 Hi, my name is Jane. And I'm Lauren. We're PCS students, and we're studying genetics in our class. And we want to ask you a question. Is it genetically possible to grow wings from your back and be able to fly? Hi, I'm Dr. Sarah Thornton, and I'm a biologist here at MIT. The question of whether we could grow wings is a really interesting one, because it's very similar to some other questions that we've answered here at Ask MIT. If you haven't already seen the videos about how to make a unicorn or if humans could engineer ourselves not to need any oxygen, I really recommend that you watch them after this video. To figure out how we would build a human with wings, we really need to start at the beginning. How do you build a human? How are we put together? You may know that all living things have genomes, which are made of DNA, and are basically the instruction manual for how to build an organism. Scientists don't know 100% how to read these instruction manuals yet, like a language that we don't totally understand. Scientists are working on this, and we understand more every single day. We do know that you started as one cell that followed the instructions given by your genome and divided again, and again, and again into trillions of cells that assembled according to the instructions of your genome into a human. You have two arms, two legs, 10 fingers, 10 toes, but no wings. But the genome of a bat or a bird do call for wings to be added to those animals when they develop from one bat cell to a baby bat or one bird cell to a baby bird. We don't know enough to do this yet, but sometime in the future, we'll know enough about how to read genomes in order to identify the part of the bat genome that calls for wings and be able to take that piece of the bat genome and put it into the human genome. However, even if we were able to do that, the tricky part is that we can't just do it in a child or an adult. You're already assembled into a human being with no wings, and it's too late to call for wings when you're already fully developed. What we would need to do is take that piece of the bat genome and put it into the genome of a very early unborn baby. Now, this is a really tricky issue because you can't ask an unborn baby if they want wings. So is it really OK to give a human wings without being able to ask their permission? Another really big issue like this that scientists are talking a lot about right now is if you could take that unborn baby and modify their genome so that instead of giving them wings, you would instead cure them of a disease. Would that be OK to do without their permission? What do you think? So there's our roadmap for making a human with wings. First, we have to understand more about how to read the genome. Second, we have to decide whether it's OK to edit the genome of an unborn baby without being able to ask their permission. And then we need to take the part of the bat genome that encodes for wings and put it into the genome of a very early unborn baby and allow that baby to grow and develop into a human with wings. But even if you can make a human with wings, would that human be able to fly? Professor Perrari is going to answer the other half of your question.