There's a Gene for That

so Jeane therapy. Billy Geane therapy is when you have to listen to to Michael Jackson songs until you feel better. But that's a good therapy, is a good therapy. I I don't mind that at all. It's it's the dancing here. Yeah. Now, gene therapy is something that has incredible potential but definitely had a rocky start. And uh, you know, if you don't really know that much about DNA and jeans or chromosomes,

if all that confuses you, go back and listen. We we record a pocast immediately before this one should have published just before this podcast did that goes into sort of gene one oh one, and so listen to that one. So you can get caught up. We're gonna be pushing on right now talking about gene therapy, which is an attempt to treat genetic diseases at the molecular level. So you're actually trying to address molecules that have some form of defective element to them and replace those with quote

unquote good molecules are good genes. So a good point of distinction maybe to start with, would be, um, how is this different than all of the normal ways we fight diseases? Well, a lot of the ways we fight diseases.

There's of course ways where we just try and treat symptoms where we're not actually addressing the underlying problem, possibly because there may not be a way of addressing the underlying problem, or you're just letting your body do the work exactly maybe and you're just trying to make yourself

feel better while that happened. For example, if you have a cold, there is no cure or for the common cold, right, but there are lots of different ways you can treat your symptoms and try to manage symptoms have different levels of efficacy depending upon whom you ask, but that's one way of doing it. Or for example, if you take an antibacterial medication to try to clear something out of your system that's attacking those bacteria that are attacking your

your body in some way, shape or form. Right, So that's another way where you're actually trying to fight off some sort of quote unquote alien invasion. Alien in the sense of it doesn't belong inside of you. Uh. Your body uses antibodies, which are proteins that attack foreign cells or sometimes its own cells, depending on how your immune

system is functioning. Right. Right, there are cases where you have things like allergic reactions where your body goes into overdrive trying to kill something that doesn't actually need to be killed. I speak from terrible, terrible experience. Uh. So these are all normal or quote unquote normal ways that

we use to fight off illnesses. But some illnesses, genetic illnesses, have to do with actual information that's in our DNA, that is defective genes that are encoded the wrong way and therefore are not producing the proper proteins the right way for certain processes. And there's lots of different types of genetic diseases that cover a wide range. So we're not gonna go and talk about all of them, because

that's that alone would be a series of podcasts. But one common element here is that these diseases have these these faulty genes at the very core of the problem. And if we were somehow able to remove the faulty genes from ourselves and insert good, healthy genes in their place, we could end up possibly curing the disease. Or if we could figure out how to um turn on or off a gene that is doing the opposite thing right,

right and keeping my jeans. You know, we didn't talk about this in the last podcast, but it does bear saying. And I think jeans are complicated, right, So you know you didn't say that, well, well in the s in the sense of like, if you think, think of Jeanes like a switchboard. Alright, So think about a switchboard where every single switch is connected to a an LED light.

So you've got a bank of LED lights, and you've got a bank of switches, and when you turn on a switch an L a ED light comes on, and then when you turn it off, the LED light goes off. If that's all jeanes were, we'd be set. That would be so easy to fix. But what actually happens is you have to flip like seven random switches all across the board to make the light come on, right, and if you also turns a few other lights on, and it also makes a weird quacking noise. Right, we're back

to the potypus. If you and if you turn, if you turn one switch off, maybe the quacking noise goes off and three of the lights go off, but then five more lights come on. It's so complex and it's only and it's within this this uh network of g means and how they all express themselves. Keeping in mind that some genes can express themselves in multiple ways. That's why it's it's not so easy as just say, you know,

turn that one switched the button. Yeah, the word for what all of the genes produced together is the phenotype. That's sort of the external expression of when you've got all the switches switched on. And so the goal of gene therapy is to address these faulty genes and to fix them in a way that is not harmful to the patient, which can also be very difficult because again it's really complex. Sometimes when you're when you think you're fixing one thing, you might be actually creating a much

larger problem or maybe just a different problem. And I've got some really interesting examples that are terrifying about that. You can't wait to get to that. So let's talk a little bit about mutations. You know, how how do genes mutate in the first place? Uh? And there's actually quite a few ways. First of all, when you're talking about genes, you're talking about this this data essentially that's encoded in DNA, and that data gets copied over and

over and over again during cellular division. You get copies of your d N a uh, and sometimes changes happen when these copies. Sometimes sometimes mistakes are made, so to speak. So it's kind of like, you know, if you were to ever make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy on a photocopy, or you know that final copy doesn't look as good as that original one. In a very basic way, that's kind of similar to

what I'm talking about here. Also, environmental factors can cause changes to your genes, so right, or even you know what what chemicals are in the food you eat, the water you drink, or the other stuff that you drink, you know, all sorts of stuff. I think things like stress can affect your genes to some extent. So you know,

there are a lot of different factors here. It's very, very complex, and most of those changes that are going to happen are going to happen in um somatic cells, in your bodily cells, not in your um sex chromosome cells that are are passed on too, or your chromosomes period that are passed on to your children. UM, that's that's a epo genetics, and that's a whole different, whole different issue. But but some of the changes can lead to like we talked about in our stress, some of

them can can potentially be inherited. Whether or not that ends up expressing itself in offspring is another question. So one interesting thing I think about inherited genetic diseases is that for the most part, they're recessive. So in order for you to have a full expression of a genetic disease, you have to have inherited two copies of the mutated gene to really inherit the disorder. When you think about this,

isn't that surprising, right? You wouldn't You wouldn't expect for most genetic diseases to be in dominant genes because uh in in any species, because if it were a dominant expression, then those those life forms, whatever creature you're talking about, most of them probably wouldn't get to an age where they could reproduce, and that gene would eventually phase its

way out of the overall population. But if it's a recessive gene, then not that many comparatively speaking, will display this or will express this gene, this trait of this, uh, this whatever the genetic diseases um. So it can actually continue to exist within a population longer than it would if it were a dominant gene. So that I thought

was really interesting. But let's let's talk about kind of the history of gene therapy itself, so we kind of find why it could be potentially really helpful in the fields of medicine. It was back in nineteen seventy two when there was a paper that was authored by a parent Friedman and Roblin who the pair wrote a paper called gene Therapy for Human Genetic Disease question mark because they were actually asking the question could gene therapy potentially

address this? And they proposed replacing defective DNA with good un quote DNA uh. They also cited the first attempts at gene therapy experiments going back all the way to nineteen seventy. Now, this paper was written in seventy two, UH, and in fact, other sources I saw said that the experiments that happened in the seventies and eighties were in large part unauthorized trials, which that leads to some pretty

serious setbacks in gene therapy. As when I get up into the nineties, I'll talk more about that, UM, but gene therapy isn't as far along as it potentially could be.

I think in part because of some overenthusiastic but perhaps misguided trials, and so in labs that were in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and in the National Cancer Institute conducted experiments which showed cells from a patient with a d A deficiency UH that's out of no scene d M in as deficiency, which affects the immune systems ability to fight off infection. Those could be corrected in a tissue culture using a retrovirus to insert corrected

genes into the cells. And this is actually still how they're mostly proposing to do gene therapy. Right. Virus it's one of the ways. UH. Viruses have some issues, but viruses are really good at penetrating cells. I mean, that's what they do in order to replicate, right, And we've said before that sometimes it makes more sense not to try and copy or outdo mother nature, but to just use it, Yeah, coopt what mother nature is already doing. Right.

If you take a virus and you strip out all the stuff that makes it dangerous, essentially it's ability to self replicate and any other uh, information that would otherwise alter your cells, and then put in the stuff you want to have injected into a cell, and then introduce that into the tissue or patient. Then it does the work for you. I mean, it's a perfect machine of viruses. Is a machine designed to inject DNA into foreign cells.

Right now, there are some problems, uh. First of all, I mean there's everyone's always worried about the idea of using viruses in the first place, especially they don't understand a lot about how viruses work. But it's also not ideal for every situation. For example, if you want to treat something that is found in brain tissue, virus is a bad idea because viruses are too large to penetrate

the blood brain barrier. So you've got to find something that's even smaller than a virus, your typical virus to be able to penetrate that barrier to deliver the good DNA to brain tissue. They are developing um I think that they are currently developing some methods specifically with Parkinson's

disease that that may use viruses. But there there's the main approach I've seen is using liposomes and creating essentially a plastic coding for liposomes that would allow it to move through the blood brain barrier effortlessly compared to most viruses which would not be able to penetrate it. They are also playing with different kinds of virus is these days.

I think originally retroviruses were what we're being used in these days, um lent of viruses are being used things like um HIV actually that have a really long incubation period and can infect non dividing cells. So it interesting winds up doing. But continue, continue with your time, back to the history. So we've we've got this this retrovirus that was used in this early experiment, they showed that

it could be done. In six they began to experiment to introduce correct genes into bone marrow cells and animals to see how safe it would be as a treatment. So they're using the animal's actual bone marrow cells to deliver good quote unquote DNA and the conclusion was that it was safe, but they didn't get the correct gene to enough cells for it to be considered effective. So, in other words, bone marrow just wasn't the right vector

for delivering this kind of treatment. It worked, but non a level that would have created enough change for it to be a good treat it. So in they try white blood cells instead of bone marrow cells, and that increased the number of cells that were affected. So they thought, ha ha, here we're onto something. Uh. And in there was an experiment with tumor infiltrating lympho sites t i L cells UH that showed that using a virus to

insert DNA material would be a safe form of treatment. Now, this experiment was more about inserting a DNA marker into t I L cells. It wasn't about putting in good DNA. It was about identifying this cell as a t I L cell. But the one of the other pieces of information they got was, oh, well, this could work for other applications beyond just marking a cell. We might be able to actually do gene therapy using this approach. Sotumber four, the National Institutes of Health treated a four year old

girl with a d A deficiency. They also treated nine year old girl with a d A deficiency, and this was one of the first approved of trials for g therapy. So this approach was not incredibly effective at first, although the last information I could find both patients are leading normal lives now they do not have this a d A deficiency apparently anymore. But the the delivery methods have

improved significantly since nine. There was actually very few successes in early gene therapy experiments all the way through the eighties into the nineties, and that was one of the reasons why gene therapy took had a real rough go

in the early days. Right, not a big surprise. We're talking about something incredibly sophisticated that we have admittedly only a you know, a sliver of understanding, Like there's so much we don't know about genes, right, and we hadn't mapped the human genome until right, So it's it's not a big surprise that it took a while because we were still learning about what we were doing while we were doing it. Um Dr Claudio Born and none of

the Vita Salute. San Rafael University in Milan experimented with gene therapy delivery systems using a hematopoetic stem cells to deliver genes. So now we're trying other methods of stem cells was another vector in researchers used gene therapy to treat babies who had a d A deficiency and moving up to nine. This was this was a terrible year for gene therapy. It was a terrible tragedy as well.

So there have been very there's been a lot of trials, very few successes, but the entire discipline of gene therapy suffered a serious setback because Uh, there was a patient who was undergoing gene therapy to treat a liver disease at the University of Pennsylvania. That patient's name is Jesse Gelsinger. Jesse Gelsinger uh died during the trial and it was

the first death attributable to gene therapy. That led to increased scrutiny of gene therapy programs across the entire world, and a lot of conclusions were drawn that many, not not all, but many of these trials did not follow terribly rigorous standards, or perhaps were not designed in the most ethical manner. The the desire to try and be the first to UH to have a working gene therapy might have been guiding people to act recklessly, particularly with

the lives or well being of patients. And it raised

a lot of criticism about gene therapy in general. So even the people who were following very stringent, strict scientific processes and being as ethical as possible were brought under the microscope, and there were a lot of questions about when is it actually acceptable to move from the experimental stage where your work ing on some isolated tissue or you're working with an animal not a human being, UH, and then move that to human trials, When is that

actually an acceptable moment in gene therapy? And the whole thing kind of brought the discipline to a crawl for a couple of years, and there's still a lot of scrutiny there obviously, because this is this is potentially very useful but also very dangerous type stuff. In two thousand two, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Copernicus Therapeutics created the liposomes UH that there were twenty five nanometers across,

so a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That's incredibly tiny, and that they wanted to use to carry therapeutic DNA through pores in the nuclear membrane. And that same year, sickle cell disease was treated in mice using gene therapy for the first time and showing that that could be an effective treatment. Two thousand three, the University

of California used liposomes coated in paul ethylene glycol. That's what I was talking about earlier, the PEG material, which that was determined to be a good vector for delivering gene therapy to the brain because again most viruses, not all, but most viruses are too large to penetrate the blood brain barrier. And then in two thousand six, National Institutes of Health used gene therapy to treat melanoma and showed for the first time that gene therapy could be a

viable treatment for cancer. Now that's the history. Lesson, let's talk about what's going on kind of around that time too. More recent. I want to stress that when I look at information about gene therapy, I still very often see phrases like last resort, right I think that usually these experiments and and this research that's going on is on children with terrible fatal diseases, and and so frequently it is it is a last resort, right, and its and

it's just well, I just wanted to stress this. Despite the fact that we have moved past some of these early days, like, there's still a whole lot of caution about it, and there should be. I mean, because again, we there's still so much we don't understand that that

it needs. We need to have caution, not only just to be ethical and safe and give the patient as good a chance at recovery or treatment as possible, but also just so we keep our own expectations in check and we don't sit there and think, oh, if I just change out this one little strand of information within

this person's cells, everything's going to be fine. Uh. It's it's important to realize that there's so much we don't know that we have to proceed with caution, because until we know all that information, we could potentially do more harm than good in our treatment. Yeah. One of the uh interesting studies I found was related to vaccines. So right now a vaccine is pretty much always preferable as

the way to prevent somebody from contracting a disease. Sure, but what about in the case of a disease where we just can't get a reliable vaccine like HIV UM Now, the human immunodeficiency virus, it's difficult to create a vaccine because of the structure of the virus. Antibodies have to recognize elements on the external structure of a virus UM to in order to want to attack it, to to recognize it and prevent it UM. But HIV is kind of stealth. It doesn't have those external structures, which is

difficult to recognize UM. And so there's been all this difficulty creating a vaccine. But some recent research, especially some stuff published in Nature in two thousand eleven, found that, well, at least in a trial on mice, the immuno deficiency virus is susceptible to gene therapy that would prevent transmission UM, and so a gene therapy could be sort of like

a preventative measure to keep you from contracting HIV. Of course, the trouble is, as with all these other cases we've been talking about, it it's it's dangerous basically, right, and there there are other diseases and conditions where we have little to no treatment right now, Like it may be that all we can do is treat some symptoms, but

we can't treat anything that's underlying that. So everything from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's, that these kind of a lot of blood blood related genetic disorders right a lot of these different genetic disorders, we really have no way of treating anything beyond some symptoms in some cases, like in some we don't even have ways of treating the symptoms necessarily. So that's one of those things that people are really

looking at. Gene therapy is potentially being another attempt to uh, to treat something that otherwise we pretty much can only just try and and and increase the patient's comfort as much as possible because there's nothing else we can do. Um in those cases, I think are the ones that are going to have the most attention to acted at them for the near term. For gene therapy. Absolutely, I wanted to correct myself really quick, really quickly from from earlier.

Lenty viruses are a genus within the retrovirus family, but they but they're they're specific properties are important. I was talking about them like they're two totally different things. That is, that is an untruth right there. I knew that, No, I didn't so in all these cases, and especially because the science is still pretty preliminary. We're talking about last resort, we're talking about it's still something we're not very sure about,

and we were only using cases where there's no other option. Really, right, But what if we got a lot better at it, sure, to the point where we can actually treat these diseases, people can lead healthy lives. These genetic disorders become a thing of the past. I see the future you're painting, right, and so its future where gene therapy is just completely safe. It's run of the mill. It's it's like vaccines are today. So you know, your chance of having a problem is

one in some huge number. And we're having a sporting stars cheating by having gene therapy to make their blood more oxygen absorbent. Exactly. Oh well, well, guys, you're you're like totally I was. I was right there in the happy future where everybody was healthy, and now you're you're twisting it. What's going on? You're talking about gene doping. Gene doping, tell me about gene doping, Lauren, Well, gene doping doesn't exist right now, but we're we're afraid could

happen in some kind of terrible future. Is is that? Yes? That that that people would use gene therapy in order to, you know, do do the same kind of things that medications are that illegal medications in most sporting worlds are are used for now, the whole blood doping stuff, the phrase comes from blood doping, which is where you know, you draw your own blood and you keep that out

in store. It let your body regenerate more to replace it, and then right before the big race, you shoot yourself back up with your blood so you've got extra red blood cells. You can get even more oxygen to your muscles, your superman yeah, relatively speaking, Yeah, But what if instead of all that, you could alter your genes? Right, there's a gene called 'm airy throw poteen. I think I got that right in one we're going to go with it.

E p O that regulates how many red blood cells are created in your body and um and when it's functioning normally, it'll shut off when you've got enough, But if you wanted a few more in there to boost you know, Unfortunately in trials, it's difficult to get them to turn off. Once you've turned them on, and then you're just like a blood sprinkler, crazy blood bags like toad, just blood shooting out your It was it was, it

was pretty. It was pretty tragic, and and and and many, you know, many other things can go terribly wrong, which is why we're not doing this right now. Okay, but so Jeane doping this paint, say, it's it's a mersure of the the future we were talking about in this

dystopian future. It's a future where you can mess with your genes, you can just do stuff right, so like in BioShock, you can just you know, yeah, yeah, we're beyond beyond the ability to do things like determine what color eyes your children are going to have or what sex your child will be. That too, write, but I think you might be little too far. Here we go, here's where the X Men come in. Okay, all right, I knew we were going to get there. I knew

we're going to get to the X Men. But honestly, I mean, we are talking about the potential in the future. Let's say that we have perfected as close as you can to perfecting anything anyway, uh, some gene replacement therapy or gene alteration to the point where we can genetically modify human beings so that they are the best of the best. So before we get to X men territory, we're really talking about Connunian Song territory, Wrath of con type stuff. These are the These are the people who

are genetically engineered to be intelligent and strong. They were meant to be warriors to end up ending a conflict, and then once the conflicts over, what do they do next? Then we should have been into space. So there's that that future. But you're talking about even going beyond that. Let's say that that's even the possibility where we're able to make people the quote unquote the best people they could be based upon the genetic information they carry inside them.

You're talking about going even further than that and giving people abilities that are not even human. Right. Yeah, Well, okay, so this raises a problem I have with the x men. Okay, this is one problem you have with the x mentor this is the problem that it isn't it's the main it's an Okay, So the x men is the x men. It is what it is because I could go out of my hands. I could go on about cable for hours. Okay, let's not talk about the summers. I can kind of

see clause. I can kind of see it like no cla like like, let's say, though, that wasn't actually a mutation, right, Wolverine got claus but no, no, he has bone clause. They were coded in adamantium. Yea, his claws are actually bone. Okay, we're good to get as Matt, when Magneto stripped him of all of his adamantium skeleton, his bone claws remained. This is excellent. Okay, so I can actually kind of see clause. I mean that seems like a long way off,

but it's it's within the realm of physical possibility. And that's the thing I want to make a distinction about. Actually, there are two things. Um. One is physical possibility. I don't think Gambit makes any sense. Well, he has that really thick Louisiana accent. It's really hard to understand what he's saying. The problem with Gambit isn't that, um, he has incredible powers. It's that the incredible power he has

doesn't make sense in terms of physics. Sure, so you're saying that the ability to touch something and make it molecularly vibrate to the point where it explodes makes no sense. Yeah, I don't see how that could ever be a property of the human body. How different How could you transfer that energy in such a way like, yeah, there's no mechanism for it. Yeah, I would say probably the same

thing about like shooting cold rays. I mean that that just seems it's not necessarily so much that it's a problem with DNA, it's a problem with physics, like how do you make rays of cold come out of here? Right? We do not have the you know, genesis for laser beams to shoot out of our eyeballs, so therefore it's unlikely.

Magnets or being able to control magnetism, I mean, yes, we all have an electric field, like like living things create electric fields, and electric fields can affect magnets because the electromagnetic effect there, you know. But being able to control entire huge hunks of metal, well anyway, all that, Yeah,

that's that's just bones. I can see bone claws, I can see it would be it would be very strange, but having weird bone claws that come out of your hand Okay, that seems like a more physically acceptable or or even sending an incredibly heightened immune system. Sure, you know, I was going to say Logan's other mutant power is regeneration and so and I can see how having an extremely quick working immune system would would be a thing. Well, yeah,

most like mammals don't regenerate like that, but like reptiles can. Sure, right, you lizard can slower, slower speed. But yeah, we've talked about using things like gene therapy for regenitative medicine, so that kind of fits in with that, right, So I think this is, uh, that kind of thing is not so much beyond the realm of possibility. But the other thing I want to talk about with x men and genetics is this idea that all of these powers tend

to be presented as if they're created by a single mutation. Right, it's called the X gene within the within the cannon. Yeah, it is a single gene. And depending on which bit of media of the X men you are consuming, sometimes it's it's it's an on or off option, which is not how you can actually you can actually be treated to a point where your your mutant nobility is turned off as is seen and I think the third of

the X Men films that I never saw. But anyway, yeah, I mean like the idea that this one gene could have essentially unlimited expressions is kind of interesting. I can see that by say, um, either genetic engineering so top down control of your DNA sequence, or millions of years of evolution, maybe we could get bone claws that shoot out of our hands. You don't think we're going to get to the point where we can teleport the bone claus No, but the bone claws that shoot out of

your hand would not be one mutation, right right. The problem is it's a it's a misunderstanding of what mutations look like when they happen. You don't A mutation doesn't cause a like complex, fully formed working apparatus that was not previously there. You can you know, mutations that turn into wings probably start as little tiny flaps and have to be amplified over generations of success in more causes.

You know, your your ear lobe to be directly connected or a little bit floppy when where it matches up with your head, and and you know which is a great mutant power, but floppy ear, floppy ear that was one of my favorite like eighth tier X Men floppy ear that was one of the lesser known powers of

Omega Red floppy ear. So anyway, getting back into this discussion, you know, the there's also a confusion about how mutations are passed on, and that if a mutation is passed on, it must therefore be beneficial to whatever creature has that mutation. But because we're talking about very complex this ums, sometimes that mutation can go along with other traits that are advantageous. The mutation itself may or may not be It might not be a problem, but it might not necessarily be advantageous.

So it's not that you know, whatever creature currently exists in its uh you know, the like that if you were to take a representative animal from any species and say, this is an example of all the traits that are the most advantageous for this animal. Because this animal is alive, therefore it has all the traits that were beneficial. That's that's facetious. Orry, you know, it's not not true at all.

I mean, it's it's much more complicated than that. So when you hear about mutations and mutations being passed along, sometimes they are beneficial and sometimes that's exactly the reason why the creatures that are alive now share that particular mutation. It's because it was one that gave them an advantage in whatever ecosystem they evolved in. But other ones, you know, it's just they happen to pee back on with traits that were very advantageous for survival, and that's why they

too have survived those mutations. But it's complicated stuff. Like you said, it's not just one thing that manifests itself immediately and fully formed. Uh format you know, things like like birds. Now we essentially understand to be the evolutionary descendant of dinosaurs actually, like they are dinosaurs, yeah, tree, But it's one of those things where it took a

long time for us to figure that out, right. It was like, you know, we we didn't have that direct that understanding of that that line of descent until relatively recently. The I think the t rex had featheries, don't they. Yeah, a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. Yeah, yeah, which totally changes my view of what dinosaurs should look like, you know, based upon the way I learned about him when I was a kid. Of course, when I was a kid. It was shortly after the dinosaurs had died out. So

I feel like we've strayed a little bit. Maybe, so we were talking about X men in terms of mutations, well mutations and sort of top down control. Maybe what the x chene does is is set off a whole crazy like nuclear reaction of other changes in human DNA. Maybe that's what it did, like a Domino effect, but not Domino the character. We're actually talking about Domino the little things that fall over correct. But to bring it back to the real world, let's so, so let's say,

is not the real world? Yeah, so we're we're ruling out the shooting fire, shooting cold stuff like that, but saying, okay, maybe you could have bone claws or whatever. Um, is it ethical? Is it ethical to voluntarily mess with our genes if we have the power to do it. It's a good question. I mean, it really all depends upon your definition of what ethics are I think, I mean, and also what messing with and also and also whether or not the person who's getting messed with is doing

so voluntarily. That clearly would have a huge impact if it's because if you're telling you about you know, making choices for an unborn child, then you are making determinations that are going to affect that child's life, and the child has no say in the matter. But then if you're leaving it all up to just biology, the child really doesn't have a say in a matter of what you can So is it better to leave it up

to chance? Is it better to make determinations? And if it's better to make determinations, how far should that go? I believe there was a court case relatively recently in the UK where UM, one of the associations of the deaf, got together and and protested a bill that had gone through the government that said that UM, certain kinds of genetic testing and certain kinds of genetic selection are okay, like, for example, testing to to make sure that your child

is of hearing. And they were like, why can't deaf parents choose to have a deaf child? Well, and and to be fair, I mean, the deaf culture is a culture. There is there is an entire deaf community, and anyone who has not ever interacted with anyone who actually is part of the deaf community. Just because your deaf does not necessarily mean you are in the deaf community, right, But they have a very strong sense of identity and they you know, that's a that's part of their culture.

It's something that they value, and to discount it is pretty tough. I mean, that's kind of that's that raises some pretty tough questions. Yeah, if you have your own language, you've definitely got something going on. Oh yeah, yeah, And and you know, and at a certain point, who is you know, what what kind of lawmaking bodies are allowed to legislate that, legislate that? And at what point is

it bad for people to decide? At what point? At what point do you have a government decide what it is that makes a person and then says anything that doesn't fit this definition isn't a person. Therefore they don't get getting into terrifying Third Reich style. Yeah, right, Well, what I was going to say is that all this makes me feel creepy. In one reason is that at the at the far end of the scale, we've all decided that eugenics is bad. Yes, but uh so, how

close is this to eugenics? That's a good question. And I think one thing we can be thankful for right now is that we've got plenty of time to ask those questions. And to come to some conclusions. Obviously, we can't draw any right now, or at least I'm not prepared to. This is a complicated issue that I think about that you know, we're so far away right now technologically speaking and medically speaking, that we've got time to have these discussions. And just to be clear, we are

in these ethical considerations. We're talking about voluntary changes. We're not talking about stuff you would need to save your life or or whatever the case might be secure deadly. Yeah. We're talking about things like being able to determine if your kid is going to uh have a genetic predisposition to being athletic, that sort of stuff, or you know, even more subtle changes in or or influence. This isn't

a child's genetic makeup. So again, we're not really there at this point, but it is the conversations that are interesting and worth having absolutely, yeah, and and and working towards a point where we can use gene therapy to help cure diseases without also causing cancer on the side, that would be good. Yeah yeah yeah. So um, all right, well, anyway,

that kind of wraps up our our conversation. We're probably gonna talk a lot more about x men as soon as we sign off here um and possibly then move on to other pantheons within the Marvel universe. Uh, we'll see. But in the meantime, I suggest for all of you guys out there listening, if you want to be involved

in our conversation, go to FW thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got everything, the podcasts, the blog post, the video series, links to other articles that talk about the same sort of concepts that we're talking about here to go into greater detail. We're gonna find a lot of awesome information there and we look forward to hearing from you. We will talk to again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit

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