Patrick Collison: observation

Transcript context

…When we think forward 10 or 20 years, this specific line of research, where you understand the effects of the genetic architecture on different traits, and you can edit, invert, insert the DNA arbitrarily. You've solved cell anemia — you've done the obvious things. What does that lead to? What are you excited about? The thing that is really interesting about it is using it as a new kind of telescope: when people hear about CRISPR, there's an obvious and legitimate excitement around using this to cure things directly in the body, as a kind of therapeutic. You can also use CRISPR to try to figure out what's going on in cells and in cell cultures in a structured way. So the body is interesting in that it has this switchboard, akin to DJ’s with those fancy mixing sets, of 20,000 genes. And with CRISPR, you can systematically go and perturb each gene one by one, mashing all the keys in sequence, and try to figure out what the effects of perturbing this versus that are. If you do that in a cell culture, where you can subject the cells to some stressor or treatment, you can see differentially how different perturbations affect different cell outcomes. Or you can use it for synthetic data generation more broadly, where you could perform all these perturbations, then sequence and see what's happening in the cells and so forth. And single cell sequencing has come a long way. Anyway, the point is, there's a lot you can do with gene editing for discovery and for data generation in the broadest sense. That's really compelling, because a lot of diseases are "complex" in the field's jargon. Yes, they're complex in the colloquial sense, but they're specifically complex in that they're not infectious. They're not just some pathogen getting into you. And they're not monogenic, like Huntington's, where it's one specific mutation. Instead, they are some combination of environmental factors, but maybe some genetic factors as well — they are somewhere in between. These include most autoimmune diseases, most cancers, to some extent cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease — the big ones we haven't yet solved. Coming back to functional genomics technologies, what's interesting is trying to figure out how it is that the genetic component of those diseases works. And even if that's only a small contributor, it can potentially shine light on what the general pathway is. So the question would be, and this is speculative, none of this has actually happened: "By figuring out the genetic interactions between genes and, say, Alzheimer's, can you figure out how Alzheimer's arises, which we don't understand today?" Then once you understand how Alzheimer's arises, maybe you can use conventional technologies to figure out how to inhibit or modulate those pathways. That's what we're really excited about from a functional genomics standpoint. There's an AI angle as well that we could talk about if you want. How do you think about the dual use possibilities of biotech? I am sympathetic with the idea that if you think of prior technology, like Google search or even the computer itself, you could forecast in advance, like: "Oh, this has all this dual use stuff." But for some reason, history has been kind to us. The meta-lesson here is: “Keep doing science.” With biotech, we don't have to go into specifics here, but are there specific things you can think of with this specific technology? You can imagine some nefarious things. How do you think about that? Why not focus, let's say, on ameliorating the risks first or something like that?…

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