2025-01-10
28 分钟Hello and welcome to the latest Science insights from New Scientist.
I'm Penny Sashay, joined by my co host, Rowan Hooper.
Hello, hello, hello.
On the show this week, we're investigating the latest on the H5N1 bird flu and the prospects of it becoming a human pandemic or not.
And we're also hearing some really important news from Italian physicists on the most scientific way to make a classic pasta dish.
So, brilliant story.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this one, it has to be said.
But we're going to start with the latest on gene editing in humans.
And what we mean by that is the permanent changing of an embryo's genome such that the genetic changes would get passed on.
And it's illegal in most or in many parts of the world.
But famously, in 2018 in China, there was a geneticist called He Jiankui who used CRISPR gene editing to try to change the genes in human embryos.
And they were implanted into women and brought to term, and three little girls were born.
As far as we know, though, the editing didn't quite work as planned.
Yeah, that was a huge shock.
And he did go to prison for it.
He did.
He had got three years.
So the reason this is back in the news again, though, is there's a paper in Nature this week looking at this field because although hay only edited one gene in the embryo, it's now becoming possible, or it will be soon, to edit many, or maybe even dozens or more to make many edits to genes at once.
And that really raises the question of prospect of doing some really interesting different kinds of monkeying around with the genome.
Michael lepage is here to talk about this.