#
It sometimes seems both amusing and sad how many people behave as if they are the masters
#
I see this both at an individual level and at the level of the species.
#
It reminds me of when Douglas Adams famously said, quote, Imagine a puddle waking up one
#
morning and thinking, this is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole
#
I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?
#
In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it.
#
This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and
#
as gradually the puddle gets smaller and smaller is still frantically hanging on to the notion
#
that everything's going to be all right because this world was meant to have him in it, was
#
built to have him in it.
#
So the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.
#
I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for, stop quote.
#
This is a familiar attitude, we are on the top of the food chain of mammals, we seem
#
to have conquered the world and we strut around like perpetually signaling peacocks.
#
But seen from another lens, we could just be useful vehicles for the true masters of
#
the universe, bacteria colonized by them and used as an end to their means.
#
And even if we were top dog, humans have existed for a tiny fraction of the time the universe
#
has been around and we will surely stop existing one day as the universe continues freed from
#
distracting social media chatter.
#
But as I point out that human existence is utterly insignificant and meaningless, I shall
#
also concede that one thing does set us apart from other species, our level of self-awareness.
#
We are the only bot designed with the capability to edit our own source code and reprogram
#
The fact that we are able to do this is one small step towards controlling our own destiny
#
and it also ought to fill us with humility.
#
After all, even if we are a self-aware puddle, a puddle is what we are and puddles vanish.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My subject for today is genetics and I intend to explore the science of it, the ethical
#
questions that arise from the ability to reprogram ourselves and others and the policy implications
#
And my guest is a scholar well placed to comment on all three aspects.
#
Dr. Shambhavi Naik is a biologist who also runs her own startup and is a fellow at the
#
Takshashila Institution.
#
I've been trying to get her on my show for a couple of years now, but the stars never
#
But with the supreme control of the universe that humans possess, we got the stars to align
#
Before we begin our conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
If you're listening to The Seen and the Unseen, it means you like listening to audio and you're
#
That being the case, I'd urge you to check out Storytel, the sponsors of this episode.
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Storytel is an audiobook platform that has a massive range of audiobooks from around
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Their international collection is stellar, but so is a local collection.
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They have a fantastic range of Marathi and Hindi audiobooks.
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What's more, I do a weekly podcast there called The Book Club with Amit Verma, in which I
#
talk about one book every week, giving context, giving you a taste of it and so on.
#
Download that app and listen to my show, and as long as Storytel sponsors this show within
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this commercial itself, I will recommend an audiobook that I liked on that platform every
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My recommendation for this week is Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami.
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I was first introduced to Murakami through a classic short story of his, The Second Bakery
#
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This book is a collection of seven short stories that I thoroughly enjoyed, so do check it
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Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami.
#
Download the Storytel app or visit Storytel.com, remembered as Storytel with a single L, Storytel.com.
#
Shyam Bhavi, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Thanks Amit, and it's great to be here.
#
I feel I've unlocked an achievement.
#
Just by being on the show.
#
And also on the sound check, when I asked you for the sound check before we just started,
#
you were saying, Hi, I'm Yazad.
#
So you know Yazad very well.
#
Yazad was also part of Takshashila.
#
And he's been on my show a couple of times.
#
And he's been on your show.
#
So when we first started doing our daily podcast, Yazad and I were co-hosts, and this was supposed
#
And they just caught on.
#
So at Takshashila, Hi, I'm Yazad, is what we say for mic checks.
#
All roads lead to Yazad indeed.
#
So, you know, before we kind of get to the very serious subject at hand, tell me a bit
#
I mean, I don't know you very well, but in the little time that we've interacted, what
#
has been very clear to me is that you are like super passionate about science in the
#
same way that, you know, other people are about books and movies and they'll discuss
#
the Marvel universe and all of that.
#
And you are into science in that way.
#
You're not someone who, you know, happened to do her education and then just kind of
#
Tell me a little bit about this love for science and, you know, were you always going to be
#
a serious scientist like you are or, you know, how did that all that happen?
#
No, I mean, currently I'm fascinated by science.
#
Even though I have now moved away from doing wet lab research, I now focus more on the
#
policy aspects of science, but still it's just, it's what keeps me up at night, you
#
know, a new paper that has come out or a new technique that we learn.
#
I love reading about it.
#
When I started out, born into a middle-class Maraustrian family, I was told I was going
#
I think my parents decided that the day I was born, this one is going to be a doctor.
#
My brother's an engineer, so obviously.
#
And I lost my grandmother when I was eight.
#
She passed away because of breast cancer, which spread to her lung.
#
So I decided that was it.
#
I was going to be a doctor.
#
I was going to cure cancer and I was going to be like this, win the Nobel Prize eventually,
#
I always envisioned myself walking down the street and this kid comes running to me who
#
says, oh, you saved my grandmother.
#
And that would be redemption.
#
That was the environment I grew up into.
#
Actually, I thought I was going to be a doctor till I passed my 12th exam.
#
And I did not get enough marks to get into a good medical college.
#
My parents thought that they could still fund me to go into somewhere which was decent enough.
#
And I made a choice that I did not want that kind of education.
#
I did not want to be that kind of liability on anybody.
#
And so I instead went and did my BSc at Ruja College and going to BSc I think was a little
#
It was not supposed to be the honorable thing to do.
#
I did not know I was going to do a PhD afterwards, but I really truly enjoyed that experience
#
because that's where I met science for the first time.
#
I wasn't being taught science anymore.
#
I could go and sit in a library and just learn about genetics and biology.
#
And I was just completely like taken in orbit and I decided I wanted to continue in basic
#
It was also the first time that I realized that doctors don't cure diseases, they treat
#
And it's the scientists to figure out how these are caused and can actually come up
#
with the cures for them.
#
I was not saying doctors can't, but they are so engrossed in their day to day stuff.
#
So that was when I realized that maybe doing a PhD in cancer biology would allow me that
#
option to come up with diagnostics or therapeutics or whatever I wanted to do.
#
So that's how I stayed in science.
#
It was actually completely out of the love for understanding how life has evolved, how
#
life works and the DNA is just an elegant, beautiful structure.
#
And the fact that it can encode for everything under the sun is simply marvelous.
#
I remember Douglas Adams, who I quoted in my introduction, was once asked why he didn't
#
And he said he didn't believe in God because of natural selection.
#
And he said that just understanding that theory and what it meant filled him with so much
#
awe that no divine awe could compare with something like that.
#
So where did you go to do your PhD?
#
I went to the University of Leicester in the UK.
#
So I went to do my masters and that was, I decided obviously, pre-decided when I was
#
eight that cancer biology was what it was going to be.
#
And University of Leicester was one of the few places that offered a master's in cancer
#
cell and molecular biology.
#
I was allowed to stay back in the lab to do a PhD as well.
#
So the university actually gave me a scholarship.
#
So I finished my master's, my PhD and a year's worth of postdoc in that same lab.
#
And then I moved to the National Centre for Biological Sciences here in Bangalore where
#
I did my postdoc again, looking at breast cancer.
#
This was all very lucky that I actually got to work in breast cancer that easily.
#
So I did spend about nine years closely examining the pathways that cause cancer to be formed.
#
And two questions really, and when did you get interested in genetics per se as a sort
#
of a subset of whatever you were working on?
#
And also, how did you then move away from, you know, doing science to, you know, into
#
the policy space and being an entrepreneur?
#
So genetics has been something that has always, I mean, as I said, and I think this is the
#
third time I am using this word, fascinated by.
#
It is just that the small molecule that can do so much and has survived the test of time
#
And obviously it goes wrong in so many ways in cancer.
#
I mean, you spoke about humans being a puddle.
#
I look at humans as a cancer.
#
We have a lot of characteristics of cancers among just being us, right?
#
We change the microenvironment around us to suit us, and we end up destroying everything
#
And if we are not careful now, we might actually end up killing the person, killing the ecosystem
#
That I think is something about that.
#
We have a lot of lessons to learn from genetics that we can adapt and use.
#
And if we are intelligent enough, hopefully learn from to change our behavior now.
#
So I have always been in love with genetics.
#
It is just that it is micro level of doing things and things work so well.
#
I mean, things could go wrong and having a baby, right?
#
Things could go wrong at so many levels, but they don't always.
#
And sometimes get this really complicated being come out of your bodies.
#
I still don't understand how it works.
#
And that's one of the remarkable things about it, that it's so incredibly complicated is
#
far more complicated than any process we have designed.
#
And yet we have this bias towards thinking that everything necessarily needs a designer
#
or needs to be planned or engineered or whatever.
#
And actually what is happening in, you know, what has happened in nature, natural selection
#
is a kind of spontaneous order.
#
All of this design has sort of happened by itself and is way more complex than anything,
#
any designer, even a divine one.
#
And of course she doesn't exist.
#
I think we are lucky for that because I think if a designer had to design what the DNA does,
#
you might end up with a really complicated, huge, big entity and not the small elegant
#
stuff that we have ended up with.
#
We might have been bulky and huge, but yeah, because it has come out the way it has.
#
I've been off my keto diet for a long time, so I am still bulky and huge.
#
And the second question, so, you know, you're doing science, it's obviously clearly something
#
How do you then, you know, move into being a policy person, being an entrepreneur?
#
So I was in the UK for nearly six years and then I was in Bangalore for three years, working
#
on more or less the same themes.
#
But there were two problems which were very acutely, I became aware of the moment I started
#
working in the lab here.
#
One is that supplies for any lab experiment that we do takes a huge amount of time to
#
So when I was in the UK and if I ordered something, it would come in like two or three days, any
#
glassware, enzyme, whatever I needed.
#
Here it takes two or three weeks.
#
And that at the core of it is a data asymmetry problem.
#
Labs don't know which suppliers to reach out to and suppliers don't know when labs might
#
And that's where Cloudcreate, my startup, was formed.
#
It was to address this data asymmetry and help scientists get their products on time.
#
It's been about two years now, still addressing the problem, but we now have a much
#
better understanding of the nodal points that need to be changed.
#
So hopefully, that will sort some things out.
#
The policy bit is because, again, I found scientists in India not engaging so much in
#
And I felt as a result, our policymaking is not very attuned to help scientists.
#
Our policymakers are not always using evidence-based policymaking.
#
They don't always seem very keen on talking to scientists and understanding what issues
#
So I thought I could be a bridge between that.
#
And hence, I started coming to Dakshashila.
#
The point was to understand how I could better engage with the government.
#
And then once I actually saw how the government processes were, and there were parts of legislation
#
where I could actually provide a scientist insight to, I wanted to.
#
So that's how I got into policymaking.
#
And gene editing, and the further gene editing is coming up, and we did not have a good enough
#
policy to support it, was how I got engaged in trying to write up a policy for gene editing
#
So, you know, just assuming that, you know, me and my listeners are kind of laymen and,
#
you know, we don't really know the science too much.
#
And I know it's a very broad question, but tell me about the state of where genetics
#
Like, you know, obviously, genetics, you know, brings out, explains very clearly and elegantly
#
fundamental truths about what the universe is.
#
You know, I earlier quoted Adams talking about natural selection and genes are obviously
#
the vehicle through which natural selection happens.
#
As you know, Richard Dawkins wrote his famous book, The Selfish Gene, which popularized
#
And, you know, when he spoke about the selfish gene, obviously that was a metaphor.
#
I mean, a gene isn't actually thinking selfishly, but take me a little bit through the process
#
Like, how have we been designed, if you can kind of speak about in layman's language?
#
How have we been designed and how do our genetics?
#
Yeah, in the sense that how are we what we are, like, you know, human 30,000 years ago
#
would have been very different and 500,000 years ago, wherever we came from, I mean,
#
to begin with, we came out of one celled organisms and then that one celled organisms basically
#
evolved into everything and that process is so beautiful and elegant and yeah, we did
#
And when I, you know, catch a virus, I often go back to soup, but sorry.
#
So take us through some of the elegance of this process and the role that genes, the
#
central role that genes play.
#
So there is, there's a lot that we can unpackage here, right?
#
Let me give you one example, which is my favorite example.
#
So we obviously think that humans are different because our brains work very differently than
#
all other species, right, we are intelligent.
#
So the reason we have brains with that kind of firepower, there are two underlying reasons
#
and one is nature, one is nurture, okay.
#
I don't remember time, I'm sorry, but many, many years ago, there was one mutation in
#
one of our ancestors, which changed the location of the jaw because of which the skull moved
#
a bit and there was more space created for the brain.
#
So the brain could actually grow more in our ancestors and as a result of that, we actually
#
have more brain space than apes.
#
That was one thing that changed.
#
The other was we discovered fire and because we had fire, we could cook food and because
#
we were eating cooked food, we could now decrease the amount of energy that was devoted to digestion
#
and so more energy could be spent on the brain.
#
At the same time, because we are eating cooked food, the amount of gut surface that we required
#
for digestion was also reduced.
#
So our gut size reduced, again, the energy consumption of the gut reduced and all of
#
that energy was diverted to the brain and because of those two things, we actually managed
#
to develop better brain power than the other species.
#
I've also read a theory that it's also because we homo sapiens started eating non-veg and
#
you know, the proteins help them grow bigger brains to fit the craniums and one theory
#
is we ate the Neanderthal, so I don't know how.
#
I don't know if we ate them or not.
#
We all have a bit of Neanderthal in us.
#
We did not come from eating them.
#
Yeah, it is likely, look, at that point of time, this is pre-agriculture.
#
So and they were hunter-gatherers.
#
So there is also this theory that because we came from hunter-gatherers, we were more
#
used to eating meat proteins than actually carbs and then when agrarian practices came
#
in, our bodies are still shifting to eating more wheat and rice.
#
So we see some changes, for example, in some of the bones in our body that are still trying
#
to fit together into this whole agrarian lifestyle and so we are not meant to be eating carbs.
#
Yeah, we just, both of us, both of us had Masala Dosa for lunch at MTR and but of course
#
we both agree intellectually that sugar is poison, however hard it is to sort of.
#
Yeah and we are basically supposed to be protein eaters, so that shift has occurred.
#
For our bodies to adjust to that shift is going to take a long time, we are still adjusting
#
to that idea that we are now eating this carb-fat based diet and obviously not doing as much
#
work as the hunter-gatherers were doing at all, having this sedentary life.
#
And we are still trying to fix up to that.
#
My idea is that maybe in a few million years ago, there might only be slim humans around
#
because obesity increases your chances of death and maybe we will get naturally selected
#
to be thin and if I were a time machine, I would like to go into that era and just be
#
thin and eat whatever I want to and still be thin, that would be nice.
#
I think that is a common lament that both of us can sort of share.
#
So briefly for my listeners, I will sort of give a very simplified understanding of what
#
genes do, tell me if I make a beginner's error or something, but essentially what genes do
#
is genes are sort of our programming, so all our characteristics are written down in genes
#
and often mutations happen and different characteristics evolve in different ways.
#
Now for example, let's say due to an accidental mutation of my gene, I get say a bigger nose
#
and we are talking prehistoric times, I get a bigger nose and it so happens that women
#
find bigger noses much more attractive and therefore I reproduce more and because I reproduce
#
more that particular gene which gives me a bigger nose has a greater chance of proliferating
#
through the population.
#
So there are more kids with bigger noses who are having more kids while those with smaller
#
noses are not mating as much and therefore eventually the gene for small noses goes out
#
of the gene pool and this is of course extremely simplified because it's not as if one gene
#
creates one characteristic, it's very complex, it's whatever but…
#
And women don't pick noses as a criteria for reproducing.
#
Example, yeah, I have no idea what women pick as a criteria.
#
But I mean this is the correct thing, right, that your nature basically chooses which specimen
#
is best suited to survive in it.
#
Yeah, yeah to reproduce and most likely driver is food, is food resources, so if you have
#
a giraffe and you have a longer neck and you can eat leaves which are at the taller part
#
of the plant than other animals of average size and obviously you have more food and
#
so you will reproduce more.
#
So we used to at some point of time also have giraffes with shorter necks but those died
#
out in competition and the longer neck one survived.
#
Because one the longer necks one would have survived and thus greater chances of having
#
a kid and two at the level of the female giraffes, the ones who would have been attracted
#
towards the longer neck giraffes would also have mated more with them and therefore their
#
kids were not just the longer necks would have passed on to the kids but also the attraction
#
for longer necks because pretty much all our tendencies and everything is sort of in a
#
sense comes from our genes like you know just talking about nature and nurture, Steven Pinker
#
once gave a lovely illustration of this which I think expresses it very well because obviously
#
it's a false binary and there's both nature and nurture and everything we do and he said
#
nature gives us knobs, nurture turns them.
#
So you could have a very big knob for something like you could be someone who's has a very
#
bad temper and that's in your genes but if you have the kind of upbringing where you're
#
not supposed to get angry then maybe that knob is not turned so much.
#
So there are these genes if they're mutated you can be extremely aggressive by temperament
#
but obviously not all aggressive people are criminals.
#
So there was a study done to try and figure out whether you could have a genetic basis
#
for criminality and you can have a genetic basis for determining if someone might be
#
more or less aggressive but the criminality comes then as an add-on of nurture and the
#
environment that they've been and what they've learned.
#
And this also reminds me of a study and I've written a column on this as well on how sociopaths
#
and now sociopath is a particular biological term there's a part I think the amygdala
#
there's a part of the brain which is slightly damaged so they don't feel empathy.
#
It's a biological characteristic that they don't feel empathy and sociopaths are over
#
represented like the 5% of the population overall something like that but they're over
#
represented in criminals bankers and politicians as far as I recall which indicates that these
#
skills are you know what the lack of empathy might be the lack of empathy might be very
#
useful in getting ahead of in banking sales yes I think so yeah but you know the thing
#
there is that before we pass judgment like are all sociopaths bad people no they are
#
not because you you're born the way you're born and I always you know try to judge people
#
by their behavior if you are born the way you are there is nothing you can do about
#
that and therefore all of us have baser instincts and you know we should not start loathing
#
ourselves because we have those baser instincts whatever they might be towards violence or
#
tribalism or whatever but we should once we are aware of once we have a certain moral
#
view of the world just as long as we behave properly that's what matters people should
#
be judged by their behavior I'm getting extremely ahead of myself and ourselves here tell me
#
a bit more about the development of the science and how we kind of reach this modern age.
#
Let us go back to something that you said about how the awe of the whole idea of genetics
#
is better than the awe of divinity and when scientists actually first figured out so when
#
Charles Darwin for example looked at evolution and natural selection when James Watson looked
#
at the structure of the DNA both the scientists the first thing that came into the head was
#
that they were going to be challenging some of the most accepted religious knowledge back
#
then because they were basically saying that there is a natural cause to the way we are
#
and this is not divine intervention and both have gone through this in their notes about
#
the idea that whether they challenge will be successful Charles Darwin obviously got
#
a lot of hate email spam email whatever from the church for putting forth the principles
#
of natural selection but then science relies on facts not on opinions so they could clearly
#
see that there was a way that nature was choosing to act in a way so right from Charles Darwin
#
we had then we had Gregor Mendel who was a monk and most of his scientific experiments
#
were done in his parish so which was and his seminal paper was ignored for like 50 years
#
because it came out in some obscure thing yeah so that's an occupational hazard of being
#
in science but they did do meticulous work Gregor Mendel obviously spent years working
#
on peace and what he did was basically show that there was a factor in peace that was
#
controlling the way peace looked so the way this happens is that genes forms proteins
#
and proteins basically govern the characteristics of your body it's a physical mental to some
#
extent behavioral proteins play a role in literally most things that go on in your body
#
my favorite example is the color of your skin because not only is it dependent on proteins
#
but also on the way sun reacts and the amount of time you spend in the sun and the color
#
of the skin also provides a nice ethical challenge for us to talk about so the way it works is
#
that the DNA in the skin cells will form some proteins that will control the color of the
#
skin similar to the color of your eyes the strength of your heart muscle the length of
#
your gut everything gets controlled by proteins so what Mendel was observing was the proteins
#
in action so he was looking either at the the way the peas were whether smooth whether
#
they wrinkled the color of the flowers etc etc and what he found was that the characteristics
#
could be passed from generation to generation and so he said that there must be some factor
#
present inside the pea plant which is crossing across generations and this is the first indication
#
that maybe God was not playing a hand at creating the pea plant after that his paper as you
#
said was buried for a long time till people again started looking at the DNA molecule
#
and this is where it is also because the DNA is so small we knew that it was made up of
#
only four alphabets A T G and C it just did not seem likely that this would be that elusive
#
code that was governing everything in life it just seemed unrealistic but then in the
#
early 20th century a lot of experiments were done to show that a whatever factor it was
#
residing in the nucleus then people did laborious experiments they first killed off all proteins
#
all RNA everything else in the cell and they showed that it was a DNA that can pass on
#
from bacteria to bacteria and cause characteristics to also manifest once passed on so it took
#
us about 50 years and a lot of debate to figure out that the DNA was actually what was causing
#
characteristics to be formed in the middle of all of that we had this guy called Lysenko
#
in Russia who came and said that genetics is bullshit there is nothing like genes there
#
is no genetics we can shock therapy you can give shock therapy to everything and make
#
it behave the way we want it to so he was doing his experiments on plants but then he
#
came and said that okay why don't we also do it on humans Stalin was by then the premier
#
of Russia and Stalin really bought into this theory so he was like okay let's do this and
#
a lot of geneticists were either killed in Russia or they fled Russia a lot of the prisoners
#
of war were then taken and given shock therapy to believe in Russian propaganda and obviously
#
eventually none of that went anywhere but we did have that phase Germany on the other
#
hand Germany UK US had their own dalliance with genetics now going into eugenics because
#
once they figured out that there was something like the DNA which could actually encode for
#
characteristics they thought well then there must be pure DNA as well because some characteristics
#
are better than the others and this I think is the ultimate flaw of genetics and the ultimate
#
flaw of the way we look at society today is that we choose what are the good and bad characteristics
#
we think we have a moral say on whether longer bigger noses are prettier than smaller noses
#
and whether a very small nose is then a freaky one these are societal ideas in nature everything
#
is okay everything is acceptable so obviously we had the entire phase of eugenics started
#
in the US actually but then championed by Germany and this was again before we had figured
#
out the structure of the DNA this was when we realized that the DNA exists and that the
#
DNA can actually pass characteristics on then in 1953 came the hallmark discovery of the
#
structure of the DNA based on the work of James Watson Francis Creek Morris Wilkins
#
and obviously Rosalind Franklin who gets zero to minimal credit up for it to be fair she
#
was also not the most cooperative person to work on the project with but it was her x-rays
#
that eventually led to the discovery of the structure of the DNA that changed a lot of
#
perceptions in the game of molecular biology and opened up the field of genetics because
#
once we knew the structure people could actually go about in trying to then start reading the
#
structure editing the structure amplifying the structure and so from the 1950s we have
#
made remarkable discoveries one of our chief problems starting out was that there is very
#
less DNA if you think about it in a cell so the first thing to do if we wanted to analyze
#
the DNA was to amplify it and that's where the most remarkable things came in the terms
#
of polymerase chain reaction which is so commonly used now any lab you go to will have a PCR
#
machine we learned to sequence the DNA's we were going to read it a lot of these experiments
#
were initially done in like flies so the fruit fly that we see that's a very commonly used
#
model system in worms which are so tiny that you need a microscope to see them but a lot
#
of say the proteins in the field I work in of cell death of how cells dies were actually
#
discovered in the worm and then we found out the human equivalent of those and all of these
#
pathways are remarkably well conserved so you might have an additional protein here
#
or a slightly little detour of pathway there but most of those things are pretty same from
#
worms to flies to mice to humans which is why you see a lot of the experiments being
#
done in mice as well so a lot of the initial work got done in them because the human is
#
a complex organism to get the DNA out of so bacteria only have genes in their DNA humans
#
have something known as introns which are massive stretches of DNA which code for nothing
#
or at least we don't understand what they code for so we have a lot of junk DNA as well
#
so it took us a little bit of time to go from the bacteria to actually sequence the entire
#
human genome the first human genome was obviously made in 2003 and we spent a few billion dollars
#
on trying to sequence it but once we understood the sequence of the gene we could start understanding
#
what proteins it makes and therefore what pathways it governs what characteristics it
#
governs and at the same time we started to also learn how to edit the genes but not in
#
humans in bacteria because it's a pretty simple genome and it's usually a single cell
#
so it's easy for us to also send in material in and out of the cell so we've been doing
#
this whole gene editing but in bacteria for a very very long time we can also do it in
#
single cells which are derived from human wings but the idea that we could rewrite the
#
code on our own in a very precise manner only came with CRISPR technology CRISPR of course
#
is a dating app for genes of course it is so CRISPR was discovered in 1987 so tell me
#
a little bit more about that what does CRISPR do and you know why is it so revolutionary
#
as with most things we do we have also adopted CRISPR from bacteria so we have our immune
#
system we have antibodies we have B cells T cells which basically kill any foreign particle
#
that enters into our body bacteria are single cells so they don't really have the luxury
#
of having this entire complement of immune cells and the most common adversary for a
#
bacteria is a virus so when people were doing these studies looking at how bacteria fend
#
off viruses they found that there were repeats in the bacterial genome which were actually
#
repeats of DNA from viruses so they thought and there was like an entire library of different
#
viral sequences that kept on repeating so what scientists thought was that maybe these
#
are viruses that this bacteria has already seen and that is where the concept of this
#
being an immune system response came in so what the bacteria actually does is that when
#
a virus comes in and it chops up the DNA it takes a bit of the DNA of the viral DNA puts
#
it into its own genome and keeps it on file so that the next time this virus comes in
#
again they can match it and chop it off immediately so they can match the DNA to the existing
#
one inside the bacterial genome go and chop off the viral genome and then they build a
#
library that way of every new virus and this entire idea that you can read a genome and
#
then you can go look for a similar genome and cut it is the underlining part of CRISPR
#
so what we did is that we use those genes that develops this machinery and put it in
#
humans we also modulated a bit so now you can specify this is the bit of the genome
#
I want to cut so that the machinery will go and cut there but then you can also specify
#
what genome you want to put in its place and that's what the machinery does it's basically
#
like a copy and paste function where you cut and paste function where you specify where
#
you want to cut and what you want to paste.
#
So let me try to sort of process the whole sort of historical arc that you've described
#
there's a theory that the pace of change doesn't you know accelerates over time for example
#
we took thousands of years to get from the agricultural age to the industrial age and
#
then a couple of hundred years from there to get to the information age and now it's
#
getting faster and faster and you know within the microcosm of what has been happening in
#
this field it seems to me a similar thing I mean you know just to think of Mendel for
#
example who on his own without a you know a body a field of work to help him has discovered
#
something has discovered that there is heritability but not figured out that genes are a mechanism
#
for it because obviously he can't it must seem to him that there is a mysterious force
#
which is doing that which reminds me of the old saying that a sufficiently advanced technology
#
is like magic which is I'm sure how it would have seemed to Mendel and then eventually
#
fifty years pass his paper is discovered this work happening on genes and then of course
#
the DNA is you know after World War II the DNA is finally decoded and we understand the
#
structure and it's so beautiful and elegant and gradually people start figuring that out
#
then it seems to me that there are like two things which happen very fast in sequence
#
one is that people begin to figure out what genes cause you know what characteristics
#
and what are the functions and the purposes of genes and the human genome project happens
#
which costs I think 2.7 or 3.7 billion dollars and today you can sequence it for a hundred
#
dollars which shows our common place it's become and after that with CRISPR and even
#
you know technologies before it but especially CRISPR onwards people figure out not only
#
what genes do but how you can actually edit genes and change genes and therefore and what
#
are the implications of that like when we're talking about gene editing I'm guessing there
#
are two aspects to it one aspect is that you do gene editing in an individual for example
#
if I have some kind of deformity which is caused by a gene can you edit my genome and
#
make me better or prevent something happening in future which I'm inclined towards and the
#
second I guess would be just changing the entire line you know editing my genes in such
#
a way that I'm passing on the edited version to any kids that I might have and therefore
#
it passes on are these broadly the sort of. Yeah so there are certain nomenclature issues
#
that are currently going around in gene editing once it calls them somatic versus germline
#
gene editing somatic being in any cell of your body that will not contribute into your
#
child's development and therefore any edit done in that cell will remain to you right
#
versus germline editing germlines are those cells which as a germ cells will basically
#
contribute to development of your child so any change we make in those will also go down
#
to your child and any subsequent children that that child has right so they will impact
#
entire future generation that comes out of you the way we do somatic gene editing in
#
itself there are two ways one is either you take out cells from your body you do the gene
#
editing in a petri dish and you put the cells back in or you put in a virus into a person
#
that takes the machinery for gene editing and transfers it into the cells in the body
#
and does gene editing if we do this in vivo in vivo being inside the body kind of way
#
we do not have a guarantee that the germ cells in your body will not be edited okay we can
#
hypothetically say that they should not but we do not actually have any control if it
#
was somatic thing in vivo only meant for me it could also go into the germline it could
#
go into your germline and we actually have very little proof we don't need to do more
#
extensive experiments for that so the way the WHO says we should call them is heritable
#
versus unheritable gene editing and so somatic gene editing could also fall into the heritable
#
part we just don't know yet we need to do more exhaustive experimentation to figure
#
that one out the ethical considerations of heritable versus non-heritable are extremely
#
diverse people are usually okay if you want to do something to change your body you want
#
to have a tattoo you want to drink sugar-laced coffee it's up to you but if that is going
#
to also impact your child and their child then obviously people think that you're tampering
#
with something that is likely beyond you so we are still to that's a very gray zone and
#
I'm sure we'll talk about it in further detail but yes at this point of time for humans there
#
are these two ways heritable and non-heritable also we have been trying to do gene editing
#
in plants but that we have been doing for ages by one means or the other we're trying
#
to do gene editing in mosquitoes in flies and also some really weird applications where
#
people are trying to say take the Indian elephant genetically modify it so that it can survive
#
cold weathers and put it in Siberia so that the Indian elephant doesn't die out so the
#
Indian elephant doesn't die out they want to send it to Siberia or they're trying to
#
figure out how why honeybees are dying and how we can use gene editing to actually prevent
#
honeybees from dying so there's this whole concept of the of the clean honeybee so apparently
#
there's some honeybees which keep their hives clean some which are like me and don't so
#
the clean honeybees live longer and so they're trying to figure out what genetic differences
#
there are between the clean and the unclean honeybees and trying to create more clean
#
And one thing that I think is worth pointing out is that when we talk about gene editing
#
we are of course talking about gene editing now with all these tools and you know designing
#
these changes so to say but we are actually products of gene editing that right from the
#
time there was that first one celled organism there has been continuous gene editing which
#
has come down to us most of it completely random with natural selection having its way
#
and you know gene editing has sort of happened by random and through nature and all that
#
but at the same time there's been a lot of sort of conscious gene editing that has happened
#
that has resulted for example like in dogs like 15,000 years ago in Central Asia you
#
basically you know these experiments started where there were some wolves which were friendlier
#
than others and then they were sort of you know bred by humans and eventually you have
#
domestic dogs and similarly mules are basically an example of you know you mate a donkey with
#
the horse and you get mules and that's in a sense gene editing that you're kind of
#
carrying out so you know a lot of the mysticism that is there around these terms as if it's
#
some horrible dystopian science fiction thing happening gene editing and all of that the
#
only thing that has changed is that we understand it better and we are trying to control it
#
better and actually it's like it's been there forever yeah it has been there forever except
#
that the driver has changed so the driver in most cases were was nature and then obviously
#
all your surrounding ecosystem got to play a role in your development so the other species
#
also got to have some say in how what your population was what kind of skills you developed
#
whether you were a burrow or whether you were going to stay up on a tree your entire ecosystem
#
fed into that we have moved from that to a system where humans are can be as selfish
#
as they want to be and pick on things that we think are necessary for our existence and
#
only help those survive which is a little scary because i'm not sure whether we have
#
a complete understanding of what we need to survive but apart from the change in the driver
#
gene editing has been a part of nature ever since before even we came along i mean that's
#
how we came along was through modification of genes there is a distrust in the idea like
#
you said when i was in the uk this was about six or seven years ago and europe is extremely
#
well known for its risk averseness and that they really really take it seriously and one
#
of the this wasn't gmos were making a mark on the scene one of the headlines in the newspaper
#
i used to get at home said oh but gmo tomatoes have dna in them and i was like but all tomatoes
#
have dna in them there is nothing unique about gmos and i mean the dna is slightly modified
#
that's it but so is every other tomato's dna every time you regenerate you get the
#
remutation that's the way life works so there's nothing yeah there's nothing fancy about
#
generating itself the only scary part is that now we are the ones who can do it and so we
#
have to do it intelligently enough then one of the things you know one of the constant stories of
#
humanity for example one of the constant battles within our species is a battle against our own
#
nature for example in some ways we are wired to behave in certain ways we are wired to crave
#
children but people like me fight that by deciding not to have kids or we are wired to be tribalistic
#
but many of us are you know we have a liberal global outlook and don't think in those terms
#
you know we are wired to want sex more than you know some of us actually aim for and it seems
#
to me that a lot of human history is sort of mitigating the programming mitigating the way
#
we have been programmed which is basically happenstance but because we have also been
#
programmed to think rationally and build a system of values we then use those values to fight our
#
own programming and it seems to me that while we have been doing that at the level of culture
#
at the level of nurture you know what gene editing and the new science also does is it allows us to
#
do that at the level of nature with far more precision than we could have you know like we
#
have all striven to improve ourselves physically you know people will exercise they will work out
#
they will go to the gym they will run they will build different capacities for themselves in
#
different ways if they want to stay awake longer they'll have coffee they'll use extremely blunt
#
tools and now all that is happening is that our tools are getting finer and finer and in many
#
ways that's almost magical and remarkable it is magical it's also a little scary because
#
i think first we do need to check in where a lot of our values and morals come from the classic
#
cases is about sex preferential right sexual preferences right we have been but i have been
#
brought up to believe that being gay or lesbian is not right oh it is i mean yeah it is not
#
acceptable it is not socially correct right and a lot of the science that goes beyond understanding
#
sexual preferences was also for some time tinged with this idea that we are looking for an
#
abnormality right we're looking for the gay gene and we have figured out that look genetics has
#
a role to play in choosing sexual preferences then not sure also might have a role to play
#
but in nature this is all acceptable we have taken this social construct of you have to be a boy and
#
you have to be a girl and if you're a boy you have to like a girl and if you're a girl you have to
#
like a boy and try to impose that on biology and that doesn't work right we have not we have taken
#
the social constructs that we have been brought up with but we have not been able to embrace our own
#
biology and there are those gray areas and then you say okay we can we can actually genetically
#
edit someone not to be gay anymore that is scary i mean you don't you cannot go into those levels
#
right if you want to say that okay we'll do gene edit and try to figure out if someone has got a
#
and this is a very weird word disease because then you and i get to choose what a disease is
#
and i can say being gay is a disease right but that those are those areas of science and policy
#
that that really intrigued me because finally science has to interplay with society in some
#
some format but we seem to be for millennia now just focused on our society and not enough
#
on our science the point you're making is really interesting because you know in a sense it feeds
#
into my point and elaborates upon that you know it's true that we have been wired in certain ways
#
many of them undesirable and because of the culture that we build through our rational thought we try
#
to fight that wiring but at the same time it is true that those ugly instincts remain within us
#
and now that we have the power to shape our nature before our culture has completely mitigated all
#
the dark sides of our nature so to say and even that of course is subjective what is dark and
#
what is not you know the danger is that we could actually undo some of the good work and you know
#
enhance some of the hard wiring that we might otherwise disapprove of at a cultural level
#
for example the preference for male children or the preference for fair skin for example
#
you know and that opens up a lot of questions about the ethics of it which we shall get to
#
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for 15% off at Indian colors.com welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with
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Shambhavi Nayak about genetics and we finished kind of talking about the science of it briefly
#
and brought you up to the current date let's kind of talk about the ethics of it because you know as
#
spider-man's daddy you know in a previous episode at you know misquoted the the famous phrase with
#
great power comes great responsibility you know that it was spider-man and it's not spider-man's
#
it's Peter Parker's dad who actually said that his uncle yeah with great power comes great
#
responsibility and now that we have so much power which can have so many kinds of unintended
#
consequences not just on ourselves obviously now there's a whole branch of ethics that is
#
dealing just with this and i'll try to sort of briefly sum up what the two kind of schools
#
talk about and then you can give your perspectives on them and one i think is summed up very well by
#
Michael Sandel who i disagree with on a lot of things and Sandel says quote to believe that our
#
talents and powers are wholly our own doing is to misunderstand our place in creation to confuse our
#
role with God's stop quote and here besides the invocation of God who of course doesn't exist it
#
also sort of seems to deny our autonomy and agency and i'm far more inclined to agree with
#
the oxford bioethicist Julian Savilescu who in the context of in the context of parents
#
gene editing for the children to give the children a better life argued that parents have quote a
#
moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life stop quote and here what
#
this sort of school of thinking argues for is to say that look this is not some random mystical
#
thing which we use we do a lot of things to make our lives better to make our health better and so
#
on and so forth for our children now if we have a tool by which we can help our children and fellow
#
human beings and ourselves why should we be coercively stopped from using that tool or
#
getting access to that tool and you know again this whole sort of romanticization of you know
#
what is natural and what is not i mean first of all gene editing is natural except is being
#
done by nature and Darwin famously described nature as quote clumsy wasteful blundering low
#
and horribly cruel stop quote and if that sounds like some people you know it's not it's nature
#
people are nice or responding to incentives so you know and i'm also a very powerful argument that
#
you know really strikes a chord with me is nick bostrom's argument where he talks about
#
the reversal argument that for example if you are going to stop me from editing my kid's genes to
#
make him say smarter then what would you what would you feel if i edited my kid's genes to
#
make him stupider because by stopping me that is effectively what you're doing it is the latter
#
you know from a consequential point of view so and i get that there are sort of nuances here
#
in terms of most people would say that what i do with my own body is my business as you pointed
#
out earlier whether i get a tattoo or a funky haircut or go on a keto diet but if i am doing
#
something which has externalities like on future humans for example that is a problem for example
#
the classic example would be that i can inject whatever i want in myself however where the
#
anti-vaccine people have it very wrong is that their actions which go against science have
#
externalities on a whole lot of people because if 10 people in a neighborhood don't get themselves
#
vaccinated it exposes the rest of the entire neighborhood to that so i've tried to kind of
#
sum up the different kinds of arguments and you know what are those sort of how do you see all of
#
this for me ethics of anything is extremely personal and extremely contextual and i might
#
be an extremely unethical person to be saying this because i myself feel that in a certain situation
#
i might take a different ethical stance of it in another situation and this is the same person but
#
you know if tomorrow i have to have a child and if someone comes and tells me that your child is
#
going to suffer from a very debilitating disease but there is a scientifically safe gene editing
#
tool that you can use to now correct the child and make sure that he's healthy i don't think i'm
#
going to say no i really don't i think it would be stupid of me to say no yeah it would be wrong
#
of you to say no matter because it's not just for the baby but for the baby's future generations
#
are also likely to get that same kind of defect and the fact that i would have to undergo i might
#
need support in raising this child the amount of money that i would have otherwise spent on
#
you know taking the child on holidays maybe or for a schooling or whatever other advantages that i
#
can give him it will be spent on trying to fix this kid afterwards and i really don't see why
#
i do not get to make their choice i mean i think at the end of the day what we can enable is for
#
people to be allowed to make the choice i'm sure there are other people who think that having kids
#
born with a certain kind of disability is their karma is god's way of punishing them for sins
#
and that is their choice i mean i would like them to also embrace gene editing or any medical
#
therapies that can be used to correct and alleviate the child's pain because i mean
#
to get better karma do something else don't put that poor child under stress yeah and i mean you
#
are dealt the cards you are dealt but if you can change them or if you can at least make sure your
#
kid gets better cards and he or she otherwise would why not and at some level is it also then
#
a question of individual liberty versus the so-called community good gene i think is so
#
complicated because there's so many ways you can use it and i think every use case has a different
#
framework of what you can scientifically is achievable what is ethically acceptable at the
#
societal and at individual level that we actually have to take a few use cases and maybe talk about
#
it right so for example getting rid of down syndrome is a straightforward case i mean
#
i don't think a lot of people will come and say that no no you shouldn't do gene editing
#
getting fairer skin though for your child is slightly more tricky because we don't know what
#
kind of advantages that you're conferring the child if the child was not fair skin probably
#
in terms of social perception there might be a difference but in terms of health
#
there might not be a perceptible change right but at the same time would we just have like a society
#
of fair skin children because we think that fairer skin is better looking or something like that i
#
mean the ethical questions that that are associated with that are very very different and it's kind of
#
also straightforward sort of again like i said individual liberty and the whole more community
#
way of thinking for example let's say a parent wants fair skin and they might well argue that
#
it's not for other people to judge well you know the value of fair skin and make those trade-offs
#
i'm the parent i'll make it in the same same way that i could teach my kid a math instead of
#
drawing or i could send my kid to drawing classes instead of physics classes and you know all that
#
is up to me and they will enhance the kid in different ways there'll be different characteristics
#
so i get to choose why shouldn't i and that's kind of a difficult argument to sort of counter
#
and especially if you know you and i would both be agreed that you know that it's not good for
#
society definitely if people display this kind of preferences because then it affects
#
uh you know people with darker skins and perspectives just change and it will aggravate
#
what we see as societal inequalities for some time if they persist i think we might just end
#
up with a completely fair skin society and that would probably mark the end of humanity
#
because of the minute we all become genetically one that is it i mean as a species we are dead
#
so we have to guard against that in a way but that doesn't actually trample on on individual
#
liberties and that is something i think we have not come to grasp yet the idea that having fair
#
skin children or allowing that kind of gene editing is good or not is something that we have
#
not understood yet because there's an economic argument to this as well gene editing currently
#
costs a few billion dollars right to do in one person we are not a lot of people in india are
#
not going to be able to afford that people who can afford that might actually prefer these kind of
#
luxurious recreative gene editing therapies simply by allowing them to do those we might bring down
#
the cost of generating total and then generating for disease alleviation might become cheaper which
#
will actually impact a lot of the poor people vulnerable people who need access to gene
#
therapeutics so when we think about the morality of doing some of these actions we also have to
#
think about the impact that has on the access of those therapies to people who really need them
#
i'll come up with two thoughts sir one is for example let's for a moment leave genetics aside
#
if you're talking about individual choices and what role the state should play in regulating them
#
let's take another example from outside science where if individuals make rational choices it
#
ends up with bad social outcomes and talk about what the different schools of thought would have
#
been what i have in mind for example is i live in mumbai now in mumbai it is very common and every
#
once in a while somebody will do a feature on how landlords are not giving houses to say particular
#
communities or to single women and so on and so forth now at a social level it's a huge problem
#
because it leads to ghettoization and it doesn't lead to the kind of intermingling you would like
#
to see though by and large mumbai is a very cosmopolitan city but you have these sort of
#
enclaves and and that's not a nice thing however at an individual level it is up to every individual
#
who they want to give their house to so if you have a jan landlord who decides that i don't want
#
non-vegetarian people in my house although i am non-vegetarian and i would not get that flat i
#
respect his right over his own property others would argue that so the argument for state
#
coercion would be that this is a social problem the state has to step in and make such discrimination
#
illegal to which my argument would be that you don't have state capacity to enforce it and how
#
do you know why a person is not giving a house to someone so the law is completely pointless
#
but even if it wasn't and even if you could enforce it i would argue that you can't you
#
shouldn't do it because state coercion should be used very sparingly and certain social problems
#
can only be solved by society itself and what you want is over time uh you know the solutions
#
to them have to lie within the realms of civil society and within the culture itself to set the
#
precedent of the state coercing on the basis of imposing some notion of virtue is very dangerous
#
because today they might do it to support your nation of notion of virtue but tomorrow it could
#
be some other notion so defending individual liberty is a better idea and this thought came
#
to me when you were you know talking about for example that thorny notion of what do we do if
#
people sort of go for fair-skinned kids and and my thought there again would be that this is the
#
social problem i'd be very worried if the state stepped in to decide what can and cannot be selected
#
exactly it is a social problem um and my fear is that gene editing might become a way for the
#
society to kind of say oh okay we have gene editing we can fix all problems using that
#
and instead of going to the root of the problem and trying to figure out why do people prefer
#
fair-skinned to begin with and the fact that it makes no sense and that we as a society can
#
change our perception of the way people of the way we feel about people and the way they look
#
and then that is the crux of the problem but we might just not look at it at all and just say okay
#
now we have something that can magically change everybody to fair skin which would be utter
#
nonsense yeah and the other thought that strikes me and i'd say this question for later but since
#
it comes up now is a question of inequality where you know i would say that i i do not foresee that
#
can be a problem because when new technologies come up a lot of people assume because those new
#
technologies at the start at the gestation period especially are incredibly expensive they assume
#
that they will cause inequality only the rich can afford it and they'll create a gap between
#
themselves and the poor but the way i see it is uh if you look at something like smartphones for
#
example everybody has smartphones rather than increase inequalities they have decreased them
#
they have equalized the field they've spread opportunities to everyone similarly i would
#
imagine with over time with over scale as more and more research happens you will also like
#
you know like we uh like you mentioned earlier that the human genome project taking sequencing
#
cost billions of dollars and now it's there for a hundred dollars and similarly whatever
#
technologies come up for gene editing or whatever someday will be affordable by the common person
#
which is an incredible thing because what they are most likely to be used for most of the time
#
is to solve diseases and illnesses and so on and the amount of human misery that will be alleviated
#
you cannot put a value to that i mean scientifically speaking uh the lowest hanging fruit is disease
#
alleviation right because a lot of genetic diseases particularly are caused by a single mutation
#
it is easy for us to do the content-based maneuver for a single thing and
#
everything else in the body functions normally the more genes that are involved in thing in a
#
particular characteristic the more complicated that cut and paste goes and so it is the less the
#
more difficult it is for us to actually get away with doing CRISPR uh intelligence for example
#
there have been a lot of reports that oh we are going to have these designer babies and super
#
soldiers and extremely intelligent beings we simply do not understand the genetics behind
#
intelligence so the idea that we might actually opt for more intelligent babies is kind of
#
and it depends on how you define intelligence like if you define a certain kind of pattern
#
recognition and so on as intelligence and you could even select for autism for example
#
so it depends on you know i mean it is true that a lot of intelligence however you define it is
#
encoded in the gene some scientists estimate i think up to 60 percent is kind of the consensus
#
but a lot of it is nurture it's again nature and nurture working together and one is not sure how
#
to define it or what value to place upon it for that matter i want to ask one last question about
#
ethics because i had taken a stand on this many many years ago with a very controversial article
#
so i'll ask your opinion on that before we get to politics and eugenics which i think you know all
#
of that the political implications of it which you had referred to earlier and i think we should
#
examine in more detail and my question is really about gene doping and and this came up some 12
#
years ago and my sense was that it should not be called gene doping and that gene doping should
#
in fact be allowed because my whole point was that look we are taking protein shakes we are going to
#
the gym we are training in high altitudes we are doing all kinds of things to optimize our ability
#
for sport so why not do that why not extend that to genetics why do you draw a line there and my
#
second point was that look in any case it is not that gene doping will spoil a level playing field
#
on the other hand sports depends on the playing field not being leveled every single sportsman
#
has a genetic advantage that allows him to get there it's obviously a combination of
#
inborn talent and hard work but without those inborn advantages like how much oxygen your lungs
#
can take or so on and so forth you know all elite sportsmen are basically freaks of nature in a
#
genetic sense complete outliers in some way or the other and what gene doping actually allows you to
#
do is level the field a little bit so i don't really see an ethical problem with it per se
#
quite apart from the logistical issues of can you even detect it if it happens but
#
what's your take on this yeah you're right a lot of at least the most elite athletes seem to have
#
some kind of genetic inheritance that they can be proud of the most recently we spoke about michael
#
phelps and his ability to process lactic acid faster and so his it tires less because his body
#
doesn't make that much lactic acid isn't hurt common with many elite cyclists as well yeah yeah
#
then there was this there's this family i think in norway which has got a muscle it's a family
#
inherited mutation which causes a high muscular strength so everyone in the family are i think i
#
was reading about this there are 29 people in that family who have that thing and many of them are
#
sportsmen at the highest level so it does occur and obviously if we really can't deliver because
#
naturally or not and i think you're right i mean i don't see why we should stop people from
#
um actually i don't know i have to think about this because if i was born with some with a
#
mutation right that allowed me to be better at a sport or but better and have better endurance
#
to actually follow sport i might from my childhood be put in an environment where hard work is
#
required but if i have access to a mutation that kind of takes away the hard work component from
#
but it can't right your mutation can just get you up to the natural level of the other person
#
as long as it doesn't take away from the hard work component i don't see why it's a problem
#
if we figure out at some point of time the magic to do away with hard work then i think we might
#
have a problem no and the interesting thing is if you ban gene doping but you allow gene therapies
#
in the population then what you'll have is that everyone in the population can be a michael phelps
#
but not a swimmer not a competitive swimmer yeah i think eventually sports might be the biggest
#
victim of gene editing in a way yeah i mean if you're not consciously either allowed gene doping or
#
ban it and monitor it meticulously the whole idea of olympics and elite sports is probably just
#
going to become redundant because all sports at some level are based on inequality some people
#
get the luck of the draw they have the privilege of being born with these immense skills and i
#
actually because i love sport i want that to continue that sense but at the same time there's
#
there's no ethical reason i can think of for sort of banning gene editing even banning gene doping
#
even if it were possible and again it's a function of the way the words play is like
#
calling it gene doping itself is making a value judgment on it let's kind of get to the politics
#
like the reason genetics gets a bad rap and the reason that even today it's almost politically
#
incorrect in many places to speak of this or that trait being inherited especially something like
#
intelligence for example is what it has been used for what genetics has been used for and in fact
#
you spoke of eugenics eugenics was popular in both the u.s and the english among left-wing
#
intellectuals like george burnett shaw and so on because you know they had that transformative
#
vision of a better society and then of course hitler used it in the way he did so it's not
#
some right-wing fascist thing it kind of spread across and what kind of seemed to happen there
#
to me is that the political associate the negative association of eugenics the way it was used has
#
cast a bad light upon the field of genetics which i think is unfair because i think people don't
#
often make the distinction between description and prescription and today what has happened is
#
if you are to say that for example a and b are not the same that is a description it is not a
#
prescription that they be treated differently and this conflation often happens in the public domain
#
what's your sense of this interesting so far my for the lab coats podcast i had um i had interviewed
#
someone for rare diseases um and february is rare diseases month um and even that segment and this
#
is a clinician scientist and even that segment ended with him saying about that this is not
#
eugenics right that gene therapies for rare diseases is not eugenics so there is this fear not just
#
among civilians but even people who are actually very intimate with the field uh that are we
#
crossing a boundary of eugenics i mean truth be told eugenics is the idea that we want better
#
children i mean that that is the basic essence of the idea that you want your child to have the best
#
resources that they can but that's the original meaning of the term if you accept that language
#
evolves what eugenic basically means today in the popular imagination is you're trying to reshape
#
society through coercive means i think that is basically the point that we need to make is that
#
we all want better societies but that doesn't mean we kill of what we deem to be bad eggs
#
right it just means that we either we redefine ourselves to be a society which is more homogeneous
#
and more acceptable we do not say that everything has to come in binaries we do not say more
#
heterogeneous you mean yeah sorry more heterogeneous yeah not everything has to come in a binary men
#
can like men if they want to and not everybody has to have any kind of value judgment on it exactly
#
you are like this therefore you are bad yeah so so that is the first thing we really need to figure
#
out and then the second thing is that what genetic allows us to do is if there are diseases that we
#
think are particularly debilitating to somebody they can have the option of choosing a healthier
#
life so we are in no way saying that you are bad it is like taking medicine i mean if you have
#
a fever obviously you're going to take paracetamol you're not going to sit and say oh i've got fever
#
i'm different from my family members because they don't have fever i have fever there's nothing i
#
can do in life and nobody is again attaching a value judgment to the fact that you have fever
#
i have this entire problem with a lot of mental health diseases for example is that we we put
#
the stigma onto mental health diseases which are probably also genetically linked in a way which
#
is very different from any physical disease that you see right and because of that they are stuck
#
in a corner and they're not able to progress what genetic allows us now to do is just a better
#
understanding of gene functions a better understanding of how diseases are caused and a
#
better ability to accept and treat them and we are now at that time in society where we can decide
#
it okay we have the ability to do all of this should we do it should we decide to make ourselves
#
better in a more progressive way should we be scared of our history not learn from it and say
#
either look at our history learn from it and go no no we don't want to go down this route at all
#
because this might mess up or look at it and say okay we have made mistakes in the past
#
but now there's a new technology that can allow us to do things better so should we take that
#
chance in fact in the words of adam cohen who wrote in an editorial in the la times a couple
#
of years back where he said that eugenics was a war on the weak but now what is happening in gene
#
editing can be a war for the weak exactly so that has you know immense connotations of virtue and
#
the way i look at it is that the way the difference between eugenics and and you know the sort of gene
#
editing that you and i support is that the kind of gene editing that you and i support make the
#
lives of individuals better they have individual aims they don't have communal aims that we must
#
have a pure race or we must reshape society and consent and that's yeah that's the second point
#
that they are voluntary and not coercive so as long as they are voluntary i don't have an issue
#
with it the moment they become coercive it's just flat out wrong and no other detail frankly matters
#
to me so tell me something in this field of science particularly it seems to me that politics is
#
always hovering in the background especially because of all the things that has happened does
#
it get in the way of the science for example just you know the question of intelligence has been so
#
politicized does it get in the way of what scientists research and what they say you know
#
is a scientist who is choosing between subject a and subject b some in a university somewhere
#
going to think that no subject a could be controversial because my descriptive words
#
could be misinterpreted as prescriptive and i could get into a controversy so let me do subject b
#
do things like that happen does that affect the science particularly in india i don't think for
#
gene editing in india per se i don't think that has happened uh because it's not such a big thing
#
here yet it is not a big thing the guidelines have been written by scientists not by policymakers or
#
politicians our problem is that we have always looked westwards while forming our own policies
#
so we have not looked at gene editing as an opportunity at all we have not thought about
#
the fact that we are 1.3 billion people with a range of say rare diseases other genetic diseases
#
mosquito-borne diseases that could provide an opportunity for us to be world leaders
#
in gene editing therapies instead we are looking westward and saying that okay what is the best
#
doing is heritable gene editing acceptable no then it's not acceptable to us as well i don't
#
think we have figured out why uh scientists from say the u.s academy of sciences or the uk academy
#
are saying that actually only the u.s i don't think uk academies has said nothing has
#
commented on on heritable gene editing but the u.s academy and the european academy has
#
come across and strongly said that germline gene editing is unethical and so it is banned in india
#
as well i don't think we have figured out whether indian citizens think that this is an ethical or
#
unethical i don't think we have even bothered to ask we'll come to the policy domain a little bit
#
later another question that i think falls within the realm of the ethical is and something that
#
you brought up earlier is a question of diversity in that if within a society you have sort of
#
certain like the preference of her skin and and the danger with something like the preference
#
for fair skin is that it could set off an arms race towards people getting fairer and fairer skin
#
till everyone is fair skin and that affects diversity and that's just one example being
#
fair skin but there could be other examples of the way people behave and all of that assuming
#
that at some point in time the science reaches a stage which it undoubtedly will is only a matter
#
of time that you can basically select for everything and sort of when that happens there
#
is a danger that we move towards homogeneity for example i had done an episode with vikram doctor
#
on indian food and how most of it is actually not indian and one example he gave there was of the
#
banana which basically india exported to the world and we have a whole huge range of indigenous
#
bananas but what happened was for all kinds of reasons of economics and scale and whatever
#
one particular tasteless kind of banana called the cavendish banana became popular everywhere
#
and now that is being sort of exported back to india where it is overwhelming the other indigenous
#
kinds of bananas so and you know could something like this for example happen with human beings
#
because as a geneticist diversity is great isn't it so it is needed for a survival of any species
#
so the idea that we might have this preference of having a cricket team with all virat coli is
#
going to be a nightmare right i mean we can't all be virat coli we shouldn't all be virat coli we
#
need the other players right we need a well-behaved virat coli we would like hadik pandya to come back
#
as soon as possible you are saying this okay yeah no because hadik is kind of politically incorrect
#
for people to say good things about after that sort of kerfuffle he had on the of course and again i'm
#
not going to judge him as a person but he is a all-arounder and we need an all-arounder in the
#
team whether the and then it's up to the team to make sure that the all-arounder is well-behaved
#
cool we shall do a high five right after this session because i think he's a very fine player
#
an underrated player and a much better batsman than he gets credit for which distinguishes him
#
from our other great bowling all around the kapil dev what are the sort of malicious uses
#
of the deliberate malicious uses i'm not talking about unintended consequences which i'll come to
#
and we need to discuss mosquitoes and bats but what are the sort of malicious uses like right
#
now we are recording this on jan 25th and there's this corona virus thing that is happening somewhere
#
in china and you were telling me earlier while we were having carbs over lunch that there's a
#
possibility that something that was being you know bio weapons might have been created in labs and
#
something has escaped from there that is the effect of carbs or so there is a lab in wuhan
#
which is a biosafety containment lab where they were researching the saas virus from 2003
#
at this point of time there is absolutely no link between the viruses that they were studying and
#
the incident that happened at the wuhan seafood market but the use of gene editing to create
#
and engineer such viruses exists right we can we can use gene editing to take a virus say even
#
something as simple as measles which is common in india you can take measles virus and turn it
#
to be vaccine resistant and let it back out right those are things that are really really scary that
#
that are possible and virus the genomes are sometimes publicly available there is this
#
field of biology known as synthetic biology where you create the entire organism out of scratch
#
and it was i think 2002 that scientists made the first polio virus out of scratch and they put the
#
sequence out in public domain which basically meant that anybody couldn't go and see on how
#
to create a polio virus and that was subsequently brought down and now the public knowledge of some
#
at least some viruses is banned so you don't want to put things like this out in in the public domain
#
but CRISPR has now become so universal and it's every lab in the institution i used to work
#
previously has done gene editing in some form or the other by now so the knowledge has become so
#
so universal that it is easier for people who want to do use it maliciously to now use it
#
and create something dangerous and it might not take a lot of effort to do that whether they have
#
the the standards to be able to protect themselves from that is an entirely different thing but a
#
the science has become universal and b there has been an increased attention at bioweapons again
#
mainly because the whole idea of genome editing creating this kind of bioweapons was first flagged
#
in a u.s intelligence agency report in 2016 and subsequently a lot of other countries have put up
#
notices that this might actually become reality and adjusting the renewed attention to the topic
#
itself might have made it more appealing to non-stage actors as well that this seems that
#
states now think that this is achievable so maybe it is no in fact that's that's like earlier people
#
used to be worried about nuclear power and you know you used to talk about suitcase nukes but
#
obviously suitcase nukes are technically very very hard to actually manufacture two guys sitting in a
#
garage lab somewhere can't do it the materials are expensive uranium plutonium whatever so is
#
what you're saying that for example you know is it far easier and far less resource incentive to
#
manufacture a virus for example in a lab it would be as compared to the other weapons it depends
#
entirely on the desperation of the people trying to create that kind of a weapon and as we have
#
seen in the past decades we have become more and more stricter on the other on the other weapon
#
systems right and it's far easier to track nuclear weapons but this we can't control this we really
#
can't track like hypothetically if someone was to come to you and offer you some of money which
#
would make you inclined to do whatever they wanted you to do and they offered you their resources
#
would you be able to engineer a harmful virus after reading a few papers and if i have a bcl4
#
facility yeah you would so there are only two bcl4 facilities in india so sure but like technology
#
you know those will eventually they'll be more common and you know i'm regretting saying yeah
#
maybe i shouldn't have said yeah okay good no i mean it'll be interesting if someone does approach
#
you let me know but kindly don't accept because obviously then i have no intention of doing that
#
but what i think what we are trying to say is that it is feasible to be done there are a lot
#
more people now who can do it than there were 50 years ago who can who can actually maybe have
#
put together bits and pieces to create a sort of crude weapon the other thing about biological
#
weapons is that unlike a nuclear weapon it doesn't have to be precise yeah it can literally be very
#
crude and the other thing i think which we we often forget in this entire talk about weapons
#
is that nations have i feel moved on from the traditional geopolitical warfare to more economic
#
warfare and in economic warfare biological weapons are much more useful than a nuclear weapon explain
#
that to me look at wuhan now right i'm not saying it's a biological weapons attack but just the
#
impact it is going to have on china's economy the impact it had on china's morale because of
#
them losing a lot of the celebrations of their new uh the lunar new year the the anxiety that
#
has come into uh whether uh that she is a good leader or not whether he has been able to handle
#
things well or not right and this is in all likelihood a natural outbreak but just the amount
#
of suspicion it has brought in you can realize the amount of impact is going to have uh and so
#
in economic warfare using something like this to destroy somebody's food crops for example
#
makes more sense than trying to nuke them yeah i mean absolutely there's nothing you can do
#
about it the genie is out of the bottle in a sense so and you can you can not tell even with wuhan
#
right the assumption is that it is it is a natural outbreak i'm it is very likely going to be a
#
natural outbreak i mean there was this entire thing about anthrax leaking out from the facility
#
in russia but apart from that we don't we we do not seem to have a lot of virus outbreaks that
#
have happened as a result of virus escaping labs but yeah you cannot tell where it has come from
#
it is very difficult to trace it back if it is a deliberate attack you cannot even tell which
#
country has done it so let's let's since we can't do anything about this we must be very dark
#
most certainly yeah we must instantly become in denial of the possibility of such a thing and
#
instead turn back to subjects we can both talk about which are science and economics respectively
#
and talk about unintended consequences like one of the famous textbook cases which everyone talks
#
about and i believe it's been tried in india is can you genetically modify mosquitoes so they don't
#
spread malaria that is one instance and another instance can you genetically modify mosquitoes so
#
they stop breeding and therefore there are no baby mosquitoes yeah which is your favorite scenario
#
my favorite scenario is the first because you know i the the spoiler has happened i know what
#
can happen with the second one which is basically if mosquitoes die out what will bats eat and the
#
whole ecosystem goes haywire and that is incredibly scary to me on the other hand genetically modifying
#
mosquitoes assuming the scientists are fairly confident then it becomes a probabilistic game
#
that there won't be other that they can control for other things going wrong sounds like a good
#
idea to me well what do you think tell me enlighten so uh i feel first came across this whole
#
genetically modified mosquitoes when oxitec was doing its studies in brazil so oxitec is a british
#
company which has pioneered uh this technology uh their technology is your scenario b where you
#
kill off the mosquitoes completely um and they have done this in the cayman islands they have
#
done this in brazil and they have an ongoing experiment in maharashtra in jalna it has been
#
going on for i think a year and a half now um but i don't know what the results um i don't know
#
don't even know if the results have been made public yet but how does it work they catch one
#
mosquito and modify it and hope that it no no no so they make the mosquitoes in the lab uh and they
#
make it so that so these are only male mosquitoes so they won't go out and bite so only the female
#
mosquitoes will bite you yeah the female anopheles mosquito basically spreads so the female mosquitoes
#
bites you because poor thing needs your blood to give birth to baby okay so it's not even selfish
#
again she's trying to perpetuate because it is natural instinct so they breed the male mosquitoes
#
in the lab and the male mosquitoes have a mutation so it's such that when they meet with the wild
#
type being the non-mutated a female uh the offspring doesn't survive so the offspring dies and that way
#
you don't get furthering of the population and the idea is that once the male mosquitoes die
#
you replace them every year with newer and newer mutated male mosquitoes so that is that model the
#
other model is in which you mutate the mosquito such that any larva that comes out so any baby
#
mosquito that comes out cannot harbor the pathogen itself so obviously the mosquito is not causing
#
dengue or malaria it is the malaria plasmodium or the dengue virus which once it goes inside you
#
causes the disease the other way is that you change the mosquito so that whenever the say
#
the malaria plasmodium enters the mosquito it dies within the mosquito itself so even if the mosquito
#
bites you there is no plasmodium being transferred so you're not going to suffer the disease as you
#
said this is a preferred scenario over killing of all mosquitoes because we really cannot estimate
#
the impacts that will have on the food chain um there are some people who argue that mosquitoes
#
form only a tiny part of the bat's diet so it might not actually impact the bat at all we don't
#
but it's really difficult to tell my other argument also is that if you completely remove
#
say the anaphylous mosquito you might see a rise in some of the other mosquito variations
#
variants in your area which might not also be desirable when it comes to the other scenario
#
where you cannot harbor the mosquito cannot harbor the plasmodium anymore that sounds great
#
but again we don't know how it will impact other mosquitoes that did an experiment again in brazil
#
where they took mosquitoes from two or three different countries and created this mesh
#
mosquito hybrid mosquito and released it in to confined field trials and what they found was
#
that some of the other mosquitoes also ended up getting pieces of dna which were not found in
#
brazil so somehow some gene transfer has happened and then this was again a trial which was done by
#
oxitec and oxitec said that we did estimate that some level of this kind of gene transfer will
#
happen now suppose the mutation itself gets transferred to other species what issues might
#
that cause we don't know how effective this whole thing might be in replacing the entire mosquito
#
population so that your complete malaria incidence goes down we don't know the problem with india is
#
that we don't even know where our malaria incident is right we first have to figure out what the
#
hotspots of mosquito bleeding are to be able to then go and do something there we need to have
#
adequate monitoring mechanisms to make sure that if anything does go wrong after we release these
#
mosquitoes we can figure out in time to stop the only difference between a genetically modified
#
plant and a genetically modified mosquito is that we cannot recall the mosquito once it's released
#
it's released it's gone there is no way we can call it back at least with plants we can know
#
which farmer has brought the seed and we can do something about it so i have my own doubts about
#
the technology about how effective it would be how long it will take for nature to fight back and
#
say that no no no we understand what you're doing how long till the larva decides that we are like
#
the plant sorry the malaria plasmodium decides that to find another host whether we have the
#
monitoring mechanisms to actually take control of the situation and my biggest doubt is is whether
#
we will again use this as a nice way to say that okay we don't need to do fumigation we don't need
#
to stay clean maintain clean households because hey we have got integrated mosquitoes so sri lanka
#
which is a tiny neighbor for us managed to become malaria free after five years of intensive effort
#
uzbekistan became malaria free after intensive efforts neither of them used genetically modified
#
mosquitoes whether we have given these other measures enough time and enough effort to see
#
if they're effective or not i don't know and whether we can actually use those existing methods
#
in a better way than traveling out something that might risk our ecosystem is something that we have
#
to figure out i mean it could be a great tool if it if there were no caveats attached to it
#
uh but i do not want it to be used as this great solution there's a great upai over everything and
#
say that okay we don't need to do anything now we just have to integrate it in mosquito so done
#
episode i really liked with vijay kelkar and ajay sha who written that great book in service of the
#
republic and one of the like like they were talking about some of the characteristics of
#
good public policy and two of them seem to me applicable in this instance one of them is that
#
whatever interventions you make make them on the smallest scale possible so that you can control
#
you can measure you can roll back and the second one is that it should be reversible so that if
#
something goes wrong you can turn track and it seems to me that in the case of this whole mosquito
#
thing one the scale is actually very large because once they are out in the wild you the consequences
#
can be across the globe and forever so it's not a small scale at all and two it's not reversible
#
ideally a lot of these gene editing experiments at the at the population level have been done on
#
islands i have no idea where they pick jaal na i mean jaal na seems like a poor choice to have
#
you could have ideally picked an island where you could do this kind of a study and try to look at
#
the impact on the ecosystem yeah and you know here what what do you think of like the common
#
argument used against genetic modification and it's especially been used and i think in that
#
context it's a bad argument against gmos is a precautionary principle that because we don't
#
know what may happen let's not do it and my fundamental opposition to the precautionary
#
principle of course is that no progress would ever happen if we followed the precautionary principle
#
and in the case of gmo the politics behind it absolutely disgusts me because the science is
#
pretty unanimous on you know gmos being completely safe and they've saved millions of life
#
and for you know since the 90s when they became common across the western world for millions and
#
millions of hectares there have been absolutely no side effects and the benefits to nutrition and
#
all of that have been remarkable i wrote a column on this which i'll link from the show notes about
#
the different satyagrahas in india where farmers have fought for their rights against
#
uh politically motivated NGOs but in general in gmos i know we'll both agree on this but
#
in general when the precautionary principle is sort of invoked what's your sense on that like
#
where do you draw a line and read and say that it's applicable here and where do you say okay
#
i think for me it is applicable when it allows for consent right so for a gmo crop for example
#
if i do not subscribe to the idea that gmos are healthy i can say that i don't want to buy this
#
product because it says this is gmo product right if you tomorrow decide that you are going to
#
release gm mosquitoes in my environment i really have no other choice apart from moving yeah i
#
have no idea how you will take my consent into account when releasing mosquitoes so for me
#
everything goes down comes down to the idea of whether individual consent is enabled in a
#
situation or not and i think for gmos for the crops it's the same farmers have the right to
#
choose whether they want to use gm crops or not and consumers have the right to choose whether
#
they want to eat gm crops or not and then you can let the market decide what happens that's
#
tremendous clarity and which is a good time to segue into the policy questions where you know
#
speaking to you now and you know before i you've got a lot of clarity on how and why we should you
#
know frame policy and how we should look at these issues partly because you are both someone trained
#
in the science and passionate about it and you're also kind of trained in public policy
#
but what's been your experience of working in the policy ecosystem of this in india which i assume
#
must be young and growing and learning and tell me a bit about it actually seems to be old and
#
unlearning a lot of the policy makers i've met i have extremely rigid views about what should be
#
done there is this subservience to what comes from outside india and extremely risk-averse right we
#
do not look at any incoming technology proactively we do not want we do not take those decisions which
#
might end up how do i say this upsetting certain sections of the society so i don't think we
#
leverage the strong points that we have a we have got well not a lot but we got a bunch of really
#
good scientists we have got good infrastructure and we have got a huge population riddled with
#
problems that basically provides like ample opportunities for you to try and do something
#
about it when i was in the uk when i was doing my phd on breast cancer i was working with breast
#
cancer patients and in four years i got to see 16 patients that's it right and one of the reasons
#
why i wanted to return to india was i was i thought was i thought that if i wanted to work on cancer
#
i need to see patients and i'm going to get to see those patients in india right but here we don't
#
seem to appreciate the fact that we have that opportunity to be able to change so many lives
#
there's a fear that because there are a lot of vulnerable people foreign companies might come in
#
and exploit them but i mean that is your role as a as a policy maker to be able to protect your
#
people but also not shield them away from opportunities to a better life so yeah it is
#
it is surprising because this whole the whole thing about heritable gene editing and the ethical
#
causes behind it i've had a number of conversations where i've asked people do you think it's
#
unethical they will say yes it is unethical then i asked them why do you think it is unethical
#
and they say oh because the science is not up to it yet it is premature and then i go but that's
#
a scientific risk it's not a ethical risk right so in their minds themselves they have not understood
#
the difference between what is ethically correct and what is scientifically correct and then when
#
you talk about ethics which is very deeply rooted in religion and faith that you have to make people
#
make the choice again in the u.s there is there seems to be scientific consensus that germline
#
gene editing is unethical right but when the pew research group did a civilian study they found that
#
87 percent people u.s civilians thought that using germline gene editing in babies to correct a
#
debilitating disease or life-threatening disease is acceptable so we don't even know where our
#
concepts of ethics are coming from no and it's interesting and a lot of it may be an instinctive
#
eekiness like for example when louise brown the first rescue baby was born her parents leslie and
#
john uh got trolled viciously uh as you would be in those days before social media with a lot of
#
hate mail including parcels containing plastic fetuses which had been splattered with blood
#
and and you kind of wondered at what kind of anger causes someone to uh sort of do that and
#
where these sort of it almost seems as if some primeval taboo has been breached yeah it just
#
happens with every new technology right when the recombinant dna first came in so recombinant dna
#
is basically you can change your dna you can create a dna inside a lab um and any change dna
#
for that's what is known as recombinant dna and when we understood that we could uh say take a
#
human gene and express it in a bacterial cell to create a human protein and then we could use that
#
human protein back in humans people were scared about what would happen right what what would
#
people be doing with such kind of technology and there was a ban on the recombinant dna
#
for many years and then there was this entire episode of when hiv first came into america
#
and it quickly spread among hemophiliacs so hemophilia is obviously this disease that
#
means your blood doesn't clot so if you have a tiny cut you might actually bleed yourself out
#
it's very common among the european monarchy for example that's something i will come back to later
#
but so hemophilia if you're hemophilia you require a lot of blood transfusions
#
and because aids had made hiv had made its way to to the u.s and people did not really know where
#
it had come from or how it spread a lot of tainted blood actually went into hemophiliacs without the
#
knowledge i did at hiv and then it became like a hemophiliac disease and people really were scared
#
because as a hemophiliac you really had no other choice than undergoing a blood transfusion but you
#
did not know whether you'll end up with hiv or not and that is when recombinant dna came to rescue
#
because people had been creating the protein that was missing in hemophilia using recombinant dna
#
in labs this was not tainted blood this was the pure protein it could be given without any worry
#
of spreading hiv and then the recombinant dna just burst on the scene people were more
#
agreeable to it more acceptable of the technology but it came at the cost of many lives and i think
#
it might be become very similar with gene editing question really is can we just learn from what
#
happened in the 1980s and 90s and say that okay we don't want to pay that cost of life anymore
#
and it strikes me just looking at incentives the incentive of a bureaucrat who's making a
#
policy decision about this would be if he is if he doesn't understand this new technology like
#
say in the case of recombinant dna and he says that okay i don't really understand this why should
#
i take a risk doing nothing and banning it is the safest way for me because if i allow it and
#
something goes wrong and would this and this is a very natural rational way for the bureaucrat in
#
question to behave but would it then point to a structural problem in the system that there aren't
#
enough scientists or people with scientific knowledge embedded in the policy making mechanism
#
so that such fears don't arise and such decisions can be taken with much more in much more informed
#
ways yeah and with transparent data i think one of the things that we have really struggled with
#
is getting data and being able to communicate that data in a coherent manner we saw this happen with
#
gmos we saw it happen with bt cotton we saw a lot of narrative being served by anti-gmo lobby simply
#
because the government of india never released data on uh how good the crops were we saw this
#
happen with jm mustard and jn brinjal which passed safety tests uh by the government of india but
#
whenever approved uh by the government of india they approved in bangladesh and they benefited
#
bangladesh enormously and our poor farmers suffered yeah but release the data we need to see right i
#
mean one of the one of the other issues is that we have been unable to accept limitations
#
if something doesn't work it doesn't work it's okay to say that it doesn't work and try for that
#
answer but we simply won't do that uh with bt cotton i thought that it is it should be anticipated
#
that the ball worm against which bt cotton provides resistance will develop resistance
#
because hey nature finds a way right it will happen we have seen it happen again and again
#
and again nothing is going to change now uh so it will happen uh and to be able to anticipate
#
that to be able to work with farmers uh so that they don't suffer a loss is something that is
#
completely doable but when technology comes and we either look at it as this miraculous cure that
#
is going to be a one-stop solution that we never have to look at it again um is hurting us either
#
we look at it from that way or we look at it from the way that no no this is going to be after
#
incomplete disaster so we shouldn't do it right we have and and when i see when i've particularly
#
for the gmos i've heard both the narratives um and they're so extremely demeaning of the other one
#
they are so extremely um they're just they're just not agreeable to hearing each other out um
#
they are not agreeing to the fact that both of them have some merits right there are some risks
#
we are not going to say that everything is great at the same time we cannot say that nothing is
#
worth it but just getting them to the middle ground is very difficult exactly and and in the case of
#
gmos for three decades there were absolutely no side effects anywhere the rest of the world adopted
#
it and we were making our you know having said that i was at the bricks academic forum last year
#
on a panel on how the bricks nations can cooperate on agriculture and someone from the south african
#
contingent stood up and asked but gmos are hazardous to health so i don't want them to
#
come into south africa and i was thinking okay these people are probably the best that south
#
africa can send to an academic forum so obviously must have an academic pedigree must be extremely
#
well educated has come with scientific people from his community and yet believes that gmos are bad
#
for health so yeah there's something wrong with the narrative shaping that we seem to have lost
#
out on so how can this policy making process in india be reformed like for example could you
#
illustrate with the example of any specific policy decision and what are the different sort
#
of pulls and pressures that go in what are the considerations and you know right so for the
#
generating policy uh the policy actually just came out in december uh 2019 the first meeting
#
was held under pressure in 2017 i was not part of any meetings i just know about this from outside
#
so in 2017 they held the first meeting this was the icmr and dbt which is the indian council for
#
medical research and the department of air technology and then nothing moved for two years
#
until the babies in china were born the genetically modified babies which again put on a lot of
#
international pressure on countries to pass some sort of policy tell me a bit about that
#
what genetically modified babies in china so the scientist chinese scientist was working on hiv
#
for a long time and there is a particular receptor in the immune cells where the hiv virus binds
#
and goes in so if you remove the receptor the ccr5 receptor you basically can afford immunity
#
to hiv so he was working with couples in africa where hiv is pretty common and he decided to
#
find couples where the father had hiv positive the mother did not modify the so take the egg and the
#
sperm create an embryo and modify the embryo so that it removes a part of this receptor
#
uh and then i did it the child should not get the hiv which her father has so he created these twins
#
nana and lulu and they were born in november 2018 and he made this landmark announcement
#
and the world shook right because till then everyone was saying that no no germline
#
genetic is something we will never get into we should not get into there were a lot of
#
skeptics who said that someone or the else is going to do it so we don't see the point of a
#
moratorium but there was this supposed self-imposed moratorium and then nana and lulu come along
#
and then these two kids come along um and obviously then the chinese academy of sciences
#
decided to take swift action the house put him on the house arrest is jailed now for three years
#
we still don't know what has happened with the kids they were taken under state control
#
um but it is china so everything is under state control i guess um and there have been some
#
studies which some will say that the babies are fine some will say that the babies might not live
#
long uh but we really don't know what's happening what's happening there after that there was a guy
#
in russia who said i want to do the same experiment but uh that the chinese scientist science was
#
wrong so that there was some arguments that the experiment that he did was scientifically
#
incorrect i mean for the ethics part but scientifically he could have done better
#
so this russian guy came and said i know i'll do the same experiment but i'll do it scientifically
#
better but then the russian government said no doing so that fizzled out so you're coming back
#
to the question of you know the indian policy on that 2017 demand and then this happened in 2018
#
and how did all of that impact the policy uh so then they came out with an actual draft policy
#
uh the draft policy came out in i think august last year uh that they announced it and they gave four
#
days for uh public consultation so it came out on monday and they said friday is your last year
#
good lord that's ridiculous and luckily i saw it uh so i gave back my comments but i've never heard
#
anything back from them and the final draft that was released um in december is exactly the same
#
draft as the the one for public consultation so i don't know if they have actually if actually
#
anyone has commented or if they've actually even looked at the comments or not so and one of my
#
bigger issues about that draft and i think it summarizes all of our comments so far is that
#
it says that gene therapies are going to be allowed for therapeutic benefits and i have no
#
idea what therapeutic benefits is it can be defined anyway it can be anything and the problem that
#
that such ambiguity in policy brings is that a india really requires investment in science
#
research and development our government spends very very little on rnd and no private investor
#
is going to come in when you cannot promise that the product you're making is going to be acceptable
#
or not at the end of the day and when you have something called therapeutic benefits in it
#
i really cannot tell right whether it's then up to whoever is the decision making committee to
#
decide what i bet that falls into i mean then it's again laid open to bureaucratic discretion
#
they may you know err on the side of safety and so on and so forth so what reforms could be made
#
to it to make them more receptive to new science and to knowledge and to better data as you pointed
#
out earlier uh you know how could it work better because i'm imagining the pace of change is so
#
fast that these are old world bureaucrats in an old world governance system actually designed in
#
the 19th century by the british and there is so much change happening so much information coming
#
in it's it's an archaic system in this modern world yeah and it's a copy paste of the old
#
guidelines so they will pick some old guidelines and say okay whatever we can copy paste you can
#
copy paste and wherever gene editing has to be inserted can be inserted the gene editing
#
guidelines actually are a little more progressive than the stem cell guidelines which came out in
#
2017 that look at stem cell therapies in that a the gene editing guidelines actually say that
#
we will form working groups of scientists and patient groups and lawyers for particular diseases
#
right this was something that even takshashira's working document has argued for the past two
#
years that let's not have one committee that determines everything for all diseases so that
#
was one thing that we found was very progressive the other thing that i think they could have done
#
and what we have suggested was that have the working group come out with detailed
#
guidelines for the disease since you are the primary funder for a lot of the research anyways
#
you can actually have the luxury of saying that these are the 10 diseases i want to prioritize
#
research on because data shows that they are most common in india so you can say that these are the
#
10 diseases we have these 10 groups working groups who will say that if your if your solution
#
can offer say 90 90 percent efficacy then we'll allow it to the next stage right if we have that
#
kind of clarity built in then we can actually see people getting more and more into research
#
and creating gene editing therapeutics instead of just using it for fundamental research the other
#
thing that we thought was it is still a very bureaucratic system so we already have a few
#
committees at the institution level so say at a research institution you will have a
#
have a institutional biosafety committee you'll have a stem cell committee and then you will also
#
have a national apex committee who has to see what you're doing so there's a lot of monitoring
#
going on this guideline actually forms a third committee on to sit on top of all of that so you're
#
like why why have all of these committees just create one that says that okay your research is
#
okay or not okay streamline the decision making now you're just going through like four or five
#
committees to figure out whether you can actually do what you want to do after which you start doing
#
what you want to do and you kind of mentioned guidelines having things like okay if you have
#
more than an x percent chance of happening and it kind of just struck me that new technologies in
#
any field new technologies have a far buyer have a far higher bar of acceptance than existing
#
technologies i mean just to take an example for example in the case of technology in cricket
#
which i have which i argued from from the early 2000s onwards when i was in cricket for that we
#
should embrace technology in cricket and my only metric was that is the technology more reliable
#
than the umpire not that it should be perfect but is is it better than what is existing and
#
it's not even a binary because technology is an eight to umpire so you're comparing umpire alone
#
against umpire with technology and say if umpires have a 90 accuracy rate i am happy then if umpire
#
plus technology has a 95 accuracy rate i'm not going to use the remaining five percent you know
#
to argue against technology and to build an alarmist case and is that something that often
#
happens in the case of new technologies i think it does i mean actually i don't know because
#
it gets it really gets compared with what we have existing right and how we can improve
#
whatever is existing your first mindset to look at new technologies to look at risks
#
people really look at benefits first the the most extreme scenario pops in your head first
#
and then you compare it to the most extreme scenario of what your existing technology has
#
and the problem is that with a new technology you don't know what the risk is so your your
#
brain automatically starts thinking that you are on batter style galactica right siberian elephants
#
will suddenly come back to india and destroy everything yeah so uh that i think is bigger
#
problem is that we have not been able to make a calibrated guess of what might actually happen
#
and for that you need more scientists in the decision making process but you also need more
#
progressive scientists we need more young scientists in policy roles we need more young
#
scientists trained in policy learning one of the other issues that i see with scientists who
#
contribute to policy making is that they have not been trained in public policy so they don't know
#
how to frame a problem in policy terms yeah and they have been always been in the nice academic
#
luxury bubble i might get a lot of flak for saying that but it is true they have not been exposed
#
outside of their campus to see how technology can integrate with and change society and how
#
society can actually adopt technology so for example i speak i work with a lot with patient
#
groups right and when i speak to scientists they're like huh jumla engineering makes no sense
#
we don't need it i'm yet to come across a patient group representative or a family member
#
of a patient group who has told me that let's not go down the chain because the pain is very real
#
for them i mean you can put everything aside but for them to see their loved one out of pain
#
is the most important i mean if you have kids with down syndrome or you have whatever any
#
kind of health problem to your near and loved one you know why should you not make life better
#
so just to understand the whole thing of benefit to risk ratio to take out opportunity cost
#
basic concepts of economics supply and demand is something the scientists are not trained with
#
i mean they're not supposed to be trained with but if you're going to make a policy decision
#
then you really need to know these facts yeah fair point so you know before we kind of wind up
#
a couple of things i'd like you to talk about one is hemophilia in europe something that you
#
mentioned about how royals apparently had more of it and royal blood and all bled out faster
#
and did not stop bleeding and the other one and this makes a whole episode non-structured
#
because it's a very arbitrary thing and i didn't ask it at the right time but about for example
#
the effect that endogamy had on gene lines for example i had done an episode with tony joseph
#
on his wonderful wonderful book early indians and he had spoken about how after all the different
#
waves of migration first the out of africa migration and then the west asian migration
#
from harappa and downwards and then finally the arian migration there was a lot of intermingling
#
for a couple of centuries everyone's having a party everyone's having fun with everyone else
#
and then suddenly that stops and it's endogamy 2000 years ago and it says david reich describes
#
it you know while the han chinese are a large population india is actually a collection of
#
many many small populations because it's endogamy and and people are you know a lot of it determined
#
by the caste system that there simply isn't that much mixing going around and i won't ask you to
#
elaborate on the politics or the sociological aspects of that but what did it mean in terms of
#
genetics so these two questions right so the first one about monarchy and hemophilia so queen
#
and hemophilia so queen victoria actually had uh was a carrier for the diseased hemophilia gene
#
since this is an x-linked gene so women tend not to suffer from it so much unless both of their x
#
chromosomes are impacted but men because they only have the x from the mother will show
#
hemophilia so queen victoria actually passed it down to her sons and her daughters were carriers
#
and because back then you know european monarchy tended to marry into with each other uh you could
#
see that gene pop up across many families but i think the most uh impactful was in the russian
#
monarchy case so zarina alexandra was related to victoria she was victoria's granddaughter
#
and so was also a carrier for hemophilia and she was very worried uh that her son alexi
#
would also have hemophilia he actually did have signs of suffering from hemophilia and it was a
#
constant worry over alexis future that brought her closer to rasputin uh because rasputin came
#
and said that he could cure alexi uh and all of that muddle obviously contributed to the sa's way
#
of dealing with i mean he had other problems as well but all of that kind of catalyzed the revolution
#
the revolution that saw the sa's end which i mean how hemophilia can ruin families is
#
is amazing and the way it actually figures along european lines is is fascinating today
#
and rasputin i guess was a baba ramdev of russia and the fascinating description of and this is
#
really unintended consequences where uh you know a genetic mutation leads to boom communism yeah
#
lord help us yeah now tell me about the caste system okay uh so obviously we have been practicing
#
endogamy for many for more than 2000 years now uh the direct result of this is that if my ancestor
#
from 2000 years ago had a mutation that caused a disease uh it continues to be perpetuated simply
#
because there is no new gene pools that are coming in right and so you see a lot of these founder
#
mutations persisting in communities the most commonly cited one the most interesting one is
#
in the vaishya community of andhra pradesh uh so they have a mutation in a gene that prevents them
#
from metabolizing anesthesia certain kinds of anesthesia uh so what doctors are saying is that
#
if you give the anesthetic to the patient the patient dies doesn't come out of sleep and then
#
some back research figured out that it was in this particular community only that this was happening
#
and then they traced it back to the mutation that was common to the community so now in andhra
#
pradesh they will ask first which community belong to and if you belong to the vaishya community they
#
will give you a different kind of anesthetic so that it doesn't kill you uh so india has now
#
embarked on projects to try and figure out what kind of founder mutations are present we have
#
i think about 5000 sub-populations if you look purely at genetics wow to try and figure out what
#
some populations might be more predisposed to what kind of diseases uh so that they're at least
#
self-aware and they can take proper healthy steps uh to either prevent the the birth of children with
#
diseases or preferably marry outside their community but that is actually a very interesting thing and
#
i think uh because i have two cousins who are of eligible marriageable age right both are extremely
#
well educated one's a doctor one's a dentist and obviously when the family decided that they should
#
get married they started looking within the community and i understand that you know at a
#
day-to-day level you'd prefer to marry someone from your community because you will probably
#
eat a similar kind of food you're grown up with similar kind of values and all of that but then
#
came that entire so the the girls are like nah i don't want to get married within this community
#
i want to find someone outside then came the question of kutra right and elders in my family
#
were like nah it makes no sense you know you should marry within the community as long as not in your
#
gotra genes doesn't make any problem so i mean these are both extremely well educated girls like
#
they're like no no but you have been doing endogamy for so long i want healthy children i want bigger
#
gene pool uh and they're just like no no you marry outside gotra you're fine the entire system of
#
gotra however discounts for the fact that once a woman marries her gotra changes but her genes
#
don't yeah so it makes no sense really i mean i can't marry my aunt's child because we still have
#
the similar amount of dna shared as i would with an uncle's child and so i think a lot of the
#
genetic diseases that we've seen in families in close group families probably because of
#
the remnant of that is a fact that we have automatically assigned different gotras to
#
girls so this is where sexist behavior actually also transcended into genetic disabilities but
#
it is um this is actually an eye-opening til for me and i'm sure for many of my listeners
#
to learn that so many physical ailments could have their root cause in a social disease
#
the social disease of caste and which is you know another illustration of why diversity is
#
just a bloody good thing yeah but on the other extreme now we have seen these things like genome
#
battery right where you can match your dna and find a compatible dna partner we still don't know
#
the science behind a lot of this right there are some extremely encouraging cases such as the
#
doriasorum which is a jewish non-government organization based in the u.s the jewish obviously
#
also have been practicing endogamy for a long time at least certain communities have been and so what
#
doriasorum does is that it looks at specific diseases that are common to those communities
#
and it takes dna samples from teenagers it takes no other information no name number nothing they
#
will give you a unique id they'll take your blood sample and they will just keep it on file they
#
don't even tell you whether you're susceptible to diseases or not when you choose to marry somebody
#
else from your community you dial in both of your numbers and they will tell you whether it's a
#
compatible match or not right so whether both of you have similar diseases or not that's it
#
it allows you the right to privacy they don't take any public information it affords you the right to
#
not know because if you know that you might be susceptible to something but you're never going
#
to have it it might just end up you might end up taking steps that you don't need to right it might
#
change your lifestyle in a way that you really don't require so that i think is a really good
#
model but we just don't know enough information about the indian genome and predisposing to
#
diseases in india to be able to make compatible matches yet so if someone does come along and
#
asks you for a dna sample and that they find you a match might not buy in immediately it is probably
#
just as similar as a patrika yeah but one day when the science is settled it'll be a better
#
way to do that than a patrika though ideally you should go for a date and have a cup of coffee and
#
ask your have carbs have no carbs okay so we have come to almost the end of the time that
#
you've so generously agreed to spend in the studio before we go you know i'll ask you to look ahead
#
in the future you know you know the science you know the policy environment you know what's going
#
on look 20 years ahead okay 20 years ahead and tell me what is the best case scenario for humans
#
and what is the worst case scenario with regard to where genetic technology is our knowledge of
#
genetics is taking us because my sense is and i think you'll agree with me is that this will be
#
enormously consequential and will have huge impact on human welfare so give me a best
#
case scenario and a worst case my worst case scenario which i'm tending to think is also
#
the likely scenario is that we selfishly use gene editing to change the nature around us
#
for it to fit with us rather than for us to fit with nature we have picked a handful of species
#
that we want to survive and we basically are going to end up destroying earth doing that best case
#
scenario is that we keep the tools ready for when we need to use them and we can intelligently figure
#
out what are the cases in which we really really need to use this technology and cases where our
#
existing technology or a change of our own convenience is enough to guarantee a better
#
future if we can figure out that gene editing is not going to be the one-off solution that we are
#
ready to give up some comforts to say rail and climate change and we opt to do that for our
#
future generations then i see in 20 years we are in a really good place on earth where we can leave
#
your future generations with the hope that they can continue surviving thank you so much for coming
#
on the show thank you for having me if you enjoyed listening to the show do head on over to twitter
#
and follow shambhavi at the naik mike i'll have to spell that out it's one word t-h-e-n-a-i-k-m-i-c
#
the naik mike one word on twitter dash shambhavi you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a-m-i-t
#
v-a-r-m-a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i-n and
#
thinkpragati dot com the scene and the unseen is supported by the takshashila institution
#
where shambhavi and along with many other outstanding policy thinkers work you can check
#
out their public policy courses at takshashila.org.in thank you for listening
