In honor of Black History Month, Short Wave is focusing on Black scientists and educators — people doing incredible work and pushing for a world where science serves everyone. Enjoy!
What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us?
In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.
The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.
Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.
Let’s explore one of Pablo Neruda’s most famous love poems. In this episode, I am joined by guest reader Otto Martinez to take a look at this sonnet in both English and Spanish. This is the 17th poem in One Hundred Love Sonnets, a collection inspired by and dedicated to his wife Matilde.
You are probably familiar with the four basic types of musical instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.
However, is it possible to have an instrument that doesn’t fit into one of these families?
In the early 20th century, Russian inventor Leon Theremin came up with an instrument that doesn’t fit into any family and doesn’t sound or play like any other.
Learn more about the theremin, the world’s first electronic instrument, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
On 18th February the Perseverance rover should land on Mars. Katie Stack-Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab tells Roland Pease about the technological advances that mean that the spacecraft should be able to land in Jezero Crater. Imperial College geologist Sanjeev Gupta discusses what this crater can reveal about the history of life on the red planet.
After months of negotiations, and weeks of work on the ground, a team brought together by the World Health Organisation has just concluded its first attempts to find out the origins of SARS-Cov2 in Wuhan. Peter Daszak, who has worked closely with Chinese virologists in the past, briefed Roland Pease on what had been discovered.
The South African government has announced that it will not be rolling out the Astra Zeneca Covid vaccine as it appears it is not very effective against the dominant strain in the country. Helen Rees, of Witwatersrand University and a member of South Africa’s Health Products Regulatory Authority, explains that the ‘ban’ is an overstatement.
At least 35 people died in a flood disaster in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India on February 6th. The details are still unclear, but the trigger seems to be associated with a glacier overhanging an upstream lake in the steep valley. Rupert Stuart-Smith of Oxford University, who has just published an analysis of a glacier melting disaster in waiting in the Andes, talks about the impacts of climate change on the stability of mountain glaciers.
And Do you find your bearings quickly or are you easily disorientated? Do your friends trust you with the directions in a new city?
Finding our way in the physical world – whether that’s around a building or a city - is an important everyday capability, one that has been integral to human survival. This week CrowdScience listeners want to know whether some people are ‘naturally’ better at navigating, so presenter Marnie Chesterton sets her compass and journeys into the human brain.
Accompanied by psychologists and neuroscientists Marnie learns how humans perceive their environment, recall routes and orientate themselves in unfamiliar spaces. We ask are some navigational strategies better than others?
Marnie also hears that the country you live in might be a good predictor of your navigation skills and how growing up in the countryside may give you an wayfaring advantage. But is our navigational ability down to biology or experience, and can we improve it?
With much of our modern map use being delegated to smartphones, Marnie explores what implications an over-reliance on GPS technology might have for our brain health.
(Image: An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing on Mars.
Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech)
St Valentine's name may nowadays be all over the romance-related merch for 14 February, but he was also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy and plagues. Let's get to know this multi-hyphenate saint a bit better.
Find out more about topics covered in this episode at theallusionist.org/valentine. All the information in this episode is real, even though it sounds like it's not.
The music is by Martin Austwick. Hear Martin’s own songs at palebirdmusic.com or search for Pale Bird on Bandcamp and Spotify, and he’s @martinaustwick on Twitter and Instagram.
It’s part two of us ripping into David Friedman’s anarcho-capitalist fever dream, The Machinery of Freedom. And we get real nutty with it as we detail his libertarian transitional program where school vouchers and surge pricing for streets lead us directly into a new frontier of freedom filled with private protection agencies and free market competition for laws. Are Friedman’s proposals radically dumb and dangerous? Yes. Are they now uncomfortably close to mainstream right-wing ideology? Also yes.
The book we discuss:
The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl).
