Rodolphe Barrangou reveals the nightmare of his CRISPR world. Photography of hologram by Langelle/GJEP
The CRISPR Craze? Or CRISPR Crazed?
24 June, 2019 by Anne Petermann
“Should we really be manipulating the heredity of future generations given our lack of knowledge about so many things.”
“Humans are very good at inventing things, but they are very, very bad at looking at what the implications are.” (from the trailer for the movie Human Nature)
The IUFRO take on CRISPR:
The opening plenary presentation for IUFRO was by Rodolphe Barrangou, faculty of NCSU, which revealed a very interesting motivation for selecting NCSU for the IUFRO event: launching a new CRISPR startup focused on bringing CRISPR to forestry.
Barrangou’s assaulting high velocity hi-tech presentation on the wonders of the “6 year-old” CRISPR technology was at once mesmerizing and horrifying. He referred to the time in human history as “BC” – Before CRISPR” vs “AD – after the death of the other recombinant technologies.” He compared CRISPR to a 6-year old child. Which was a bit of an odd choice since he also insisted that, “the science, we know…the science is not in question.” Not too many 6 year old children are so fully formed.
I found the speed of his delivery combined with his huge wide screen presentation and his fantastical ravings of the miracles of CRISPR to be an all-out assault on the senses.
At one point, he showed a slide containing a diverse array of species, from domesticated animals, to chimpanzees, to crop plants, announcing proudly that “we can edit the genome or epigenome of any species on Earth!” Pointing to a pig he said “We can make CRISPR bacon!”
He also delighted in explaining how they can even change the color in the very complicated wing pattern of a butterfly, which he demonstrated on the screen with horrifying before and after makeovers of two species of butterfly.
He did add a few words on the work still needed to be done. CRISPR is not, he said, always reliable. Getting back to the child metaphor, he explained it occasionally “has tantrums,” and “still does not work 100% of the time in 100% of the cells in 100% of patients.” Undeterred, he proudly explained that thousands of labs across the world are “mining biodiversity” to improve it.
Which revealed the real reason his entire presentation sounded like a high-pressure sales pitch. It was.
Halfway through his presentation he announced, with great aplomb, the launch of his new CRISPR startup, which he was launching right then and there at IUFRO in partnership with four other faculty from NCSU and one from Duke University. Its purpose—bring gene editing technology into the forestry sector. CRISPR would not, he admitted, solve the demand side problem. Commercialization, he said, is the limiting factor, because “the science, we know… the bottleneck [is] acceptance by regulators and society.”
It is a public perception problem. But they are on it! He showed a trailer for the movie Human Nature scheduled to premiere this September at the same time as the upcoming IUFRO World Congress (a coincidence??) – a film designed explicitly to convince a wary public that CRISPR is the best thing since sliced bread (or, was that the OxO gene).
Another public relations strategy, he explained, was a CRISPR process that uses “DNA free RNPs, and that’s the path to a non-transgenic, transgene-free, non-GMO approval, and that’s what I think is going to change the game,” and be the perfect antidote to regulation and the anti-GMO movement.
He neglected to explain how a process designed to engineer genomes would not be genetic engineering. In fact, he feared this would be the downfall of the CRISPR movement–if people perceived it as genetic engineering. Which it is, so he should be concerned.
He wrapped up his talk explaining how the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used to “predict what genomes, sequences and pathways should be targeted—and once you understand this you can knock them out, turn them on, turn them off, whatever you want to do and hopefully eventually get to the relevant trait that is of interest to the industry.”
Again: genetic engineering.
His fanatical worship of the CRISPR God was tempered slightly at the end of his talk when he admitted that CRISPR scientists are nowhere near understanding tree genomics as well as we understand human genomics due to the fact that tree genomes are so much bigger and more complex.
Not all Fertilizer and Roses
His stunningly depressing presentation, interestingly, was followed by James Holland, a USDA/NCSU corn researcher who provided comic relief with his explanations of everything that can and will go wrong in the pursuit of genetic knowledge. His honesty was like a breath of fresh air after the hard pitch CRISPR advertisement that proceeded him.
End day one…