 Good evening and welcome to Nerd Knight East Bay number 58. My name is Rick. I am one of the co-bosses of Nerd Knight East Bay. I'm going to get a little bit sentimental. We usually close the show with thank yous, but this time we're starting them. First off, thank you everyone who bought a ticket. All the bosses are making all of the ticket proceeds go to North Bay Fire Relief, so we donated that today, so thank you very much. Thank you also for attending. How many of you is this your first Nerd Knight? It's fantastic. So this is not my first Nerd Knight. We've been doing this for five years. So five years ago we launched during the Bay Area Science Festival, our old digs were a little bit less glamorous. You can see it's standing in the room only. There are fewer pixels in me not only because of the camera technology, I also just got fat. But we have had 174 presentations on this stage. It's pretty fantastic and that can't happen without amazing speakers, many of whom are volunteers from the audience or suggestions from the audience. If you want to be up on this stage and get plied with free drinks, come talk to us after the show, sign up on our website, let us know you're out there and let us know what you want to learn about. We also love working with food vendors. Grilled cheese guy is here. He's a crowd favorite. Get your grilled cheese. They leave after the second break, so yeah, eat up. And we're lucky to have the Oakland Public Library as well. If any of you do not have a library card, tonight's the night you should get one. They're amazing. They let you get access to audio books and e-books if going to actual physical libraries is not your thing. Great resource. Also, Club 21 is fantastic. I love this place. I've worked with a lot of venues, some for the show, and there's not been a single venue that is as easy to work with as these people. So thank you very much. And finally, I want to make sure that I really thank all of our volunteers. We have Marie here tonight. We have Caitlin and Mike in the back. A lot of the times it's kind of a thankless job. And I want to thank my co-bosses. Scott and Rebecca have been amazing. This was the first year that I've missed any shows and I've missed like three of them. So it's fantastic to see them run without me. But back to you guys. I think this is great. When we first started we didn't know if we could get people out on Monday nights to come learn shit. It turns out, hey, you can. Learning shit's fun. The only time it felt like a bad idea to have these on Monday nights is tonight because last night we were out at a wrestling show and I'm still fucking hungover from that. So be easy on me. It goes with the costume. That is Pluto kicking the crap out of Bill Nye. He really kicked the crap out of Neil deGrasse Tyson because Neil deGrasse Tyson demoted him from being a planet. So I don't mind getting sentimental at this show because I'm happy to introduce to you our first speaker who is actually a Nerd Knight San Francisco alum. She presented at Nerd Knight San Francisco before Nerd Knight East Bay existed. This was actually a second talk when news made the channels that someone had inadvertently eaten squids from metaphors in her Calamari. And so Dana gave a great explanation of that. She is an expert on squid sex. She literally co-authored the lab guide to in vitro fertilization of oceanic squid. So she also wrote this book. She'll have it in the back. I strongly encourage all the cephalopad fans to pick it up. It's a good read. And with that, welcome to the stage, Dana Staff. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for coming out on a Monday night. Thank you Club 21 and bartenders especially. And I am so glad to be here. I will not be talking about squidsperm. I'm curious. Wow, that answered my next question. I was going to say who is disappointed about that, but it sounds like everybody is disappointed about that. Sorry. But who likes dinosaurs? Yeah, dinosaurs. I like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are very cool. They're very big. They're all dead. They're very mysterious. They're sort of monstrous. And you can color them any color you want in the coloring book because nobody knows. Mostly. There's a few little hints and pieces, but mostly nobody knows. And so I am definitely not here to diss dinosaurs. However, after three Jurassic Park movies and Jurassic World, I might be here to suggest that they are a little bit played out. Just a little. So they're awesome. Nothing against dinosaurs, but I would like to introduce you to the next big thing. And so you can go out to all of your friends and say that you were here at the beginning of this craze, which is that cephalopods are the new dinosaurs. What do I mean by this? Of course there are modern cephalopods, squid, octopus, cuttlefish. Just as there are modern dinosaurs, who knows which dinosaurs still live with us today? Birds! I love you, nerd night audience. Yes, birds are dinosaurs. And just like birds are only sort of this small remnant of the majesty and wonder that was once dinosaurs, they're also great. Birds are great. Any ornithologists here? I don't want to offend. But squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and all are also only remnants of a once great lineage. All of the ancient cephalopods. So those are the ones I'm going to be talking about today because they are mind blowing. And those are the ones that you're seeing up here. These tentacled beasts in strange shells are ancient cephalopods. Most ancient cephalopods lived in shells, and those shells fossilized really well. So we know quite a bit about them. One of the things we know is that they were enormous. Right? It's crazy. So this guy on top, Cameron Serres, lived almost 500 million years ago. That's basically the dawn of animal life on earth. So way before the dinosaurs, they were totally the first monsters, the in-charge beasties. And then on the bottom here, the coiled one, you can actually see a picture of the fossil here. It's incomplete. That's why the drawings are much larger, sort of like paleontologists find a dinosaur hip bone or incisor or something. And then they come back and they're like, it's the biggest species ever known because they're extrapolating from that information. Similarly, this is extrapolating to how large this coiled beast might have been. Probably true. The tentacles, however, are a lot of guesswork because those don't fossilize really well. So we don't really even know if they had tentacles. Probably. We don't know how many they had, and we definitely don't know what color they were, which leaves paleo artists free to do things like this. Which is beautiful. This is the work of a paleo artist, Kate LeMedico-Mariette, who does this magnificent work. And it's great. They could have been this color. I don't know. All of these heads with hoods and tentacles and suckers, that's total guesswork. But the shells, these super weird shells you're seeing that are like tied in knots and coiled up like ice cream cones and things. Those are real shell fossils that actually have been found. So this is my second point about ancient cephalopods. First was that they were enormous. The second is that they're super weird and so therefore worthy of our respect. And then you get to ask, okay, what's the history? How did we get to this? Because this didn't just springfully formed from the ocean. That is true. So to tell the story of where they came from, we are going to go pre-human. We're going to go pre-dinosaur. We're actually going to go before anything was on land. Not even plants. Maybe some little smears of algae here and there. But mostly nothing on land and everything interesting was happening in the ocean. It worked really hard on this ocean here. So how about a round of applause? Thank you. That was not necessary. But you're all very kind. This is what the ocean looked like at the time. It was full of trilobites for the most part, some of the first large animals to lumber around. And there were a few things sort of scuttling in the water right above them and there were a few worms burrowing down in the ground. But mostly everything, every animal was in the ocean and every animal in the ocean was on the sea floor. There was almost nothing swimming around. There were no fish at all and there was certainly no squid. And so everything was on this interface between land and water at the bottom of the sea including a lot of things like snails, including this little fellow who's quite small, would have fit very comfortably in the palm of your hand. And related to snails, he's been given tentacles in this reconstruction because he's believed to be the ancestor of all cephalopods. And he did something very cool. I should say evolution did something very cool with his shell which is the top of it here grew little walls to make little chambers and in those little chambers the animal was able to pump out water and let gas diffuse in. So this is a diagram sort of backwards, sorry, A is all the way down here and then B and then C because I guess that's how scientists think. I don't know. I was one for a while but I did not responsible for this diagram. Anyway, what you can see in yellow is the beginnings of those little chambers filling with gas here and as they get bigger and they become more of them and this is a tube of the animal doing that pumping job to get the water out and let the gas in. The animal gets lifted up off of the sea floor. It's like heating up the air in a hot air balloon. It goes right up off of the ground very quietly and peacefully. I imagine there are a lot like little dirgeables just slowly lifting off of the ground and once that happened they could get really big. This is another drawing of that giant camera, Sarah, that you saw with anachronistic human diver that actually is not realistic but the size relative to humans is realistic and the reason is once you have a buoyant shell you can make it as big as you like. Shells like snail shells are heavy and awkward and that's why snails are not very fast and clams live mostly stationary lives but what cephalopods did was they had this brilliant evolutionary innovation. They filled it with gas and then no matter how big the shell gets it offsets its own weight with gas and so it just doesn't even matter. They can get as big as they like and they very clearly rose above the competition. If you're curious this is what the competition looked like. These are kind of the only other swimming sea monsters at the time, for lack of a better word, they're these weird little shrimp guys called in Latin weird shrimp anomalacaris and they were big, they were bigger than any shrimp you would see today but still sort of leg-sized so nothing like the giant camera, Sarah. So you have cephalopods very quickly just taking over. They were the only large game in town. They're the first sea monsters and therefore, because there's nothing on land yet, the first monsters in all of Earth's history. What they ate is a little bit up for debate. Many people, myself included, like to imagine them as super predators, the great white sharks of their day just swimming around like deadly dirgeables picking up any trilobite that looked delicious and chowing down. The problem with this scenario is that we don't have any fossils of jaws for these animals so we don't know if they even had jaws. Kind of difficult to crack into a trilobite without jaws so it's still possible that we just haven't had the jokered themselves. They have this weird bulky armor on their own bodies. It's a location point in the water. This book did well enough that we did a volume two the following year and when that publishing company started going weird, I founded Word Horde in 2013 and while I do love crafty and horror at Word Horde, I also do things like Tales of Jack the Ripper, which was an anthology commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Ripper Murders and Children of Old Leech, which was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, which is cosmic horror of a different stripe. Last year I did Cthulhu Phatagan, which was all original horror stories in the Lovecraftian mode. This one, the This is Horror Award, which was a really nice honor and I continue doing stuff that touches in the Lovecraftian realm. Raven's Table by Christine Morgan is all Viking stories and yes, it's Vikings traversive deep ones in a couple of the stories. Vikings meet tentacles, Vikings win. Beneath by Christine Demise, Handling Colts in rural Appalachia and it is an honor of publishing it. An augmented four. So think of John Carpenter as the thing that's starring Geyser Butler and New York Times this weekend. So not bad for a little company in Petaluma that's got me and my wife as the only employees. And I just put out Tales from a Talking Board, which is a Ouija board themed anthology. No real tentacles there, but if you like good horror stories, I hope you'll check it out. And that's H.P. Lovecraft. He's the guy that came out with Cthulhu. Also, I don't know that I'd have a beer with him or anything like that. He was kind of a weirdo. He had some opinions. Some of them aren't my opinions. But I consider him to be a hell of a writer and a huge influence and you know, you can have your literary idols, you can have your heroes, but they're all human, they're all flawed and that's kind of the way I look at this guy. Kind of a weird uncle. So Cosmic Horror continues. I ended up watching a cooking show the other night where they were doing Halloween cakes and somebody sculpted a gigantic cake that was Cthulhu coming over a hill. And I said, okay, we have achieved peak Cthulhu in our society today. But I think people 100 years from now will still be reading Lovecraft's books and still be reading stuff inspired from it and still be writing stuff in this mode because one of the things Cosmosism does is it reminds us that we are just tiny creatures on a tiny planet in the middle of a vast maddening cosmos and yet we persist. Any questions? Let's go with you. I fake it. I repeat the question. How do you pronounce all these weird names? Well, you fake it. I know people that actually try to use Lovecraft's pronunciation of Cthulhu. I say Cthulhu. It rolls off the tongue. But they look at how he described how to say it. It's like Clulu. And I can't wrap my tongue around that so I just say Cthulhu. It's easier and more people know what you're talking about. Otherwise it sounds like you got a weird cough. Anybody else? Yes. So what is it about Cthulhu in particular that captures people's imagination? It's the tentacles. Folks love the tentacles. But it's also, I think this idea of this sleeping god thing that wakes up and reeks havoc every once in a while kind of touches into something that is part and parcel of western thought. With Christianity being such a huge influence on western culture and this idea of one day Jesus will come back and fix all this shit. The idea that Cthulhu is out there sleeping and one day, oh shit, he's going to wake up provides an interesting sort of inversion of that idea. And I think Lovecraft played with these sort of inversions quite frequently. His story The Done Which Horror has actually been described by a few critics as an inversion of the nativity story. So he was definitely looking at that as a huge influence. Yes. So I'm going to try to sum that up. Do I find Lovecraft's cosmos more comforting than Legati's cosmos? Oh, absolutely. But the thing with Legati is a lot of people miss the humor in his work. Legati is a funny guy. It's Gallo's humor. He's definitely coming from a position of pain when he's writing. But the contrivances, the conspiracy against the human race. That title has been on my mind a lot today because of the conspiracy against the United States. And Legati definitely nails that nihilism. But in a lot of ways he's channeling folks like Siren. He's looking at the philosophy that's been going on since Lovecraft. And Dad doing his own thing with it. But again, he'll put you up against clowns in a parade. And so you got to look at Legati with that sense of on the one hand he wants to scare the hell out of you. But on the other hand, laughter is an equally uncontrollable reaction. And he's trying to poke at that at the same time. Yes. Last question. Lovecraft was a terribly racist guy. Part of that was the time he lived in. That does not excuse it. Part of it is that he was just kind of an anti-humanist in a lot of ways. He was kind of homophobic. He may have been actually kind of closeted. We don't have any real proof there. So there's a lot of stuff about him that's just kind of like, yeah, you just stay over there, dude. I don't really need you to rant about those folks down the street. I mean, the guy didn't like Eskimos. Who doesn't like Eskimos? But we wrestle with authors a lot. You know, you look at famous authors. You look at somebody like William Burroughs. I mean, drug addict and pedarast. You look at somebody as famous as Marion Zimmer Bradley. I mean, she was a child molester. Orson Scott Carr. Huge bookseller, but also terribly homophobic. So authors, we have to look at him in a lot of ways as separate from their work. With Lovecraft, dude was afraid of everything and that shows up a lot in his work. And you can definitely look at it as a theme. But what he created is far more interesting than what he was afraid of. And in publishing, looking for people that take a lot of what he was doing and invert it and play with the idea of how do we reframe this for modern social mores. So when I did Cthulhu Phytogen, a lot of that stuff in that book kind of takes what Lovecraft was doing and says, you know, well, how's this going to fit now? And I think it was quite successful in doing so. And I'll continue to kind of, you know, be a little bit of a pugilist up against Lovecraft but also say, he's well worth reading. A lot of his stuff is just outstanding. Some of it's uneven and wasn't meant for publication. And yet it's out there anyway. But when he's on, he's on. Thank you very much, folks. If you have more questions or things to talk about with Ross, he's in the back selling books, which are all awesome. Turn in your tribute to the library table and we'll be back in ten. And last chance for a grilled cheese. Time for our last talk, which is going to be about DNA. DNA editing, which is a thing. That's totally actually a thing. You can edit DNA. So I was wondering, this got me thinking and I came up with a question that I didn't know the answer to. Who discovered DNA? Does anybody know? It was from DNA. Took a very pretty picture of it. But who actually, that's okay. Don't feel bad. And also, trust me, this is going to be a little background. He's the guy that bred the pea plants. He was a monk and he discovered that there was dominant and recessive traits and it all followed these patterns. It wasn't like if you have a black cat and a white cat, their baby is going to be a gray cat. It's not quite like that. It follows certain rules. You remember him from the Punnett squares you had to do in high school, right? But Mendel had no idea what was the mechanism of inheritance. Nobody did. It existed. But then in 1879, we have this guy whose name I'm going to mangle, Friedrich Meischer. And he used chemistry to isolate a substance that he found in the nucleus of cells. And he did his experiments on white blood cells. Now where did he get white blood cells? From pus, from used bandages. That's Halloween. So I had to incorporate that. He called it nuclean because it came from the nucleus. It was actually nucleic acid. And he was interested in it because it was not a protein. It was in the nucleus but it was not a protein. It was acidic. So inspired by its chemical components, what we know now are the nucleobases. Really what it was or what it was for. But people did know that chromosomes were associated with inheritance because they could observe meiosis and mitosis and all that. They just didn't know what it was in the chromosome. Because in addition to nucleic acid, there's also proteins in a chromosome. And people possibly contain all the information to have made. He recognized that the non-harmful bacteria had transformed into harmful bacteria by taking something from those dead bacteria. And he called that the transforming principle because he didn't know what it was. What were they getting from the dead bacteria? Avery McLeod and McCarty in 1944, quite a bit later, figured out it definitely is DNA. They isolated the DNA from the harmful bacteria and then sort of repeated essentially the same experiment and it still worked. They were like, yeah, it's DNA, but maybe not, because maybe we didn't completely, perfectly isolated and it could have had some contaminants, but we think probably. So finally, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in 1952 were like, yes, for sure it is DNA. This is where inheritance is coming from. They used viruses, bacteriophages, which are just protein and DNA and it's really cool, you should look it up. But they used radioactivity to trace what was actually being injected into the bacterial cell and yes, it was the DNA. So it took until 1952 before people were pretty confident that genetic information was coming from DNA. And it was not long after that we started to look at the structure of it and Rosalind Franklin's discoveries became very important and two other guys, but whatever. All right. So here to talk about, now that we know so much about the structure of DNA, how we can manipulate it and all the cool things we can do with it are Megan and Kevin. I love you too. Welcome. I'm Megan Hochstrasser. And I'm Kevin Doxin. I'm the director of the Organisms Edited with Chris Burke. And it will make sense soon. And so take pictures, take videos, all unpublished data, but that's okay. So we're going to start with stuff that happened very recently to get a sense of how quickly this field is moving, this field of editing DNA. And so actually last week, there's this photo, this picture. And so what you see here are two pigs. And on the left, you have these two pigs and you can see their heat from this thermograph and they're about the same temperature. And then after four hours of being in the cold, you can look at these emoticons and you can see the pig on the right is heated up and the pig on the left is about the same temperature. And so farmers wanted to heat their pigs up so that they could save money on the expensive cost of keeping the pens warm. And how they did this is that they took a gene from a mouse and stuck it in the pig, which caused them to generate more energy. And so, but in doing so, these pigs have 24% less fat than the normal pig. So you can eat more bacon and feel less guilty in the process. And so this is kind of a primer of what we're going to be talking about today is a lot of the weird things people are doing with genome editing. Just for all those who care about the molecular detail. Can you make it a little bit louder? All right, I'll take yours. Okay, so for those who care about the molecular detail, we're going to dive into a cell and just quickly go over the mechanism. Here we have this CRISPR protein looking for its DNA target where a scientist has told it to cut. Here's the target in purple. So the protein approaches, checks to see if this RNA that we used to program it matches to the DNA. It does, so it cuts it in half, floats away. And then the cell is able to incorporate a DNA that we've added. For example, that mouse gene that let the pigs heat themselves up. And the cell will patch this in to make sure it doesn't have a cut in its DNA anymore and you've successfully inserted a gene. So done, so easy. And just to kind of recap what we just talked about, on this graph you can see the pig DNA and you program the Cas9 to cut where you want it to cut. And once you cut the pig DNA, you can insert whatever sequence of DNA you want, in this case a hot dog, and you can then have a new type of pig. And we didn't make that, that was a real figure. That was actually a published figure in a real paper. Yes. So now that we can do this, we can do it in basically any organism. If you've read comics or watched the Spider-Man movie, you know that with great power comes great responsibility. And there's a lot of different kinds of mutants and changes you can make to DNA. Here we have some very powerful, positive mutants. There's also sort of unintended mutants that we don't really mean to bring into existence, including Blinky. So this is from The Simpsons. Nuclear runoff created this mutant. And CRISPR can actually do sort of similar things if we don't use it correctly. We can use it for good, we can use it for bad, and we can use it for things that we're not trying to use it for, like Blinky. And so to start tonight, we want to talk about a couple things that have made the headlines recently. And a lot of people are using CRISPR and this genome editing technology to edit human genetic diseases. So on this slide we have two common genetic diseases. On the left you have sickle cell anemia. And sickle cell disease is caused by one mutation in the entire genome. So billions of base pairs. And you can imagine if your genome was a bunch of letters, it'd be a 600,000 page book. So trying to find that one letter in that whole book is really difficult. But with this new technology, you're able to do that. And so scientists are actively working to use this technology to cure sickle cell disease. And also Huntington's disease. On the right, this is a Huntington's patient and scientists are actively trying to cure Huntington's or reverse it. And in addition to these genetic diseases that are caused by mutations or other problems in your DNA, there are other diseases that are not thought of as genetic diseases that we can potentially cure or treat with CRISPR, including HIV, which hides in your immune cells and can pop out later, which makes it so hard to get rid of. With CRISPR we can cut its genome out of the T cell or immune cell genome where it's hiding and keep these little green viruses from popping out of the cell again. And then with cancer, we can do something else with immune cells, also shown in blue here. We can reprogram them to be much better at finding tumors and then put them back into a patient and potentially cure their cancer. Right. So that was all kind of noble and it's great to cure disease, but there are a lot of weirder things that we can do with gene editing in people. And so if we take the species Stevis Hercules and we're going to play a little mind game. And so thinking about ways we can use genome editing to create certain enhancement in people, and Megan and I were talking the other day and we were like, oh, wouldn't it be fun to create kind of a superhero? And so if and this was actually done. So this is actually a whippet dog and normally there's a really skinny dogs, but this has a natural mutation in the myostatin gene that makes it absurdly buff. And what myostatin does is it's kind of puts the break on muscle growth. And so when you remove this gene, these just anything, any animal just it's ridiculous. And there are cows that this naturally occurs in and there are actually humans. So if you go search on Google later, YouTube, there are some humans and some kids who have this myostatin mutation. So we're going to knock out myostatin, get big muscles, and the next thing we thought we'd do is add in some color. So we picked the green fluorescent protein, which most scientists are very familiar with, which occurs naturally in this fluorescent jellyfish. And so we're going to delete this, add in green, and what do you think we might get? Yeah, we're going to get the home. All right, good job guys. So yeah, I mean, these are actually things you could probably do. You would need to do it at kind of embryo stage, which right now is a touchy issue. But kind of thinking of, and Megan and I were also thinking of other kind of superhero shoe can make. And my favorite example is what the axitol? Axolotto. Mexican salamander. Salamanders regenerate right their limbs. So I figured why not take those genes, put it in you, add some steel and facial hair and your Wolverine. And so I think you can play these mind games. So that's our quick bit on humans. We're going to move on to plants. So this is another organism or realm of life that you could edit in beneficial ways. So one thing you might want to do is make your farm more bountiful and get more yield out of your crops. So in this one experiment shown up here, scientists took normal tomatoes that grow in a single vine and edited branching genes to create these heavily branched varieties that have tons more tomatoes. So you could grow potentially way more crops on the same amount of land, which is great if we want to sustain agriculture in the future. And then on the right, this is another example, one of the first gene editing examples that made the news in the plant world was these mushrooms that don't turn brown after you cut them. And this is something that's being applied to a lot of other organisms as well, like apples and I personally hope avocados. And hopefully this is sort of something that will make people think differently about GMOs. I'm sure there are a lot of different opinions in the crowd, but I think if we start to make things that are actually helpful to people and not just farmers, maybe there will be more widespread acceptance. Now some of you are, oh yeah, tomatoes and mushrooms, sure, yeah, yeah. But there's agriculture out there that you probably care a lot about. And so marijuana, some CRISPR experts really think that editing marijuana is actually going to be a huge economic boom. And so obviously James Franco is super excited, but you could take your favorite strain, increase the THC. And so that actually should be an interesting thing, so look out for that in the future. All right, so I don't think squids have been edited yet, but over 200 different species of organisms have been edited with CRISPR successfully, including all of the ones seen here. So we thought that for the remainder of the talk, we would talk about some of the weirder examples and reasons that we would want to change the animal world. And so there's actually a nerd and I talk currently about editing butterflies. And so we thought we'd put this example in because it's awesome. And so CRISPR can be used to just understand the biological world around us, so not to create anything that desirable, but instead just to understand how organisms grow and what defines them. And so there are two genes in butterflies that kind of act like a paint by numbers. So that's also why we're dressed as butterflies. So here's what happens when you mess up paint by numbers. On the top we have an example of a butterfly, two butterflies really. Here's what a normal butterfly would look like, correct patterning. And on this one, the lines or the outlines are all correct. You can see they sort of match up in the places you can see them on each side. But the paint is going over the lines. It's all smeary and runny and doesn't form correctly. On the bottom we have basically the inverse example where on the left we have the normal butterfly with this eye mimicry. And on the right we have the colors that are generally in the right places, but the lines are all screwed up. And so we've learned a lot about how butterflies work. We can also learn about a lot of other things. Including really gross ones. So here's a mouse, two mice. And the one on the top is kind of your normal mouse. And there's something missing from the bottom one. What's missing? Some limbs, yeah. So this was an interesting experiment. So scientists, okay, well so DNA. DNA is right a long 1D kind of rope. But inside when you stick it in the nucleus you kind of wrap it around into a 3D ball. And so some things that are really far away in 1D when you wrap it around in a ball is actually really close in 3D. And so you have these two colored boxes right here. This one right here is Sonic the hedgehog gene, which affects limb growth or generation. And one on the left is mouse enhancer. And so the enhancer kind of acts like a throttle. So it'll turn on or light switch, turn on and off this hedgehog gene. But if you replace this mouse enhancer with a cobra enhancer, then you've turned the light switch off. And so in doing this you create, if you look at this diagram, this mouse does not have any little legs anymore. And this reminded me of those Rick and Morty fans out there. And this past season he did this with mice and took their limbs. In addition to just learning about animals and how they grow and how they function, we can manipulate them in different ways for our own benefit. And so we thought we would show you a few examples of this. On the top left there's a cow. One of the things cows can carry is tuberculosis. And it's kind of one of those unique examples where it can actually jump from a cow to a human. And so this is a reservoir that we want to get rid of. And scientists were able to use CRISPR to make cows resistant to tuberculosis. And this could be applied to a lot of different organisms hopefully. On the right is why I'm dressed up as a pig, in addition to all the previous bacon content. In China there's this institute that took regular pigs and altered them to have less growth hormones so that they couldn't grow up basically and created micro-pigs. And so these pigs will never reach normal size, they'll only ever get to be about this big. And for a while they were going to sell these as pets for like $1,500. And then they abruptly canceled their plans with no explanation. So you won't be able to get on anytime soon, but I think a lot of CRISPR pets could be in the market in the future. Obviously dogs, which we'll talk about in a minute, have been manipulated over lots and lots of years. But here we can kind of take this fast track and make all kinds of weird, potentially cute pets. And speaking of cute, so we have this goat down here. And this is a Shan Bai goat, also known as the cashmere goat. And so this is where you get your cashmere sweaters. And they edited this goat so that the fur is about a third longer and it has more hair follicles. So you can get more cashmere from a single cute goat. And on the right you have a chick and probably its brother inside a little egg. And a lot of people are allergic to chicken eggs because of certain proteins inside the eggs. Researchers are working on mutating those proteins so humans are no longer allergic to those eggs. And you can imagine this would be really exciting, especially if you applied it to peanuts or some really deadly allergies. And in addition to doing things that just sort of benefit or entertain us, we can do things to actually help animals, which I think are kind of cool. So hopefully if there are animal lovers in the room, you'll be happy about this. So on the left we have a gene edited cow. This was actually made with an older technology called talons. But the point is that this cow doesn't have horns. And a lot of cows, 80% of dairy cows actually have to go through this process where they're de-horned, where their horns are ripped out of their heads, which is pretty horrible. And so scientists were able to switch in a gene that's naturally occurring in hornless cows into these regularly horned cows so that they would avoid this process. And some of you in the audience might have pure bright dogs, and a lot of you know that pure bright dogs often come with really awful physical abnormalities or predispositions. So kind of the iconic one is this bulldog right here, which actually 90% of bulldogs have to go birth through C-section, because their heads are too large for the birth canal. And also their smushed face means they can't breathe properly, and they also have high levels of flatulence. So the bulldogs just not, it's been bred to just... And the dalmatian is predisposed to blindness and deafness. So you can imagine we can kind of try to undo what's been done in these animals after so many decades or centuries of breeding. Right, so another thing we can potentially undo is extinction. One of the examples that's gotten the most press recently and is actually being made into a movie is the effort to bring back the woolly mammoth. And this is possible because we have really well preserved specimens of mammoths. We have their DNA sequence, and we've been able to compare their DNA to that of the Asian elephant, which is actually not that different. It's only about 1,500 genes or so that are mutated comparatively between them. And so there's a team on the east coast that's working to start taking all these woolly mammoth genes, so the hairiness gene or the crazy tusk gene, and popping them back into Asian elephant DNA. And so eventually we can potentially make a hybrid woolly mammoth elephant embryo and implant it into Kevin who's volunteered to be the first surrogate for a woolly mammoth. And we can bring back a mammoth. It's been called. It'll never be totally woolly mammoth, but we can potentially resurrect the species that we've never seen in modern history. And after that great cephalopod talk, let's talk about some dinosaurs. And unfortunately we probably won't ever be able to bring back dinosaurs, and why would you because the movie's never end well. And so interestingly DNA does not last, well it lasts people under ideal conditions. People think it will last about six million years. The oldest DNA to date is suggested to be in between 400 and 800,000 years discovered. And so dinosaurs were extinct 65 million years ago, so unfortunately we probably won't be seeing those anytime soon. But another thing that we could potentially help are these more recently extinct species. This is Lonesome George. He was the last of the pinta tortoises from the Galapagos, and many people followed his final days in 2012. And this is the northern white rhino of which there are only three left. This is specifically Sudan, the final male that remains. And so these extinct species could potentially be brought back with gene editing, especially since we have not only their DNA, but tissue samples and cells. And so this is potentially a viable way to help right some of the wrongs that we've done to the world's ecosystems and animals. So we've covered a lot today, a lot to think about. We'd love to answer some questions, so if you want to learn more, we work at the Innovative Genomics Institute down in Berkeley. And on our website we have podcasts and videos and blogs. And we also have a lot of public events where we invite the community to come and talk and actually learn from them, because a lot of this stuff can only be done in collaboration with the public. Right. And I thought I would specifically point out our Ask a Scientist program, so if you can't get your questions answered here, though we encourage you to do so, we have this thing on our website that you can sign up for, and we'll match you with a scientist, and they can answer your questions one-on-one. The end. Yeah, I mean there are definitely countries leading the way, like China, the US, and France, and Australia. But this technology is so interesting because it's so cheap and simple. So it's being picked up by a lot of second world countries and even third world countries. Yeah, so there's already clinical trials happening for cancer, which we mentioned earlier in China and soon in the US that use CRISPR. And probably one of the things that you'll start seeing first, though, are crops that have been edited with CRISPR. So I think in 2018 there's some corn variety that's going to be on the market that's been made with this technique. Good question. So why did it take so long to discover CRISPR? Well CRISPR is... Yeah, so CRISPR is actually a bacterial immune system. So when a bacteria gets infected with a type of virus known as a phage, it will use CRISPR to defend itself. And so it was just through the process of understanding bacterial immunity that they eventually realized they could repurpose this immune system as a kind of genome editing tool. So it kind of speaks to why we should invest in basic science because you get to really discover really cool potential tools. Agreed. With all the DNA samples? So is there an international library? Yes. Or a collection of DNA? Well... I mean certain...a lot of microbes are available from this one service, all their DNA, but I don't think there's one centralized resource for everything. You kind of have to be in the know. What's that? Oh, back it up? Yeah, yeah, I would use two hard drives for that. Yeah, so I was at a conference in Germany two weeks ago specifically on biosecurity. So it's definitely in the conscience of pretty much every country. How can we, if a country generates a genetically modified mosquito, how do we ensure that the country next to it doesn't, you know, get those if it doesn't want them? And so we were thinking about those questions now in preparation for when this will, people will use this for whatever means they want to use it. So whether that's in a decade. I think another thing to add is that a lot of the things I could imagine doing that are nefarious with viruses or microbes would already be possible before CRISPR. And for whatever reason, bioterrorism has not been that popular as far as I know. I'm not one of the people that really knows those things. But I think it's just kind of expensive and there's easier ways to do terrorism. Last question. Yeah, so we did our PhDs in her lab. Yeah, and she definitely gives a lot of talks talking about how we need to start these conversations with the public. Yeah, so one of our things on our resource list, which maybe you can get from the Oakland library is the book that she co-wrote with one of our former grad student friends, A Crack in Creation. So that's one of the things you can read more, read it if you're interested in learning more. So I think that's it for questions. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much to Megan and Kevin. For a great talk. So we have some trivia results. We have a winner. And if that person's not here, we have a runner up who will get the prize. And the prize is Dana's book and Ross's book that have been advertised to you earlier. So you can learn a lot more, a shit ton more about these topics. So our big winner is Sophie. Is that you Sophie? Come on up and get your books. You only missed like one question. You did great. You're welcome. And Rick, you want to? Sure. First, thanks to all of our speakers. We always close the event with a quick calendar. Bay Area Science Festival is awesome. It's still going on for another week. Go to as much of that as you can. If you missed the Science Hoodslam this last Sunday, they have much less educational wrestling events coming up. And it's still a lot of fun. You should go. So, we advertised at the wrestling event Bill Nye versus Neil deGrasse Tyson. And one of our volunteers thought that we were getting the real Bill Nye to wrestle. I don't know what he thought of the Tesla versus Edison if we were digging people up. The real Bill Nye is coming to the Bay Area really soon. So go to that. Next month, Science has an event in San Francisco. Taste of Science. East Bay is starting up fairly soon in a few months. So look for that. Next month, last Nerd Night East Bay show of the year. We have a talk on how the pilgrims were basically assholes. We have a talk about the great Oakland cranes that they use for shipping. And we have a talk on urban winemaking. So we hope to see you there. I think tonight you can get tickets for just five bucks. Best deal in town. See you next month. Rick, thanks a lot of people for a five-year anniversary. But thank you, Rick, for all you've done to make Nerd Night happen.