The Science Soapbox team sat down with Dr. George Church to talk everything from the dawn of CRISPR to the place of science fiction in society.
Dr. Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, leader of the Synthetic Biology Platform at the Wyss institute, and director of PersonalGenomes.org. His three-decade long career includes major contributions to both the reading, and writing of genomic material. The jump in our ability to edit existing genomes within less than a decade has opened the door to a wealth of applications. But genome editing has raised some challenging questions and concerns about how these new technologies will be applied and regulated.
Here are some of the links and references mentioned during the show:
- De-extinction Is a Good Idea, Scientific American essay by Dr. George Church on the merits of bringing back the wooly mammoth (or engineering mammoth-like elephants)
- The CRISPR Patent Interference Showdown Is On: How Did We Get Here and What Comes Next? from the Stanford Law and Science Blog
- Bitter fight over CRISPR patent heats up: Unusual battle among academic institutions holds key to gene-editing tool’s future use from Nature
- Bioart, Cell Trends in Biotechnology review ruminating on the biology and art movement
- Object of Interest: The Twice Forbidden Fruit, The New Yorker profile on bioartist Joe Davis’s project “Malus ecclesia”
- CBSN clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson on the science of “The Martian”
For more information about the research of Dr. Church, we recommend browsing his website: http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/
This episode was recorded on January 21, 2016 in the Science Outreach Lab at Rockefeller University. Special thanks to Visager for music and to Marius Bugge for the photo.