60 Minutes - 4/29/2018: CRISPR, The Price of Admission, Seaweed

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Bill Whitaker reports on a new gene editing tool -- that is revolutionizing biomedical research. For nearly 20-years -- Bill and Melinda Gates have sent 20-thousand disadvantaged students to college. Scott Pelley talks to some of the students who benefited from the Gates Millennium Scholarship. Lesley Stahl reports on a new type of farming -- with seaweed. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. I think CRISPR, it's fair to say, is perhaps the most surprising discovery and maybe most consequential discovery in this century so far. If you have never heard of something called CRISPR before now, that's likely to change. CRISPR is a tool for editing our DNA, reprogramming the genetic code, and it has scientists excited about tackling genetic diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.

How many diseases are we talking about that this could be used to treat? There are about 6,000 or more. The hope is that we'll be able to address most, if not all of them. There's a new kind of affirmative action happening on college campuses, and students from low-income families of all races are the ones who are benefiting. I feel like a lot of our peers knew from the jump how to navigate college. Their parents were like, you need to do this, you need to do this, and a lot of us did not have that privilege.

I was having this discussion, and it's like, oh, we're going to go to New York for the weekend. Let's all go to New York. It's like, I can't go to New York. I've got to stay here. I have to do my job. This is literally my job. Welcome aboard. Thank you. It's not often you get a ride to visit a farm on a boat. Here we go.

But former fisherman Bren Smith, the nation's leading advocate for a whole new type of farming, ocean farming, Ocean Farming, asked us to join him as he headed out to his version of fields to plant his staple crop, a type of seaweed called sugar kelp. So are you a fisherman or are you a farmer? I'm a farmer now. What else are the pieces of what it is to be a fisherman? It's to own your own boat, succeed and fail on your own terms, and have the pride of feeding our country. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott

Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown, sausage crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. It's challenging to tell a story about something that's invisible to the naked eye and tricky to explain,

but it's one we undertook because rarely does a discovery come along that could revolutionize medicine. It's called CRISPR, and it stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR sounds more like a refrigerator compartment than a gene editing tool, but it's giving scientists power they could only imagine before, to easily edit DNA, allowing them to reprogram the genetic code of living things. That's opening up the possibility of curing genetic diseases. Some researchers are even using it to try to prevent disease entirely

by correcting defective genes in human embryos. We wanted to see for ourselves, so we went to meet a scientist at the center of the CRISPR craze. This is CRISPR. This has CRISPR in it. So this is what's revolutionizing science and biomedicine. This is what many people are using in research and trying to develop treatments. That's wild.

Yeah. That little vial is igniting a big revolution that is likely to change the way doctors treat disease in the future. One of the brains behind it is baby-faced Fang Sheng. How about the scale of RPA? At 36, he's already a tenured professor at MIT and a scientific celebrity because he figured out a way to override human genetic instructions using CRISPR.

So the CRISPR is not the liquid. The CRISPR is in. It's dissolved in the liquid. There are probably billions of molecules of CRISPR. Billions. In here. In here. That's right. And the way we use it is we take the

liquid and we apply it to cells. It's very exciting, actually. For the last seven years, Shung has been working on CRISPR at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's a research mecca brimming with some of the brightest scientific minds from Harvard and MIT on a mission to fight disease. CRISPR is making medical research faster, cheaper, easier. So just mix out these three. Zhang's colleagues predict it will help them tackle diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. How many diseases are we talking about

that this could be used to treat? There are about 6,000 or more diseases that are caused by faulty genes. The hope is that we'll be able to address most, if not all of them. Most, if not all of them? That's the long-term hope. So we're talking diseases like Huntington's, sickle cell. Yeah, ALS, hemophilia. I think CRISPR, it's fair to say, is perhaps the most surprising discovery

and maybe most consequential discovery in this century so far. How that code is read out. To understand exactly what CRISPR is, we went to Eric Lander for a quick science lesson. He's director of the Broad and Chong's mentor. He's best known for being a leader of the Human Genome Project that mapped out all of our DNA, which is like a recurring sequence of letters. During the Human Genome Project, we could read out all the human DNA

and then in the years afterwards find the misspellings that caused human diseases. But we had no way to think about how to fix them. And then pretty much on schedule, this mind-blowing discovery that bacteria have a way to fix those misspellings appears. This comes from bacteria. This comes from bacteria. Bacteria, you know, they have a problem. They came up with a real clever solution. When they get infected by viruses, they keep a little bit of DNA and they use it as a reminder.

And they have this system called CRISPR that grabs those reminders and searches around and says, if I ever see that again, I'm going to cut it. Zhang used that same bacterial system to edit DNA in human cells. Our DNA is made up of chemical bases abbreviated by the letters A, T, C, and G. As you can see in this animation from Zhang's lab at MIT, a mutation that causes disease reads like a typo in those genetic instructions. If scientists can identify the typo, they can program CRISPR to find it and try to correct it. You program it.

You say, I'm looking for this string of letters. And the CRISPR will go in, and out of all of the billions and billions and billions of letters on your DNA, find the exact ones that you have programmed. That's right. CRISPR will allow you to do many different things. You can cut it to edit it. So you can snip out the bad part and you can add something that you want as well? That's right. You can give the cell a new piece of DNA that carries the sequence you want to incorporate into the

genome. You say this so matter-of-factly. This is amazing. It is pretty cool. How many other labs around the world are working with CRISPR like this? Many. One of the things that we have been doing is to make the tool available to researchers. To date, I think we have gotten it out over 45,000 times to 2,200 labs in 61 countries. What are they doing with it? They're using it to do everything. A lot of applications of CRISPR is really a Swiss army knife. Cue the worldwide CRISPR frenzy.

At the University of California, scientists used a form of CRISPR to edit mosquitoes so they can't transmit malaria. Their colleagues are modifying rice to better withstand floods and drought. In China, scientists tweaked a gene in beagles to make them more muscular. A CRISPR vial from Shang's lab made its way to Dr. Kang Shang. He's an ophthalmologist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and wanted to see what all the hype was about. What did you think when you first heard of CRISPR?

I was a little bit skeptical. Why skeptical? It worked so well, too well, to be believable. He decided to experiment on mice with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic form of blindness. He conducted a vision test using a mouse with the disease. This is the blind mouse. This is the blind mouse. And obviously you can see that he is ignoring the rotating stripes.

His researchers injected CRISPR into the eye of another blind mouse. The CRISPR was programmed to find the main gene associated with the disease and turn it off. It takes three months to see the results. Now let's see how he's responding to the light. He's following it around. Yes. Look at that. You're sure that he is seeing these lights?

This is actually a very commonly used test for vision. How much of their sight do they recover? About 30, sometimes even 50% of the sights for mice. They all have very strong research programs. The next phase of Dr. Shang's research is to see how CRISPR works on one of our closer relatives. He sent us this video from his lab in China where he's studying monkeys with retinitis pigmentosa. The blind monkey ignores the food. He says this monkey was treated with CRISPR and it's easy to see the difference. Dr. Shang hopes to try this

on humans soon. If CRISPR is used to treat disease or make a drug, it could mean big bucks. The Broad and Fengshang hold a primary patent for CRISPR's use in human cells in the U.S. But no technology is developed in a vacuum. Biochemist Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, and her team made landmark CRISPR discoveries. This is no longer science fiction. This week, they are challenging Zhang and the Broad in court for the rights, arguing in part that Zhang's advance was derived from her team's breakthrough. It's a high-stakes battle. CRISPR is projected to be a multi-billion dollar market in a decade. Does that mean big business

for you? I think we're still quite a ways away from developing CRISPR into a real therapeutic. I think you're being a little bit modest. I mean, this is sparking an incredible boom in biomedicine, and you're in the center of it. I think there's still really a lot of work that seems to be done developing the system so that they are efficient enough, making sure that they are safe enough. But these are things that we're working hard to make possible. But what if it were possible to stop disease from even occurring? That sounds like science fiction. But a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon, say with CRISPR, it's now a reality. You correct it at the very, very earliest stages of life.

Right. In the womb. Even before that womb. Manipulating embryos has been the focus of Shukrat Matalapov's career. He runs the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University. Matalapov is a maverick. He regularly makes headlines with his innovative, sometimes controversial methods to prevent genetic disease. Preventing is always more effective, so there would be no recurrence of new disease, particularly when we're talking about heritable diseases that parents pass to children.

So Matalapov and an international team of scientists decided to use CRISPR on human embryos to correct a single genetic mutation that causes a deadly heart disease called hypertropic cardiomyopathy. We got lots of eggs, so that was great. They got healthy eggs from donors. Do you want the embryoscope dish? And sperm from a man who carries the disease. At the same time the eggs are fertilized, they also get an injection of CRISPR. Final co-injection?

Yes. Metallopov enlarged the microscopic procedure over 300 times so we could see it. Here we have our pipette with sperm inside, which has been already exposed to CRISPR. And this is an egg. And so what we need to do is pierce through, and then we break membrane, and now... Release the sperm into the egg. Yeah, and now this is the sperm coming in. Now it's inside the egg.

Just like that, that egg has been CRISPR'd. CRISPR'd, fertilized. And you have changed the genetic destiny of that embryo? Yes, we believe so. These embryos will never be implanted, but they are grown in an incubator for three days and then checked to see if they carry the disease mutation. Normally, 50% would. Matalapov says with CRISPR, 72% were free of the mutation that would cause the heart disease. This is a huge advance in science and medicine. We hope so. I think we're still kind of in the early stages. I wouldn't say that we're ready to go to clinics now. He knows his results have to be replicated by an outside lab

before they are accepted by the scientific community. But if they hold up, one day CRISPR could be used to help families that have been plagued by inherited disease for generations. Is that what drives you? Yes. Of course, it's a suffering of children but also the guilt that parents have it saying I passed it to my child so like I caused this disease and I think now we have a tools where we could help these families. Matalapov wants to use CRISPR to eliminate disease but the concern is his research has created a blueprint for less

scrupulous doctors to design human beings, to edit embryos to make babies that are smarter, taller, stronger. Metalopov says that's not even possible right now. Your critics say that you're playing God. I think you could say to every treatment that the humans and doctors develop that we're playing God. God gave us brains so we could find a way to eliminate suffering of human beings. And if that's playing God, I guess that's the way it is. So what do you think about editing an embryo to prevent disease? We don't really understand how complicated biology is. There's a gene called PCSK9. If you remove PCSK9, you can reduce cardiovascular disease,

heart attack risk significantly. But it also has been shown recently to increase risk for diabetes. So how do you make the judgment call between these tradeoffs? And there will likely be other impacts we haven't yet identified. So I think we need to wait and be more cautious. I don't think we're close to ready to use it to go edit the human population. I think we've got to use it for medicine for a while. I think those are the urgent questions.

That's what people want right now, is they want cures for disease. Those urgent questions might soon be answered. A small clinical trial, the first in the U.S. using CRISPR to target certain types of cancer, is now enrolling patients. I want to always balance hope versus hype here. While it's not going to affect somebody who might be dying of a disease today, this is going to have a real effect

over the course of the next decade and couple of decades. And for the next generation, I think it'll be transformative. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping, history-telling podcast, chronicling the epic

story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. America, built on the dream of upward mobility, has become a country of deepening divide between rich and poor. The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. Now, major universities like Princeton are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status. It began with two of

America's wealthiest parents, Bill and Melinda Gates. They spent more than a billion dollars putting low income minority students through college. Before they tell you what they learned, come meet some of the Gates Millennium Scholars. I'm Bill. Imagine having a couple of billionaires walk into your life and make the seemingly impossible possible. Hi, Kyra. Nice to meet you, Kyra. That's what Bill and Melinda Gates did for these students at the University of Central Florida. They're among 20,000 nationwide whose tuition and expenses were paid in full. When you were notified that you received the scholarship,

was that a letter, an email, a phone call? How did that come to you? A letter. Came as a snail mail? How did that come to you? A letter. Came as a letter. Snail mail? Yes. Really? I think it was priority. The founder of Microsoft, and you got a snail mail acceptance letter.

When you got that letter, what did you think? My mom, she opened my mail, and then that's when she broke the news to me that I got this car. I'm sorry. Nearly 70% of Americans don't have a degree, and Kyra Kelly was destined to be one of them. She grew up in poverty, and even today, she wastes nothing. Because as a child, she often had only one meal a day, the free lunch at school. I guess I never really dreamed of going to college. I just knew I just had to do what I could do to make sure that my family and I could survive.

When you started the scholarship, what were the big questions that you wanted to answer? Well, one was whether a group of minority students could have very high achievement, go to the toughest universities if there was no financial constraint. You assume that minority students would do as well in higher education, but what you were looking for was data, hard facts. You bet. What's proven itself out now with the scholarship programs, you remove that barrier, they not only do as well as their white peers,

no matter what zip code they're from, they often actually do better. The Gates program looked for good students, but not necessarily the top of their class. The results have been remarkable. Nearly 90% of the Gates scholars have earned a degree, and that's life-changing, because on average, graduates earn a million dollars more in their lifetimes. Make some observations. Now it's Kyra Kelly who's doing the teaching,

after earning a bachelor's and master's degree in education with her Gates Scholarship. As college becomes more expensive and student debt rises, what's at stake for America? Well, it's a huge problem. We'll have a two-class society where the richer families are able to support the scholarship, and you'll have an inner-city, mostly minority group that's no longer going to those elite colleges and therefore a lot of the high-paying professions are out of their reach. So that's really bad at an individual level. It's also very bad for the country and our basic founding credo of equal opportunity and our economic strength. Bill Gates's warning echoes on the quad of Princeton University.

We have to be a place where people can come together from lots of different backgrounds. President Christopher Eisgruber is leading the nearly 300-year-old school through a radical transformation. You know, the 20th century activist Upton Sinclair described Princeton as, quote, the most perfect school for snobbery in America. We look back and we see those kinds of quotations about us, and we have been working to produce a very different Princeton. And this commitment we have to be a real leader on socioeconomic diversity is a big part of taking the next step for us and making the right kind of difference in the world. To make his point, Eisgruber showed us yearbooks going back 100 years.

This one's from way back in 1915. You can see, obviously, we're all male and we're all white. 68 years later, Eisgruber graduated from Princeton. So we've run the clock forward pretty rapidly. Now we have women. Now we have women. Now we have women. And here's an African-American student. But only occasionally in 1983.

Over the next 30 years, minority representation more than doubled to 40 percent. But it wasn't enough. Sixty percent of its students were still from the top 10 percent income bracket. So Princeton decided to start recruiting students based on socioeconomic status. We realized we had to train our readers in the admissions office to look for different things in these applications. A kid who's working two jobs to help bring money home and achieving great grades isn't going to have the same kind of extracurriculars as a kid from an elite private school in New York. But if two applicants with the same test scores, the same GPA apply, are you

going to prefer the first generation low-income student? We do think those students supply something special on this campus. So yes, we're looking for that. It's a new kind of affirmative action, it sounds like. Yes, it's a new way of making sure that we have the diversity on our campus to deliver on the kind of education that we care about and that the world needs. Last fall, we met some of Princeton's chosen ones. Toyin, Mason, Kelton, Jackson, and Jalen are first in their family to go to college. With Chris and Tyler, they're considered low income. At Princeton, that means household income of less than $65,000 a year.

Be honest, how many of you stepped onto the Princeton campus for the first time and thought to yourselves, I may not make it? Almost immediately, like two seconds in, there it was. What intimidated you? The school looked like Hogwarts. That's true. And I had never been in an institution that looked so expensive and old in my life. It just seemed like everyone was so much more capable, and it made me feel very small. But Jalen figures she's part of a new community, the FLIES. That's short for first-generation low-income. You're sitting here wearing a fly is fly t-shirt. What does the shirt

mean? So, Fly is Fly is a campaign educating Princeton students on the resources available to first-generation low-income students and also working to destigmatize this sort of first-generation low-income, low socioeconomic status. Princeton helps these students succeed with summer programs and seminars on public speaking, resume writing, and networking. We really want to develop your fluency in what's essentially relationship building, right? I feel like a lot of our peers knew from the jump how to navigate college. Their parents were like, you need to do this, you need to do this. And a lot of us did not have that privilege. And then it felt like they already had a leg up and that we're struggling

to catch up. I was having this discussion and it's like, oh, well, we're going to go to New York for the weekend. Let's all go to New York. It's like, I can't go to New York. I got to stay here. I have to do my job. This is literally my job. This year, 28% of Princeton's freshmen are first generation or low income. 60% of the student body receives financial aid. Your student body isn't infinite by accepting some of these first-generation low-income students. You must be turning down some highly qualified kids, maybe kids who have Princeton in their family history. Scott, one of the things that is so tough about our admission situation right now is we're turning down 93.5% of the kids who apply. So as we've taken up our low-income students who are still underrepresented in our population, we've had to make other tough choices about other students. Is this idea of bringing up the lower socioeconomic

class into higher education a movement in this country? I think it is a movement right now, at least among college and university presidents. I think there's a recognition that in this country? I think it is a movement right now, at least among college and university presidents. I think there's a recognition that in this country right now, some of the divisions that we need to heal are around economic class, and we need to be paying attention to that. Among those paying attention are the presidents of some of the largest public universities. In 2013, backed by the Gates Foundation, they formed the University Innovation Alliance, headed by Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. Within each school, what's worked and what hasn't worked? I can tell you that.

In four years, Alliance schools have increased low-income student graduation by nearly 30 percent. How did you do it? We did it basically by innovating our culture. We changed our culture from faculty centrism, that is we're there for the faculty, to student centrism, we're there for the success of the students. Now that might sound like we should have been doing that all along, but the academic culture is often built around the academic as opposed to being built around the student. They've lowered tuition costs by making it easier for students to transfer from community college and by increasing online learning so students can both work and stay in school.

Bill, we've talked a lot about the needs of the students, but what are the country's needs going forward in terms of a workforce and education? Well, the economy is constantly changing, and automation is taking away a lot of the jobs that you could do with only a high school degree. And so if we look at the current trajectory of how many kids are going to college, we're going to fall over 10 million jobs short of being able to fulfill the demand. Also, as we're competing with countries, China and many others, they will get ahead if their education level gets beyond ours. And so it's great for the individual, but it's also important for the strength of this country.

A country that if their dreams come true true can expect from these low-income students a future lawyer, entrepreneur, president, and professor. What do you think the class of 1970 would think of this group? Diverse. They wouldn't be able to believe that you were at Princeton, their Princeton. I hope they wouldn't think it's their Princeton. It's kind of like our Princeton now. Like, that's the good thing about it is, like, we're so diverse. And, like, that's the best thing about this whole change that's happening. It's our Princeton.

And, like, 20 years from now, it's going to be someone else's Princeton that may look a whole lot different than this. And I think that's the beautiful thing about it. Mm-hmm. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Many of us think of seaweed as a nuisance, the slimy, sometimes smelly stuff that clogs fishermen's nets, gets tangled in our ankles in the ocean, and washes up unwanted on the beach. Even its name, seaweed, implies something undesirable. And yet, increasing numbers of fishermen, scientists,

and foodies in this country are starting to look at seaweed very differently as a promising source of food, jobs, and help cleaning ocean waters. With rising global populations and limited space to expand agriculture on land, they are turning to the sea and its weeds as a new frontier. Welcome aboard. Thank you. It's not often you get a ride to visit a farm on a boat. Here we go. But we were on board with Bren Smith, the nation's leading advocate for a whole new type of farming, ocean farming.

We joined him on a cold day in December, the time of year he heads out to his version of fields to plant his staple crop, a type of seaweed called sugar kelp. Here it is. This is the farm? I can't see anything. The whole idea is it's down under the water, so it's the white buoys. That's the edges buoys. Yeah. That's the edges of the farm. And the black ones?

Black buoys are holding up a horizontal rope below the surface, so it's rows, kind of rows of crops. This is the seed. He showed us what looked like a tube covered in fuzz. Is that kelp? Yeah, these are the baby plants. They're about two millimeters, and these are going to grow to 15, 18 feet by the spring. It's one of the fastest growing plants on Earth. And unlike all those plants that grow in Earth,

seaweed doesn't need fertilizer or fresh water. It's what's called a zero-input crop. So now we're just going to unravel it. Just attach the string it grows on to rope and suspend it eight feet underwater. And that's it, huh? That's it. In five or six months, that fuzz will look like this. This was some of his crop last year. Smith began leasing the right to farm this 20-acre plot of water in 2012 from the state of Connecticut. His was the first commercial seaweed farm in the state. Now there are nine, with a half dozen more in the

works. We hope, you know, in 10, 20 years there are thousands of farmers doing this. We think it's the future, the time to move out in the ocean, and luckily we can do it the right way. Smith spent most of his life working the oceans in what he now considers the wrong way, on industrial fishing boats, going after lobster, tuna, and cod. We were tearing up whole ecosystems with our trawls, fishing in illegal waters, and just really chasing fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea. And you didn't think about the idea that you were depleting the population of fish. The oceans just seemed boundless. Boundless and bountiful. The sense of meaning of helping feed my country, you know, fishermen, there's some jobs, you know,

coal workers, farmers, I think steel workers and fishermen where, you know, there are jobs that are soul-filling. You know, there are jobs that we write and sing songs about. And I just, I think steel workers and fishermen, where, you know, there are jobs that are soul-filling. You know, there are jobs that we write and sing songs about. And I just, I wanted that life, and I still do. But that life was increasingly in peril. Cod stocks crashed due to overfishing. And after Smith reinvented himself cultivating oysters in Long Island Sound, hurricanes Irene and Sandy hit,

destroying his crop two years in a row. Wren was really on the verge of bankruptcy. Searching for a new career on the water, he sought advice from Charlie Yarish, a professor of marine biology, whose lab at the University of Connecticut studies some of the thousands of different types of seaweeds. But there's only 20 globally that are actually farmed. They're not all edible. No, they're not

all edible. Some of them actually are quite toxic. We have now all these strains. It was Yarish who suggested Smith consider sugar kelp, a local seaweed that gets planted after hurricane season is over, has a mild taste, and can also be used as animal feed and fertilizer. Seaweed for you was the light bulb. Yeah. The eureka moment. We can create jobs here. We can protect and improve the environment. We don't have to make this choice. Yeah, that looks nice. Smith now operates one of the largest seaweed hatcheries in the country with tanks full of developing kelp spores and a processing room that comes alive in spring when he and his team bring in the harvest and get it ready for sale.

Blanched in 170-degree water, kelp turns a vivid green and can then be sold fresh or frozen, sometimes in the form of noodles. Smith's customers include Google for their cafeteria, Yale University, and several restaurants and wholesalers. He has sold out the last four years. But at this kelp farm across the country in the waters outside Seattle, producing food is almost beside the point. This is a test farm where Betsy Peabody of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund and a team of scientists are doing an experiment to see whether seaweed can help fight the growing problem of ocean acidification

caused mainly by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the seas. Seaweather seaweed can help fight the growing problem of ocean acidification, caused mainly by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the seas. Roughly 25% of CO2 in the atmosphere is being absorbed into oceans. That is what we're getting from fossil fuels? From both carbon emissions, from deforestation. And I think initially people thought, well, thank goodness the oceans are taking up some of that carbon dioxide. But then scientists started to document that in fact, when that carbon dioxide goes into the ocean, it causes chemical changes. Changes like increasing the water's acidity, as documented in the U.S. government's

2017 Climate Science Special Report. The excess CO2 causes a decrease of carbonate ions, which many marine species use to build their shells and skeletons. Worldwide, ocean surface waters have become 30 percent more acidic over the last 150 years. And in the Pacific Northwest, the problem is compounded by currents that bring more carbon-rich waters to the surface. And that's where seaweed comes in. Kelp take up carbon dioxide like any plant does, and it just so happens it lives in the water. There are winners and losers in ocean acidification. Organisms that produce carbonate shells, like shellfish, they're a loser.

They can't handle the lower pH. They can't deposit as much calcium in their shells. On the other hand, when seaweeds, like kelp, they actually pick up that carbon dioxide because now it's easier for them to do photosynthesis. Imagine trees on land pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. Well, seaweeds and kelp are really good at pulling CO2 out of the water. So basically what you're doing is the equivalent of planting trees in the ocean. Exactly. And then testing to see how much of a difference it makes.

We've got scientific mooring buoys anchored at both sides. The yellow. The yellow buoys. They're measuring how water changes as it flows through the kelp field and seeing if baby shellfish grown with the kelp do better at building their shells. Results won't be in for more than a year, and Brent Smith is eager to see them. He's been growing shellfish on his kelp farm, too, but not, he admits, because of the science. He says it's good business.

In November, he and his team loaded thousands of baby mussels into netting that looked like massive sausages and then suspended them from ropes that hang down below the kelp. He calls it 3D ocean farming. Why 3D? We call it that because we're using the entire water column. And if you can stack crops on top of each other, it's just really efficient. You don't use large plots of ocean, but you get so much food. So you've got your seaweed. Yep. You've got the kelp here, and then we have the mussels. Underwater, each row looks something

like this. Off the same lines, we have scallops. And then below the whole system, we have scallops and then below the whole system we have cages with oysters in them. He brought up one of those oyster cages from the bottom to show us. What kind of these? We call these thimble island salts. Let's haul some mussels. Andy hauled up a mussel line so we could see their progress too. They're in bunches. These are about mid-size, so they'll double in size. We'll harvest these just about the same time we harvest our kelp. So this is going to be a big harvest. So are you a fisherman or are you a farmer? I'm a farmer now. Whether I like it or not, I'm an ocean farmer.

And I talk to fishermen about this. I say, listen, we have to make this transition, that heartbreaking move from being a hunter to a farmer. But what else are the pieces of what it is to be a fisherman? It's to own your own boat, succeed and fail on your own terms, and have the pride of feeding our country. We get to keep those things. He's so convinced he's launched a non-profit called Green Wave to encourage others to follow his lead.

Husband and wife Jay Douglas and Susie Flores are among his seaweed farming disciples. A former Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Douglas learned the ropes literally on Smith's farm last spring, spent a year getting a permit for his own plot of ocean in Connecticut, and built 36 anchors from scratch. The day he and Flores went out to plant their first crop, Smith was along for guidance. I want to set this at an angle downwards. His non-profit provides free seed and guarantees to buy 80 percent of their harvest for the first two years. He estimates that with a $10,000 to $20,000 investment and a boat, new farmers can turn a small profit the first year,

rising to well over $100,000 later on. JJ! What am I on? Has anyone actually said, you know, you guys are a little nuts? Yeah. People just, yeah, kind of scratch their heads and say, what are you making all these anchors for? It's like, I'm starting a kelp farm.

What the hell is kelp? Yeah, right. Why? Which raises a question for this whole endeavor. Will Americans in large numbers start eating seaweed? Just toss them in there, a little kelp. Chef and author Barton Seaver thinks so. He's written a whole cookbook of seaweed recipes. When I hear the word seaweed, the last thing in my head

is I want to eat that. You think they'll buy it out there? I do. I think, you know, 10 years ago, kale wasn't on the shelf. He says, first off, the name seaweeds got to go. He prefers sea greens. Is this one of the dishes you created? This is an Italian dish that typically uses spinach. He suggests integrating seaweed, pardon, sea greens, into things we already know and like. Are you nervous that I might not like it?

In front of all of America? No, not at all. Surprisingly, it didn't taste fishy or seaweed-y. Annie says kelp is rich in calcium, fiber, iron, and antioxidants. That's really good. It is really good. This is what's exciting about this space. The oceans are a blank slate. From my generation, this is a really exciting moment. I can farm and grow food, but also I can soak up carbon and nitrogen, while creating jobs, while giving people the opportunity to create small businesses. And while fulfilling his dream of living his life on the water.

Yeah, I want to die on my boat one day. That's sort of the goal, and I think if I look over my life, my goal is just always how do I keep working at sea. Fifty seasons of 60 Minutes. Tonight, from ten years ago, when we interviewed the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he was a polarizing figure with a sharp wit and piercing intellect. He was a constitutional originalist, a philosophy he laid out for us. It's what did the words mean to the people who ratified the Bill of Rights or who ratified the Constitution.

As opposed to what people today think it means. As opposed to what people today would like. But you do admit that values change. We do adapt. We move. That's fine. And so do laws change. Because values change, legislatures abolish the death penalty. Permit same-sex marriage if they want.

Abolish laws against homosexual conduct. That's how the change in a society occurs. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.