The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking about evolution and medicine with a Professor of Genetics

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Professor Aoife Mclysaght is a geneticist. We chat about all things genetics and evolution  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dog bless you festering endas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. It is hauntingly chilly in Limerick City. It's below freezing with a ghostly thick low hanging fog. The type of weather that would make you stay out of a graveyard. I'm going to keep the introduction short this week because I've got quite a long podcast. Quite a long, fun-filled podcast for you. I had a very interesting conversation with Professor Aoife MacLeysett, who is a geneticist at Trinity College above in Dublin. She's a professor of molecular evolution. She's also incredibly funny and sound and a magnificent science communicator. She speaks about genetics as an expert, as a professor, in an incredibly accessible way. I chatted to her a couple of months back in Vicar Street. It was a fantastic

gig. Every single person in the audience was just absolutely focused in silence with a look of sheer wonder on their faces because this conversation about genetics was so captivating and interesting. I don't know much about genetics or biology but I'm really curious about it so it was an absolute treat for me and even though I'm chatting with a professor this is actually an unbelievably silly podcast so I'm gonna go straight into the chat. You know I love my Vicar Street gigs. I adore them. I always do my Vicar Street gigs on a Monday or Tuesday night because that's the night that no one else wants. But for me the energy, the crowd energy of a Monday and Tuesday night is absolutely perfect for my podcast because what I

like to do up on stage is to have a conversation. To have a conversation with my guest, like we're in a kitchen. And then for the audience, it feels like going to the cinema or being at a play. And if you're up in Dublin, I'm back in Vicar Street this month. Again, a Monday and Tuesday gig on the 22nd and 23rd of January, down to the very last tickets. And I have magnificent guests lined up. So here's the conversation I had with Professor Aoife MacLeysett all about genetics. So I was trying to not talk to you backstage because I

was getting too curious. It was very difficult. Yes, I met you years and years ago on Science Week and we'd so much crack and I've just got loads of questions about genetics right? Like what okay the best way to start who knows who doesn't know what genetics is? All right good. Everybody knows. Fantastic! I can go straight to the heart stuff I'm going to say something right and then you can tell me if I'm talking out of my arse okay is it true that like

let's just say a human was a building right that DNA is like the architect's plans for that let's take the architect out because that means God but like DNA is like dna is like my dna is like how blind boy replicates himself and grows like the ear that i have now right yeah that probably wasn't the same ear i had in 2013 is that correct you mean in terms of the cells renewing them yeah

like the ear like i was i was on the stage in Vicar Street 10 years ago. Did I have a different ear then? Like literally, like seriously? No, I don't think you did. I mean, the certain cells, human cells don't renew themselves. Which ones? Well, there's lots of injuries you can't recover from. Like if you chop off the top of your finger,

it won't grow back, but you can cut your skin and it'll heal. So there's a limit to the... But in terms of what you're asking, like is the DNA kind of the blueprint to the but um in terms of what you're asking like is the is the dna kind of the blueprint to the building or the architect's plans you could kind of say that people say that sometimes but some maybe a better uh analogy is like it's a recipe so if you have a recipe for a cake you don't get the same cake every time but you get you know more or less the

same cake because genetics isn't quite as as perfect as as a blueprint um did you ever hear of uh DARPA D-A-R-P-A it's it's like the American government's advanced scientific research thing I I kind of heard of it I don't know what it is um just because it came into my head so I I love looking at the DARPA website because it's literally like, it's what the American government and the military are spending billions on into researching.

And I love looking up the things they're doing. And one thing they're building at the moment is a type of concrete that regrows itself. Wow. You haven't heard about that? No. How does it work? I'm assuming they're...

I'll ask you. But it's not conspiracy. Like, it's there. You can see it. This is something they're... Like, drone technology would have been... DARPA would have been doing that in the 1970s, you know? I reckon they're probably looking into...

Like, if you've got concrete, right, a block, and then it breaks, but that concrete's able to grow back itself. So it has living matter in it rather than... Yeah, it sounds to me like... I don't know, if you cut off a plant... Actually, why does this happen? If I've got a plant and I cut off one branch,

why do the two branches grow back? Well, it depends where you cut it, actually. It depends where you cut it on the branch. But plants are much more versatile in terms of like you know their shape than us so it's actually an interesting comparison because you know like i say if you cut off your finger nothing grows back but if you cut off parts of a plant it'll something will always grow and if you there's lots of ones like if you accidentally expose some of the root to the sun a new uh like stem will grow and things like that. So maybe this is not what you're interested in,

but that's one of the things in terms of genetics that you can basically compare and contrast can be pretty useful. And so people try to understand how does development work in a human body and trying to understand, because it's relevant to kind of repair and recovery and things like this,

how do things heal? And there are animals that can regrow limbs and things like that. And then you can contrast that with something very different, like plants that you can cut them and they do regrow, but in a different shape. Actually, didn't the field that you're in, didn't that start with some monk who was growing beans? Yeah. It did, didn't it? Yes.

Mental. Yes. Peas, but yeah, same thing. But yeah, he understood some of the really early things of genetics. It was quite fascinating what he was able to figure out. And when was this? He was a contemporary of Darwin, but Darwin didn't know about him. Everyone knew about Darwin because Darwin was super famous.

But so Mendels would have had his 200th birthday this year if he had been able to live. So that's how long ago it was. Do you reckon he was doing that with the peas so he could make himself live that long? No, I don't think so. I think he was actually quite a humble person who was really, really curious. And what he did was, you know, he did all these crosses with pea plants. I think people who've studied genetics in school

probably came across Mendel, but not biology in school. But, you know, he did these pea crosses and, you know, we're just told this story, you know, the short version is he did this and he figured out kind of there are genes there. There's something that gets passed on, but actually the intellectual leap he had

to make to figure that out is really very extraordinary. And why, like, humans have been breeding animals, like, fucking for ages, right? Why did it take until Mendel for him to go, I think this is what's happening? Because people, what

Mendel understood, basically, people understood that something gets passed on, but they didn't understand how it gets passed on at all. And what Mendel understood was that they were essentially particles that don't get blended. People thought of it before like mixing paint, so that you mix it and it's all mixed and you can't unmix it. But one of the things Mendel showed is you can't unmix it

because you can have tall plants and you can get small ones out and vice versa, depending on the trait you're looking at. Whereas if you're mixing paint, you just keep adding more in and eventually you've got a muddy brown and you're never going to have anything else. And so even, say, Darwin didn't understand this properly. And he kind of had the mixing paint view of things. You just put things together and you have the two parents and the offspring or some kind of mixed average of it.

So Mendel's work showed that you have these discrete things that are genes, which we now know are on pieces of DNA. But that they stayed separate and they don't just become stuck together and permanently muddled um and you said there that like so like dna is like the recipe is is cancer when the recipe gets fucked up yeah partly yeah yeah so um basically cancer is you know you have a uncontrolled cell division and there are lots and lots of genes whose job it is to keep cell division going right. And that means there's lots and lots of different things that could go wrong, basically. And any of those or many of those can lead to cancer. And like radiation that can change genes.

Yeah. Like how does that work basically because the dna is just um like it's a big long chemical it's it's a big long sugar actually and um the radiation just is it creates a kind of chemistry reaction a chemical reaction that changes a bit of it and um it's just so much easier to break something than make it better so those changes are more likely to to break something and stop it working properly and your area is more into we'll say animals than humans did you find any cool shit in chernobyl um like surely you're looking at chernobyl and the animals i haven done that. I don't know what's been done there.

Part of the problem with Chernobyl is that it was such a huge amount of radiation that it would kill them before, you know, because there's a certain dosage of radiation that can change your DNA without killing you, but I think that was just such a, there was too much death there, I think. But now Chernobyl is being considered like this massive rewilding project. Like humans have gone and there's animals there going,

this is great. Yeah, it's kind of mad, isn't it? I mean, it is. Did we predict it wrong? Because at the time, people would have thought this place, we will never see life here again.

And now it appears to be thriving. Like people can't go near the core of the reactor, but you're seeing wolves and deer and butterflies. Yeah. And they appear to be thriving. Like people can't go near the core of the reactor, but you're seeing wolves and deer and butterflies. And they appear to be healthy. They do, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there must be still radiation there because that's like the half-life of radiation. But they are obviously surviving through it.

Yeah, I mean, there probably is a good deal of mutation, but I don't know how much it is. But it's kind of cool, the rewilding thing. I want to ask you about some mitochondrial Eve. Okay. Which, as I understand, is like... They call her Eve because Adam and Eve, but it's the earliest human.

Why is it the mother's DNA, the most important thing when trying to find early humans? Basically because we could, essentially. So when you're trying to trace DNA back through generations, so the DNA you have is going to be half from your mother, half from your father, and the DNA you got from your father will be a mix of his two parents, et cetera, et cetera. And so it gets very muddled very quickly and it's really hard to trace patterns because everything gets scrambled together at every generation.

But the thing that doesn't get scrambled is this small bit of DNA that's inside your mitochondria in your cells. So these are people who did biology, they would have been called the powerhouse of the cell or something like that. And they got this small bit of DNA of their own and this only passes through the maternal line

you get them from your mother and so men don't pass them on and the flip of that is the Y chromosome which goes only through the male line and it just makes it easier to study because it becomes a single single chain, a literal thread that

goes through back through all of human history and so you can trace that and you can figure out you know where people came from because you carry your dna with you and you can trace back the relationships and until all of these lines converge on a single mitochondria. But yeah, this is just a very, very ancient human woman who is like the ancestor of everybody. And how old, like? How old is that? Mitochondria leave. Okay, so I'm actually not 100% sure.

It's not as old as you think. It's much younger than humans. More than one million? No, less, less. Wow. Yeah, so... Oh, is she like an actual human being, not a hominid, like a human being?

Yes, so it's basically the... There's a kind of a time back in history where everybody shares ancestors with everybody, and it's not as far back as you think and i can't remember that story be much better if i could remember this but um it's more like so humans are about 80 000 years old and this um this kind of point in time where everybody shares all of their ancestors is about um it's more like 5,000 years or something like that. It's much more recent, 5,000 or 10,000 years, you know.

So it's... Wow. Yeah, and it's basically, and so you get to a certain point in time and you know you get these stories of somebody does one of these TV shows and they trace their ancestors and they discover they're descendants of Charlemagne or something like that.

And they get all excited and they get that little tear in their eye and then you realise that actually everybody who's alive today is probably a descendant of Charlemagne I saw a documentary once, The Blood of the Irish and they said that most Irish people are descended from Nile of the Nine

Hostages. Yeah so there's a lot of Irish people descended from Nile of the Nine Hostages or at least probably Nile that's actually Hostages. Yeah, so there's a lot of Irish people descended from Nile of the Nine Hostages, or at least probably Nile. That's actually work done by a colleague of mine. So that was done tracing the Y chromosome. And you can trace Y chromosome and you can trace surnames. So it's really neat in Ireland

because we have this really ancient surname tradition where the surnames pass on intact, like by contrast with somewhere like, say, Iceland, where I would have been called brian's daughter yeah and the anglo-saxons were like that too yeah in england uh it was only until the normans came in that they had surnames yeah yeah so then so our surnames carry a lot of history and um the through the male line and the y chromosome essentially carries that same history so they could see there were lots there was this really common y chromosome in Ireland which was associated with that O'Neill clan of surnames so

it's not only people called O'Neill but there's a whole group of surnames that would be the O'Neill names and it's probably that this story that fits in history is Niall of the Nine Hostages was a really dominant character probably had lots of children yeah right that's what i was wondering did it mean that he was just having loads of kids yeah probably who also had kids and there's the the bigger the kind of the similar story that's more international is genghis khan yeah yeah so genghis there's like one percent of y chromosomes in the world which is a huge number, are traced back to, are very, very similar in the trace back to probably Genghis Khan.

And so, yeah. Because historians then look at history and go, there was a palette there. What matches, yeah, yeah. But the nine of the nine hostages won. So my colleague who worked on it, his name is Dan Bradley, and he has that chromosome,

so we called him Genghis Dan for a while. Something I'm real fascinated about, right, Bradley, and he has that chromosome, so we called him Genghis Dan for a while. Something I'm real fascinated about, right, is I love mythology, and I love how mythological stories through oral culture could be thousands of years old. And there's an Irish,

there's a book called the Lower Gavala era, the Book of Invasions, and it was written about 1500 years ago but the stories could be a lot older and it kind of it's a mythological attempt to trace who the Irish are and in this book it kind of suggests

whoever came here came from Spain has genetic work ever confirmed anything in mythology to go oh they were right? There is actually a bit of a link with Spain, and especially the Basque area. And there is some similarity there.

And I think some of it is related to refugia in the ice age. So some bits that managed to have pockets of in of habitation when so much of europe was inhabited uninhabitable and um yeah so there's some and there's also this um pattern of you know being kind of slightly uh like extreme west parts of europe because um you can actually see in um when you look at dna you can retrace migratory paths and you can see how people moved across

Europe from the east moving west and you even see it within Ireland, you can actually see a gradient east to west in Ireland and I'd love to know about interdisciplinary stuff here because someone like Mancon Megan who I've had on this podcast loads so man con's obsession is finding the roots of the irish language but man con

he finds words in like india you know and man con reckons there's a ton of words in india real and in sanskrit which is three four000 years old, and he finds very similar words in Irish. Would someone like a linguist or an etymologist ever kind of work with someone in your field to go, we're looking at words here, and we reckon there's something going on in India. Is there work that you have that might help us with this? Do you ever work together?

I didn't personally, but actually there's a really famous study that linked genetics and languages. So, yeah, yeah, by this guy, Luca Cavallisforza, and basically they showed this really strong connection between language proximity and

the genetic proximity. So you can kind of see the people, you know, people moving and, you know, essentially groups of people branching off, taking their languages with them, of course. And then the languages branching off then as well. It's actually really cool. I don't know if this is related, but it got me thinking, like, just the relationship between how things spread, language and culture, right? Do you remember just after COVID covid when we first started doing gigs

again and people weren't allowed to sit down like this you'd have these pods and something i found fucking amazing was i did a gig in kilmainham so it was this huge fucking field and it's me up on stage i think it was with jim sheridan and everyone was sitting in a table that was like 12 feet apart. And this was so that COVID didn't spread, literally so COVID didn't spread. But what I found was, like I'm doing this a long time, so I know if I tell a joke, I know if a joke will make an entire room laugh. So I was landing these jokes that usually work,

but only one pod laughs there there and one pod laughs there. But here, everybody laughs. So the cultural mechanism that through empathy, that humor was using in a room to spread laughter, the fucking COVID was the same. When you put a restriction in to stop a disease spreading amongst the crowd, also empathy didn't spread too. Yeah. That was a bit of a tangent there. Kind of sad as well.

We're all for tangents. I'm talking a lot about the past, right? But where does your work tie in with the future? I mean, okay, put it this way. How much of your work is in with the future? Like, I mean, okay, put it this way. How much of your work is impacted by climate change? Well, some bits. I mean, in terms of one of the things we're doing is trying to understand,

because my work is evolutionary genetics, so it is looking at the past, but you're trying to learn from the past. And one of the things that we are trying to do is figure out how, you know, when there have been massive environmental upheavals in the past, how some things survived that. So, do you know, there was a genetic bottleneck, I think maybe 60,000 years ago. There was a volcano or something. It was a volcano.

And didn't it reduce the human population to a very small amount of people? Did that happen? 60,000 years ago, it would have been pretty small anyway. I read it on Wikipedia. Okay, yeah. Which is reliable enough. It is, actually. Are you familiar with a large genetic bottleneck that happened as a result of a giant Indonesian volcano?

I mean, you're not talking about Krakatoa, because that's only a couple of hundred years ago. No, it was longer than that. Yeah, no, I don't know about that story, but there were lots of bottlenecks in human history. And what's a bottleneck? So a bottleneck is essentially a really drastic crash in the population size,

and they call it a bottleneck because it's like you have this big population and it suddenly becomes small, like the neck of a bottle, and then it can go out wide again. But every time when... So humans originated in Africa and essentially went by foot

to the rest of the world. And every time, you know, a new group was established and a few people, like that becomes big and a few people decide to break off and walk off somewhere else and form a new group, that is a bottleneck forming the new group because you can imagine this bigger group

had a lot of genetic diversity just because of a lot of people there and if some small number like 10 walk off to explore somewhere else and found a new colony of whatever kind, they by definition can only carry a small amount of genetic diversity with them. So it's a small number of people and it's a kind of crash in the diversity. But those are kind of the bottlenecks. Those things um they call it a serial founder effect so you have founders of a new pop of a new uh population then a small number grow and go and

found a population again those are the things we trace when we are tracing how humans have moved around the world those are the kind of things you see and do you see like unique diseases or things like that that you can trace to these bottlenecks um a yes and no i mean in the sense that um if by chance one of those 10 people was carrying something um it wouldn't be unique uh because it existed in the in the original population but whereas it might have had a like a one in 10 000. Now it's got a 1 in 10 just because one of the 10 people who walked off happened to carry it. And you do see that.

There's things that are common in Ireland. Cystic fibrosis is really common in Ireland. I heard that cystic fibrosis exists because at one point in our history, the same gene for cystic fibrosis is the one that makes you immune to cholera. There are those stories. I don't think they've been proven though okay is that just like internet bullshit no it's not internet bullshit it's just a it's a hypothesis but i mean there's another story which kind of links it to tb because that's also a lung disease and that the um that being a

carrier for cystic fibrosis so rather than having the full-on uh symptoms but just being a carrier for cystic fibrosis so rather than having the full-on symptoms but just being a carrier could have made you resistant to tb which is a plausible enough hypothesis actually and there are other examples where being being a carrier for something um make you resist makes you resistant so it happens with malaria a lot so there's multiple examples of where being a carrier for some blood disorders actually like and there's one called sickle cell anemia doesn't that affect people who are african-american um well african yes okay so and and african-americans then yeah by extension but essentially um it is uh very common in parts of the world where malaria is common. So you see it in sub-Saharan Africa. There's a lot of people who are carriers of this sickle cell anemia gene. They are pretty okay.

They might be mildly anemic, but they are resistant to malaria. And so in a situation where there's no malaria, that mild anemia is going to be kind of a disadvantage. And you could imagine over a long... Because malaria is a much bigger threat basically it's like this cost balance cost uh is it a genetic trade-off is that what they call it a genetic trade-off that would be a kind of a trade-off yeah and then but the problem is then um if you carry two copies of the gene instead of just being a carrier if you inherited from both your parents you get sickle cell disease which is quite bad and painful and people have it's a like a clotting problem and people get pains in their joints and it has to be managed um

um do you ever look at like like royalty right like but like all throughout your like because the thing is what i'm always thinking about right is is one of the issues with the area that you're in is like racists latch onto it. And racists are all like, we can breed perfect humans. And like, that's what royalty tried to do. Royalty were like, we're class, so I'm going to fuck my cousin. Yeah, it's true. But pretty much. It's so true.

Yeah. And they've been doing it for a long, long time. Yeah. Because royalty did a lot of damage. Yeah. But is there the benefit in going, while you were being pricks to everybody, at least we can study what happened

when you fucked all your cousins. Yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah, probably. I mean, they do show the really bad side effects of having your parents being too closely related genetically there's the famous one

I think it was King Charles II of Spain who was the last of the Habsburgs I fucking went into a gallery in Madrid because cannabis is kind of legal there I love the way this story goes. I went there and it's like, oh, it's legal. Smoked a joint, way too strong because I'm in Spain.

And then went in and looked at a lot of Habsburg Jaws and got a bit of a whitener. Because I wasn't expecting that. I went, oh, some bit of weed, some paintings, listened to a bit of music, Mariah Carey, and let's look at some wonderful portraits.

And I went over to the, it was a Velasquez, I think. But because the weed was kind of a bit strong. Did you trust your own eyes even? No. So I'm looking at this, I think it was a Velasquez going, he's a great artist. Why is that chin so big?

Yeah. And then I start thinking about, thinking about the chin and then before you know it, Whitener. Yeah, yeah. Whitener, where's the exit please? Where's the exit?

Into the disabled toilet, splashing water on my face because of some fucking prick from the 15th century and his large jaw yeah yeah but after i calmed down i went back and looked at it again and it's like wow okay all right they all have these jaws what's going on here and then i googled it and everything was okay the hapsburg jaw so that was like the the jaw was really prominent and if that was all that was

going on it wouldn't have mattered too much although yeah for charles ii to spain it went too far because his teeth his jaws didn't meet at all and he couldn't chew food because it was just like it was too out of line he had loads of other symptoms as well and he was the end of the line because he wasn't he was too frail and unwell he wasn't even able to have children much as they tried actually um i thought i had a thought that I had while looking at him and staring at him for about 25 minutes straight was I'm like

you're a fucking human pug but that's really what it is like because poor old pugs inbred like poor old pugs their faces are a bit squashed

actually it's the opposite pugs can die just by falling down they can poor little pugs like they have problems with their hips yeah yeah they get problems with their lungs by falling down. They can. Poor little pugs. Like, they have problems with their hips.

Yeah, yeah. They get problems with their lungs. And ironically, it was the courts of Europe. Again, it was the royal courts of Europe

who created a lot of these dogs. A lot of the kind of display dogs or whatever you want to call them. Like, the display dogs who, anyone who owns

one of these dogs knows that it's tough because you love them and it's an animal but they have so many medical issues because of the extreme amount of inbreeding it's got worse though in the last 50 years or so or 100 if you look at um like you know you have um drawings of say a french bulldog from 100 years ago and they aren't as squashed up in the face and all of that they've really because i mean it demonstrates at the same time like what selective breeding does you know that's genetics

you can you choose the parents and you can create these unusual outcomes you know so they kept selecting parents with even more like for purely aesthetic reasons purely aesthetic and so the breeds of dogs that were bred for other reasons, kind of working type reasons... Bit healthier? Tend to be healthier, yeah. Did you ever hear about the tarn spit dog? No. This is...

It's where terriers get loyalty and tenacity. And the tarn spit dog was a working dog from about the 1600s. And it looked a bit like a terrier. They don't exist anymore. But the purpose of this dog's job was, they used to work in a tavern in pairs, right? And you'd have a big leg of lamb on the fire.

And then like a hamster wheel up there on the wall. And the teams of dogs, the turn spit dog, little terrier, terrier would go up there, and then he would run in the wheel, and that would turn the meat. But then the other dog is sitting back waiting waiting for turns right so they're barking at each other it's my turn it's your turn but what they were really bred for wasn't just the dedication to the work the loyalty to sit beside a turning leg of lamb and never bite it and this turn spit dog a lot of terriers trace their roots to that,

and that's why you'd get like... There's a wonderful little dog in Scotland, in Edinburgh. I visited his statue at the weekend. His name is Greyfriars Bobby, and he was a little Scottish terrier, and he stayed on his owner's grave for the rest of his life, but he can trace himself back to that turn-spit dog. It's that dedication of, this is my job, I'm not moving.

The phrase, every dog has its day, comes from the turn-spit dog because of how they would diligently roar at each other, do your work, do your job. It's a bit unfair. They should have been out in the field having crack, like, you know, poor capitalist dog. It's kind of mad, though, as been out in the field having crack, like, you know. Poor capitalist dog.

It's kind of mad, though, as well, because it tells you that these things that are really subtle are actually genetic as well. Because you do... So dogs are kind of an amazing genetics experiment. Well, I said to you backstage, my theory, dogs aren't real. Yeah, well, that's kind of true.

They're not. Dogs aren't real. Dogs don't exist in nature. We made dogs. Yeah, we made... There's wolves, and then there's dogs what the fuck are they they're tame wolves

yeah it's true they're tame wolves but they kind of picked us so you're right dogs aren't real because so many dogs are

I mean I've been saying it for ages and people are going what's wrong with this dogs aren't real and cows aren't real I don't think are cows real no they don't look like the wild one at all no the wild one is really different carrots aren't real. And cows aren't real. I don't think... Are cows real?

No, they don't look like the wild one at all. No. The wild one is really different. Carrots aren't real. Did you ever see a fucking real... A real... Real carrots. Wait till you hear this, lads.

I think I did the carrot podcast before, but... Original carrots, right, are much more... They're related to parsley, I believe. And original carrots were effectively a type of parsley with a little root. Yeah. That was kind of purple, right? And then they got this parsley and just started breeding it and breeding it until it was larger. And it was purple.

Yeah. But then, this is how you can connect it to orange men. Carrots were purple, right? Up until about the 1700s. And then, the House of Orange in the Netherlands, William of Orange,

right? They started breeding carrots that were orange for the Dutch national identity. Yeah. I didn't know that. And then, what else fucking happened?

So, that's where we get orange carrots. So, it's directly related to the orange man up north. And then... Oh, you know corn as well? Oh, the original maize.

Yeah, Tio Cinte. That was tiny and ridiculous, wasn't it? Have you seen it, the original corn? Yeah, yeah. So it grows in Mexico. It's just like a little... It just looks like a kind of a bushy grass and has these tiny little things.

So, you know, a cob of corn is big like that. These are small like that and they just have a few seeds on them. And it was... But it was but it was that was domesticated like 10,000 years ago

or something by people living in that part of the world and they started you know selecting better and better and it's actually become

like totally dependent on humans so a normal plant oh wow so it's not real it's not real yeah no but a normal plant you know

it sheds its seeds some way or other like it either produces a fruit that gets eaten and so it gets carried off or it uses the wind or it uses insects or something but one of the things humans selected for when they were

breeding corn for farming was that all the seeds stay on the cob so that you can just cut the stem and carry it off so they can't actually spread untended corn will die as a species yeah wow mad um i'm trying to think of my next question now um tell me about how racists try and co-opt oh all the time yeah no so racists love genetics because um it's like you

know little knowledge is a bad thing kind of thing. And as soon as you start saying that there is any genetic factor for something they decide is good, like any of the things that decide are good, the racists think, well, all of those good things are in me, first of all. That's their first assumption, that they think all of the good things are collected into them and the people who they decide they like or look like them. the people who they decide they like or look like them and then and then they try to basically say that genetics proves that they're better they're superior and that they should and people who take it further will like have eugenic ideas and stuff like that and the one that's the most stupid one i ever saw is um you sometimes see these racists out defiantly drinking milk like getting a big thing of milk glugging it, shirt off,

the milk spilling everywhere, they get somebody to video them and this is because of this idea that the ability to drink milk, so being lactose tolerant, is more common in Europe. So, you know, white supremacists will like drink milk in public just to

show off their lactose tolerance. Silly, silly bastards. Yeah, yeah. Totally silly. And it's not even true that it's only European. And that's the second thing. It's like, you know, because also this development of lactose tolerance, which comes from lactase persistence.

So lactase is the enzyme that digests it. We have it all through our adult. Well, if you can drink milk without having to take a little lactose capsule, it. We have it all through our adult... Well, if you can drink milk without having to take a little lactose capsule, it means you have it. But it happened in Africa as well, in certain areas where they have a dairy culture. It's just a product of having a strong history.

I mean, it's survival. It's like milk is... Well, I don't know if it's milk or good or bad. I saw you eating oat milk backstage. I just like the taste of it. But I also like the taste of it. But I also try to avoid animal products. I'm not vegetarian, but I minimise. Something I'm mad fascinated about,

and it veers a little bit into conspiracy theory. Well, not really. Do you know the way, like, companies like 23andMe, all these DNA companies, right? And these have become very, very popular in the past 10 years. And what I understand too is

like, it costs about like 120 quid or something like that. Something like that, yeah. And I heard that the actual cost is closer to about 800 quid. But the money, the reason it's cheap is because when you get your test, you now give that company the data of your DNA. And it was either 23andMe or one of the other ones,

they sold all that data to GlaxoSmithKline, who make L limb sip and and other stuff but like they sold it to them for 300 million yeah so what's going on there yeah they are basically i mean now it is i mean it's kind of like what you say that they um they collect your dna they also ask you lots of questions so they'll ask you and it's and it seems like fun they'll ask you oh have you ever they'll they'll ask you lots of um obvious straightforward questions like the color of your hair and they might ask you your weight and your how sporty you are and do you have these things in your family and then then you can go through and it's like um it's like collecting you know air miles points or loyalty points or something like you're you're getting a score for all that and they'll say like you uh you'll get your results and it's

like i bet you like spicy food I bet you don't like things like that well yeah some of it will be like that and so some of the results so there's that part you know but they are basically then collect they're doing a huge study on they got loads of DNA samples and then loads of detailed information about all the people who gave the samples so then they can look for these correlations between the genetic variation and the traits because you've given them loads of information about you, even if it feels very impersonal. And so then, yeah, they can then try and mine that for information that might be valuable

to a pharmaceutical company. So, yeah, why the... Like, then, from the point of view of the pharmaceutical company, what do they want from all that? They want to understand some of these traits that might have a medical angle on them. So they they'll ask you one of the questions they ask you is um have you ever like lost 10 kilos and managed to keep it off or something like that and and so then so one very valuable thing in pharmaceuticals would be you know dealing with weight problems

because it's kind of a rich person's problem right so people have money to spend and um so like that would be one that so it is profits of course yeah no that's what i mean the main motivation of um pharmaceutical companies is profit yeah um does it like does it freak you out like it freaks me out but i know fuck all it does it does it freak you out as someone who knows loads um i yeah i'm not too comfortable with it actually yeah and just the idea that i mean i think ownership yeah i think i mean so we have a bad history this in certain regards so the one that i know reasonably well is um the first ever gene that was discovered that's a risk factor for breast cancer. So it was called BRCA1 because it's bruh from breast and ca from cancer.

So BRCA1. And actually the work that was done to find that gene was done by this woman, Mary Claire King, who I think is amazing. I met her. She's fantastic. And I think she probably deserves a Nobel Prize. She might get one.

She's won lots of prizes but um she started studying breast cancer as a genetic disease when it was not fully even accepted that it was genetic and there are other causes of cancers right you can get there are cancers that can be virally induced so we know about the HPV vaccine and all that kind of stuff so you know and um so it was not even totally acknowledged that it was genetic and she started studying it really on her own and people thought she was mad to even think about it she studied it for probably like years and years and this was a time when we had hardly any information um no genetic disease was known linked to a gene or anything like this and she probably did about 20 years work or something, and it had gone from this enormous search.

It was narrowing it down, narrowing it down, narrowing it down. And it's like if somebody had said, oh, you know, there's a treasure chest somewhere in the world, and she said, oh, it's in Vicar Street Theatre. So once she had narrowed it down, 20 commercial pharmaceutical companies

hopped on the project. Oh, fuck off. With round- round the clock teams working on it and she was beaten to it by about a month by this company called myriad genomics who right away patented the gene so and that patenting that gene what does that mean patenting a fucking gene well yeah exactly what does it? But they were allowed to do it. And the consequences of that were that for decades, if you as a woman needed to get a test to see were you a carrier of this gene, which is a really strong risk factor, it's a really important piece of information. cost of that test was the cost of the materials and the you know the labor to do the test plus a fee that was owed to myriad genomics which was bigger than any of the other costs so what happened in reality was health services in any country were very reluctant to do these tests because it was so expensive and they'd only give you the test if you had reasons like you know you have to have two relatives who were affected before they let you do the test and stuff like this. This was fought through the courts

then for ages, and it was eventually struck down, but they had the patent for about 20 years, and in that time, research was suppressed because basically every time you did anything using the sequence of this gene, you were considered to owe money to this company. Like copyright, like a copyrighted tune. It's just totally bonkers, and of course, like, you know, to owe money to this company. Like copyright, like a copyrighted tune. It's totally bonkers. And of course, like, you know, women would make the comment, you know, you don't charge me for having the gene, you know, if you have the

disease. I mean, it's the one, it's the same, like, so Angelina Jolie, when people know that she had a mastectomy and these things, because she discovered she was a carrier. That was from, you know... Because she had money. She had money, yeah, but at that point as well, it was just around the time it got struck down.

But yeah, she did have money as well. Obviously, she could have had private healthcare. But it's a really useful piece of information. It's an actionable piece of information. You know, if you know you're a carrier, you could have checks more often than somebody else, you know, and all this kind of thing. And so it was just really, really annoying.

And so the idea that some of this genetic knowledge becomes proprietary knowledge that a company owns it and they get to decide who gets to use the knowledge that's kind that doesn't sit so easily with me and it's it's classism at a level of health and genes you know and it's dangerous and what so here's the thing right conspiracy theorists are very much we've seen this since covid right big farmer this big farmer that right which means that it's a minefield like to the point that i'm queasy saying the word big farmer because if i start talking about big farmer to ye you you're all going to go, what?

Really, blind boy? Do you know what I mean? Because it's kind of a dog whistle. When I hear someone say big farmer now, I'm like, how long until they start saying that it was all the Jewish people's fault? It's that. It really is that.

But what you've described there is a responsible, evidence-based approach to something which is fucking legitimately unethical yeah which we can go oh that's that's wrong how do you navigate that how do we navigate that information because all of you are listening to that and going what are you fucking serious do you know what i mean how do we navigate that so that we can get interested in this stuff keep informed and then not be i mean. I mean, pharmaceutical companies are companies in the business of making money.

And like any company that's in the business of making money, they want to make money, they want to make profit. But they're not in the business of making people sick. There's enough sicknesses going around that they don't need to invent any, right? Is that the difference? It's they are inventing illnesses so that they can provide the cure,

and that's when you step into... That's the conspiracy theory is that, you know, or that there's another one i've heard which is that there is a cure to all cancers and that the pharmaceutical companies are keeping it private because they make so much money on curing on treating cancer and it's like can you imagine how much money they would make if they could cure cancer like it'd be actually making tons more it's like a total nonsense and of course all the people who would have to be apparently keeping that secret.

So, I mean, I think it's normal. It's normal that a commercial company wants to make money. Every commercial company wants to make money. That's what they're there for. They're not charities. So if you accept them as part of the health system, that's fine, you do, but you just know as well that you have to monitor them

and have limits on what they're allowed to do and limits on what they're allowed patents. And what is the fight? Like, what do we do then? Like, where are the organisations that are fighting that fight? What do we do as civilians to kind of... To make... Like, this is our bodies. OK, yeah.

Like, how do we... I don't think it's fair that a pharmaceutical company can control treatment for something that everybody gets and you get access to that depending on how wealthy you are. I don't want to live in that world. So, like, how do we fight that? What organisations are fighting that fight that we can support them?

I mean, I think it's probably diffuse. I mean, the way I see it, obviously, I work in university and I kind of see things from my point of view, but, you know, we do research. Do you ever clash when the university wants to be, like, we're bringing in this company and that company, and you're like, well, what about our research here? No, the universities are, thankfully, more democratic than that, and so that doesn't happen, but, you know, but we do, so I think one of the things is, you know, so we do research that's funded by the government and therefore everybody owns it. And so and the conditions of our research would be that to publish it and, you know, and to share the knowledge essentially.

And who oversees that ethics? So it's kind of a mix of things like so we have internally, but also just think, it's the philosophy of university research generally. And like, you know, there was the Human Genome Project was an example of that. So the Human Genome Project was, so it's 20 years ago now, but it was publicly funded by lots and lots of governments. And it was essentially, and then it was a really big technical challenge to sequence the human genome, just in terms of the actual chemistry to do it. And it was really difficult. And a much easier thing to do was to sequence little bits of DNA. But to try and sequence long bits of DNA was technically difficult.

And you needed to sequence long bits because if you imagine, it was like one of those jigsaws when it's all beans. So there's too many bits that look the same that if you had only small jigsaw pieces you could never solve the puzzle because it's just all orange beans. But if you have big ones you can put it together. So the human genome has loads of these repeated bits inside it like one of those jigsaws.

And so the publicly funded project had these conditions that all the data had to be released every night at midnight so everything was released to the public on websites that anybody could access if you you know it didn't wouldn't make sense to everybody but it was there if anybody wanted it and then this private company got founded just you know shortly before the end and um were doing what they did was this really short sequencing that was easy, but they could make it work because they were matching it against the big pieces. So it was totally piggybacking, and their stated aim was to make money out of the genome. And the only way they could make money out of the genome,

like we felt it was probably because they were going to try and patent some things or keep proprietary access to the genome. So then it became a proper race because there was this huge push that the publicly funded one needed to win, like it needed to win. And so there was this huge amount of work and we started doing everything faster.

And essentially it was declared an official draw. In fact, the other one was, as far as I'm concerned, a scam because they weren't able to do the sequencing for the first time. They were only able to re-sequence. They were only able to repeat because they could match it against something, which is easier. It's easier to do something the second time.

But they officially got credit, but the company eventually fizzled out because they didn't have a product anymore. So that was a bit of a victory. That's nice. Is there anything that makes you uneasy, such as, like, I don't know, universities around the world and private interests or funding studies, you know, or is this like what pops up there that within the community you're all like, oh, don't do that. We need ethics. Yeah.

what pops up there that within the community you're all like oh don't do that we need ethics yeah yeah i mean i think um one of the things that is very uh like say in science um it is totally totally normal and standard that everybody has to declare at every time any even potential conflict of interest or an even perception so there are scientists who will found companies and be involved in companies and every time they write a paper they need to state that even if this paper they're writing today is about songbirds somewhere but they'll have to stay say i'm on the board or i'm an advisor for some other company and then and it's very normal in science that we do this and it's to be like to so that everything can be seen openly and i think that um that works pretty well i think so at least when you're reading it you can go okay this guy obviously

has an interest they put this person it seems to have an interest or you know they they have they have this interest but you know you can decide if it's been done well or not and um unfortunately you know governments aren't interested in funding universities that well anymore and so this is the bit of the and then someone else pops up and goes I'll fund it and it's Blackheart International my my kind of

purest way of doing things would be that the research is funded publicly and owned publicly and when Jonas Salk made the polio vaccine somebody asked him would he um would like was he going to patent it and like his answer was something like could you patent the sun or something along those lines you know it's like it's not even mine to patent yeah his his perception

of what he had done was that he had walked around a corner and found something not that he had created something that was there to make him money and of course then it was hugely valuable i mean it um you know the that was able to be uh distributed and essentially like eliminate polio almost worldwide it was it was uh totally eliminated from so many countries but now today you see like um and again correct me if i'm wrong I've spoken to people who are HIV positive. Yeah. And they described it to me as like, it's almost like having diabetes now. Yeah, yeah.

Because they have access to PrEP and all these other medications that they're allowed to be, they're healthy people living a normal life and they can even not pass it on to someone else. Yeah, it's actually amazing. But the drugs are so fucking expensive. So these are people living in a wealthy Western country

where the drugs are subsidized, but then people are still dying of AIDS in Africa. Yeah. So, I mean, the argument goes that you need to have some kind of profit incentive for the companies to develop them, otherwise they wouldn't even bother in the first place and that's the that's the way the argument goes and um i think if you accept that argument you could also say but there's a certain point in time when it like reverts to public or something

because that they that you know that they have they run out of a patent or some shit like that yeah but then what happens is like the patents do expire, but then they just start, you know, they just need to come up with some new usage before the end of the patent to renew the patent and things like that. But I think they could have, there's a lot of arguments that say, there's a lot of economists who say

that you don't need to have exclusive patenting rights in order to still have pharmaceutical companies being profitable. And so you could have a different model of of organizing pharmaceutical companies so this guy Dean Baker in the US I don't know if you've heard of him he's very interesting I bet you'd like him and like he talks about this and he talks about the idea that I am you know you don't he talks about all kinds of different aspects of economics but he talks about specifically patents and copyrights

and how he thinks those are no longer fit for purpose and how they just... Where a lot of people like the free market idea and they think this is the ideal and then this is the exact opposite of a free market. Absolutely. And it's not constructive. There's um and it's not uh constructive free about not being able to access health care because you're poor well also it's nothing free about

saying you know i own this you can't even make it and sometimes it's not even that they were they weren't always even the creators of that thing they just sometimes bought a patent off somebody else and then increased the price you know a patent uh you know the research has you know paid for itself you know well over like multiple times by now and so i think there's things like that and like when you talk about the conspiracy theory stuff you know sometimes it becomes easy to to latch on to a conspiracy theory about pharmaceutical companies because not many people love pharmaceutical companies you know and so it's probably either they're easy to hate and i think in a certain way but um but you know but on the other side of it we do need companies that produce reliable effective medicines at scale you know they do so many things really well you know you can go into a chemist and you can get

paracetamol you're not worried about what it contains because you know that this has been produced to really high standards on a production line that's clean. And these medicines, it could be quite easy to take for granted that you can just buy this and swallow it, even knowing it has potent effects. That's why you've got it. It's this thing that has very potent effects, but you trust that the dosage is the dosage that's on the label you know so pharmaceutical companies are also really important they have an expertise and they're they're doing something really important and i think you could change the profit structure change the way it's organized they would still be making tons of money and we could have a more kind of democratic system of medicine at the

same time. I'm going to take a little break there from that fascinating chat with Professor Aoife MacLeysett and have a little ocarina pause. Before I do I want to clarify something I said there in the chat where I was speaking about HIV and I compared it to diabetes. I want to be clear there that I wasn't minimising or downplaying HIV. I've spoken to people who work with organisations like ACT UP, which is a group that works towards ending the AIDS pandemic, and they also inform people about HIV and AIDS, because people who live with HIV,'s huge stigma social stigma around it and ostracization and social rejection and the reason I said diabetes is because people who are HIV

positive today with access to the right medicine can manage the virus and live a normal life the way that the person who is diabetic can do the same when they have access to medicine and insulin. So I should have clarified that when I was chatting with Aoife. So I don't have an ocarina this week but I do have a book. The book that I have in my hand is Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono. It's a book of strategies about how to think more creatively. It's a book of strategies about how to think more creatively. Edward de Bono was like a professional thinker. I think he might have possibly invented the phrase thinking outside the box.

He definitely invented the phrase lateral thinking. But if you want to address any problem or situation in a more creative way or want to change how you think creatively, then get yourself Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono or any book by Edward de Bono. I'm going to hit myself into the head with this book now and you're going to hear an advert. You can hear that echo, a movement. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock

hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH,

the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. My home studio into a room with poor acoustics, so you can hear the echo of this book off my head. enterprisechallenge.ca Very painful too. That was the Ocarina Pause.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever has you listening to and returning to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing because this is my full-time job this is how I earn a living this is how I pay my bills it's how I rent my office I adore making this podcast I love it this podcast is seven years old now the happiest seven years of my fucking life where each week I get to be genuinely passionate and this is only possible

because of patrons it's the only reason it's possible there's no commissioner that I have to please there's no one coming in saying get more ratings or you're cancelled there's no advertisers coming in saying change your content we need more listeners fuck that I have the time and space to embrace failure and be playful and that's I couldn't possibly ask for anything more so thank you to all my patrons if you met me in real life

would you buy me a cup of coffee or a pint well you can via the Patreon page that's all I'm looking for the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it

if you can't afford it don't worry about it you can listen for free because the person who is paying is about it you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gets a podcast i get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast upcoming gigs like i said vicar street this, the 22nd and 23rd, Monday and Tuesday. If you're liking this live podcast there

with Aoife, that's the vibe that you can expect from one of my Vicar Street gigs. That's why I adore the venue. Then, I'm off to Norway. I have a live podcast in Oslo on the 6th of February. Really looking forward to that. And then I'm in Berlin

on the 8th and the 9th the 8th is sold out couple of tickets left for the 9th can't wait to go to Berlin 20th of February I'm up in Derry at the Millennium Forum 23rd of February I'm in Killarney and then in April

my big giant UK tour Cambridge, Brighton Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, Glasgow, Newcastle. And then on the 1st of May, I think the biggest live podcast I've ever done. Without doubt, in the Hammersmith Apollo. Tickets are selling quickly for that UK tour. So, come along you wonderful crackintons. Without further ado, let's go back to the live

podcast with the profoundly interesting and wonderful Professor Aoife MacLeysett. Something I'm mad to ask you about, and I've never had the opportunity to ask someone who's in the know about this, epigenetic trauma. It's a word that gets thrown around all the time. know about this epigenetic trauma it's it's a word that gets thrown around all the time it's a word that gets misused quite a bit what is epigenetic trauma and what do you know about it um so i think it's basically this idea oh so it's just an idea most things everything starts as an idea doesn't it but no but it's it's an idea it't fully work, so yes. So basically, the idea of epigenetic trauma is that if I suffer something, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still have some legacy of this, somehow some memory of it.

So the trauma, big enough, can impact the DNA in your body. That's the idea, but it doesn't work. I mean, it doesn't work that way. Because essentially, like, so if I do suffer a trauma and it then affects my behavior, I'm scared of something for the rest of my life or I'm, you know, I'm somehow affected by that psychologically. What I pass on to the next generation is a single cell, the egg,

that has a copy of DNA that doesn't have those memories from my brain, doesn't even have a brain. So the mechanism for that to be passed on is kind of tricky at the least. So when people say epigenetics, like epigenetics is a thing and so epi just means on top of and it's basically modifications to dna and it's usually to do with which genes are turned on and off and things like this and it does have um some lasting effects as in during that process of development where you have so you start with just a fertilized egg and it eventually grows into a little human during that process um you know the starting fertilized egg they say it's a you know totipotent

it can become any type of cell in the body but at certain point um the cells kind of get committed to one type so if you cut your skin and it heals it heals with new skin cells but you can't grow liver cells from skin cells and things like that. And that's because some of the genes have been permanently turned off. And then that can be reset, and it has been done. So there is this, but only in an experimental setting. So there's this thing where you could take skin cells, and you can kind of wipe off, essentially, the epigenetic marks, and then you could use it to grow cells in the lab that would be a genetic match to me. So, you know, it could be used for some kind of medical transplant of sorts. That's kind of the idea. So that epigenetics is the stuff that goes on to the DNA that changes what's on and off. And the idea of the epigenetic trauma across generations is that that gets inherited.

The idea of the epigenetic trauma across generations is that that gets inherited. And there's no, so you're saying in your role, we haven't seen evidence for epigenetic trauma. Not this transgenerational thing, which is the thing that people get very interested in. So the study that a lot of people hear about is this one of famine in the Netherlands during World War II. of famine in the Netherlands during World War II and how there was apparently some effects of this into a couple of generations. And so it can go potentially two generations in one scenario. So let's just imagine if I was pregnant right now with a female baby,

then what things I suffer obviously affect the the baby because we're together at this point and if it's a female baby she's born with all her eggs already there in her body unlike males who produce sperm throughout their life so um the thing that happens to me is happening to all of us in a sense and including happening to her eggs so that's kind of the limit of it and you mean stress on your body and then the stress on the baby

yeah so that could so that in that sense you know you could see how if I suffered a famine for example that that could affect the baby that I currently have in a pregnancy and could potentially have some effect. But it's not fucking with their genes?

No, not permanently and not across more generations than that. The last generation it could possibly affect is the one that grows from the eggs in the baby. Something I think about a lot, right? So my great-grandmother was in the famine right wow well i come from a line of people who had children really late so it's strange so my great-grandmother was in the famine then like oh no was that my great-great-grandmother

one of them then my grandmother wasn't in the famine right but she was an anxious woman and then no lads i'm after getting this fucked up hold on hold on hold on a second my great-grandmother was in the famine she was a baby though hold on she was in the famine then my grandfather right he was in west cork and he had to he was in the famine. Then my grandfather, right? He was in West Cork and he was in the RA. He had to fight the Black and Tans. As a result of that, having to fight the Black... He was just a farmer and all of a sudden he's in this position. He was a very anxious man on account of having killed people and been shot at. A very anxious man with a lot of trauma. A very anxious man with a lot of trauma. And then my dad picked up this trauma and anxiety because he's being raised by a very anxious person. So my dad was mad anxious. And me then, as a child, I learned anxiety as a response.

When something would happen in the house, whatever it would be, my dad wouldn't react to it in a calm or rational way. His immediate first reaction was panic okay so me as a little kid looking at the adult i learn oh the first thing you must do is panic yeah any type of stress you must panic and then i become an adult with severe fucking panic attacks and i see that for me as learned behavior because of a trauma but nothing to do with not the genetic genes it's simply behavior yeah you know and kids look to adults for behavior yeah you like you can learn a lot of those things like you say but are there let's so i'm autistic right is there a gene for autism uh there isn't a gene for autism in the sense of not one thing but there are multiple

potential uh genetic factors that can um make autism more likely in a given individual so this is where like it's the recipe not a blueprint okay but um so that um it it could you can have genetic factors that make something more likely in one person than they are in another person, but it still doesn't mean that's definitely going to happen. And what are they? So they would be not anything that would roll off the tongue, like it would be a small variation.

And there'd be lots of potential different genes because the brain is very complex and autism is very complex and has lots of different aspects to it and lots of differences in severity as well um you know so like i don't jesus christ i could meet another person who's autistic and we fucking nothing in common like yeah yeah no honest to god though honest to god like they they're all of they can hear lights and they get freaked out by lights like i don't have any sensory issues or anything like that um but it is it's a weird thing for me as well because i almost feel uncomfortable calling myself autistic because i was there at the airport at the weekend you know and because i'm diagnosed autistic i'm entitled to a wristband that means that i don't have to

queue up at the airport i can get special assistance and i'm there i don't have to queue up at the airport. I can get special assistance. And I'm there. I don't do it, because I'm like, I don't fucking need it, so I'm not doing it. But I was there with the big massive queue, going, fuck's sake, no.

And then I saw, and it was all these, it was people in fucking wheelchairs. And it's like, oh, they actually fucking need it. And imagine me rocking up and going, can I jump ahead of the queue there? Oh, why?

I think about the Norman invasion and all for the last... Do you know what I mean? So it's weird for me. But someone else can be like straight up, there's a crowd or even the lights at the airport and that's it, they're, fuck, get me out of here, you know? So it's a strange thing. I don't understand it it i'm not allowed to call it asperger's anymore yeah that term has been dropped he was a bastard do you know why we don't call it asperger's anymore you don't know no hans fucking asperger was a nazi yeah so he was a nazi doctor

and what hans asperger would do was that at the death camps when they were deciding if people had physical disability or what they perceived to be mental disability, when these people were being exterminated, Hans Asperger would walk in and go, not them ones, those ones would be good scientists and artists and these

were the Asperger kids and they were people who, what we now call ASD level one, the people who are high-functioning autistic. It's like, you're a bit eccentric and this, and that's what Asperger's is. So we don't say that anymore. Now it's ASD level one.

But then for me, then it's weird because it's like, I'm calling myself autistic, but then I meet another person who's autistic and they really need a lot of support and a lot of help and they can't fucking speak yeah yeah and then for me I feel uncomfortable in that space so it's a weird one yeah it's like I do need another word just not one named after a nazi yeah yeah no it is I think it's a challenge as well just because it is such a wide spectrum of symptoms that people have and then you know there's this thing people say you know um not about us without us or something like that is that the way they or the way they phrase it but

you know so and there's this push that um you know patient adverse advocacy groups should be patients speaking for themselves but then you have this issue that within autism the ones who can't speak for themselves are a group that have a different experience than the ones who are actually non-verbal. And it gets very difficult. This is why, like, even... Like, I said I was autistic on the Late Late the other night, and I felt like a bit of a prick for that exact reason.

Because how do I speak for someone who's non-verbal? Like, someone was asking me, what would my ideal... School was pretty difficult for me. But right now, as an adult, I'm pretty, I'm grand. I'm flying it, and I'm in a career that I like, and I get to explore my interests. But school was difficult for me,

because in order for me to learn something, I need to pace up and down really rapidly while listening to heavy metal I'm not joking you when I'm researching my podcast and I'm in my office and I hide this behaviour this is the behaviour that I hide

because it looks fucking mad but if I'm coming up with a hot take I'll run up and down listening to fucking Sepultura and when I'm doing that I'm incredibly happy and I can move my hands and I'm living in space and I'm thinking of all the And when I'm doing that, I'm incredibly happy and I can move my hands. Oh, and I'm living in space

and I'm thinking of all the ideas and I'm in the place I need to be. But I really do need that in order to learn. And when I can do that, I'm like a fucking laser beam. In school, it's like sit down.

I'm intimidated by everyone that's around me. I couldn't learn fucking shit. But imagine, now that's what I would have needed in school. It's a big ask. It's a big ask. But then what made

me have a little bit of compassion for myself, right? Because I was thinking, that's a bit greedy. You can't ask for that in junior, junior cert. Even though, if I'd have fucking done it, I'd have flown past it. I'll give you the fucking example right so I failed my leaving cert I almost failed my junior cert very very bad results

except for one area there was an agricultural science section on the science paper we didn't even study this in my fucking school didn't even study it I took it and got 100%.

But the reason was I'd been listening to this band called Cypress Hill at home and they were a rap band and I fucking loved them and I'd listen.

When I got home from school that's when I could be myself. That's when I listened to music and got into the interest I was into. So my interest was

when I was 14 listening to this band Cypress Hill, and Cypress Hill just kept speaking about weed, smoking weed, growing weed, but I was so interested in the lyrics, I just wanted to know more about cannabis as a plant. So I looked into the back of one of my brother's magazines, and they were setting all that mail order stuff

about how to grow cannabis. So I bought a book on that and sent off for it which was how to grow cannabis and it came back but it was actually a really fucking rigorous scientific document about botany so i'd be at home listening to cypress hill all day reading really advanced fucking botany and then i went into the junior cert sat this paper that they don't even sit in the school and got a%. The marks that I got were so high that I was putting notes there that didn't even belong and answering beyond the questions. It got me in trouble. I got pulled into the principal's office because they're like, you're a little shit. You're a little shit. The rest

of your results are terrible. What the fuck did you do here? Did you do here? Because it was so... Did you tell them? I couldn't. I couldn't because I couldn't tell the teachers because I've got a book at home about growing hash. But I look back at it now and the reason it happened is because

I got to follow my thing there. Listening to music that I love, whatever it is about the music, I perceive things differently like i i can perceive music as almost like shapes yeah i hear music as as because music is just symmetrical vibrations of air so sometimes i can't envision it being there like a synesthesia i was gonna ask oh no it is yeah when i like when i i produce music as well so when i make songs i've got my two speakers there, but it's Lego.

And do you kind of see it? Do you feel like you see it in front of you or do you kind of feel like it's somehow inside your head as well? Some people... It's not augmented reality. What it's like is... It's a little daydreamy.

I can imagine the blocks so well that they're not there, but they are. But when I listen, it's 100% physical, and I can see all that space. And because I'm relating to music in a very different way, that's why when I was 22, I made a song in my bedroom, and it almost became Christmas number one and beat fucking X Factor. But that's it. That's why. Because I could see music.

But when I was a kid in school, I realize now that that actually, learning about agricultural science and botany that was me as an autistic kid going that's how you fucking learn and if i had actually been allowed let him do history on his own listening to cypress hill i'll get fucking 100 i'm not joking you but imagine then i went to the other kids in the class the kids who were neurotypical the kids who were okay sitting down listening to the teacher watching the teacher's face

imagine I said to them no you can't do that anymore you have to listen to Slipknot and pace up and down and then try and learn your history that would be fucking torture for them so it was torture for me the other way around yeah you know it's nuts but that's just my unique autistic experience what about someone else and

their problem is lights yeah so it's a real it's a tough thing to accommodate because the spectrum is so unbelievably different for everybody but i think even not within autism like people i mean in a kind of an ideal situation people be allowed to learn in their own way at their own pace instead of you know another way like our school system is you've got a class and another class so you're doing history and you're just starting to get into it and they go sorry no geography now you know or now maths you just have to chop and change instead of just burrowing into something and finding it interesting and seeing where it leads you it just doesn't work at scale i suppose i don't know you'd have to measure passion yeah yeah you know you'd have

to measure passion and engagement rather than the actual outcomes of it and it's just i keep thinking it's a huge big ask but like is it really because you're talking about people's lives yeah and they say with the the school system as we have it today it's something that was very much developed in the industrial revolution and we all make little office clerks that's what school is school is is training people to be good in the office you know it trains people for how the society works today even i did a podcast about the history of the color gray and i but it's it's i traced do you know those little beehives on Skellig Mikkel? Yeah.

So you know Skellig Mikkel, don't you? That little island. It was in Star Wars. So it's an island. I think it's off the coast of Galway. I think so. No, no, no, no. It's down by Kerry.

Down by Kerry. And on these islands, you have these strange little stone beehives. And monks used to work in there. And their work was clerical work it was official office work, it was considered unnatural because it was work that was

not performed in nature and what those monks were doing was how do I separate myself from nature so they built these grey stone huts but you can trace that and the colour gray of those rocks all the way right to the color of the fucking uniform that you wear in school because you go into an office why is it gray why is everything gray why is everything serious gray why are

politicians suits gray you can trace it all the way back gray was seen as unnatural and what i mean by unnatural removed from nature so that you can be not distracted by the wonder and beauty of everything and focus intently on your work you know that was a tangent of a tangent and a fucking half and i want to ask some of the questions that oh yeah the internet had loads of there goes my vape internet had loads of this fucking my normal I want to ask some of the questions that... Oh, yeah, you brought questions. The internet had loads of... There goes my vape. The internet had loads of...

This fucking... My normal vape broke. I don't like this new one. It looks like lipstick. And the other thing as well, and I noticed this with my guest last night too, because of the fucking shape of it. It's like I'm intimidating you with a knife the whole time.

It doesn't happen with the other vapes. Because I noticed you... And my guest last night as well was uncomfortable, and I'm not intimidating you with a knife the whole time. It doesn't happen with the other vapes. Because I noticed you, and my guest last night as well, was uncomfortable, and I'm like this. I don't feel intimidated, if that helps. Okay, good, good. Let's see. Oh, yeah, the rumours a couple of years ago that they cloned a human in China.

Did you hear about that? I heard about it, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it is technically possible. It's just considered ethically taboo. Because we had that sheep, Dolly. Dolly, yeah. Dolly was a proper cloned sheep. And other mammals have been cloned.

So we could do it with a person. It's technically possible. But it's like... Ethically. Don't be fucking doing this. Yeah. No, and it's like... It's not only... I mean, it's just don't be fucking doing that. And it's like, it's not only, I mean it's

just like a whole minefield of so many different things because... If you clone a human, does that human have parents? Genetically, yeah. It has the same it has whoever the donors are. So you do require sperm and an egg to clone a human? Well actually, sorry, no

to clone a human, the genetically, the parents would be the same as the one who was cloned so like if we cloned you this i know about cloning because of my book from growing weed when i was 14 but like genetically they'd be the same as you so genetically your parents would be their parents even if they met them ever or not or existed it's an exact copy. Genetically, yes, apart from the mitochondrial DNA, which is what we mentioned earlier,

the little bit in the mitochondria, because that's separate. They don't usually transfer that. Did Dolly the sheep have a brother or sister? You mean a cloned one? Well, like... When they did that cloning experiment, so the guy who did it just died, actually, just incidentally but they tried

several hundred times and one worked basically and then so I don't think they cloned again from the same source as far as I know but yeah so Dolly was an exact copy of another sheep but was um the surrogate

mother was a different so so the other sheep what i want to know really is like was there a parallel sheep with dolly because that's the interesting thing in a perfect world where you were allowed clone humans you'd make multiple of the same little clone army because if you have that then you can test all the like I'm being mad unethical now yeah

but like if you have two clones of humans I mean have that one in Dublin and that one in Cork you know what I mean that's identical twins

so that actually has been done oh really are identical twins clones basically yeah fuck off in the same sense no but really really effectively off. In the same sense.

No, but really? Really? Effectively. Genetically, it's the same thing. Wow, okay. You've got two people with exactly the same DNA. Do you think they cloned a human in China? They could have.

It's quite possible. And the rumors, were they legitimate or was it just internet shit? It's really hard to know right because it's not the kind of thing they probably can um uh announce to like so if you really wanted to do this and have it absolutely verified you'd be announcing it in the audience they're taking no but like you'd be announcing it in advance you'd be demonstrating this is where we took the dna sample from this is where we got the egg from and then at the end you'd have this uh baby that's born and you'd be able to show look this baby has the same dna as this other individual but because the way it was done was not and it was secretive and so they claimed they did it um but you know the the where the people they took the sample from and the person they took the egg from and everything wasn't made public.

So that's the way you could have verified it. So they could have done it because the technology exists and because it's quite possible that somebody could subvert or bypass ethical constraints and manage to do it anyway, find somebody who's willing and all that kind of thing. But it isn't verified because nobody kind of kept track of it that way probably because it was illegal and secretive and what is the main ethical argument about not cloning humans like why is it so bad i suppose and lots of different ones i um it potentially treats human life as kind of a commodity and it also carries a potentially huge burden of

expectation like even if you were to imagine something less contentious like cloning your dog like you know you have this dog you love and they die do you think that's going to happen in the future i think people possibly have done that actually my beloved dog died can i have it again yeah and then what happens is you get really disappointed because oh fuck well it's not your dog it's your dog's twin oh my god

you know so this dog is going to be different it's not going to not the same personality no the same way that two twins are not the same yeah so

then you have this has this happened have people done dog cloning and just had a disappointing Jack Russell I believe so but that's what we're dealing with that's what we're dealing with

yeah this one's a bit of a goal yeah I like this one likes I believe so. But that's what we're dealing with. That's what we're dealing with. Yeah. This one's a bit of a goal. Yeah. This one likes postmen. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. And yeah, yeah. They don't want the same food and whatever.

And this one used to sit on your... The old one used to sit on your lap and just be really quiet. And this one just yaps at you and poos on the carpet and stuff. But then, yeah. So cloning humans, if you were cloning humans because you're trying to replace somebody you love. Oh, fuck. Very, very problematic.

Oh, dear God, yeah. If you're cloning humans because, I mean, so not even cloning humans, but even, you know, there is an ethical, it's a kind of a side shoot of this. Can I grow one of me and he's in a cage and I can have his liver when mine fucks up? Well, yeah, and that's, you know, I can have his liver when mine fucks up well yeah that's and that's you know

the Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go that's basically that it's or there's a film The Island as well which is that but it's basically people who are grown for organs grown as organ donors but you know so that's an issue would you be doing it for that reason

and there's a kind of a side shoot of this which is if you have like so you know if you have a family you've got a few children one of them needs uh an organ donation or a bone marrow transplant or something you might then look and see somebody else in the family a match right and then there's and that would be considered okay normally but then having a child deliberately so that they could be a match is kind of the next step on that. And that's where it gets a bit more problematic. You know, and you can have a lot of arguments one way or the other. Is this ethical?

Like, are you, you know, are you having this child? And you could use IVF to be confident they'd be a match and things like that. So you could select which embryos to use. And, you know so that's technically possible but ethically really problematic because it's different than saying you know this is our family and we have these children and if one of them is a match you know you accept as a parent that this one goes to the surgery for the bone marrow donation or something but choosing to have the child specifically for that purpose feels more

transactional and it's not great yeah and it's you know it's there isn't what the thing is right i only have a feeling and i don't have words for the feeling because it's so new so that means it's bad yeah no it's just it just it just feels like you're not treating that person as their own person anymore you're treating them and it's it's not the same as having a copy of you in a cave that you can come and take the liver for later. But it feels not totally different either. Do you think we could get to a point where you can just grow my spleen or my liver?

Because that doesn't sound too bad. Because my liver doesn't have feelings. Doesn't have feelings, absolutely. And we are getting to that point. And is that a goal? Is that a goal? Yeah. So when I mentioned earlier that thing when we were talking about epigenetics

and I said, you know, your skin cells are always your skin cells, but experimentally you can kind of reset that. That's what that area of research is aiming to do. So essentially you can, so the just fertilized egg is that cell that can make any possible other kind of cell and they're trying to take a skin cell and reset it like that and then trigger it to grow into other types of cell and so um you know some structures are more simple and so liver is actually an easier one because it's an organ that doesn't have like lots of complex structures inside it.

Like a heart has a proper shape and you've got to have chambers and all that. But the liver is just kind of a big sludge to be technical about it. And one of the, do you remember earlier I was talking about 23andMe? Yeah. One of the conspiracy theories about that,

just because it's interesting. So one of the conspiracy theories about that, just because it's interesting. So one of the conspiracy theories I read was, so you've got 23andMe, all these companies, and they put a lot of money in the past 10 years into targeting deliberately young people, people 21, 22. And the conspiracy theory is, they're targeting young people,

so that in like 50 years they're basically hoping for that technology they're hoping for sometime down the line we'll be growing livers and lungs and when you're on twitter or facebook in 30 years and you get older your targeted ad is going to be we've got your liver in a jar. But do you know what I mean? Because you did 23andMe when you were young, we got your whole DNA, sold it to Glatclose Mick Co-Cline, it's internet in the future,

and now you're, in the same way that like I'm approaching my 40s, so most of my targeted ads are hot milfs in your area. Do you know what I mean? This is the maddest one of all, right? This is the best one. I bought

a barbecue there about three years ago, right? And I was unhappy with the barbecue, so I engaged in a series of angry emails with the people who sold me the barbecue. This barbecue isn't good enough. I want it replaced. And it went back and forth, back and forth. But I'm doing it on Gmail. So all of my words

are definitely going into that data. So after a week of arguing about a barbecue, I started getting ads for divorce lawyers. Because it was such divorced behavior. Divorced man behavior, you know.

But that's what they're thinking. They're thinking thinking you give away your dna to 23andme when you're young and then in the future your targeted advert is we know what age you are we kind of know what health issues you may get because we have your dna and do you want your lung we've got your lungs over here we can grow them right there we're shipping to you does that sound mad yeah um that was the best yeah i've ever gotten in my life you didn't even elongate it it's like a fucking punctuation yeah yeah so that's fucking nuts well because you still have

your own dna too so if you need a new liver, you can just take a sample from yourself. Okay, okay. Yeah, but they, I mean... So they don't have exclusive rights to your DNA. But, so yeah, and it'll be a fresh sample as well. It'll be much better. Okay. Yeah, but...

Is this why we stopped hearing about stem cells? So, well, what they... You don't hear about them anymore? I do. Oh. But, no, these ones... stem cells and so well what they call you don't hear about them anymore i do but uh no these are white dog shit so these um so stem cells are the cells in an embryo that can grow into almost anything and um these ones if you take a skin cell and reset it, that's called an induced pluripotent stem cell. So it's an induced...

Your own stem cell. You're basically inducing an ordinary cell to become like a stem cell. Before I open questions to the audience, I want to ask you about gene editing. Yeah. I want to ask about gene editing designer babies. Tell us about this.

Okay. Why did designer babies... Sounds like a class band, doesn't it? Yeah. So, I mean, basically, I mean, you know, DNA can be written as text. You know, you write your sequence as text, so you can talk about changing it, like

editing. Some kinds of editing are, in my opinion, totally ethical and really, really, if we could do them, I'd be doing them right away. This is like hereditary diseases. Yeah. And you can do it in such a way that you are only treating the individual. You're not doing something that would be permanent through the generations. So let's just say,

like if you took the example of cystic fibrosrosis where that's caused by a mutation in one gene and there's actually one specific mutation is the most common one in ireland it's just a little piece that's missing and three letters are missing in the middle of the gene that's all and um that causes the disease and so if you could um have a therapy that could be like because it's the lungs, it could even be in inhaler form potentially. Wow. Who takes it?

The man or the dad? No, no, no. The idea would be in this case, it would be the person. To the person who has. Oh my God, you can change. Oh my God. Well, it would be affecting only the cells it comes in contact with. So it would literally be the lining of the lungs.

So that's an idea. Okay, so that's not working. That is amazing though. That's actually been one. It's not working yet. That's been an idea for a while. It turns out one of the symptoms of cystic fibrosis is having very thick mucus. So it's hard to get through.

But there are other kinds. So there's colleagues of mine who work. I didn't know gene editing was something. I thought it meant it has to happen at an IVF stage. I didn't know it was for someone now. It can be both. So in the way I'm talking about it, it would be as a therapy. A gene therapy.

Yeah. Okay. And it's been done as well for blindness. So there's genetic forms of blindness. And in that case, it can be... I mean, it sounds... People might find it squeamish, but it's better than the alternative.

It's an injection into the eye. And so it affects only the eye. And if you do it before the person gets blind, it's now, like these have been in human trials for a while, have been quite successful. And you can delay or prevent the onset of blindness. And that is gene therapy being used? Yeah. And that is editing genes and editing the genome and introducing genes and replacing genes and things like that.

Is there anything mad that can happen from that? There are possible problems with any of these things. So essentially, what they do is they use a virus to deliver the DNA. That's because what viruses do is essentially inject their DNA into the cell they're infecting. So you take advantage of the fact that viruses are already doing this kind of thing. And so you use a safe virus that does it. And then that DNA can get integrated into the normal genome that's already there. And one of the risks would be that it gets integrated into

a place that causes a problem by itself so if you imagine you have a normal gene here and this integration just happens right in the middle of that then it breaks that gene and so that could be a potential problem and you know so those are the kind of risks you have to weigh up um i heard that um the covid vaccine has got gene editing in it and when they turn on the 5G we're all going to die no but that as an example of how your work

gets, that's what conspiracy theorists say, people are saying that the COVID vaccine has got is it gene editing like that and then it's tied in with 5G but like I'm not being mad I'm just saying this is what people believe and it's wrong and now we have an expert so it doesn't actually the covid the mrna vaccines don't have do any editing so what they have so mrna is um so the gene is dna and the mrna is produced by dna which when a gene

is turned on the first step of a gene being turned on is it makes mRNA, and that is the instructions to make the protein, which is whatever. So the COVID... That's what it does to us. So the COVID vaccine was just the mRNA, which are the instructions to make the protein.

So what happens is when you get the vaccine, it enters into your cell and it makes the protein. And that protein that the COVID vaccine makes is the spike protein of the virus, which means now that your body gets exposed to the spike protein, but a disembodied spike protein. So it's, and then your immune system learns that protein the same way it would have learned it

if it was an infection. And now your immune system knows how to recognise and destroy things that are attached to that spike protein. And how different is that process to, we'll say, fucking Edward Jenner, the old school vaccines? So the original vaccines were either mild or deactivated

forms of something that was the full virus. So in this case, the vaccine was not the virus, the one we're talking about. So there were versions of COVID vaccines in some countries that were an inactivated virus. So you can give an inactivated virus or you can give a mild. So the word vaccine comes from, so the Latin for cow, because it was the cowpox he was giving as a mild thing that was close enough to smallpox that your body could mount a better response to smallpox because it had seen something like that before. But the COVID vaccine was never entering your DNA.

So it's just the mRNA. And how does it get to the point of misinformation where you have people saying what i just said yeah um yeah it's i i not quite sure because i don't quite understand how it went so far and i don't understand like when people were going on about 5g and then vandalizing masts and stuff yeah it was it was so i mean it's a great like okay it's a great story. I would watch that film. But that's the thing with conspiracy theories. It's folklore.

It's folklore, but it's right now and it's harmful. But it's like we were talking about earlier. People mistrust the pharmaceutical companies. So there were certain people who were just ready to jump on the idea that they'd be taking this opportunity to poison us all or whatever instead of actually the fact that it was some really, really amazing scientists who worked really hard to very, very rapidly produce a vaccine that gave us all our normal lives back, which was pretty amazing. And one of the women who worked on it just got the Nobel Prize,

which was fantastic. Wow. Just a quick one on designer babies. Oh, yeah. Like, I want to know about that. I want to know, is it ethical? Is it possible? It is neither ethical nor fully possible.

So have you ever seen the film Gattacad? Do you know this film? Yeah, that's class. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's wonderful. And I mean, I suppose that's, I like that film. So for anyone who doesn't know, it's basically set in a future time

where designer babies are totally possible. It's classism at a genetic level. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get genetic racism essentially or whatever. But one of the things, so there's lots of parts that I think that are really quite realistic. And one of the things

that's really quite realistic in that is like even though you pay for all of this, you don't always get what you expected and so you have the guy who was the natural child and he's the one who is motivated and works hard and does everything and you got somebody else who has all the genes for everything apparently but either suffers an accident in their life or just not that into it or whatever and that's part of it so and another aspect of it is most of the interesting stuff um genetically is really really complex so you know there's not just one gene or three letters in the middle of one gene that you can change to change the outcome

you'd be talking about 200 different things and each of them having a really incremental effect and um even still we don't that doesn't explain the whole thing. And then, you know, when you get into things like personality traits and abilities and intelligence, there's lots of evidence that there are genetic factors that affect intelligence, but we don't know what all of them are. And they don't, and you know, when I say this,

the racists get happy because they go, oh, just genetic factors for intelligence like mine. And, you know, they get all happy that they are somehow genetically superior and all of this. But, you know, there are genetic factors that affect intelligence and all kinds of other traits. We don't see them racially divided at all. But yeah, so it's a really complex, messy job. Like you'd have to edit so many things and we don't know what they are. And even still, messy job like you'd have to edit so many things and we don't know what they are and even still when you have the genetic factors even if you had the genetic factors in place and they increase the tendency for something they don't dictate the outcome so you won't even necessarily get the

the outcome even if it were some point considered ethical and is there even an ethical approach whereby like two parents are having a child and they're like one of us hunting this disease or something like i i don't i've got this what is it called genetic counseling yeah where two parents are advised maybe you shouldn't have kids because we think your kid might be very sick yeah For those people to go, there's another route. Yeah, so that would be considered like the only kind of ethic. Well, I consider that an ethical situation to do it, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be editing. And you might not necessarily call it a designer baby.

You could do what I think they call, so a couple in that situation would probably go through IVF rather than a fully natural route. And then you could have multiple embryos. And instead of editing an embryo to be a certain way, you could select an embryo that doesn't have a specific thing. And is that possible now? Yes. Wow.

Yeah. So you can test. So the embryo can be a few cells big and you can test the DNA and you can, when it's something like Huntington's, it's actually very, very clear because in that case, it is a single gene. And it's one of the rare cases where it's a single gene

that definitely causes the disease. If you carry that gene, you do get the disease, unfortunately. And so that would be one where it would be very clear cut as well. So, and in that case, you could say, you know, I'm not trying to decide everything about my baby, but, you know, I don't want my baby to be sick, you know, and you're just choosing that they don't get this illness. That's the only thing you're choosing, which is a very different thing than trying to say, I want my baby to be a super athlete.

And, you know, I think it's a different... I think I feel like it's a different type of decision. Hello. Hello. How are you? What's the crack? Hi. If you had a clone of yourself, like, up here in your house, same personality and everything, how would you treat it?

Do you think you'd treat it ethically? Like, what do you want to say to it? Thank everything, how do you treat it? Do you think you treat it ethically? Like what do you want to say to it? Thank you. Where would you take it? Oh my God. That's a, that was worth it, that was. I often think about this a lot, like if I'm, no, but if I'm thinking about,

like I'm always very hard on myself, throughout Like, I'm always very hard on myself. Throughout my life, I'm always very hard on myself. And, like, I'm in my 30s now, and I'd look back to... Like I was saying earlier, like, when I was, like, 22, making horse outside. And I'd love to... No. I would like to, me now, like, get into a time machine and go back to me when I'm 22 and give myself a big hug and go,

do you know what? You're not so bad. And then I'd think, nah, 22-year-old me wouldn't like that at all. I'd get terrified. I'd be like, who the fuck are you? I'm you. And do you know what would happen? We'd end up trying to have sex with each other.

Because that's just what lads would do. I'd be like, me at that age would go to 22-year-old me and 22-year-old me, I'd be like, all right, grand, I'm dealing with it. You're from the future. Okay. Christmas number two, really, was it?

Fucking great. What does your dick look like now? Have any grey pubes? I do, I've got nine. But that wasn't your question. Do you know, that's a fucking brilliant question, that is. That is a fantastic question, and I'll tell you why. When I'm thinking about how I manage my mental health, right?

So, a huge thing about mental health is, when you're getting depression, anxiety, and you think of the voice inside your own head, especially anxiety, right? It's really critical. Like you're fucking useless. You're weak. You're pathetic. That's the inside

and then you feel these horrible things and I always say to myself would I say that to my best friend? If I get social anxiety I'm afraid to my best friend you know like if I get social anxiety I'm afraid to go out my inner voice will say you pathetic useless piece of fucking shit

you can't even go out and then I have depression after that you know what I mean if my friend came to me and said I'm scared of going out to the pub I wouldn't in a million years would I say to them you useless pathetic cunt

I'd go oh my god how can i help you with that listen i'd listen to him so if i had a clone of me up in my attic locked into my attic that's what i'd be doing i'd be having that trying to have that self-compassion i know they'd have it wouldn't work because they'd have worse mental health problems than me because they're locked in the attic actually that's a tough one that's a tough because they'd have worse mental health problems than me because they're locked in the attic. Actually, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. We'd have to live parallel lives.

I don't think I could use the me locked in the attic as... As you being ethical. Yeah, imagine that. Imagine me locked in the attic. And then I walk in and it's like, yeah, I've got bad anxiety today. I'm being very hard on myself. I'm being real hard on myself. I'm being real hard on myself.

I'm scared to go to the pub. Can you talk to me about it? And then attic me is like, No, I'm in a fucking cage of bigger issues. Can I have a nappy? So... Any other questions? Because that one...

That's very platonic. I like that, that's real Plato's cave shit fair play for that question Yonder I have a question for Aoife just because I'm really interested in what it is that you do was there a piece of research that you were either involved in or that you read that fundamentally changed your outlook or your career, was there something that you came

across like that I suppose yeah loads of things um so there's actually okay lots of different things but um one that sticks with me is actually uh possibly one of the most mundane in the sense that it's probably a piece of genetics knowledge that a lot of people know, if not everybody, and one that I had certainly known for a long time before it suddenly blew my mind in a different way, to the point that I remember where I was standing and who I was talking to when it happened.

And that's just that, you know, so you get your DNA from your parents. Everybody knows that. And they got it from their parents. Everybody knows that. And they got it from their parents. Everybody knows that. And the way that DNA is copied is, you know, you've got the double helix, which is the two strands. And so they pull apart and each strand acts as a template for the new, for half. And that's how you now have two. So the old stuff touches the new every time. how you now have two. So the old stuff touches the new every time.

And so basically, every cell in everybody's body has an unbroken physical chain of contact, direct contact, to everything that ever lived and the origins of life. Fuck. Yeah. That's exactly the reaction I had.

That is insane oh my god and again I'm going to say something mad unfortunately but it is relevant highly relevant I said this a couple of weeks ago on a podcast but I was meditating a lot for a while and I used to meditate by a river and one time I was meditating a lot for a while and I used to meditate by a river and one

time I'd gotten into meditation so much that when I come out of it the first thing I saw was a nettle and I was overcome with a sense that it was like a sibling I know it's it's not the same as like a professor and years and years of research and work but I was astonished with that feeling how much love and empathy it was more than love and empathy it was a slight realization that me and that nettle it's like we're the same me and you and then I come out of it knows back in the real world but it made sense and then you backed it up with science no but there are genes that are practically identical actually there are

some with everything that's gone on and all the amount of time that's passed, there are still some genes that are practically identical between us and plants. And what, like, this is the question I always ask scientists. At what point do you ever start going,

oh, fuck, there might be God? Me, no. Others, no. Brilliant. Do you think when that happens, you're kind of stopped being a scientist? No, I don't know. I mean, I think, so for whatever reason, more physicists believe in God than biologists. Really? I don't know why. I think maybe the cosmos blows their mind. But, you know, when it comes to any kind of natural life um i don't feel any need to invoke anything supernatural or a creator or a designer no quite the opposite i get absolute i find it so fascinating and endlessly interesting to the point that i've been spending

my whole career looking at the processes of evolution and how we can actually trace it and you can see it's always different versions of the same thing like it's the same processes just happening and you know you've got mutation and selection essentially you know change happens and some of them survive and some of them don't and these little basic things produce these enormous diversity of life and extraordinary adaptations, like the fantastic feather displays of a bird, the beautiful displays and the perfumes of a flower that attracts that bird to come and drink there. And, you know, all of that, it's, yeah, it's mad.

I could literally just chat for ages with you forever. Oh, that's about the nicest compliment I ever got. Unfortunately, we're at curfew and you have buses. I know. I'd be like, I'd stay here forever chatting. Aoife MacLeysid, Professor Aoife MacLeysid, thank you so much for a wonderful night. That was an absolutely magnificent chat.

And thank you so much to Professor Aoife MacLeysid for that. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, slow blink at a cat. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. you