Good Life Project - Your DNA May Not Be Your Destiny: Carl Zimmer

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

Is your DNA your destiny? Can you swap in better "source code" to save your life, change your appearance, be smarter or more athletic? Can a mother inherit DNA from her fetus? What do you really get when you pay for inexpensive genome-testing? These questions are just part of what we cover in today's deep with acclaimed science-writer, Carl Zimmer. Zimmer writes the Matter column for the New York Times and contributes to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American, among others. He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award three times, among a host of other awards and fellowships. He teaches science writing at Yale University. His previous books include Parasite Rex, Evolution, and Microcosm.His new book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a stunning, powerfully-researched, eye-opening look at the truth about heredity, DNA, what is truly in our control and the astonishing breakthroughs coming our way in just the next few years.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible.Photo Credit Mistina Hanscom Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So think about this. Can a mother actually inherit DNA from her child? Can a parent who is a smoker pass down not just their genes to a child, but the risk factors that would activate disease from their smoking, can they pass that down to their child and then their child and then their child? And then once we have our DNA, once we have our genetics, once we have inherited, quote, whatever it is we've got, can we do anything about that? Can we find out what it is? Should we find out what it is? And if we like what we've got, then awesome. But if we don't like what we've got, is there something we can do about it? These are just some of the questions that I explore with today's guest, Carl Zimmer. Carl is a science writer who has written, I think, 13 or 14 books. His latest is an absolutely

fascinating deep dive called She Has Her Mother's Laugh. And it's an unusual, astonishing look at this idea of heredity. Deep dive into what it actually is, the history of it. We spend a lot of time talking about what this actually is and isn't, and all these questions about genetics, DNA, and some pretty amazing cutting-edge science that may dramatically affect the answer to the question, do you just get what you get and don't get upset? Or is there something that you can do about your state of DNA and in turn, the future of your life? I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Also, before we dive into today's conversation, I have something kind of important to share.

Our annual gathering, Camp GLP, is coming up in August. It's just about 90 minutes from New York City. It's already about 80% sold out. And the final $100 early bird discount expires in just a few days at the end of June. So the reason I'm bringing this up is if you've been on the fence or thinking to yourself, this sounds amazing, I have to go, but then figured, ah, I'll come next year instead. We want to make sure that you know there will be no next year. This is your final chance to come and celebrate with us and our beautiful, brilliant community and really just drink in the warmth and the friendship

and the profound awakening that this experience brings with it. So to learn more or reserve your spot and come to camp, just visit goodlifeproject.com slash camp or click the link in the show notes. Okay, on to our show. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. When our first child, Charlotte, was due, and Grace, my wife, was pregnant, our doctor said, okay, we want you to go see a genetics counselor, which is standard. But we just didn't want to go.

We just sort of felt like, well, what is there that they're going to tell us? And this was way before any sophisticated genetic know, sophisticated genetic testing was possible. This was, again, so this would have been in 2000. And, you know, I go in there just very sort of cocky and a little hostile, I think. And the genetics counselor is talking about, you know, the issues of like, well, you know, like we want to talk about your family and what sort of things you might have inherited and what you might pass down to your child and obviously like this is like high school stuff this is grade school stuff but it really started to rattle me because this was not an abstraction anymore like this was happening you know and and and she's asking us about our family history. And I'm like, well, you know, there was this uncle who I think had this condition,

but I'm not sure. And this grandfather who I can't really remember how he died, but it was something. Oh, my God, what was it? Maybe it's something that I could pass down. You know, and she's trying to like sort of calm me down. So you go in at first kind of like all chill, like you know it all. And then by the time you're done. I got this.

I do this for a living, you know. Just trust us. We're cool. Yeah, and by the end, I'm just a wreck. You know, and then the girls are growing up. And, you know, you sort of look at them and you say like, well, she got that from you. Or, no, no, she got that from me or whatever, you know. And it could be anything. It's absurd, you know. And that's kind of, she got that from you. Or no, no, she got that from me. Or whatever.

And it could be anything. It's absurd. And that's kind of where the title comes from. I mean, you could say, well, where'd you get her eyes from? Oh, she's really tall. Where'd you get that from? She's got your voice. She's got your laugh.

She likes math. She hates math. She hates math. Somehow, it's as if all these things are sort of magically encoded in some little book that you're passing down this incredibly mysterious molecule. I mean, people just ask each other now very casually, like, you get your DNA tested yet? You do 23andMe. Which company do you like? Do you like 23andMe? Do you like Ancestry.com?

What about FamilyTreeDNA? Which Ancestry do you like better? Yeah, right. Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. But people getting their DNA sequenced for less than the price of the glasses on my face is just amazing. Because the first time people sequenced the human genome, it was $3 billion. And here we are where you can just order it as a cheap Christmas present. And millions and millions of people are doing it now.

Let me ask you, what is the difference between the quality and the detail of the sequencing that was done the first time that cost $3 billion and what you would pay a couple hundred bucks for to get from swabbing your cheek now? Yeah. So in the 1990s, the Human Genome Project, which was a government project, which also kind of turned into a private one as well, there was a bit of competition. But basically, the goal was, we are going to sequence the quote unquote, human genome, like singular, as if we all have the same one. Basically, what it meant meant was we just want one rough map of where all genes

are in our DNA. Because our genes are generally all in the same locations on our chromosomes. It's just that the spelling of our genes might be a little bit different between you and me. So they just wanted one. And it wasn't even like one person. It was actually kind of a mishmash of a few people. I just all sorts of genetic diseases or risk factors for cancer and other things without having to hunt through the whole genome to find a gene. You just look at your atlas. So now if you go to 23andMe or Ancestry.com, they're not sequencing your whole genome. So your DNA, it's spelled out in basically like letters. There are four different units your DNA can be in, and you've got like about over 3 billion letters. So think of like a big wall of books at a bookstore.

Like that wall would be your genome. Now, if you go to these companies, they will only sequence the letters at a million about a million different positions scattered through the genome so it's more like a representative sample yeah yeah so these are yeah so and and the thing is that the way the dna gets passed down it gets it kind of gets shuffled in each generation through something called meiosis and then passed down and what that means is is that DNA from person to person, they're like similar chunks, you know, so the same chunk of DNA,

but it'd be sort of like traveling down through the family tree. And so if you know that you have, you know, one of these genetic markers at such and such a location and maybe another one nearby, chances are you, you can guess what that whole sequence is. Yeah, you say, oh, all right, that's the signature of this kind of chunk of DNA. So you, I wouldn't say guess, the term is impute. That's the official term.

So you can get a pretty good idea of what your DNA is like from that. And, you know, it can, you know, if you needed to like get a super, super up close sequencing, like you might, you know, like if there was a gene that popped up as being a real concern in one of these tests, you might go to a clinical geneticist, they might say like, okay, we're going to really sequence that gene like crazy to make sure we know exactly what's going on there. Now, while I was working on the book, I actually figured out a way to get my whole genome sequenced. Which was not easy for you. No. Well, it wasn't so hard to get it sequenced.

It was hard to get my hands on it. So the actual data once it was done. Yeah, it's the funny thing. And why is that a good thing and a bad thing? There was a company that was offering to sequence people's genomes when they went to a meeting to learn about genomes in medicine. And this is something they do every year. And at that point, it was like

2000 bucks. So I went to my editor at Stat, a place where I write about medicine. And I said, hey, if you pay for that, I will write you a series of articles. I'll just look and see what I got and I'll write about it. And they were like, okay. And so again, we're going from $3 billion to $2,000. Like, that's amazing. And it's cheaper than that now. But anyway, so this company sequences my DNA. And then what they give me, this is a company called Illumina, what they give me is a report. And basically they say, well, we looked for these like 1,600 mutations that we know cause particular diseases.

You have none of them. You're a carrier for a couple diseases, which means that if my wife and I had the same mutation, our kids would have the disease. But these were two diseases that if your kid had it, you'd know it. So that was it. And I thought, wow. So no access to the huge, huge data set behind that. Right. No access because of the way that they sequence it.

Basically, they just break up the DNA into lots of little pieces. And they make copies of those pieces. And then they sequence those pieces. And then they just basically throw all that into a spreadsheet and so it's like this crazy raw data which you have to sort of piece together like a puzzle to try to figure out what the true sequence is i mean this is weirdly enough this is pretty much state-of-the-art right now there are better techniques that are coming online soon. So they would say, well, we don't want to give you this raw data because it hasn't been vetted by a clinical geneticist. You ordered this as a medical test,

so we're giving you the results of the test. We're not giving you all this extra stuff. And I was like, no, but I want it. I want it. And so this geneticist who had sort of invited me to this meeting in the first place thought about it when I presented him with this problem. He said, I got an idea. So he was doing a study on what it's like for people to get their genome sequenced and to use that to sort of guide their health or just to sort of like incorporate into their life.

And he said, I tell you what, I will enroll you in that study. And then I'll add on a little extra little thing there saying that in your case, you actually get the raw data too. So then Illumina said, okay. And a few weeks later, a hard drive shows up at my door and it's got 60 gigabytes of this crazy genetic data. Yeah, but it took forever. And it's still very difficult to get your DNA. If you get your whole genome sequenced, the procedures really just aren't in place for you to get your hands on it, which is strange to me.

I mean, it's your genome. Why shouldn't you have it? But I mean, it's interesting, too, because I guess there are concerns beyond it hasn't been properly vetted. Because even when you go to the inexpensive commercially available ones, I don't know what the state of the law is around that, but I remember when they first came out, it's like, oh, a couple hundred bucks, get your genome. And everyone's getting it, and they were excited to get all the information. What does this mean? And then pretty quickly after that, they kind of got shut down and said, no, no, no, no, no. You can't be providing any context for this in any way, shape, or form. And then I think it's gotten a bit more lenient, but what's going on there? Why does this happen? And what's the concern?

The problem there was not so much that the data that 23andMe was providing. It was the interpretation of the data. So they'd say, we're pretty confident that you have this mutation in this gene that's been associated let's say with the risk for alzheimer's and initially actually what they did was they tried to take a few different genes that might be linked to the same disease and try to come up with a sort of their own kind of risk score so if you if we look at all these genes that are associated with this disease that we know of, what would we tell you about your risk? And that kind of information or claims, I should say, got the FDA really up in arms because they're like, whoa, this is a medical

test. And if you're going to use a medical test, you have to validate it. You have to show us scientifically that you really are telling people accurate information. And the fact is that there's a lot of gray zone in the scientific literature when it comes to genetics. It's kind of astonishing. Like, I have a variant in a gene that, you know, if I had gotten this stuff done like five or six years ago, my genetic system would have looked at it and said like, okay, like we need to talk seriously about your incredibly serious heart disease that you have because it was a mutation that had been linked in a small study to a disease where people just, one day they just dropped dead of a heart attack. It

was like that scary kind of heart disease, you know. But then, like, later, people looked at more and more people and looked at the data, and that difference went away. You know, the people with that variant really weren't any more likely to get this disease than they weren't. So the FDA said, like, look, you got to really step up your game if you want to provide this kind of information. So 23andMe sort of backed away. They got more into ancestry, telling you, like, you're 13% Irish or whatever.

And, you know, kind of harmless stuff like, oh, these are your genes that we guess you have blue eyes. And everyone's always, well, how much Neanderthal are you versus this versus that? They got into the Neanderthal genes and things like that. But now just recently they have picked a few diseases and really thrown a lot of resources at it, enough that the FDA has looked at their new application and said, okay, you can give people this medical information direct to consumer. So it's happening now.

You know, like if you go to 23andMe now, you'll get information potentially on risks for various kinds of cancer or Alzheimer's or all these, you know, really serious things. Then again, what do you, what you do with that information still is kind of squishy. Like if you find that you have a, like say a 20% elevated risk of, let's say skin cancer, you know, I guess you might put on a hat, you know, I, you know, there, there, there might be something, things that you might do to sort of be extra careful, but we all should put on a hat. There might be some things that you might do to be extra careful. But we all should put on sunblock. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what to do, especially when there's no known way to prevent things or treat them.

So if you have an elevated risk of Alzheimer's, what do you do? I mean, there's nothing that we know of that will prevent you from developing it. So what good is that information? Yeah. I mean, I guess the argument would be, we may not know for sure, but there are some clear potential interventions, lifestyle-based interventions, pharmaceutical interventions, whatever it may be. And maybe it would let you make a decision to say, let me proactively start doing it, even if I don't necessarily know if it's going to be 100% effective. I accept the potential side effects, or even if there are no side effects.

But it is a really tough question, right? Because it's like, okay, so information where there's a clear, you know, like, here's your risk. And we know that if you make this change in lifestyle or take this, you can have a dramatic effect on your risk profile, you know, that information versus here's your risk of something we really don't know how to do anything about it is knowing that more damaging than not knowing it. So Robert Green, this geneticist at Harvard who had helped me get my genome sequenced, he's actually done a lot of research on the sort of psychological impact of this information. Because one thing that the people said was like, oh, if people find out they have one

of these really strong risk factors for Alzheimer's, they're just going to lose it. They're not going to know how to live their lives. It's too much information. And so therefore, we should not give that information to people. Because there are a few variants, like if you got them, your chances of Alzheimer's are going to go way up. Most variants just barely tweak your risk. But it turned out that people could handle it. If they wanted to know whether they had it or not, and then they found out that they had it, they were able to survive psychologically and move on with their life. But on the other hand, what I find striking is the case with Huntington's disease.

So there, it's not a question of, do you have a slightly elevated risk of Huntington's or not? Because it's one of these diseases called a Mendelian disease after Gregor Mendel. If you've got one variant in one gene, and you just need one copy of that variant, not two, boom, you are going to get hunting this disease. And which means that in your forties or maybe your fifties, you're going to start suffering all sorts of really horrendous brain symptoms. You're going to look as if you're kind of starving and you're going to get dementia and you're going to die of this disease. And it's, there's still virtually nothing that can be done about it. But there's

a really very accurate test for it. And a lot of people with Huntington's in their family, like with parents with Huntington's, don't get the test. They have a 50% chance of getting this disease, but a lot of them don't get tested. Because they don't know about it or they don't want to know? No, they know that there's a a test but they just choose not to know they're just like well like either i've got it or i don't you know if i find out when i'm 20 do you do i want that hanging over my head you know there's no and because there's nothing i can do about it now so just live either way yeah i mean it's it's interesting my my reaction is it's almost the opposite. It's almost like Steve Jobs said, knowing that you're going to die is the greatest gift while you're alive.

If you kind of own that and visit it on a regular basis, but if you effectively have something where you know you're not going to be who you are around a certain time of your life, I almost wonder if that makes you more present and more engaged in the way you live your life and sort of more, you know, like you kind of know that you've got a window of time not to waste it. I don't know. You know, it's one of those things where I think it's hard for any of us to really fully imagine the experience. You'd have to be somebody with it in their family. And what that means is you're probably watching a parent dying of it. And you're probably a teenager or a young adult yourself. And so you get to just see it with your fully mature mind. And it's hard for me to imagine it.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You know, some people decide to get this test and some people don't. And when you read about their different choices, it's fascinating but grim about, they choose the way they do. Yeah. And I guess we're also on the cusp of maybe starting to leave behind the notion of, well, I got what I got. You get what you get, get upset when it seems like there's the next evolution, not even the next evolution, the current evolution of science, the ability to actually alter genes is upon us and is like being very actively researched.

And I mean, there's got to be an incredible amount of hope around this. Oh, absolutely. And so one form of that hope can be treating people for diseases, you know, when they're children or adults, you know, so that let's say someone has, say, sickle cell anemia, which is another one of these inherited disorders where you have two copies of a faulty gene for the hemoglobin in your blood. So there are experiments right now where scientists are, what they want to do is they want to introduce viruses into people's bodies and these viruses will infect cells and will insert, will basically like rewrite a little piece of their DNA that's faulty. So they'll just rewrite it. And that should allow them to be able to start making good hemoglobin that can allow them a normal life. So yeah, so you, I mean, this is stuff

that's actually moving towards clinical trials right now. I mean, it's so amazing and exciting. We don't know if it'll really get the job done yet. I mean, you got to do the experiment, but just the mere fact that we're doing the experiment is really thrilling. Yeah. And I mean, it seems like it's happening so quickly that it sounds like what you were just talking about is, is that what this thing called CRISPR is that I've been reading about and hearing about for the last couple of years? And I mean, that just touched down in my radar, at least really just in the last five years or so.

So these ideas, I guess maybe the ideas underlying them have been around for a while, but the actual ability to do this in any sort of meaningful and accurate way is so new. So for you to say that this is actually moving toward clinical trials in the near future, I mean, that sounds staggeringly fast. It is. It absolutely is. I mean, people have talked about the idea of rewriting our DNA for many decades. I mean, once it became clear that, first of all, genes are the stuff of heredity and that DNA is the stuff of genes and the DNA is kind of like a book, you know, and the spelling of the letters in the book determines a lot about your health.

Then people said like, well, what if we could rewrite the book? And the imagination goes way ahead of what you can actually do in these situations. But people would try sort of simpler versions of this since the 60s and 70s. So there was something called gene therapy, where you would just sort of stick in an extra copy of a gene. It would just kind of float around in the cell. And that was the idea. And that, well, there were some promising results,

but then things didn't work out very well, and someone died in a trial, and it kind of stalled for a while. So that was actually in human trials? Yeah, yeah. So there was someone in 1999, I believe, a young man who volunteered to be treated for this metabolic disease. And basically his immune system just reacted to the virus and just flipped out and he died of the immune reaction. So gene therapy kind of went

quiet for a long time, but now actually it's coming out. They're actually getting towards FDA approval too for treating blindness and so on. But in the meantime, people were thinking, well, would there be a way, rather than just sticking in an extra gene, what if you could actually rewrite the DNA? And the problem was that nobody really knew how to do that. But they were looking at different kinds of gene editing possibilities. And it turned out that bacteria had evolved this technology on their own. It was kind of crazy. It was just sitting there waiting for someone to find it.

And people first sort of found CRISPR and bacteria in the 1980s. And they were just, they're like, what is this? It was just a very odd kind of stretch of DNA. And it didn't quite look like regular genes. No one could figure out what it was. And then gradually started to become clear in the 2000s that, oh, wait a minute. So this is a way for bacteria to grab DNA from viruses that infect them, inserting their own DNA, and then use that DNA to make little sort of guides to seek out the matching DNA in new viruses that

attack them and to bring along an enzyme to cut them, to basically shred the viruses that are trying to make them sick. And so several scientists looked at this, like, for example, Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley and Emmanuel Charpentier at Max Planck. And they said, okay, now that we kind of understand how bacteria are using this, I think we could use this. We could basically fashion these guides that will take this enzyme to any place we want in DNA. So any stretch we want to find in that huge, you know, wall of books, basically, we can zero in and change it. And they proved that that was true just with sort of loose molecules, and they started doing it in bacteria. Then people started doing it in mammal cells and human cells,

and boom, yeah, like really, it was only five years ago when you started hearing about it that all of a sudden this came online. And it's moved so fast that I think the scientists themselves are saying like, whoa, whoa, we weren't expecting this. We wanted more time to sort of think about the ramifications of what we're doing. Yeah. I mean, what are those ramifications in terms of, I mean, there's some interesting ethical questions that I want to explore, but in terms of the actual risk, because if you have the ability to essentially say, okay, so here's a bad SNP that's, you know, like here's this SNP for disease or for this or for that. And if we could effectively just swap it out for some good one, that's awesome if it all works. Does it always work? And is there a downside risk? So you definitely want to make sure that you cut out the right piece and put in what you want in its place. So if for some reason

that guide ends up dropping in somewhere else and cutting a different gene, you could have serious problems. So there's a lot of work seeking to sort of fine-tune this whole CRISPR system so that it's incredibly precise, even more precise than it is now, so that you wouldn't have to worry about what they're called off-target effects. And I mean, the other thing that it seems like this is, yes, it's incredibly complex technology, but at the same time, it seems like this is actually a reasonably fast and cheap intervention compared to what a lot of people have tried to do in the past, which if you could create something like this, that could literally

swap out the bad for the good. And it was something that was actually potentially doable enough and affordable enough that it was accessible to a mass number of people. I mean, this could change the face of the human condition. It really could have incredible impacts. I mean, that is another aspect of this is that CRISPR is cheap. CRISPR is something that grad students use to create a line of mice, for example, that they want to study as a model of Alzheimer's or some other disease. They say, well, okay, if we change this gene in the mice this way, then they'll have these symptoms and we can study it. And it just takes a matter of just a few weeks to do that. And it used to be, oh my gosh, like it could take a year or more to create one of these lines of mice.

And only then would you discover you actually hit the right target or not. And then you'd have to start over. So yeah, like scientists themselves doing research on animals, plants, bacteria, so on, they're all using CRISPR all the time. And so that doesn't make you think that, wow, like if we start using it medically, the impact could be vast. Could be dangerous, but it also could be incredibly beneficial. Yeah. So the phrase you just used is if we start using it medically. I think that's where everybody's super excited. Yeah. I think one of the ethical questions

that comes up with all of this is, well, what if you wanted to use it for a performance edge? What if you wanted to try and target something that would make you taller or more muscular or faster or more intelligent or all these different things that would, in theory, give you some kind of an edge in life, in business, in work, whatever it may be. A, is that even possible? And B, talk to me about sort of the ethical conversation around these things. Well, one thing to bear in mind is that genes do lots of different

things. They're involved in lots of different activities in our bodies. So you might look at one particular thing that a gene does and say, ooh, I want more of that, you know. I want bigger muscles, or I want more oxygen, or I want faster reflexes, or whatever. And if you just have sort of tunnel vision and get somebody to tweak your genes for that particular trait, maybe you get it, but maybe you get a bunch of other things too. You know, so you could be putting yourself at risk of a side effect, you know, because that gene might be involved in something else. And now you've affected its performance in that other job in a bad way. So there can be, you know, there can be these potential extra effects that we may just not understand. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I understand well enough because we just, you know, human biology is still leaves us a lot to understand. I think that sometimes, though, that people imagine that for any trait you can think about, there's just one gene in there that if you just toggle it, it'll make you amazing however you want. And again, that's not how human biology really works either. So you mentioned intelligence and, you know, there definitely are genes that influence intelligence. Usually what happens is that, you know, if you tinker with the genes involved in the intelligence, it's a bad thing.

Human intelligence, some scientists have argued, is really pretty much very well optimized right now among living humans. And so if you start tinkering with it, you're not going to make it better. You're probably going to break it. And that just has to do with how neurons sprout connections in the brain, how quickly they send signals,

and all these sorts of different things that go into what we call intelligence. And the other problem is that maybe if you looked at a list of genes that are identified as having some influence on intelligence, if you look at a gene that has been found to have any sort of beneficial effect, you might find that if you just have one particular variant of it, on average it raises people's IQ scores like 0.1 IQ points. Not a significant effect for you know, 0.1 IQ points. So, you know. Not a significant effect for the risk, especially.

Yeah, you know. And so, you know, like so, and you'd say, oh, well, just go in there and change 100 of them at once. Well, that is so far beyond today's technology. I mean, at best, you can maybe change a few genes, different genes at once. That's it. So, you know, like, these are, you know, on the one hand, these are like, definitely conversations that people need to be having. But on the other hand, I'm hoping in the book, I can sort of help people to sort of, to recognize which conversations are really pressing and really plausible and what are sort

of, you know, just more kind of letting our imagination run wild. Yeah, I mean, it is so interesting. And who knows what the real thing, you know, like, who knows what the pace that things are going, what the future will really look like. And the other thing that jumped into my head is that if we have the ability, if we're rapidly developing the ability to identify genes that cause harm, like SNPs that cause harm, and then pretty inexpensively swap them out for good things in a matter of weeks, would it also then be possible to do the opposite, to weaponize DNA, to weaponize these things and use them as tools to cause either individual or mass harm? I think that that is certainly something to think about.

We'd have to really think about scenarios where that could actually be an issue. How would that be delivered to people who didn't want to actually go to a clinic and have viruses injected into their arm? Could you do that in some sort of airborne bioweapon way? That being said, the US Department of Defense is looking at CRISPR very seriously, feeling like they need to support research to understand how it works. You know, part of it is that there may be ways to use CRISPR, not just on humans, but on plants, for example. Maybe somehow introducing, if someone could somehow introduce CRISPR

into the plants that make up a country's food supply, would that be disrupting it? You know, could that lead to famine? You know, could you introduce a gene that makes plants vulnerable to a disease and they all die off or something like that? Like, again, it sounds a little Michael Crichton-y, you know, a little science fiction-y,

but it's not as far away from reality. Right, there's like enough of a thread. Yeah. No, I know. I mean, I'm writing about stuff in my book where I'm looking at it. I'm like, wow, these scientists are talking about this with a totally straight face. I have one scientist over here saying, here are these wild fruits. I think I can basically replay the agricultural revolution in one step and use CRISPR to turn this into a domesticated crop, you know, in one generation.

I just need to like put in the right changes and boom, I have a crop, you know. And I think he's right. The map is right there. The roadmap is right there. The roadmap is right there. Or other people who are introducing CRISPR genes into the DNA of animals themselves, mosquitoes. And this might actually be a really powerful way to eliminate malaria in some places by basically driving these populations of mosquitoes to become resistant to malaria. And these mosquitoes are alive right now. They're being very carefully contained in labs, but I've been there. I've seen them. So yeah, when you're witnessing that stuff, you tend not to be too dismissive of some of these otherwise wild possibilities. What's it like for you to sort of like walk into these labs just on a personal level and know that you're staring these living things in the face that are the future, that are like nobody else outside of this in the world can see or even knows exists. It's exciting, especially because not only

are these things just in these particular labs and nowhere else, but also these scientists themselves didn't dream that this was possible just a few years ago. I mean, so Anthony James, the scientist who's been raising these mosquitoes in Irvine, he's been looking for ways of genetically manipulating mosquitoes as a way to fight malaria for decades. And he's tried all sorts of different things and they just tend not to work. And he was, you know, he was kind of resigned to the like, you know, maybe like, maybe this was a crazy idea. And then CRISPR comes along, and he's like, huh, maybe this would work. And then actually some young grad student down the road in San Diego just was tinkering around and figured out a way to make it work.

And boom, that was it. They were in business and you know it's like the fact that they're almost sort of stumbling into this kind of stuff is astonishing yeah it really is amazing the which also brings up interesting privacy concerns right i mean if we're freaked out these days by what social media platforms know about us that we're giving them voluntarily like if if if sequencing our genome if so reliving having more detailed levels of information becomes really readily available to all of us does it just become you know you go to for your end of your physical or whatever it is the first time you're you know like you're an adult and part

of you know the physical test for that year it's you're not just getting your normal blood you're an adult and part of the physical test for that year, you're not just getting your normal blood, you're getting your genome. And then that becomes a part of your medical history that then follows you for life. It's like, you know, it's really interesting questions about not only do you want to know it, but who else do you want to know or not know? And then for people like, or industries like insurance,

you know, where they're in the business of trying to evaluate your likelihood of getting X, Y, and Z, and then adjusting what you're going to pay for the rest of your life based on that. I mean, the ramifications are huge. They are. I mean, in a way, you know,

life insurance companies and health insurance companies have been doing kind of a rough version of this just by looking at family history. Family history is a pretty good guide to some of the dangerous genes you may have in your life. But again, it's just a rough idea. Yeah, now potentially an insurance company could look at your entire genome. Now, fortunately, in the United States, we have this law called GENO, which basically, it's the acronym for it. Basically, it prevents insurance companies from using genetic information to determine whether you can get insurance or not health insurance. Not life insurance, not long-term insurance. If they can get their hands on it, it's okay. I think that all these health systems are sequencing the DNA of their patients.

Some of them are saying, we're just going to grab everybody's genomes. Partly because it's great for research. You get a huge data set. Huge data set. And then you can start to see things about basic human biology you could not see before. Because if you have like, you know, like 23andMe is actually getting into this business, you know. So they just, they have, you know, 5 million customers. And so they'll have like hundreds of thousands of people who like have a hard time sleeping.

And thousands of people who have a hard time sleeping and thousands of people who don't. And when you have that many people and you have their DNA, whoosh, all of a sudden you see dozens and dozens and dozens of genes that are linked to these conditions that no one had seen before. So that's really exciting. And that's going to be really potentially very useful for medicine. It's not going to be able to happen if everybody's terrified that their DNA is going to be really potentially very useful for medicine. It's not going to be able to happen if everybody's terrified that their DNA is going to be used against them. That's not something that's sort of essential to DNA itself. It's more a question of like, what kind of healthcare system do we want or that we're going to just put up with?

We're putting up with a healthcare system that's really dysfunctional in a lot of ways. And one of them is that we are potentially going to deprive ourselves of all this insight that's going to come from our own DNA because people are going to be so scared they're going to go bankrupt. Yeah, and I guess the laws will have to start to keep pace with the science, which is another issue. You know, we see the same issue in technology, right? You know, we're having the same issue now in medicine.

You know, zooming the lens out more, the idea, you know, we've been kind of granularly focused on DNA and modifying it. But just the bigger idea of heredity is, it's kind of fascinating to me because reading through your work, it's, what I learned in high school was very cut and dry. And admittedly, it's pretty much where my education ended in anything beyond just popular reading around it. And the notion, what you really offer is that this is not only far more nuanced, it's far dirtier, it's far more complicated. It's far less clear. And I mean, even the idea that at one point you talk about the idea that a mom can actually,

DNA can pass both ways when in utero, which kind of is a little bit mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can have heredity in reverse basically so when women get pregnant now they're they're the fetus is is shedding cells and those cells can get into her bloodstream and after the baby is born in a lot of cases the those cells disappear in some a remarkable number don't disappear and these fetal cells will end up potentially all over a woman's body. So there was one study where scientists did autopsies on women who had died. These were women who had sons. They looked in particular at their brain,

and they could find neurons in there with Y chromosomes. So these were clearly their son's cells that had integrated themselves into these women's brains for life. They had become neurons. And the cells had been found in other parts of the body, in various organs and breast tissue, just all over the place. And so these women are called chimeras after the mythical beast. And that's not the only way that you can become a chimera. So sometimes there will be twins in the womb, and one of those twins just fails to develop and kind of gets absorbed into the other fetus. And then a baby is born and no one's any the wiser that there was a twin, except that that person's body is now a combination of these two kinds of cells. And there have been these crazy situations where people get

genetically tested and they don't seem to match themselves. So one of the wildest examples was a woman who had to get a genetic test as part of claiming welfare benefits because she was a mother and she had these kids she was taking care of and she needed assistance. And they said, well, these aren't your children. Like, what? Of course, they're my children. And then they just started accusing her of fraud. And she was actually pregnant at the time. And the government sent somebody to basically watch her give birth. And then they did another test on this new baby. and they said, no, that's not yours either. Because these eggs were being produced by one population of cells inside of her,

and the blood they were drawing was coming from the other population. They're basically looking at the two twins inside this one woman and saying, well, it's not the same. It's just incredible. And this is not that rare. It used to be when this was first discovered, people thought, oh, well, this is like one in a billion. It's quite common. I mean, you could be a chimera for all I know. Who knows? Yeah, it's amazing how complex it is and how the pathways go both directions. And one of the other things that I think is really fascinating is the idea that there's a hereditary relationship not just with the genes themselves, influence their genes or the expression of their genes, that not only the gene itself, not only the

code can get passed on, but the state, whether it's expressed or not, that can be passed on too. Yeah. It's kind of freaky. It is. It is. It raises a really profound possibility that experience can alter heredity. And, you know, this has echoes to this old idea that Lamarck and others would put forth that, you know, the inheritance of acquired characters.

And, you know, for a long time, people said that, well, that could never happen. That's impossible. But that came out of a time when we were just totally focused on genes as sort of the defining element of heredity. And in my book, I sort of argue that we ought not to just put our blinders on too tightly, because heredity doesn't have to equal genes. You know, there can be other channels that heredity can use, possibly. And when one cell divides in two, you know, both of those new daughter cells inherit the same DNA because it copies the DNA. But it also copies all these, they also have all these around the dna that determine what is used and what isn't so that's its own kind of in kind of inheritance and so you know it that could really play a big part in our health you know if you smoke as you mentioned like does that affect the

epigenetics in some sort of long-term way? So that when cells divide, you know, are they inheriting some kind of dysfunctional kind of state? And then the big question is, well, does that go from one generation to the next? That's the million-dollar question. And that's what gets people really crazy. Right. So it's, you know, like three generations ago,

if a grandparent was a smoker, is that affecting you now? And then if you make a decision now, is that potentially going to affect the genetic expression of your great, great, great grandkids or something like that? It's a really mind-blowing idea. And people have really grabbed onto it. There's lots of really, really strong evidence for that, but it's in plants. So if you're a plant, yeah, that can actually be a very important part of heredity. Definitely. Now, you know, people are more interested in themselves than they are in plants. So, you know, they want to know, well, what about me?

Well, things get sketchier because, partly because these experiments are just hard to do. But there's, you know, these tiny little worms that scientists study called C. elegans. And they seem to have something like this too. Like you can give them some experience and it will alter their eggs and sperm and then they sort of will pass down something different through several generations. You can see the mark

of experience several generations down. When you get to mice, then people really start to debate fiercely about whether these experiments are legitimate or not. There's some amazing experiments. There's one experiment where scientists would expose mice to a certain smell, a certain almondy kind of smell, and then they get a shock. And then those mice had offspring. And they actually did this to male mice. So the only thing that they could pass down would just be their sperm and the contents inside of it, DNA and the other molecules. And they claimed that in the following generation, those mice, if you expose them to this odor, they were unusually reactive to it. But, you know, if you bring that up in a group of researchers in this area, some of them will love it and some of them will just scream about it. It's really at that sort of intense moment right now. So we'll see

where it goes. Yeah. It is really cool that there's work being done around it and that there's actually a debate about it now rather than just like completely that's ludicrous, which also kind of brings us to the one more thing I really want to talk to you about which is this idea of microbiome you know so that this has been another huge buzzword microbiota microbiome gut biome for you know like a while now and i think most people have heard it most people probably know have some understanding of well we've got all these critters living in our gut you know and and you know and there's a lot of them and that they, and now, you know, there's research that's showing that sort of the makeup of what those critters is, can dramatically affect not just our state of wellbeing, but our disease risk,

our state of mind, like our thought patterns, which is freaky. And talk to me about how the idea of heredity and DNA within the context of those things comes into this conversation. So this is a really fascinating area because if you look at certain species, it's really hard to tell the difference between their own genes that they inherit from their parents and the bacteria that they inherit from their parents. Everything's so intimately wound up. So take cockroaches. So cockroaches actually have special organs where they grow a certain kind of bacteria, just one species of bacteria. And that bacteria can't live outside. It can only live inside cockroaches. And there it breaks down some of their food and provides

them with some essential nutrients they need to survive. So if you get rid of these bacteria, the cockroaches die. Now, in female cockroaches, something amazing happens. The cells that contain these bacteria will crawl over to the cockroach's eggs, and they'll sort of glue themselves to the eggs and then split open, and then the bacteria infect the eggs. So that when these eggs are fertilized and then the cockroach lays them, the bacteria are already inside the cells in the cockroach larva. They're already there from the very beginning. And these bacteria have these genes that let them do something essential for the cockroach's life.

So you really say, well, what's the difference? They are inheriting these bacteria just the same as they are inheriting their own genes. There are lots of examples like this in the animal kingdom. It's fascinating. And so that raises a question, well, what about us? We all have this microbiome. And we need it for our survival also. We need it. It does all sorts of things for us. It need it for our survival. We need it. It does all sorts of things for us. It tutors our immune system when we're young.

So if you don't have a healthy microbiome, you may develop certain kinds of immune disorders. You need them to synthesize vitamins, all sorts of stuff. We don't have bacteria kind of like infecting our cells when we're like a fertilized egg. It's not like that. But what's interesting is that there's a lot of debate about, well, when does the human microbiome get started in a baby? It used to be thought that babies were totally sterile when they were born. Not the case. Certainly by the time they're going through the birth canal,

they are getting slathered with bacteria. And so that basically you are getting exposed to these certain species as you're being born, maybe even earlier. And in breastfeeding, they're actually bacteria in breast milk because they grow in the breast. Certain species grow in the breast. They get bacteria in breast milk because they grow in the breast. Certain species grow in the breast. They get into the breast milk, and it looks as if they thrive in a baby's gut.

And women actually will produce a certain kind of sugar that the babies can't digest, but certain kinds of bacteria can. So it's almost like they're producing the food for those bacteria to flourish. Yeah, so they are feeding certain kinds of bacteria. Now, it's true that we pick up lots of bacteria just in a day-to-day existence. So you wouldn't really say that you inherit bacteria that you got when you handled a doorknob or someone passed you a piece of cheese or something. But there seems to be sort of an underlying kind of heredity.

There are certain kinds of bacteria that seem to be special to our species that have been adapting to us for millions of years. And so to some extent, we may be inheriting our microbiome. It's a fascinating area. Right. And especially if, as the research seems to be pointing to, the fact that there are healthier microbiota and less healthy ones, and ones that, as people are trying to alter theirs on a daily basis now by taking prebiotics and probiotics and eating different foods

to try and get different health outcomes. And again, it goes back to that earlier conversation, which is when we think about not just the actual genetic code that we have gets potentially passed on, but the state of our bodies surrounding them, which we may play some active role in creating. In some way, you wouldn't necessarily say that gets inherited, but if it kind of all happens at the same time, and that becomes the fundamental bacteria that implant a colony that then populates the inside of offspring's body, effectively, it's pretty close. Well, I agree because I think that it would be good to

reclaim the word heredity and to think about it more broadly than just saying, well, it's just these particular genes that you inherited, and that is everything there is to know. I think that heredity is more about what previous generations are handing down to this generation and what this generation is handing down to future ones. What accounts for our similarities? Our microbiome is a lot like the microbiome of earlier generations. It's not identical. Antibiotics have disrupted it to a large extent, but there's a continuity in a lot of different ways. And, you know, part of the continuity is that we inherit genes, but there are other channels. And, you know, maybe we should be thinking of the microbiome as one of these channels. Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me, which feels like it's a good time for us to sort of come full circle here. I mean, it's so fascinating.

I think we're at this moment in time now where not only the understanding of what is the umbrella that we call hereditary, but also the ideas, the technology, the processes are expanding just the potential of both our ability to understand and our ability to do something about what we understand, about what we discover. I think it's a super exciting time. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So as we sit here, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think to live a good life is to always be curious and to be willing to recognize that you were either wrong before or just didn't know about something and to be always ready to move forward and update how you understand the

world because it's much more interesting and much more complicated than you can guess at beforehand. And so, you know, that's how, when I think about living a good life, that's an important part. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Life Project podcast. And thanks to our absolutely fantastic

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