February 21

Please complete the brief and anonymous Survey Monkey course survey! Frank feedback will help me make the “What has DNA done for me lately?” course better suit your interests - thank you!

For our last meeting

Please raise any issues you wish to talk about, though I expect we will spend much of our time discussing the potential benefits, challenges and dangers of germline gene editing.

Below are PowerPoints that highlight the difference between gene editing in somatic cells (such as muscle, skin cardiac or kidney) versus germline cells (sperm, eggs and early embryos) and also raise some specific “Brave New World” questions that we might wish to consider. As before, most of the explanatory information in the PowerPoint files is given in the Notes section of each slide. To view these Notes, select Notes Page.

1. CRISPR as a gene editing tool

2. Somatic cell gene editing and germline gene editing
   

Additional Readings (& images)

Two back-to-back, one-page opinion pieces, published in Nature, in which Jennifer Doudna urges caution on germline gene editing and George Church argues that we should encourage, not restrict, research on germline gene editing.

Isaacson highlights the views of Harvard Philosophy Professor Michael Sandel (Chapter 35, page 281) on the ethics of gene editing. Sandel’s article in the Atlantic “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering” is clear, thoughtful and forceful.

In case you may be interested in reading some more about DNA research, nature vs. nurture and/or the Human Genome Project, click here for a few books that I highly recommend!

James Watson bookends our course - sadly, or appropriately, after a career of honors, at the end he has been dishonored by removal as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and banished from its meetings. He still lives on the CSHL grounds in Ballybung, the President’s Mansion. CSHL itself has a regrettable past as, from 1910 to 1939, it was a major institution within the American eugenics movement and base of the Eugenics Record Office of two prominent American eugenicists of the period.

Here is a nice description of how the conventional PCR test for covid-19 works, and here is a news piece that describes CRISPR assays for covid-19, including those developed by the Doudna group and the Zhang group.