 Hello, and welcome to top 10 emerging technologies, a show from the World Economic Forum that looks at the performance of some of the most promising technologies from the past decade. I'm your host, Alice Hazelton, and in today's episode, we're talking about precise genetic engineering techniques, which made it onto the 2015 list. So this story really starts with DNA, you probably know that DNA is the code of life that gives cells the ability to function, gives organisms the ability to develop. But when there are mutations in that code, it can also give rise to disease. And we know a lot about the sequences of DNA in cells right now, and we know about mutations. But up until now, it hasn't been possible to do much about those mutations. Imagine that we had a tool whereby we could actually fix individual mutations in DNA, much like you would do with a word processor to cut and paste and edit text. What if we had a text editor for DNA in cells? Here today to tell us more about these genetic engineering techniques is Fang Zhang, a professor at MIT and one of the pioneers of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system. Hi, Fang. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So Fang, you've helped pioneer a technology that allows us to edit the genomes of plants and animals, including humans, in a quick and efficient way. But can you just tell us exactly how it works and why it's different to some of the genetic engineering techniques that we've seen in the past? So the human genome is very large. It's got, you know, three billion letters in the genome. And if you think of this as a book, there could be typos in this document. And so the way that you would actually fix something in the Microsoft Word is you open up the find function and you type in that typo, and then the program will take the cursor to exactly where that typo is. So now you can backspace to delete and you can type in new letters. The way CRISPR-Cas9 works is that it works in a chemical environment inside of yourself. You can give it a string in the form of RNA. CRISPR-Cas9 will take the string and the search along the genome to find out where that mutation, that genetic difference is in the DNA. That's where you can delete sequences and that's where you can insert new DNA sequences. We hardest it so that we can use it in the human genome to make genetic changes to treat disease and also to be able to better understand biology. Great. Is the CRISPR-Cas9 system the first time that we've been able to do this? Or were there other techniques in the past that maybe they just took longer? Tell us how CRISPR is different to the past. What is really unique about CRISPR is that it's far simpler and easier to reprogram and to be able to use inside itself. Before, it used to take researchers maybe several weeks or even longer to be able to engineer a new gene editor to be able to edit a specific gene. With CRISPR-Cas9, you can design a new editor within minutes and then you can design tens of thousands of editors to study many genes and edit many mutations. Great. If we think of CRISPR-Cas9 as some molecular scissors, I guess, what are these molecular scissors already being used for today? CRISPR-Cas9 has been used in a lot of different places from research to biotechnology in agriculture and industrial organism engineering, all the way to the development of human therapeutics. And all these take advantage of CRISPR-Cas9's ability to make precise changes in the genome so that we can engineer function or to restore health in patients. And so looking ahead, what do you think we can see from genetic engineering techniques over the next five to 10 years? Scientists have developed CRISPR-Cas9 as treatments for sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia and also for congenital genetic disorders in other parts of the body, like in the liver, but also it's being used in agriculture. Researchers or scientists are engineering crops that are drought resistant, pest resistant, producing higher yield. So overall, these are just the tip of iceberg. I think we're going to see a lot of additional applications in the future. And hearing from you now, it sounds like there's so much opportunity for the future. But are there any challenges that you see on the horizon as well? So we heard a couple of years ago that there were scientists who have used gene editing to edit embryos and then created gene-edited babies. And these are things that should not have happened and they certainly breached ethical considerations. And these are the things that is really important to deal with as we move forward. We'll have to come up with ways to be able to regulate and ways to be able to consider what are the things that we want to do and what are the things that we don't want to cross the boundary. Great. Fang, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on, you know, the progress to date, but also the opportunities and indeed the challenges for the future. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. As we've heard today, precise genetic engineering techniques, such as the CRISPR-Cas9 system, have made significant headway since making the top 10 emerging technologies list back in 2015. Gene editing is such a powerful technology that has the potential to upend both the environment and humanity. For example, we've heard how researchers can now use this editing tool to engineer crops so that they're resistant to drought or to even treat genetic disease. Opportunities to improve planetary and human health are clearly plentiful, but governing the use of this technology will be paramount to its success as it's clear that there are some ethical issues that still need to be resolved. 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