Evolving Ourselves

Evolving Ourselves

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Season 1, Episode 491 , Segment 3

Teach for America, Editing our DNA, Modern Chivalry

Episode: Teach for America, Editing our DNA, Modern Chivalry

  • Feb 17, 2017
  • 16:33 mins

Guest: Steve Gullans, PhD, Managing Director, Excel Venture Management The National Academy of Sciences just this week endorsed a highly controversial procedure that allows American scientists for the first time to edit out inherited diseases from human embryos. The disease, then, is no longer passed down through the family line. Consider this, last year, the first baby genetically related to three parents was born. American doctors did the controversial procedure in Mexico, because it was not then legal in the US. They first took the mother’s egg and cut out the genes for a devastating disease, then replaced them with healthy genes from another woman before fertilizing the egg with the father’s sperm and implanting it in the mother. So the baby – born healthy in April– has DNA from two women and one man. And the baby then passes down this altered DNA to its children. It’s a striking example of humans taking the reins of evolution from Mother Nature.