspect of the book and aspect of this technology or the story is that you think people might not pay enough attention to are there certain things that I think no doubt you communicate very very clearly and perhaps there's something that you worried people might miss because it's not a huge feature in the book, but nonetheless very important. Is there anything
like that?
The big thing I fear that people might miss is that if you don't read the book, you might have a knee-jerk reaction just like people have to genetically modified organisms or you know food or corn that's been genetic GMOs those type of things and it's fine to have a strong opinion about GMOs, but it's also useful to know what a gene is before you have such a strong opinion.
Onion and I would hope that people keep an open mind just like great scientists and great people who are curious and creative they keep an open mind because they are both good and bad things that can come of this but mainly good things and so we shouldn't have a knee-jerk reaction and say oh, this is horrible. We're playing God. We're messing with Mother Nature. Well, you know if you want to talk about playing God
On nature and Nature's God have created a species that has evolved enough to learn how to influence its own genetic Evolution and that species is ass. So this is natural that we have learned these things and we shouldn't have knee-jerk reactions to it based on not understanding it. And so I hope people will Reserve judgment on what type of genetic editing.
What type of vaccines what type of uses we should do with our molecules and order to fight viruses not have a knee-jerk reaction until you see the wonders of the exploration and keep an open mind about how the technology can be used for really great things like alleviating suffering and also potentially be used by people with less good
intentions, and I would add to that. Thank you for saying all that and answer.
The question and I would add to that that whether you like something or not is oftentimes kind of a relevant in the sense that if it is and it is not going to go back to is not then particularly when it has the culture shaping Arc of History bending potential of something like this. I feel like it is certainly helpful and in some ways incumbent upon
On us to have a basic understanding if we can develop such an understanding of up something like crisper. I mean I it is not to overstate the case, but I think we will look back at this kind of with that Promethean perspective that you mentioned
earlier. Absolutely. This is the most important invention of our time. I think the ability to edit our
Jeans and to program our molecules to do things like create immunity to viruses and like any technology can be used for good or for bad. And I think we have to understand it so that we can all have a conversation about it and we should be open to the Beauties in the Wonders that got us there, you know.
so sometimes our moral thinking has trouble keeping up with our discoveries that happened with the atom bomb and then we had to say okay now let's wrestle with it morally after we dropped it twice that frankly in my mind is happened with social networks where it kind of got ahead of our moral thinking about how can these best be used to connect us as a society so
If we're going to keep our moral thinking aligned with our new discoveries and Innovations, we have to understand those new discoveries and Innovations, and we have to know the story behind them. We have to ask the question that you asked all the time which is
why why the app it's and why not also it strikes me that you never before have the
questions of philosophy that might have been considered entertaining thought exercises for our freshman philosophy 101 never before have they been so incredibly important and of practical
Implication if you look at AI if you look at programming autonomous vehicles to say have to choose between hitting two children on the sidewalk versus three adults in the road that is a decision that this car, you know, the programming needs to be able to make and with crisper the similarly of many of these philosophical questions are no longer abstract discussions over a bottle of wine that they actually are pressing in.
Respects
I think these are the questions were going to have to face in the next 20 years. So it's good to start understanding how it happened now and I love the fact that you say it's not just questions of why but also questions of why not when I was writing this book as I got near the end and when Jennifer doudna was thinking through the moral issues. She not only asks, why would we do something like that but after a while when people who have kids with
You know problematic genetic defects or horrible, you know condition such as Huntington's or Sickle Cell. She'd say well why not fix it wouldn't we consider it immoral not to be using this new technology. So we don't have to just ask. Why would we use a new technology or sometimes we have to say why not wouldn't there be something morally wrong?
About not helping to cure people even if it means we're doing it through genetic editing
Walter. I think this is a great place to begin to wrap up. I always have so much fun in our conversations. And is there a is there anything that you would like to add any closing comments questions to pose to my audience requests to make of my audience anything at all that you
I'd like to add before we slowly wind this to a
close. I think the one request is to help get everyone to understand the nobility and the beauty of Science and open inquiry, but then also being able to walk into the future into this mysterious new room. We're about to enter with a sense of hope and optimism so that we can figure
Word out step by step cautiously, so it doesn't become a slippery slope slopes are less slippery if we do it step-by-step hand in hand. And I think that's what we're going to have to do as we watch this new biotech Revolution help us make our own molecules into microchips that we get to program.
Walter Isaacson, I want to take your class sir you
my classes online. It's on YouTube. If you can find it we will like to it but I'll come to Austin to and we'll hear some good music will eat some good food will have a home and away games. I'll
listen to some Austin
music and you can you can come here some funk and Jazz here in the French
Court. I would love that and Walter.
Thank you for the time your newest book for everyone listening is the Codebreaker subtitle Jennifer doudna Gene editing and the future of the human race. You can find Walter at Isaac's and Dot Tulane dot edu, and the the gumbo and some coffee and some music as a date good
sir. Thank you very much.
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