CRISPR gene-editing technology is making many advances in the medical world, but you’re more likely to first encounter CRISPR on your plate. In this episode, we walk you through how CRISPR works, its opportunities and why some people worry that the risks may outweigh the potential benefits.
CRISPR gene-editing technology is making many advances in the medical world, but you’re more likely to first encounter CRISPR on your plate. In this episode, we walk you through how CRISPR works, its opportunities and why some people worry that the risks may outweigh the potential benefits.
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Credits
A CRISPR Bite is supported by the Jean Monnet Network, which is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union through the GEAP-3 Network of scientists. More on our project here. This podcast does not reflect the views of our funders.
This podcast was co-written and hosted by Dr. Lauren Crossland-Marr. Our executive producer is Corinne Ruff. She co-wrote, edited and produced the show. Jake Harper edited this episode. The show was sound designed and engineered by Adriene Lilly. Aaron Crossland made our theme music. Rachael Marr designed our logo. Legal support from New Media Rights.
Thank you to the GEAP-3 team! Special thanks to Matthew Schnurr, Klara Fischer, and Glenn Stone for their support and advice on this podcast.
Leave a 5-star rating and review of this episode on Apple podcasts to help us spread the word. Have more to say? Email us at acrisprbitepodcast@gmail.com.
Jennifer Doudna: "A few years ago, with my colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, I invented a new technology for editing genomes. It's called CRISPR Cas9. The CRISPR technology allows scientists to make changes to the DNA in cells that could allow us to cure genetic disease."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: It's 2015, and Dr. Jennifer Doudna is standing in front of a large audience in London, giving a TED Talk. She's wearing a blazer, black pants, and heels. And despite how sleek she looks, she's not a marketing executive or a consultant. She's a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. And this talk, in front of this audience, is just the start of her media blitz.
Jennifer Doudna: "So, once a double stranded break is made in DNA, we can induce repair and thereby potentially achieve astounding things like being able to correct mutations that cause sickle cell anemia or cause Huntington's disease."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: This is the moment right before her career skyrockets. Right before her new gene editing technology changes the world. Just a few years later, Jennifer's gene editing breakthrough is worth millions of dollars. Walter Isaacson has written a New York Times best selling book about her, and she's built up a 100 million startup.
But the best is yet to come. In 2020, she and her co inventor win the most prestigious award in the world, the Nobel Prize. That invention, often shortened to CRISPR, is marketed as a cure all. Some scientists say it has the promise to develop grand solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. It promises in the medical sciences to cure genetic diseases and even design superhumans.
It promises in the crop sciences to curb climate change by creating drought resistant crops. and design plants that produce more, solving world hunger. Despite all this fanfare, most people have still never heard of CRISPR. With such grand promises, it's not surprising that the technology has attracted skeptics, especially when it comes to ethics.
With every great technology comes the potential for misuse, and in the case of CRISPR, it can look pretty dystopian. Picture a lab where scientists are curating the most... "desirable" human traits designer babies with higher intelligence sprinting abilities and great hair and you might have heard about a scientist in China named He Jiankui.
He was recently released after three years in prison for using the technology to genetically engineer babies designer babies bring up important ethical questions But what if I told you the average person will first encounter CRISPR? Not in our medical system, but on our plates.
I'm Dr. Lauren Crossland-Marr, and this is A CRISPR Bite, a show about the promise and price of gene edited foods.
I'm a food anthropologist, and you can consider me your guide on this journey into the world of CRISPR-edited foods. On this show, I'm going to take you inside labs where researchers are using CRISPR for many applications. From making soybeans with more protein, to creating cattle with no horns. In each episode, I'll walk you through the pros and cons of a new use case in agriculture.
And I'll unpack the big questions about what all of this means for our food system. And for you.
CRISPR-edited foods are just starting to come to U. S. grocery stores. At the time we taped this podcast, the first U. S. commercial product was scheduled to hit grocery shelves on the West Coast in the early fall. It's a blend of salad greens developed by the company Pairwise through its brand Conscious Foods.
The vegetables were edited to have more nutrition and to reduce the pungency of mustard greens. The company is planning a whole portfolio of fruits and vegetables for the North American market. Things like seedless blackberries and pitless cherries. The sale of CRISPR greens are a big step in the U. S., but they weren't the first commercial CRISPR edited food in the world. That title is held by a special tomato in Japan, which we'll taste test in our next episode.
But what you need to know now is that there's a lot at stake here. There are two main sides to this conversation in the scientific and activist communities.
On the one hand, many scientists believe that CRISPR will solve some of the world's biggest problems. And on the other, there is worry that this technology will only create more problems. But where does that leave the public? The people who will actually eat this food? Sonja Lindberg has spent a lot of time thinking about this.
She's a PhD candidate at Iowa State University, and she researches public perceptions of gene editing technologies being used in foods. She grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Minnesota, but didn't think too much about gene editing technology, the kind that farmers around her used back then were called genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
Sonja Lindberg: "I remember when they first started appearing in fields and I would see the test plot signs saying roundup ready. And to be honest, I didn't really think about them again over the next 20 years or so until I came back to grad school."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: So Sonja was open to the possibilities of the newer, flashier gene editing technology CRISPR when she started researching it during her graduate studies.
Sonja Lindberg: "My first perception was just, I guess, neutral, like, this is interesting technology. I want to hear what more people are saying about it, because there was a lot of hype generated immediately in the years following the CRISPR breakthroughs."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: But she says innovations in biotech and agriculture have a history of hype and disappointment cycles, and she's not sure yet whether CRISPR will fall into this category.
Sonja Lindberg: "As I learned more about what was being said about GMOs prior to them coming out, I developed a more critical perspective because a lot of what was said did not materialize. And when I started to understand the various systemic barriers that stood in the way, it started to make more sense."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: So what are the systemic barriers she's referring to? It's a long, complicated story, one we will come back to throughout this series. But personally, I think barriers begin with what companies can best monetize. And that's not always in the best interest of farmers, consumers, and even saving the world.
Sonja Lindberg: "I, right now, I just, I remain very skeptical."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: While Sonia is making up her own mind, her research focuses on what other people think about gene edited food. Last year, she surveyed Americans on their perceptions of food edited by technology, like GMOs and CRISPR. She and a co-author published their findings in the journal Rural Sociology. They asked questions like, would you be willing to eat gene-edited foods?
Sonja Lindberg: "It was roughly 30 percent adopters. 30 percent non adopters and 40 percent in this undecided middle. So that's why it matters what's being said right now. There's potential to really influence a good chunk of people's opinions."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: And there are a lot of people still trying to decide how they feel about the technology, let alone if they'll eat it. But there was one thing the majority of respondents did agree on. They wanted gene edited food to be labeled. They wanted to know whether they would be buying food that's been genetically modified.
But the problem is that the researchers, universities, and companies making food edits aren't exactly making it easy for consumers to get this information.
Sonja Lindberg: "You know, there are very deliberate campaigns to try to shape understandings of gene edited crops."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: In fact, there's a push by scientists and companies not to label CRISPR products. That's because they're worried people won't buy them. And this has certainly happened with earlier gene editing technologies used in food, specifically GMOs. And, if I was a betting woman, I'd guess many of you have at least one product in your cabinet labeled non-GMO. Companies are trying to rebrand CRISPR in a way that is very different from GMOs, using terms like conventional breeding and new breeding techniques to make them seem more natural?
This is all really confusing. So what are the differences between CRISPR and GMOs? Honestly, I wasn't entirely sure myself when I set off to do this project. I'm an expert in cultural anthropology, and I spent a year in Milan, Italy, researching the made in Italy sector. I examined questions like, who makes food authentic? And a big part of this research was also working with an Islamic community in Italy.
These were folks who were creating a halal certification, to assure that foods were made according to Islamic law and scripture. At the same time, the foods that sold well in Islamic markets were those considered Italian artisanal foods. Think parmesan, cured meats, and gelato. Needless to say, the participants in my study were acutely aware of exactly how their food was made, and where it came from.
My research also showed that there was a lot of anxiety about gene-edited foods in Italy. This background led me to join a project on new gene-editing technologies in agriculture. After I graduated with my PhD. And so I spent the last couple of years diving into the world of gene-edited foods. Our international team of social scientists have written academic papers and held academic conferences. You know, the stuff that expands our resumes and makes us good scholars to our universities and colleagues.
But we realized that we needed to help people understand the basics of what's going on with gene-editing technology in food. Because the technology is changing quickly, and these new foods will be on our plates in a matter of years.
So I'm going to walk you through how gene editing, and specifically how CRISPR works. As I mentioned, I'm a cultural anthropologist, so I'm going to need a little help to explain all of the science involved. Dr. Michael Antoniou knows a lot about this. He's a molecular geneticist at King's College London, and he uses CRISPR in his work on gene-based medicines.
But he worries about how CRISPR will be used in agriculture, and how it might affect human health. Despite being a busy researcher and advocate, he spent almost two hours on Zoom with me, and this is all part of his own belief that the scientists working on gene editing should be spending time explaining their work to the public in an accessible way.
Michael Antoniou: "For me, the sign of a good scientist who really understands what they're doing, they should be able to explain it to a five year old and they'll be able to get the idea, if you see what I mean. If they can't explain it to the non-expert and really have them get a good understanding of it, then they're not a true scientist. They don't have a good understanding themselves."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: He says all forms of gene editing, including that produced by CRISPR, use artificial genetic modification. Put another way, there's nothing natural about it.
Michael Antoniou: "The lobby, the industry, and their academic allies that are pushing for deregulation, they're trying to say that 'Oh, these are the sorts of things that can happen naturally. All we're doing is mimicking what could happen naturally. Therefore, it's not GM, and therefore you shouldn't regulate it.' For me, you couldn't be more dishonest about the technology when you portray it that way. Why is that? Gene editing is unquestionably a genetic modification procedure. It's not something that happens through natural breeding, natural reproduction, through pollination. It's an artificial laboratory procedure. where you gene edit plant cells growing on dishes, and then you grow plants from these plant cells."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: So how do you do what Michael calls an artificial procedure? He says that in the vast majority of applications, you do this by performing a double strand break in the DNA.
Remember back to high school biology? You probably learned that DNA is a double helix. That means that DNA has two linked strands, making it look like a twisted ladder. Gene editing technologies break the twisted ladder at specific sites in order to add, delete, or damage the DNA. This cut is the double strand break.
Technologies like CRISPR, TALEN, and zinc finger nucleuses all create this kind of break. And for older GMO technologies, changes were made by random insertion of one or more genes. Using one of two methods. First, scientists can use a bacteria to deliver the foreign gene into the plant cells. And scientists still partially use this technique to get gene changes they want in some of the newer technologies.
That includes one we'll learn about that is very similar to CRISPR, called TALEN. The second way looks like something you'd see in a science fiction action movie. Scientists use a gene gun to shoot millions of particles coated with foreign DNA into plant cells.
Honestly... I wish I could have been there when scientists came up with this idea. I imagine one scientist, who in my mind is dressed like Yosemite Sam, saying, 'What if we just shoot the darn thing?'
Anyways, as you can imagine, these earlier GMO methods were fairly imprecise, and scientists had to select for plant cells that took up the foreign DNA that they inserted. For the technologies using the new wave of gene editing technologies, including CRISPR, you try to make changes within the organism's own genome without intentionally inserting foreign DNA from another organism. The double strand break I mentioned earlier is key to this process.
Michael Antoniou: "First of all, when the double strand DNA cuts are dangerous to the cell, if the DNA is broken in a cell, it rings alarm bells. And the DNA repair machinery of the cell are rapidly activated to try and repair that double strand DNA break."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: Basically, the DNA is in crisis mode and is trying to put itself back together. Michael says that the DNA repair following the double strand DNA cut by the gene-editing tool is not an exact process, and it can result in unintended DNA damage. But that's not the message CRISPR boosters like inventor Jennifer Doudna have been telling consumers in news interviews.
[News clip montage]
Jennifer Doudna: "A revolutionary gene editing tool that allows scientists to make precise changes to the DNA. in any cell or organism. I've heard it compared to essentially like a film editor. Slicing a bit of film. I would say that's a great analogy. It's like a zip code that you can address to find a particular place in the DNA of a cell. And literally, like scissors, make a snip."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: Jennifer is stressing how precise CRISPR is, and this precision is one of the hallmarks of CRISPR. But Michael warns that CRISPR just isn't that precise. And this can have pretty big consequences on other parts of the genome, changes we can't predict. So why is CRISPR particularly prone to this?
Michael Antoniou: "They're all prone to what are known as off target DNA damage. So what does that mean? It means that these tools can cut the DNA and damage it at locations in the genome other than the one that you intend. And CRISPR is particularly prone to this."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: Michael says the DNA recognition is a short, simple way of making the double strand break. But this also means it can potentially cut similar sequences in areas of the genome, areas that scientists may not even be looking at. And this is what has activists so worried.
Claire Robinson: "We are very convinced that there are dangers attached to CRISPR gene-editing, and that we should be aware of those, and that the technology should continue to be regulated, as it is at the moment in the EU."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: That's Claire Robinson. She's the co-director and managing editor of GM Watch, an organization against gene editing in food. She says the biggest issue is that scientists aren't looking for off target changes. Claire says scientists should be required to check the whole genome to make sure nothing unexpected happens when making edits to plants and animals.
Claire Robinson: "What worries me is that the gene editors are saying that none of this is necessary. Oh, we don't need to look, because as one gene editing scientist said to me, a tomato is just a tomato. Well, actually, a tomato can contain toxic substances. So can a potato. So can a cabbage. So can anything that we gene edit. So, you'd better look for those things. It worries me that they think that this simply isn't necessary."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: This point is well taken. Is CRISPR as precise as we're led to believe? And even if it is, what does responsible regulation look like? On the flip side, maybe the risk is worth it, because the rewards could be huge.
[Montage of voices you'll hear throughout the series]
"That would be my warning for using new technologies, that we found out things along the way after we started this conversation with the Food and Drug Administration."
"And really what we're doing is, kind of undoing what the commodity system has done to our crops. So we're taking genes that have been muted in the commodity system and bringing them back to life."
"We are very convinced that there are dangers attached to CRISPR gene editing."
"What CRISPR brings to the table for the first time in the genetic control of insects is specificity."
"It just didn't work out. It just didn't live up to the hype."
"I feel like I'm in the middle of like the biggest tsunami of dislike that I could have ever imagined and I would have thought agricultural science was a Fairly safe career choice in terms of not doing anything controversial."
Lauren Crossland-Marr: Each episode in this series will follow a food edited with this new gene technology. And along the way I'll unpack the three big questions I have about CRISPR. First, is the technology really as precise as promised? What are the business interests at play? And lastly, what might responsible regulation look like?
So join us for our next episode, where we dig into whether gene-edited tomatoes could help relieve anxiety. Or maybe not. I'll take you on a trip to Japan, where we will taste the world's first CRISPR edited food on the market.
"Can you taste one for me? I wanna know!"
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Credits
A CRISPR Bite is supported by the Jean Monnet Network, which is funded by the Erasmus Program of the European Union through the Jeep 3 Network of Scientists. This podcast does not reflect the views of our funders. This podcast was co written and hosted by me, Dr. Lauren Crosland Marr.
Our executive producer is Corinne Ruff. She co-wrote, edited, and produced the show. Jake Harper edited this episode. The show was sound designed and engineered by Adriene Lilly. Aaron Crossland made our theme music. Rachel Marr designed our logo. Legal support from New Media Rights and marketing help from our friends at Tink Media.
Thank you to the GEAP3 team.Special thanks to Matthew Schurr, Clara Fischer and Glenn Stone for their support and advice on this podcast.