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Just because we can, does it mean that we should? Technology is developing so fast and enables so many new opportunities, but is there reason to occasionally pause and consider broader implications? Prof. Matthew Cobb is today's guest, and he discusses the history of recombinant DNA techniques and the times where researchers stepped back and had serious conversations about this powerful technology. He then poses the same questions to instances of gene drives, human germline editing and gain-of-function research.
Talking Biotech is a weekly podcast that uncovers the stories, ideas and research of people at the frontier of biology and engineering.
Each episode explores how science and technology will transform agriculture, protect the environment, and feed 10 billion people by 2050.
Interviews are led by Dr. Kevin Folta, a professor of molecular biology and genomics.
Talking Biotech Podcast 372
As Gods- A Moral HIstory of the Genetic Age - Matthew Cobb
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Kevin Folta: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to this week's Talking Biotech podcast by Col Labra. Now in the States, this last week we celebrated Thanksgiving, and why I don't like to timestamp these hopefully evergreen episodes. I do want you to know that I remain grateful for the opportunity to share science with you every week via this podcast.
It's only appropriate that I say thank you to all of the loyal listeners, but also to collaborate the sponsor. Their sponsorship allows me to do much more with this podcast. They help me reach a wider range of different people to dis different disciplines, to interview and really have higher quality recordings.
They bought me a nice microphone. . I'm thankful because this is my passion, sharing the stories that clever scientists give us. It's also a savior in a lot of ways, and it's no secret that my career as a university researcher and science communicator Took a lot of hits over the years, took a few hard [00:01:00] hits, whether it was that New York Times smear piece that was orchestrated through U S R T K back in 2015 to very visible public misrepresentation of some confidential legal work I did to groups that attacked the scientists to even my own university that they pulled me away from doing outreach as a university professor you know, made me cancel talks and, and, and, and remove me from any kind of public facing work that all of these are huge setbacks because they either took or changed or attempted to take really my meaning, like who I was and what I did.
You know, they tr and, and that's really tough to survive. And back when the New York Times article came out, I sat with some trusted advisors and we sat and asked some serious questions and said, you know, where do we wanna be? Where do I want to be? Where's Fulton? Five years, 10 years, all that stuff. And I decided that I still wanted to be at the [00:02:00] forefront of science, communication and, and training others how to do it.
And that was the decision. It meant that I was going to have to dial it up and do more rather than do less and retreat. And I've had to do that at every one of these watershed moments. When I was told to stop or told, you know, here he's corrupt, or here's whatever. To, to just dial it up every time.
And I've done that now for a long time. And this, this podcast really moves into its eighth year super cool . They can't take this away and it's only gaining momentum. And that's only possible because of your kindness that you're able to listen every week, download, share, write reviews, you know, share this thing in your social media with your networks find the old archived episodes that you think somebody might appreciate and share those, you know, that's huge and it really makes a difference.[00:03:00]
And it really validates my decision to fight the malevolent forces against science by elevating the production of this media and even try to create some others. So, thank you. Thank you. And thank you. So today's guest, the discipline of molecular biology, grew from this funny confluence of biochemistry, physical chemistry, and genetics.
These disciplines, they ran in their own separate tracks, but informed each other to really help understand the basis of how DNA works and how it how it contributes to form and function and how it's, how heredity works. And over time, it really morph from a mechanistic understanding of the molecular events around gene replication and gene expression to recombinant DNA technology.
And with that came its own set of challenges and ethics. And that's where t today's guests work provides immense clarity into the discipline's progression. [00:04:00] And his new book, which is called As Gods in the US or The Genetic Age, our perilous quest to edit Life Where it's everywhere else. It was just released and it's a must read if, if you use the tools of recombinant DNA or interested in the history.
It's a really good read and, and, and really a lot of information I never knew. So we'll talk about that today. But he also talks about the decision points, the ethics of the work, just because we could, does it mean that we should? And what were some of the instances where scientists orchestrated pauses to say, let's step back, take a look, reevaluate before going forward.
And even more so what are the new challenges and should we be taking a pause right now to better understand these technologies and their potential social, environmental, and other implications before racing forward? So today we'll cover this topic with Dr. Matthew [00:05:00] Cobb. He's a professor at the University of Manchester, and welcome to the podcast, professor
Matthew Cobb: Cobb.
Hi. It's good to be here, Kevin. Thanks for the invitation. It, it's
really
Kevin Folta: great because I, I do this podcast every week, and I don't know if you had a chance to go through the 370 episodes that we've done. Not all of them, but, but, but I'm a, I'm, I'm really an advocate of biotechnology. I absolutely love it.
People have accused me of being a biotechnology evangelist because I really love the applications and the good things it can do, and I really am out on that fringe. I'm the one who's on the one side saying, you know, we need to apply this at every place. We can do it in a good way. And then you've got the folks on the other side like, you know like naem to lab who says this is a breeding ground for black swans and, and negative events.
And so I, I, somewhere in between is probably reality and , I figured your book would lean more to the, you know, precautionary side, but I was really excited to read it. And so [00:06:00] let's, let's start out with you know, if you could start with, start with what was your major? Impetus to write this particular book?
Matthew Cobb: Well, there there were two reasons. Firstly it struck me that there was no history of genetic engineering as a, as a technique, as a, as a science. And I thought, well, what better way to read one than to write one? So it's partly you know, or you could say, well, the gap in the market, but it was more that there was no kind of overall approach to this, this topic, that, that satisfied me.
In particular, there was virtually nothing I was amazed to discover in the academic literature on the history of the genetic engineering of plants, which has proved immensely significant. So there was that on the one. And on the other hand there are three areas of genetic engineering that I'm interested in, that I've talked to the general public about for the last seven years or so and that I'm concerned about.
And they are very briefly the editing of human embryos of the germ line of the [00:07:00] possibility of the existence of gain, of function research on dangerous viruses. And finally, the thing that really alarms me, I think, which is the the gene drive work, which could with luck, remove malaria or reduce malaria transmission, but might also go wrong and have consequences for the ecosystem.
So I, I had these three worries, but I also knew from knowing the history of genetics that these are very similar, two fears that have repeatedly popped up over the last 50 years since genetic engineering became a reality. And so I wanted to test my fears to see whether you know, tho those fears in the past, none of them were realized.
None of the predictions of catastrophe and new diseases came true. So maybe my current fears are equally well, not ill, ill-founded, but exaggerated. So that was the kind of way, it was a bit of therapy as well as book write.
Kevin Folta: But when I was reading the, you know, the preface in the, you know, [00:08:00] the early material that was in here, it really did set up much more of the fear based feeling that, you know, the, the concept of Frankenstein came up over and over again and the mad scientist feeling came up over and over again, and it really set me up to really not want to go any further.
I was like, this is just gonna be trash and genetic engineering. But I was thrilled to see the history because I, I teach this stuff. You know, the material, but I didn't know the, the history. So how did you find out all of this stuff about conversations between, you know Stanley Cohen and her Boyer and Jim Watson, and where did you get the information that's in here?
Matthew Cobb: Well, some of the material is, well, all of, virtually all of it has been published previously. So in the 1970s when genetic engineering first became a reality, and also the first fears were expressed, first of them in private by you know, by, in, in phone calls and discussions. And then subsequently at smar, this very famous meeting that took place in [00:09:00] 1975 when all 200 of the world's genetic engineers, which was pretty much all there was in those days came together to discuss not whether their experiments should be done, but whether they could be done.
I, what were the how could they set in. Safe procedures that would enable those experiments to go forward. And there was a huge interest throughout the 1970s in this field. And there were some terrific books published in particular Michael Rogers book biohazard, which is an account of the ACIAR Conference and everything around it.
So I, yeah, I mean, I did what all journalists and academics did do. I read, read a great deal, and used the accounts that were there at the time that were there in the press, in the Washington Post and so on to make the story a bit more alive and a bit more vibrant. I also interviewed quite a few of the, the, the key people in this.
I was very lucky enough to join the Pandemic. I not only wrote the book but I also. [00:10:00] Made a BBC radio series or podcast, as young people call it which interviewed, looked at the history of genetic engineering and also interviewed many of the key people. So I did have some great conversations with Herb Boyer with Paul Berg and so on,
Kevin Folta: and that was really some of the fun part of this was those interviews, or at least the discussions that you were able to dig into that really gave a nice texture to the history of this and how the things we take for granted today, like restriction and the nucleases or, or just the, just the ability to move a gene, how monumental these steps were.
But the thing you never really get from this as a scientist learning about it, is that there was this ethical question that was overriding and the fears that the public, or not the public, but the scientific establishment was having about, okay, now we've done this. Now
Matthew Cobb: what? Yeah. I, I think that's something that genetics and geneticists can [00:11:00] rightly be proud of in that four times.
In its history, genetics has uniquely in the history of science, as far as I'm aware, no other science has said, these experiments are worrying and potentially dangerous, and we should stop doing them very strikingly. The researchers who were building the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project during the war, they questioned what they were doing in particular after the defeat of Nazi Germany, that the whole point of the bomb had kind of disappeared, but they didn't actually stop work.
Whereas four times in the history of the last 50 years, geneticists have said, no, we shouldn't be doing this until we're certain that it's safe and it's the right thing to do. So I think there's a, there's a tremendous you know, history of kind of social responsibility and thinking about these things and worrying, and the reason is fairly obvious.
Because as Sydney Brener one of the key figures at ail put it, the difference between an accident in genetics and a road accident is that road accidents in general [00:12:00] aren't self replicating. So if we get it wrong with a genetic element or a genetic construct, that could have quite far reaching consequences.
So you mentioned
Kevin Folta: the four pauses that happened. Could you go a little more into detail on what were the events that precipitated those four pauses?
Matthew Cobb: Well, they, they took place in 1971. In 1974. In 2010, and then most recently in 2019. And the first two were kind of the same thing in a way. So they both involved.
Paul Berg went on to win the Nobel Prize. So in, in, in 1971, Bob Pollack, who was a young postdoc at Coldspring Harbor, he learned that Berg's lab was going to introduce a SV 40 dna. SV 40 is a virus that in hamster cells will produce tumors, and he was gonna introduce that into e coli. He hadn't done it yet, but this was his plan.
In fact, Genetic engineering had yet take no had taken place. [00:13:00] Recombinant DNA had yet not only to be named, but actually to be created. And Pollak was so alarmed because the idea of putting a potential cancer causing gene into a human gut bacterium seemed pretty, kind of crazy. So he picked up the phone to Pollak picked up the phone to Berg and said, what's this crazy experiment you're doing?
And Berg gave him an earful. They didn't know each other, and Berg was kind of insulted. Why are you telling me what experiment I can. But on reflection over the next few months, be to talk to people. And he decided, well, a, it's pretty unlikely. This is dangerous, but it might be, and I'm not really interested in the experiment.
What he really wanted to do was do the opposite thing to put some DNA from e coli into SV 40, and then get that SV 40 to go into a mammalian cell whereby he could start to understand how genes work in, in mammalian and human cells, which at the time nothing was known about. So he ditched the experiment because it wasn't really interesting for him.
Plus it was potentially dangerous, but with the [00:14:00] development of what soon became known as cloning, which was part many done by her Boyer and Stanley Cohen. Matt was done in a year later after this experiment. Was was mooted. Then it became clear that Asberg put it, anybody can do anything , you can mix up DNA from any species.
And that then starts to become a bit alarming. And so following a series of discussions in particular involving young researchers in 1973 there was a whole series of debates and then very famously a series. Leading geneticists, including Berg. And Jim Watson. Another signed a letter calling on a moratorium until they were certain that these experiments could be done safely.
That was broadly accepted. And then in February, 1975, they had the cinema meeting, which they basically said, yes, it's okay as long as you follow by these, these basic protocols. The other two events in this century the first one was when researchers in [00:15:00] their terms fui the researcher viral in Amsterdam said he'd done something.
And I quote him really, really stupid. He had mutated the hell out of the H five N one bird flu virus and now made it transmissible through the air. Now, he wasn't doing this cuz he was a mad scientist. He was doing this because he was concerned that. Yeah, the, the thing that's stopping H five N one bird flu, which we've got a terrible epidemic of in the UK at the moment, where birds are dying at this.
It's very alarming. The thing that's stopping at. Killing lots of people is that it is only transmissible by touch. It's not transmissible through the air like COVID 19. And what Fuer Ron Fuer wanted to do was to try and see how easy it was for H five N one to be mutated so that it could now be transmitted.
Through the air. So that was his idea. I mean, I think that's a crazy idea and you shouldn't do it, but I mean, it wasn't, you know, trying to kill everybody. He was trying. It was well-meaning. But on the other hand, it was terrifying because it worked. And [00:16:00] now he had this really, really, really dangerous disease, far more dangerous than Covid 19, which could be transmitted through the air.
So he and his colleagues decided, okay, we're gonna stop doing these experiments until we're sure that the containment facilities and the procedures are appropriate. And then finally, in 2019, after the her John terrible experiment involving mutating human embryos that were perfectly healthy, and in fact, it all going ho, horribly wrong, there was a call for a moratorium, a pause on research into human germline editing.
So that's editing the embryo. And very strikingly, unlike all the other moratoriums, which were widely accepted, this one. There was a big division in the academic community, and to give you one very striking example Emmanuel Shon, who co won the Nobel Prize for discovering or inventing crispr, she signed this call, whereas Jennifer Dower.
Who won the prize with her did not endowed his argument is, well, the [00:17:00] genius is out the bottle. We can't ki try and stop it better to try and control germline editing. So we are currently in a situation where we have technology that's potentially very alarming, but which there is no agreement within the community on whether that should go ahead.
It must be said that if you edited a human germ line in the UK or in the EU or in Australia or Japan, you would get the force of law coming on down, coming you like a ton of bricks. In the usa it's different. You can't use federal funds for that. But if you're very rich, Individual or you are in a private institution, then you can, there's no federal law against it.
Kevin Folta: Yeah. And how much does the technology's ease of use and access to the raw materials make potential abuse of that even more of a threat?
Matthew Cobb: Well, yeah, I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't, people got very excited about synthetic biology, which I, I kind of, I don't skip over. But in, in the book, it, it doesn't get much of a much time because it, it was something that people got very [00:18:00] excited about and there were biohackers, you know making e coli turn blue in their basement.
But doing anything else actually turns out to be quite difficult in the, although this science is easy and inverted commerce, and you can explain it to the general public and certainly a high school student can work out how to do it if you take them through the steps. Having the facilities to be able to do the really interesting stuff beyond buying a kit off the internet and making a bacterium term blue is actually quite difficult.
So in, in terms of research, it has been the invent, the discovery and invention of CRISPR and its application has been astonishing, both in terms of fundamental science, which is where I work, but also in the development of new gene therapies, which are not going to. The germ line, but will change the cells in particular in the blood cuz they're easy to access.
I mean, there are tremendous new therapies coming down the line, which will be quite remarkable. So there are fantastic things that have happened with this, partly because it is so [00:19:00] relatively easy to do in terms of there being bad actors who want to kill us all. I, you know, I mean, we've seen around the world that if people really want to do bad things, then genetic engineering is not the way to go.
You can do very bad things with, you know, vehicles and knives and, and and so on. So I'm not particularly worried about the terrorist threat. It's also something a. Footnote I discovered was that after the fall of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan allied troops discovered documents written by Al-Qaeda leaders who said, Hmm, the West keeps on saying that genetic engineering is really easy.
Maybe we should try doing this and use that as a weapon. And they did try, but thankfully they failed because it's not quite as easy as is often made out. So, in fact, by this, this rhetoric of, oh my God, terrorists could actually use this maybe we are creating you know, rod, for our own bat, we're actually drawing people's attention to it.
I think in fact it's very, very difficult to use in a bad way.
Kevin Folta: It is very easy to use in a good way, and at least, [00:20:00] at least in some applications. And I, I love the fact that you touched on Ms. Victoria Gray, which is one of the great success stories in my mind. And maybe, you know, could you mention that a little bit and how those technologies maybe plan to service in the
Matthew Cobb: future?
Yeah. So Victoria Gray is an African American woman who has sickle cell disease. So she's born with a genetic defect. The origin of this gene is in fact in our resistance to malaria, because if you have one copy of the sickle gene and one normal gene, then you can, you're much less likely to get malaria.
The malaria parasite finds it difficult to get into the sickle cell cells that you have. So that's the reason why we still have this gene in the human population because in malaria ridden areas, it's actually an advantage. But if you have two copies of the sickling gene, which a quarter of the population will do in any, you know, ab normally breeding population, so in parts of Africa, a quarter of the people will suffer from sickle cell [00:21:00] disease cuz they've got two copies of the gene.
And Victoria Gray is a woman in her mid thirties and she incredibly bravely I think, I mean not because it's not safe, but just because, yeah, you. She's a Guinea pig, right? Let's be clear. She's, she volunteered to have her cells, her red blood cells altered. Now what they did, although the the sickling gene is caused by a single letter in dna, they didn't actually change the gene encoding for hemoglobin, which is what absorbs oxygen.
They use the CRISPR to drive the production or to encourage the production of fetal hemoglobin. Cuz when we're. In the uterus and we're absorbing our oxygen through the placenta. We have a slightly different form of hemoglobin, so they, they encourage that form of hemoglobin. Basically. They, they kind of turned the gene back on.
It's been turned off cuz she's an adult. And it's worked. And the last I heard it was kind of two years after the experiment and she said, look, [00:22:00] I I am, I'm feeling absolutely fine. I am pain free for the first time in my life cuz sickle cell disease is not used to be called sickle cell anemia. Cause that's one of the key symptoms.
But in fact it has all sorts of very unpleasant symptoms, including chronic pain and. From what I've seen of her in interviews and on TV programs and videos, she seems absolutely fine. So this is one possibility for curing this disease that is absolutely crippling hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
The issue, of course, is access to that because any of these new technologies are, they sound fantastic, but you know, is access going to be equal? One genetic engineer pointed out that we don't have equal access around the world to eyeglasses. So how are these new inequalities, health inequalities gonna play out around the world?
That's a broader issue, but you know, that's what's being raised. These are not simply take a pill [00:23:00] and you're gonna feel better. These are quite complex technologies that are expensive, and we know that only certain parts of the community are gonna get access.
Kevin Folta: Yeah, I had similar feelings. I also kind of noticed though, that when we first had a flat screen television, these things were, you know, tens of thousands of dollars and when the first electric cars came out or whatever, any innovation is extremely expensive for the first adopters.
But the fact that you can do it and it works, I almost can envision, and I think I said this years ago to the to the person from one of the companies that's been working on the technologies is that I can almost imagine clinic spot popping up in every town that can take your your stem cells and perform this gene at a tweak and then put this back in and infuse it back in and a few days later, and maybe this being something that would be covered by insurance, especially in the, the industrialized world because of the tremendous cost to, you know, so here, so here's the problem.
Money's the driver, right? As soon as the [00:24:00] insurance company sees a benefit out of treating it, Which is cheaper than the cost of the disease, then things will change,
Matthew Cobb: right? Yeah. And so, of course, not everywhere has private healthcare. Like in the usa some of us are very lucky and we have state healthcare, but you still have financial drivers and you have limitations on what's available because of what is considered to be value for money.
And that will be, but it'll be exactly the same thing. You're right that there will be ways of even through state provided healthcare like in the UK or much of Europe, that you will be able to get massive changes to some people's lives. Other, other therapies are potentially dealing with high cholesterol.
And, you know, this, this could be fantastic.
Kevin Folta: And what about germline editing, though? And this is where, this is one of your concerns, and maybe we could start out by talking about hug Jen Queen work and the ways that that went wrong. Because we all know the story about the twins, but we didn't know about [00:25:00] the negative side of that.
And if you could kind of bring us up to speed on that and then maybe some thoughts on the germline editing.
Matthew Cobb: Well what he said he was trying to do was to edit the embryos to prevent them from getting hiv. And as David Lou, the, the Harvard chemist asked at the meeting where he announced this, what was the unmet, unmet medical need?
To which her John had no answer because there wasn't one. I mean, there's, we all have plenty of ways of not getting HIV , you know, they're well known and they're very straightforward. So there was no reason to do this. I think that's the starting point. So he took healthy, normal human embryos, and he mutated them deliberately.
Now, what then happened was that what he did went horribly wrong. We now know that well from what we, the little we know because the full data haven't been presented, we know that the not all of the cells in the two girls, in fact, there are three girls we know there's a third embryo was brought to [00:26:00] term.
And perhaps there are dozens or more embryos sitting in freezers somewhere in China. Nobody knows. But the not all of the cells of the, the little girls who were born are identical. In other words, they're mosaics. Now this might not matter. People can have mosaics and just have, be mosaic and just have say, different color eyes, or they can have mo be mosaic and have terrible heart problems.
So we don't know with this particular gene whether, whether it will have an ill effects, hopefully not. But it didn't work in that respect. Secondly, it didn't introduce the edits that he wanted to introduce. There is at least one edit that has appeared that has not been seen in any other human being.
Again, we can only hope that these children will be normal. I think more seriously as we don't know what else happened in their genome. We now know from a whole series of studies on primate embryos in particular, that the state of the cell, when you do the experiment, when you make the intervention, is incredibly sensitive.
And if you don't get it right, then [00:27:00] literally whole chromosomes can be lost. A whole chromosome. I mean, you know, that will be catastrophic in a human being. So this is not a technique that is safe at the moment. It's not a technique that is reliable. All that we properly understand, I think more importantly, is the question of why would you do this?
What is the point? What is often argued is, okay, well we can get rid of genetic diseases. Well, for a start, you won't be able to get genetic diseases cuz a lot of genetic diseases appear in the formation of the egg and sperm. That is, they're not present in the, in the bearer's family. So you don't know that an individual has a genetic disease.
Secondly, those people who do have a genetic disease in their family are and aware of it currently have a way of avoiding having a child with a genetic disease. And basically you have ivf and then you select the embryos that are not affected and you implant them. And that is a widely available, reliable [00:28:00] technique that you can undergo.
So how many people would not be able to have a, an unaffected biological child using that approach? Well, the answer is we don't really know, but estimates are a few hundred couples around the world and that's it. So when you think of it, and everybody else can have their child, their healthy biological child through pre-implantation screening and ivf.
So we're talking about a few hundred couples. In fact, we're talking about meat. We're not talking about any humans yet. We don't talk about babies cuz they don't exist until you do the experiment. It's talking about allowing a certain kind of human to appear and in order to meet the desires of those couples who want to have a healthy biological child of their own.
But you know, there's no right to have a child. Lots of people can't have children. It's very sad. But there are lots of babies, healthy and otherwise that need [00:29:00] adopting. And maybe that's the solution that people, rather than undergoing this technique, which is incredibly dangerous and has no real point would be better off investing their love and their money in adopting a child.
Kevin Folta: Well, I guess the other big question on that is that how ethical is it for us right now in 2022 to make decisions for generations that won't be alive for a hundred years to have a gene or not have a gene? Well,
Matthew Cobb: exactly. I mean, you, you know, those children that her John Key mutated, it's not just them. If they have children, then those genes will pass down.
And so there are all sorts of people who fantasize about mutating us to, to, so we can live on Mars and work for a certain person's company when get there. Just think about it, you know, now, none of us asked to be born. I get that, but none of us would ask to be mutated either. So you'd have these people who have been kind of turned into [00:30:00] objects to meet somebody's desire to change them so that, so that they can live on Mars.
Well, maybe they don't wanna live on Mars. Maybe they'd like to live on Earth. And the complexity of this is another issue. I mean, people often, you know, you, the, the image is often, okay, well we're gonna end up with a load of Nazis, you know, blue eyed babies. Well, okay, let's say you wanted to have a blue eyed child to be absolutely certain that your child was gonna be, have blue eyes.
Well, there are about eight 60 genes that are known to play a role in eye color. And so if you wanted to be really, really absolutely sure, you might have to do up to edit up to 60 genes to be certain that your baby's gonna have blue eyes. So the idea of then, you know, doing something similar to be able to live on Mars or wherever is just silly.
Kevin Folta: So we're speaking with Professor Matthew Cobb. He just released the book as Gods of Moral History of the Genetic Age. [00:31:00] And this is Collaboratives talking Biotech podcast and we'll be back in just a moment. And now we're back on the Talking Biotech Podcast by Col Labra. And we're speaking with Professor Matthew Cobb.
He is a professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester in the uk and we're speaking about his new book as Gods a Moral History of the Genetic Age. And as a scientist who has studied molecular biology for 35 years and has had a front seat at the controversies, this is one of my favorite things that I've ever read.
Mostly because the way that it started, I wasn't thinking I was going to like it, but ended up just becoming Entrenched in what is really a history book and the history of the early days of genetic engineering and how it applies to plants and how it applied to animal. Really, really well done.
Really appreciate this. So let's talk about plants a little bit. When you talk about the Franken food issues and the chapter's called Franken food, where did the fears of [00:32:00] this technology really start? And maybe it had something to do with the timing of the, of the develop. Of genetically engineered plants.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah, I think it was a, it was a bit of bad luck and there was some bad, you know, some poor decisions on the part of some of the key players, but I think it was partly a lot of bad luck. So the time when genetically engineered plants finally became a reality, which is about in the, in the mid 1990s, so 15 years after it was first shown in the lab.
And it just gives you some idea of the enormous lead time there is in developing any, any genetically engineered product. It's very hard work, and there's a lot of concern about security and all the rest of it that goes into it. But when those plants eventually started appearing in fields I mean, there'd already been a lot of concern about it in the 19, late 1980s when the first crops were, were, were grown and there was worries that these modified genes might get into wild plants and, and, and so on.
But I think. On a large scale, it, [00:33:00] it, it hit a very bad time in the second half of the 1990s, in particular in Europe, but also in the us when there was kind of a, a, a series of forces arose, which weren't entirely connected, but which ended up being connected in people's heads. So the first thing I think you've gotta remember is that we had in the UK the a huge food scare, which turned global over mad cow disease, which had nothing to do with genetic engineering, but it was to do with food security.
And it was horrible in the, the, the lots of cows died because of this pry on this protein that can. Be transmitted from animal to animal. And then there became the great concern that it might enter the human population, which it almost certainly did in the shape of a variant Crot cell, Jacob Disease, which led to, I think, getting up for to 200 deaths, almost certainly, because people were eating contaminated beef from the uk.
So there was a food security scare and that was linked to things, you know, stuff being done. And you [00:34:00] know, what are they really telling us? Generally, you know, widespread and perhaps not entirely irresponsible suspicion that people can have. At the same time, there was the development of globalization and the World Trade Organization in the sense, certainly in Europe, that US companies were going to be able just to give, make us eat whatever we, whatever, and give us not only eat, but also culture.
The, the, our way of doing things will be swamped by those versions driven by the us companies and by our relative governments. So a huge protest against the WTO in Seattle, all over the world. And then the final element is the, the, the concern about genetically modified plants, which seem to have.
Well, they did. Part of the problem with genetic modified plants is that they don't only have the gene you wanna modify that gene is inserted somewhere in the genome. So you might have other you might have other consequences because of the way that the, the plant has been constructed. And also in [00:35:00] the way that you develop and test the plant, you have other genes, for example, those associated with bio, with antibiotic resistance, which can also be present in some of these genes.
Plants. So then generally they've been eliminated as part of the, the, the, the creation of the crop. So you had a, this, this really bad time associated as well with some very bad press from Monsanto, one of the main leaders of the the drive to get new genetically modified plants into the fields, in particularly their kind of, their prosecution of many small farmers who were using grain that they'd bought off Monsanto and they were being prosecuted for that.
So all this led, I mean, you can see that these things aren't actually connected, but in the public mind they became so, and this led to a substantial critique and protests, you know, crops were trashed and in the end we had two situations. So in the us you. Buy GM crops. In fact, you initially, you weren't allowed to know if the tacos that you were [00:36:00] eating came from a GM crop or not.
This wasn't something you weren't allowed to label this material as not being uh, as being gm. Now you've got a very unhelpful QR code on your food. So if you really wanna know, you can find out. But you know, all virtually everything made of what you call cake corn and we call maize in the US, is made with GM crops and that's absolutely fine.
Do you know harm at all? I think it's really important to recognize there's no evidence that any of this stuff is bad for humans to eat. On the other hand, in Europe, you can't directly eat any of this stuff. It's not imported, but it is imported to feed animals. So the animals will then eat it. And you know what?
They're fine. And people who eat animals then eat the animals and they're fine too. So it was a combination of, of suspicion. And that's what the second chapter is called about. But you know, with cuz it's just this overall feeling of they're out to get us in some way. Which genetic engineering and genetically engineered plants got caught up in.
Kevin Folta: And, and [00:37:00] another part that I learned from the book, something else I never knew was, I always thought the first genetically engineered crop to go on the ground was the flavor saver tomato . But something came out
Matthew Cobb: much before that. Yeah. Well, there were two things. I mean, there was one, there were, there was a genetically modified or there were spraying bacteria.
Onto strawberries to try and enable them to resist frost damage. So that may be what you think of that was in the 1980s. But in fact, the first genetically modified plant was tobacco which was being mod grown illegally. In fact, in China. China has a great interest in this, and it's fascinating what, how it's still playing out today with the possibility or not of having genetically modified rice.
But the Chinese started growing genetically modified tobacco, and the US said, can you not, we don't wanna get this. We don't have this imported into our country. Can you stop growing it? So they were, they were worried about the apparent health damage potential health damage due to gm. Consuming gm tobacco, not because of the tobacco, which is [00:38:00] kind of like dangerous , but because these fantasies about GM crops.
And although it was very telling that how things have changed in the last 25 years cuz the Chinese government just rolled over and said, okay, yeah, we won't grow 'em anymore. That wouldn't happen today, I don't think.
Kevin Folta: Well, let's maybe touch on that a little bit because I, I've had some experience in China and no many Chinese researchers and there seems to be a real push for genetic research and for gene editing and crops and animals.
Everything over there seems to be that this is being funded and really promoted. But when you talk to the Chinese people on the street, they're very much against the technology and really have been it seems like very deliberately I don't wanna say poisoned, but had their opinion. Tarnished very strongly by by activist efforts to really control that narrative.
So it seems like the, the government's staying quiet, but they're funding a lot of research and the public is, is really against it yet. Where is it
Matthew Cobb: [00:39:00] really over there? Yeah. So I mean, this was the, the thing that I found, I had no idea about any of this, and I found it absolutely fascinating. I, I read a book called GMO China by a Chinese researcher's linked with the UK called Conka.
It is absolutely brilliant and it reveals exactly what you've just described, this mismatch between a lot of the ideas, the Chinese Communist Party, which is encouraging vast amount of research in all sorts of genetic areas. And, you know, you read any, virtually any paper in genetics these days, and there are Chinese researchers, either from China who are working there or who are working in Western labs and are gonna go back to China and build the, the base, the science and development base over there.
But it's interesting that, that, that there is a difference between growing, for example, gm. Which is widespread around the world and nobody seems to bother. Basically what you, your GM cotton will resist in particular the cotton bo, you know, insects that will destroy the crop and it produces this [00:40:00] organic insecticide.
And, you know, nobody eats cotton. You just wear it and it's led to about three quarters of a billion, tons less insecticide being sprayed around the world. So that's a, that's a good thing, I think. But when it comes to eating, Then I think we're hitting something different. And that's where the Chinese government and include the, the top levels of the Army are split, should they make GM rice.
And at the moment, nobody has actually commercialized this because I, I think, you know, people are happy or they're people all over the world use GM insulin. You know, insulin that everybody takes these days is made in genetically modified bacteria and or yeast often. And that is better than what we had previously, which was derived from animals, which had an extra amino acid on, and in the end you got kind of you had an allergic reaction to it.
So in a way, GM technology has absolutely transformed our ability to get [00:41:00] hold of this vital drug. The pricing, of course, is a completely different issue. And the pricing in the u US and the UK is substantially different, but, People seem okay to inject themselves with a GM product, but eating something GM for whatever reason, strikes a rather different set of psychological chords.
And it's clear that in China in particular, the Chinese Communist Party very wary of doing anything to affect something which is not only a food, but it's a fundamental piece of culture. I mean, I dunno, if you imagine in the US if you'd had mad cow disease and it was affecting your burgers, there'd be a, you know, it would've been absolutely massive as a cultural event.
And I think the same thing is true in China, that they are concerned that if they have GM crops and rice in particular, then that will you. Awaken all sorts of fears, which are to do with eating. And they're, they're really deep, it's [00:42:00] very hard. We can't just say, well pull yourselves together. It's quite, it's not gonna do you any harm.
There's something deeper going on there, and it's all to do with our attitudes to food rather than our attitudes say to drugs. And,
Kevin Folta: and I totally understand that we talk about that all the time and how we use communication strategies to help folks communicate about what the strengths and weaknesses of biotechnology really are.
And that's always really the careful thought is that the emotion food is more emotional than it is. Yeah. Cognitive, right? It's not executive function. It's, this is basic sustenance, Maslow's first level of hierarchy of needs . Whereas medicine is something that's a little higher up and appeals more towards our executive function.
You know, this is more of a, a, a cerebral cortex issue. And so maybe that's why that works that way. But I guess along the same line. And then this is a, when you have moral discussions about morals or ethics around biotechnology, you can see lots of moral reasons. Be careful[00:43:00] ethical reasons, more reasons to be careful with technology, but what is the feeling about if we have it and we don't use it?
Yeah, and I think this is really where we talk about things like golden rice.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah. Well I mean, golden rice is I mean, it, it's very interesting. I, I have no I have no dog in that fight, as they say. I mean, I, I'm not particularly, I'm certainly not worried by it. But one of the striking things is that golden rice.
So this is the idea of introducing vitamin day. A so the rice is orange and golden like an in a carrot which will help reduce blindness cuz lots and lots of people, hundreds of thousands of people are suffer from deficiency, vitamin deficiency and lose their sight in particular in the, in the far east because they're not getting their vitamins elsewhere.
This isn't a problem, say in the uk or in the usa, but. It's striking that in the Philippines, for example, other solutions such as vitamin supplements have gone a long way to reducing the effects of these of this vitamin [00:44:00] deficiency. I think the striking thing is that, yeah, again, this is an incredibly well-meaning project and there is no money involved.
I mean, the whole, all the patents have been handed over to, you know, charities and the scientists involved want to save lives. But it's striking that as in general GM crops, I mean, you have to, if you're gonna do this, you've got to choose what crop am I, what, what exact version of rice am I going to start fiddling around with?
You can't do it with loads cuz it, it takes forever, as I said, to do this. And the choices that have been made for what kinds of rice, what exact versions haven't necessarily been the. Decisions in terms of what can be grown widely in very, very variable agricultural conditions. The same applies to, to, to the application of GM crops in, in Africa, for example.
So GM is fantastic if it's in a very uniform environment, on a very large scale where you can leave space in the case of those g crops that [00:45:00] produce insecticides or are resistant to a herbicide where you can leave space set aside space where your, your insects can thrive. Bizarrely, that's what you need.
Otherwise you get resistance setting in. So. That doesn't apply in conditions where you have lots of small holders, it's very difficult to use these crops. And similarly in the kind of patchwork of ecological conditions, agricultural conditions in the far East, then in, in the Philippines, for example, the crop singular that has been chosen to be mutated for for golden rice isn't necessarily the best one that suits them.
So even if people were to say, okay, I'm gonna do this, this is great, and buy into it, it wouldn't necessarily be the best solution for them. Now, maybe CRISPR is gonna help us with this, but you know, gene editing gene editing plants is hard because of the way that their biology works. And it's gonna be some time, I think, before we resolve this.
I mean, the other, the other striking example is, This, this conundrum, cuz I think it is a problem, is that [00:46:00] of using gene drives to potentially eradicate mosquitoes. And whenever I talk about this because it worries me I always start by saying, remember 600,000 people died last year from malaria. The vast majority of those people were children under five.
That is the benchmark that is happening now with all the insecticides, the bed nets, all the things we're doing now. We are still losing 600,000 people a year. That is the problem we've got to solve and how we solve it. Now, maybe we can solve it by a, a vaccine. There's a new vaccine that's just been approved by the W H o, so maybe we won't need fancy genetic technology.
But you've got to remember those challenges and the absolutely well meaning and well intentioned views of the scientists who are wanting to resolve those problems. Before you start throwing everything out and saying, okay, well we shouldn't do anything. I think you've, you've gotta weigh both sides in the balance and collectively as a, as a community, as a planet, ultimately come to [00:47:00] decisions about whether it's the right thing to do or not.
And
Kevin Folta: let's transition into that a little bit here. One of your concerns of the book, and let me go back to, you know, my experience with the book where in the beginning it was a lot heavy imaging on Frankenstein and things gone wrong and, you know, should just because we could doesn't mean we should.
And then I was kind of getting, you know, rolling my eyes and saying, you know, as somebody who really loves technology to solve problems, I was thinking this is gonna be nothing more than a book that slams technology and shows how we're doomed. And I was so happy to see such a good recapitulation of the history and all the positive benefits and things like that described.
And really where you start to get into the concerns are the same ones we all have, or at least most of us have. Really around these areas of things like gene drives and how they're implemented and once they're implemented, how that genie gets back in the bottle. So could you touch on gene drives and, you know, maybe start out with what they are for listeners who are unfamiliar.
Some of the ways that they've been suggested to be [00:48:00] implemented and maybe some of the potential hazards.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah, so Gene Drive, this is a very clever idea that was thought up in the beginning of the century by a UK scientist, a theoretical biologist called Austin Burt, and he realized that you could have a gene that would target that, would you produce what's called a nuclease, which is an enzyme that cuts dna.
And you could, it could be time. These things exist. In fact, these, these strange genes exist in in yeast and, and other fungi that would hone in on its own location on the other chromosome. The consequence of that would be the gene would produce an enzyme that cut the other ch. Cut the DNA on the other chromosome, the cell would say, oh, I've got a gap in my, my dna.
I don't like that. Let's see what's on the other chromosome. Oh, we've got a full sequence. I'll copy it over. And therefore, where you initially just had one copy of this gene, you now have two. So [00:49:00] that means, means that when that individual makes with a normal let's say a mosquito say just by, by ch, choose one at random, a mosquito with two copies of this gene, mates with a mosquito with no copies, which is what would happen if it got out then.
Initially in the embryo, you'd have one copy of the gene drive gene and one chromosome without the gene drive gene, because you've got half of your genes from your mom and half of your genes from your dad during as soon as that happened. Soon as you get fertilization, the gene drive gene would produce that nuclease.
It would cut the gene, cut the DNA on the other chromosome, and the cell would do what I've just described, produce another copy of the gene drive gene. So now all of the offs. Would have two copies of that gene. The same thing would happen in the next generation and the next generation. And you can see you'd get exponential growth of this character.
Now that actually happens in Funguses and they're quite okay because the gene is not actually doing [00:50:00] anything. It's just cutting DNA and copying itself. It's a, it's a selfish element, but what Burt realized because of the issues that I've been describing associated with the deaths to due to malaria, is that you could attach to this nucleis coating gene.
This homing nuclease. You could attach, say, a gene that would make. I dunno, the, maybe you could make the, the mosquitoes sterile, or you could make it you could make it resistant to malaria. And so you would drive this character through the population. And we know this works because people have made them, they've put them into mosquitoes and in cages, large cages in the laboratory.
A whole population of tens of thousands of mosquitoes is eliminated in a period of about nine months. So these things are incredibly effective. The issue is how do you stop them? Because the world's a big place. Mosquitoes travel. So it's as, as Kevin Selt, who's one of the people who theorized how to make these things using crispr, as he said a release anywhere is a release [00:51:00] everywhere.
You need to think about how you can stop it so that it would just affect the particular area, perhaps stop malaria transmission. Rather than it just carrying on and spreading all over the world, because I know we don't like mosquitoes, but they are eaten by a vast number of animals, an incredible number.
And it's true that, you know, no single species is reliant on mosquitoes, but ecology is very complicated. So it wouldn't be impossible to imagine that if lots of species went a little bit hungry because there were no mosquito larvae or adults for them to eat, then you'd start to get an ecosystem which was outta control.
We don't know that, but that's largely because we don't know much about ecosystems in particular, in the areas where the mosquitoes are, are prevalent and problematic. So we need to understand that before we let one of these things loose, and we also need to have clever ways. Stopping it or it petering out.
That seems [00:52:00] to be the main way and that's the some of the ideas that Kevin Selt is coming up with about having various different genes, kind of like a jigsaw on your chromosomes, and you'd need all of the pieces of the jigsaw for it to work. And through normal processes of spreading of genes, that would mean that very soon you wouldn't have all the pieces, all the four or five different genetic bits you'd need for it to work.
And the the, you'd have had a rejection in the population, but the gene drive would eventually die out. And I think that's got to be the safest way of deploying one of these things for the moment. Nothing's been done. It's only in the lab. I don't think it's an accident that darpa, the US Defense Agency is the main funder of these things, cuz you can imagine that you could target a country's crops by developing one of these things or, you know, changing the, their ecosystem.
And that's, you know, DARPA is not primarily, well, it's interested for defense reasons as well, how they could stop one if it were released, but [00:53:00] I suspect they're also interested in using it as a potential weapon. So we need to have very strict control of this so that it doesn't inadvertently get out of control.
The first people who actually made one in using CRISPR in a, in an insect titled their article that it was a a genetic chain reaction. In other words, it's kind of a. And that's not an exaggeration. It's similar in its potential destructive power, I think, to nuclear power. So just as we have very strong regulation of nuclear power all around the world, not nuclear weapons, but nuclear power, we should have very strong regulation of this this potentially transformative, but also very scary technology.
Kevin Folta: And I agree with you on this one and the other scary technology, and I, I'm saying scary. The other technology that you felt is something that we need to be very careful with is this idea of gain of function experiments, which really came to light even more in discussions around the covid sars CO V two virus.
But can you give us a little bit of [00:54:00] background on, on that and why you feel these are important for us to look at
Matthew Cobb: too? Yeah. So they really began to become, these experiments really began to become of interest. Actually it's after nine 11, so after nine 11 there was, as I'm sure you remember, many listeners will remember, there was a great kind of security, panic and fear, not only in the USA but around the world, and clearly in our airports we still live with that and quite rightly too but it meant that people began to be very concerned that there would be technology.
Not just, you know, smashing airplanes into buildings, but more subtle forms of technology that could be very destructive. And this followed on from the collapse of the SSR in the 1990s. And it was revealed shortly before that, that in fact the s s R had a very well developed program of building genetic weapons using genetic engineering.
And in fact, the, the old timers, Soviets, who were there at a cinema in 1975, were ridiculed by the young [00:55:00] American scientists as being these duffers who didn't understand anything. They had already set up a program of genetic engineering to create bio weapons. So the fear became that it would be what would happen was that these with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of, you know, whole laboratories worth of stuff, that some of this might get into the hands of terrorists.
So the US in particular began to. Try and understand what could be done. So to try and understand what can be done, you, you've gotta do it. So they started to carry out these gain of function studies. This coincided with the SAS epidemic, which was the first coronavirus epidemic, which we dodged. It didn't turn into a pandemic because of basic basic health security in, you know, public health measures in China.
But that, again, worried people. And so people started to study these viruses to see, How they might become worse, they might become more dangerous. H five N one, the bird flu virus as well. So you had this feel that the American government actually, NIH started funding [00:56:00] this massively. So you got this huge influence influx of researchers who hadn't been trained in basic virology starting to do this work because there was lots of money in it.
They could get grants for it. But it was also very dangerous because of course it could cause terrible consequences. And with Ron Fuchsia's announcement that he mutated H five N one in 2010, this led to a a long. Moratorium on this research until it could be done safely, which basically means, you know, having better biosecurity approaches.
But there was also, in the US again, there was a great panic in the, about 2015, there were local transmission. A couple of people got Ebola in America from somebody who'd come from Amer, from Africa with Ebola. And that again caused a huge panic. And there was decision by an NIH to stop funding gain of function studies that started up again.
And there's now a lot of debate. About whether the controls over the grants [00:57:00] that are being awarded for these studies are sufficiently tight. And as you rightly say, this all got caught up with the origins of Covid 19. And I'd just say for listener's sake, there is no evidence that Covid 19 was genetically engineered at all.
Its features are entirely what we would expect from one of these viruses and everything points to a natural spillover event. Much has happened with sars, so we, it's come from our close as indeed happened with the 1918 Flu Pandemic, which had its origins not in Spain. We call it Spanish flu, but in the USA there was a cn, bit of rebranding went there.
it happened from is a spillover from farm animals. So where humans are in close proximity with animals, be they birds or bats or whatever, cows, then we can get diseases from them. So that's the thing I'm worried about. And there's a big argument in the scientific community, the advocates of this technology or this approach say this will enable us to predict the course of future [00:58:00] pandemics.
I would respond, saying, well look, we're in the middle of one. And this didn't help us. One, jot not one bit. You know, we worked out how to fight the virus by completely other means. It seems to me that the it isn't worth it. This is a very risky percept process and I can't, I don't think it's worthwhile.
But that's, and I'm, I'm not a virologist and there are plenty of people who would very strongly disagree with me, but I think it's too important to be left to the virologists.
Kevin Folta: Well, it's, it's an interesting question because I know when we're looking at just, you know, just say Protein X, you know, your favorite gene, one of the ways that we learn how it works is by gain of function analysis.
Or maybe not even inadvertent testing, but maybe just mutt jenesis, you know, let's change every amino acid to, yeah. So, so this is something we do all the time because it helps us understand the relationship between structure and function. And so when we start getting into viruses, it really is a important question.
You know, I [00:59:00] feel that we should understand how they potentially could change in ways that could make them more transmissible or more vir and in, I'm not a virologist either, , but I know we have this discussion a lot, and I think the public's perception of gain of function might be very different from what the scientist's perception of gain a function is in terms of its value of understanding biology.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah, I mean certainly from I mean gain, gain a function is a term that's been around since I think the eighties was when I first heard it in Drosophila Genetics. You know, and it's just a, as you say, a matter of trying to understand what a particular gene does. The other option is options, is to knock it out.
You knock out the gene, see what happens to the organism without it. But it's. What I'm concerned about is this particular application to extremely dangerous viruses that are already dangerous. And, you know, the, it's like that when, when people resurrected the, the 1918 flu virus. I mean, I, I really wasn't sure what the point of this was.
And the insights that it provided seemed pretty [01:00:00] limited. And I'm not sure, you know, given we've just lived through a pandemic, we can now see the problem is, I mean, you know, there are still people who are arguing about how it's transmitted, where it's clearly transmitted through the air, and yet there are plenty of people who will say, yeah, masks don't work, or whatever.
And so it's, the science isn't necessarily gonna help us with the public health issues, which future pandemics. Pose us with, you know, if we, when we get another pandemic, another animal spillover event, we're gonna see these same arguments coming up again. And it's some basic, it's not so much we don't know what's gonna happen with the pandemic in the viruses.
It's a matter that we do know what will happen in the general public and amongst certain politicians and so on, who will seek to weaponize the what is already a terrible situation and build public mistrust. And as somebody who is very concerned about that, I, I think that's, I'm more worried about that.
I'd rather be spent our in, you know, our brilliance and initiative, trying to figure out how to get over scientific facts very clearly [01:01:00] and securely and convincingly to the public around the world so they don't misunderstand.
Kevin Folta: And see, that's what I've dedicated my time to and that's where this podcast comes from.
And a lot of my other efforts is because I agree. I think the problem isn't the science, the problem is the public's perception of why we do the science. And I think with something like SARS co V two, most people don't realize this was the third major pandemic of. Millennium. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, we had SARS and mers and mers and SARS were much more penetrant and much more fatal.
Yeah. And now we've kind of set the table of distrust with SARS CO V two, where people say, oh, it's just a cold, don't worry about it. Where if there was, well, when the next one comes, it could have profound consequences for populations. Absolutely. Particularly those in areas that deny the science.
Matthew Cobb: Yeah, absolutely.
No, I mean, I, I agree with you entirely. If, if me was transmitted like COVID 19 is, we would be [01:02:00] in a hell of a state. I mean, we were very lucky with that. And it, and it's still rumbling on, in the, in the Middle East. But it's very low level because it's only transmitted by very close contact and it's therefore relatively easy to, to stop.
So it's the airborne stuff, which is really scary, which is one reason why people went nuts, including Ron Fu when he did that on H five N one. Cuz it seems kind of alarming. But I, I accept that there, you know, I, nobody should think that there are any, Mad scientists that work in any of these laboratories.
This is all very well intentioned.
Kevin Folta: So, professor Matthew Cobb, this has been a really interesting talk and discussion of genetic engineering history, but also the careful way that we may wanna go forward and the precautionary proceeding going forward. So if people wanna learn more, well first, where can they buy your book?
Matthew Cobb: Well, you can buy the book from a, your local bookstore. I would encourage you. A bookshop.org is the online place I would go to. But any any, any book seller will have it. It's got two titles, confusingly in the us. It's called as God's Moral History of the Genetic [01:03:00] Age in the UK and Elsewhere in the World is called The Genetic Age.
Our Perilous Quest to Edit Life. Different publishers like different titles, ,
Kevin Folta: that doesn't make it easy to promote well. So you have the two different titles depending upon where you live, or better yet, order one of each . Well, thank you very much for a really insightful conversation. I really appreciate it and best wishes with your work and with the book.
Matthew Cobb: Okay, that's been great Kevin. Thanks a lot. Fantastic. And as always,
Kevin Folta: To all our listeners thank you very much for listening to The Talking Biotech podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for all the things you do to promote this work in your networks. The podcast keeps growing because you keep sharing.
So thank you so much for helping us remain consistently in the top 25 of iTunes Life Sciences podcasts from a tiny little office in Archer, Florida. In the middle of nowhere, we're able to have some reasonably decent impacts in the area of science. So thank you again very [01:04:00] much for listening to The Talking Biotech podcast, and we'll talk to you again next week.