Good afternoon everyone. It's a wonderful pleasure to be here on our home campus And I just feel like I've got my my extended family here in the room I have to tell you that you know when I I moved to Berkeley in 2002 I was recruited here from from Yale University by some of the distinguished people in this room actually and I knew I was moving to an exciting place. I've been very happy at Yale, but I knew this was sort of opening the door to a lot of new exciting opportunities and research. What I didn't think about at the time but I've come to appreciate, especially in recent years, and you'll see in this lecture, is that our great university is much more than you know any individual department. So I'm fortunate to work in two great departments here, but there are so many ways that this university has now contributed to my thinking about the future of genome editing, where it's going in a societal sense, a legal sense, and an ethical and moral sense in addition to all of the opportunities in clinical medicine, agriculture, etc. So I feel like I am so lucky to be at a place that has been fostering my intellectual growth in all of those different realms. I think this lectureship in honor of Dr. Elberg certainly is very fitting in the sense that he is someone who has inspired many of us, reading about his life and his work here at Berkeley, is just sort of, to me, epitomizes why Berkeley is such a great place to have the opportunity to work and work with such great students. So that's my little tribute to Berkeley. What I want to do today is I'm going to tell you a story really about some research that started here at Berkeley with just a collaboration among colleagues and then an international partnership with Immanuel Charpentier that led in an unexpected direction and it produced some science that has profound implications going forward in different areas of of course in medicine and agriculture, but also makes us really think about what it means to be human and what it means to have the power to manipulate the very code of life. And I want to get into some of that today with you and I'll talk for, hoping to talk for about 40 minutes and then I want to save a generous amount of time for discussion at the end. So to get into this, I wanted to introduce the topic of genome editing by pointing out that a lot of times in science, and this is something I love about being a scientist, we do experiments in the lab because we have an idea about something. We have something we want to test and the result isn't something you could have predicted. It takes your work in an unexpected direction. And that was exactly the case for the work that led to the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing because this was a project that began as a curiosity driven experiment to understand how bacteria fight viral infection, something that might sound rather esoteric to folks in the room, and yes it is, in many ways, but it was something that I was curious about and and through that research that we did in partnership with various colleagues, this led to an understanding of this bacterial immune system that allowed it to be adapted as something very different, namely a tool for manipulating the DNA sequences in any type of cell or organism. And this really started with a conversation that I had with a colleague here at Berkeley, Jillian Banfield. And you know, this is one of the great things about Cal, you know, Jill called me one day, it was probably around 2006 or so, and she said, Jennifer, I don't really know you, we don't really know each other, but you're doing the type of research that I think could be very interesting for something that I've stumbled across in my own work. And she proceeded to explain to me that she studied the DNA isolated from different kinds of bacteria and the viruses that infect those bugs in the environment, and she'd come across something very mysterious that was intriguing, and that was the fact that many bacteria in their chromosomes, so this is a diagram that illustrates the circular chromosome of a typical bacterial cell, many bacteria have a sequence of DNA in the chromosome that is a storage site for sequences of DNA sequences that come from viruses that infect those cells. And these DNA sequences have a distinctive pattern of repetitive elements that flank unique bits of DNA that are stored from viruses, and they were called CRISPRs. So when you see the acronym CRISPR, even if you don't know what it actually stands for, now you know that it really represents, it's an acronym that is describing this repetitive DNA element that is a genetic vaccination card for bacteria, where they store records of past infection. And what Jill wondered was whether these sequences might in fact be a signature of a bacterial immune system, a way bacteria could prevent future infection by those viruses, and one clue to this was that many of these organisms, in addition to having these repetitive CRISPR sequences, they also had CRISPR associated genes that encoded proteins of unknown function at the time that were nonetheless always inherited with CRISPR arrays, so it had the look of some kind of a conserved system that might have evolved over time to do something very specific. And what we now know, and this is really based on work that was done initially by scientists working in the dairy industry who are studying the kinds of bacteria that are used to culture yogurt and to make cheese, is that in bugs that have a CRISPR system, they in fact can adapt to viruses and protect themselves from future infection. And here's how it works. So this is a cartoon of a bacterial cell, and if that lucky cell has a CRISPR system in the genome, then when it gets infected by a virus which injects its DNA into the cell and starts to make all of the molecules that are necessary to make more viruses, this cell can in fact acquire a little sequence of DNA from the virus and store it in the CRISPR array in the genome. And then the cell makes a little copy of that CRISPR array in the form of a molecule called RNA. It's a genetic cousin of DNA, so it provides the zip code for this system to recognize viruses that might have a matching DNA sequence, and those RNA molecules combine with proteins encoded by the CAST genes to form surveillance complexes that utilize the RNA sequence, the letters in the RNA, to find matching sites in DNA molecules, and when those matches are found, then the CAST proteins are able to cut up that foreign DNA and get rid of it. So it's a great way for bugs to adapt to viral infection. And the amazing thing about these pathways is that Jill Banfield's work and others who are working in this field, very small field at the time, were in fact uncovering many different examples of these CRISPR pathways. It's not one immune system, but in fact many, and I wanted to show you this great picture from Jill's lab. So these are two members of Jill's lab, including Christine He, who is a joint postdoc between our labs, and what these lucky lab members get to do in their work is go out on field trips like this and they collect samples of groundwater, samples of soil, and they are able to filter those samples and isolate the bacteria that might be growing in those environments. And then the DNA from those bugs is sequenced and used to look for new examples of CRISPR systems as well as lots of other kinds of interesting pathways that these bugs might be using. So it's a field that's known as metagenomics, and it's really interesting because we often don't even know what these bugs are. They've never been identified by scientists or cultured in a laboratory, and nonetheless by doing this kind of metagenomic research, you can get a lot of information about the lifestyles of these organisms. And so this kind of work has uncovered many different flavors of CRISPR-Cas immune systems, and I'm showing you here a slide that just illustrates in cartoon fashion the collection of different kinds of CRISPR-Cas enzymes and proteins that are part of these pathways. And I would just want you to notice that overall we can divide these systems into two categories known as class one and class two. And the thing that really distinguishes them is the fact that the class one systems consist and require multiple proteins that provide protection from viruses, whereas the class two systems each consist of a single large gene that encodes a big protein that's responsible for protecting cells. So rather than requiring a whole set of proteins, one protein does everything to protect the cell. And so it was really that sort of thinking about this difference in these types of CRISPR systems in nature that led to a partnership that I established with Emmanuel Charpentier's lab back in 2011 to investigate the function of a particular gene, a gene encoding a protein known as Cas9. And we were both at a conference together. We, you know, were scientists who came from different parts of the world, and we were our science had, you know, we were coming from very, very different scientific backgrounds. But when we met at a conference, we realized that we were both interested in the same question. What is the function of this Cas9 protein? It seemed like a fascinating, must be a really interesting protein if it could provide this kind of programmable protection against viruses. And that embarked my lab and Emmanuel's lab on a wonderful collaboration to answer this question. And two scientists working with us, Martin Genek, a postdoc here at Berkeley, in my lab at the time, and Christoph Chalinsky in Emmanuel's lab working in Vienna at the time, figured out that Cas9 is an amazing enzyme that has the ability to recognize segments of DNA at sites that match a 20-letter sequence in the guide RNA. And remember that this is a, would be an RNA molecule coming from and derived from integrated pieces of DNA in the CRISPR locus that record a past viral infection. So by definition, these RNAs are able to recognize matching DNAs that come from those viruses. And so in this cartoon right here, I hope you can see that. Maybe you can see the laser pointer. This piece of RNA provides the address for DNA recognition. And when the protein, which is shown in blue, recognizes that segment of DNA, it's able to unwind the DNA duplex. And then two chemical centers in the protein generate a double-stranded break in the DNA. And that's really how it works. So in bacteria, when that break is generated, the bacterial cell is able to quickly then degrade those ends of the DNA. And if that's a piece of viral DNA, then the virus goes away. And importantly, by doing these biochemical experiments where we had purified the Cas9 protein and we're figuring out what were the essential components for this RNA-guided DNA recognition and cutting, Martin and Christof figured out that the system requires a second kind of RNA, this little molecule here shown in red, called the tracer, which creates a structure for binding to Cas9. So in the laboratory, it was essential to have both of these types of RNA molecules present with Cas9 for targeted recognition and cutting of DNA to work. And we quickly showed that that's true also in cells. Now Martin Ginek, being a terrific biochemist, was very interested in kind of the minimal components of the system. And he was busily kind of figuring out what the essential parts of these RNA molecules might be. And he realized that you could actually link together the part of the RNA that provides the address label with the part of the RNA that provides the handle for Cas9 assembly. And this created what we called a single guide form of the RNA that in a single molecule could provide both the ability to bind to DNA and the ability to recruit this Cas9 protein for cleavage. And when we did this experiment and saw that these single guide RNAs could easily be altered on this end to recognize different places in a DNA sequence, whether that DNA molecule was a very short molecule tested in the test tube or whether it was an entire chromosome of a cell, we realized that our work that had started as a curiosity-driven project to understand a bacterial immune system had the potential to go in a very exciting and very new direction. And that's because by introducing a targeted break to DNA, it could be possible to trigger genetic changes to be made to the DNA in the process of repairing that break. And that's because in many other labs around the world, really over the past several decades, people had been studying the process of DNA repair, especially in human cells where misrepair of DNA can lead to cancer and other problems. And so there's lots of interest in understanding how this works. And it was appreciated that in our cells and in plant cells and other kinds of animals and plants, when double-stranded breaks occur to the DNA, rather than leading to rapid degradation like happens in bacteria, instead the cells can recognize that break and fix it. And they repair it by either introducing a very small disruption to the DNA and the process of pasting those ends back together or by integrating a new segment of genetic information if a template DNA molecule is available in the cell, something that is easy for scientists to introduce in a research setting. By doing this, you could actually, if you had a way to introduce a targeted break to a genome, you could actually carry out something that at the time was called genome engineering. You could literally change the DNA sequence at a particular place by inducing the cell to make that change in the process of repairing DNA. And I wanted to show you a video that was created by a wonderful colleague and scientist at the University of Utah for us, Janet Owasa, that shows how this works when we put these molecules into human cells. So when we go into the cell, of course the DNA in a human cell is inside the nucleus, it's packaged as chromatin, so it's wound around histone proteins. And amazingly, the Cas9 enzyme can use its guide RNA to find a matching sequence of DNA in the genome. And when that match occurs, the protein is able to unwind DNA. It forms a hybrid with the RNA, little helix inside the protein. And then the DNA is cleaved and the broken ends handed off to other enzymes in the cell that can repair the break by, in this example, inserting a new segment of genetic information. So it's a very powerful tool. And amazingly, after we published this work in the summer of 2012, very quickly labs around the world started to adopt this method for genome engineering and quickly that word turned into DNA genome editing because we all realized that with this technology it became much easier now to change the sequence of DNA precisely and accurately and it really became a democratizing tool that allowed labs to do experiments that in the past would have been prohibitive for various reasons, whether due to expense or time or just technical difficulty, now suddenly those kinds of experiments became a lot easier. And so just to, for those of you in the room that, you know, if you're not reading the scientific literature every day, just to give you a sense of what's happened over the past few years, you know, this technology just took off incredibly quickly and I wanted to just show you an illustration. This is actually from the Elsevier Journal website just showing the numbers of publications over the last few years with different technologies for genome editing. And so before there was CRISPR, there were tools for altering genomes that were based on having to engineer proteins that could cut DNA precisely. And these are shown in these three examples here. And these, you know, were adopted initially, but once the CRISPR technology became available, it really took over. And the reason is that it's just a lot simpler and faster to be able to change a molecule that provides the address label for a single protein, Cas9, is the same in everybody's experiment, whether they're working with human cells or wheat cells or zebrafish or anything else, they just have to change the address label, this RNA molecule, something that is relatively trivial to do with molecular biology methods. And so for me, you know, as a biochemist and a structural biologist, this, you know, experience of doing this work and then sort of being part of this revolution really that's happening where we have a new technology that's incredibly enabling has been, you know, very exciting and also incredibly challenging. And I wanted to share with you just a few things that we've been working on in the lab. I'm just very briefly tell you some of the questions that I'm still asking in the laboratory and trying to understand the answers to. And then I really want to dive into where this is all going in terms of what's going to happen. How is this going to affect all of our lives in the future? And what do we do about it? How do we think about it? And so to start with, you know, a little bit of the science that we're doing, so, you know, we've always been fascinated with how molecules work. And I still find that, you know, every morning when I wake up, that's usually the first thing on my mind is, you know, I'm thinking about experiments that I've been discussing with the members of my lab and our collaborators and colleagues, and I'm wondering what are the results of those experiments. And one of the things that we've been, you know, puzzling over is really understanding the mechanism by which this Cas9 enzyme is able to function as an RNA-guided protein. So think about it. This is an incredible molecule, right? Because it's a protein that has this little address label and somehow by a mechanism that is still being dissected, it's able to interact with the DNA in a cell so precisely that it finds a 20-letter sequence in the DNA out of all of the billions of base pairs of DNA, three billion, for example, in the human genome. And it finds that 20-letter stretch, and most of the time it does it pretty accurately and it makes a cut in the DNA. And so how does that work? We've been studying this using a variety of techniques, including X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy. Those are techniques that show us the structure of molecules and what they actually look like, as well as all sorts of ways of probing the behavior of these molecules, whether it's in the test tube in the lab or whether it's actually in living cells. And that work has showed that this is actually a 3D-printed model of Cas9. It's based on a crystallographic structure which is actually solved by my former postdoc Martin Genick, who's now a professor at the University of Zurich. And what this shows you is the white protein, which is the white part of the model here, Cas9, with its guide RNA, the orange molecule, that's the address label, holding on to a DNA molecule that is unwound inside the protein so that it can make this precise set of base pairs with the RNA. This is a transient RNA-DNA helix that forms inside Cas9. And when that occurs, the protein has a sensor that now triggers cutting of the DNA. And we understand now a lot about how that works by a lot of, and I wish I could have several hours to tell you all of this, but this is really all of the work that's been done over the last six years in our lab by a whole collection of undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and technicians who are able to sort of tease apart how this actually works. And I wanted to show you another, this is just a representation of a structure of a related enzyme called Cas12. It's also an RNA-guided DNA-cleaving protein that's a member of a related CRISPR-Cas system. And this shows you how this, again, this protein is structured so that it holds on to the orange molecule, the guide RNA, and as the DNA traverses the protein, it unwinds inside the enzyme to allow access to each strand of that DNA-double helix so that cutting can occur. Now these proteins, amazingly, are able to open up the DNA duplex, but they do it without any external energy source. They somehow coax apart those DNA strands, and that's a fundamental question that we're still puzzling over. How does that work? Because it's critical for the mechanism of these enzymes that they are able to gain access to the DNA helix and not only that, unwind the duplex so that it can be cut. And one of the things that's emerged from our research over the last few years is that these types of proteins, and I'll show you this example for Cas9, are enzymes that they're able to change their shape. They're sort of like shape-shifters. And this is an example that shows a comparison of different crystallographic structures that we have of Cas9. And the animation starts with the protein alone morphing to the shape that it forms when it binds to the guiding RNA. Once that occurs, there's a channel in the protein that is available for binding to DNA. So that's a really big rearrangement of the protein structure. And once DNA binds in this central channel, there's an additional rearrangement of the protein to accommodate that RNA DNA helix. And then finally, this part of the enzyme right here, this yellow piece, swings into position so they can actually cut the DNA. And we initially, this was initially a model for how Cas9 might work to sort of construct in our minds for how it might work. But we've been able to test all of these steps using different chemical methods, and we now feel very confident that this model is correct. This is really an enzyme that's designed to grab on to DNA, disrupt the helix probably in part by changing the shape of the enzyme that prize apart those DNA strands, and then only when it's engaged with a correct matching sequence that matches that guiding RNA does the cleaver position itself to actually make a cut in the DNA. So it's really an amazing little molecule. So I wanted to talk now about, you know, what this kind of tool is enabling. And I'm going to focus on three different aspects of applications of genome editing. I want to talk a little bit about applications in public health, applications in agriculture, and then finally, applications in biomedicine. Because one of the amazing things about genome editing, if you think about it, you know, every living thing that we know of on our planet has a nucleic acid that encodes the genetic information. And for cells, that's DNA. So given a tool like this, it turns out that this is a technology that is enabling in many different areas of biology. And so people, of course, have been, you know, thinking about how you might use a tool that allows changes to be made to DNA precisely and accurately. How do you use that in ways that are going to solve real-world problems? And what's so interesting is that, you know, it's just, it's allowed incredibly creative and interesting things to be either done or to get into the pipeline. But it also raises, I think, some very profound challenges in terms of the societal implications of this work and ethical, you know, the sort of ethical issues that are coming up, as well as issues of equity and how we think about a technology that's moving so quickly in the laboratory. And you saw with that chart I showed you of publications. There's, I think, the last time I typed, you know, CRISPR-Cas9 into PubMed, which is our, you know, search, sort of the library of medicine, I came up with close to 10,000 publications just in the last few years. So it just gives you a sense of how exponential the growth has been in the use of this tool. But that's moving forward much faster, I would say, than any of the, you know, grappling with these kinds of challenges that we're doing. And so this is why it's so important to have people thinking about this and get it engaging in what it means to have a way to literally control the code of life and to control the evolution of organisms, including ourselves. So in public health, so one of the things that's happened is that, you know, people have appreciated that you could use the CRISPR-Cas system in ways that will have a clinical impact but don't necessarily involve using genome editing directly in people. And this is an example here where scientists are using gene editing to alter the DNA of animals like pigs that are envisioned to be good organ donors for humans, and using it in two ways. One is to remove endogenous viruses from the pig DNA that could otherwise potentially infect humans and receive organs donated by these animals. And the other is to make the organs in these animals more human-like, so they're less likely to induce an immune reaction. And that's actually work that's going on both in academic labs and also in companies now. So that's an area where, you know, this is something that, I mean, a few years ago I wouldn't have ever imagined, you know, something we were involved in having that kind of effect. And yet this work is moving forward really quite quickly. And I think that most people would agree that this is an exciting potential application of this that could solve a real problem, which is the scarcity of organs that are necessary for donations. And then another area of interest in public health is an area where I would say there are both very interesting opportunities but also some real ethical challenges. And that's in an area that we call gene drives. And maybe some of you have seen this in the media. In fact, there was just a story recently on NPR about gene drives in mosquitoes. And I just wanted to very briefly explain what a gene drive is. And it's basically a way of introducing a genetic trait very quickly through a population of organisms. And it requires an efficient way of integrating genetic information into the genomes of these organisms. And this is a diagram that is adapted from an article, recent article in Science News that just shows how this works in an insect population. So normal inheritance works like this, where we have traits that are in each of the parents and they have progeny. And those traits are inherited in a, generally in a sort of what's called a Mendelian fashion, that a trait in this animal doesn't take over the population. It's simply inherited according to this lineage. But if we have a gene drive in place, and this is something that can be enabled with a gene editing technology like CRISPR-Cas9, now we have a way that if this animal has not only a particular genetic trait, but that trait is coupled to the gene editor, then every time it gets into an animal, it will tend to get into animals that don't have that genetic trait. And so you follow this through this population and you can see that very quickly, virtually all of the organisms have this particular genetic trait. We're no longer relying on Mendelian inheritance. Why would this be useful? Well, people envision that you could use such a technology to control the spread of mosquito-borne diseases by creating animals in the wild that are either unable to spread the disease or are sterile, for example, which might lead eventually to extinction of the population if you took it to that extent. And so there's, I think, both incredible excitement about the potential for this, but also a growing recognition that this could have profound impacts in the environment that need to be evaluated. And we need to be very careful about taking steps that might be difficult to reverse once they get unleashed. And so that's one of the kinds of challenges that a technology like gene editing is now bringing to the fore. I wanted to also speak a little bit about agriculture. So, you know, in agriculture, I personally think that this is probably the area where gene editing will have the widest global impact in the near term because everybody has to eat. And there's lots of research being done to alter plant properties that will allow plants to resist drought, to resist disease, potentially to be more nutritious, and to do that using gene editing so that genes can be very precisely altered without requiring years of breeding as well as all of the genetic variations that typically go along with traditional breeding approaches for plants. This is an example from a research lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Zach Libman, who published a paper showing that you could use the CRISPR-Cas9 system to essentially as a rheostat to dial up or down the numbers of fruits that are produced by plants, such as tomatoes. And, you know, he's done a lot of work on this showing that he's really impacting the genome at a place that is highly conserved across different kinds of plants. So you could start imagining being able to control crop production in many different kinds of crops using this sort of a strategy, which sounds very exciting. And then there's work that was done at Penn State University by another academic research group that was able to use CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out one gene, a single gene made of one gene disruption that creates a trait in these mushrooms that prevents them from turning brown when you cut them open. And so, you know, this was sort of a novelty when they initially did this, but again, the idea is that it demonstrates how straightforward it now is, at least in some settings, agriculturally, to make these kinds of targeted changes to plants. And the big question is, or a big question, is how do we all feel about that? How do we feel about going to our local farmer's market or grocery store and picking up some mushrooms that have been edited this way? Are people going to accept that or resist that? And I've discovered that, you know, depending on the country that you live in, the answer is going to be different, at least from an environmental, governmental perspective, because in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided that any kind of gene editing that leads to genetic knockout, not introducing new genetic information, is not to be regulated, and it's not considered a genetically modified organism because it doesn't contain any foreign DNA. But if we go over to Europe, it's very different. In Europe, the ruling has come down in the last few months that organisms such as the mushroom would be considered a genetically modified organism, and those would be regulated very strictly or perhaps not even allowed on the market there. So, you know, we're at this very interesting moment where countries are having to grapple with this, and it will affect global markets for products that are produced from everything from home farmers to big commercial farming operations. And then finally, I just want to turn to biomedical applications, and this is actually a slide from some of our own work. So, you know, one of the amazing things about gene editing is that even labs like mine that are very firmly in the camp of working on purified molecules and thinking about mechanisms have been enabled to do things that we could have never imagined actually experiment done by a recently graduated or departed postdoc, Brett Stahl, who was able to show that he could make modified forms of CRISPR-Cas9, this little molecule diagramed here, and inject them into the brains of mice that had been tagged with a gene that turns red when the DNA is edited precisely. So that's a very nice marker that tells us when and where cells in the brain have received a DNA edit. You can see here that in this experiment when these Cas9 molecules were injected in two places in the mouse brain, we got a fairly large volume of cells that received a precise DNA edit. And we're excited about this, because we're actually now working with people at UCSF to ask whether we can use this strategy to generate a disease and also to deliver molecules into tumors that could be beneficial for cancer patients. Something that, you know, a few years ago I wouldn't have imagined that I would be involved in exciting work like that. And then there's also potential to do things that are outside of directly delivering gene editing into patients that involve detection of disease-causing DNA. And this is using CRISPR-Cas molecules as diagnostics, something that several students in my lab pioneered really with their careful work understanding the real some of the sort of side functions of these Cas proteins really and then recognizing that that those activities could be harnessed as diagnostics. So those kinds of applications sound like things that I think all of us would agree are worth moving forward and don't really have ethical ideas beyond any sort of the normal ones that we might think about for developing therapeutics. But what about editing the human germline? And, you know, this is an idea that really came up very, very early in the whole field of gene editing because people recognized that if you could make changes to what's called the germline, that means in embryos or eggs or sperm that you could actually introduce genetic changes that would become part of an entire organism and not only that, they become heritable so they can be passed on to future generations. And this was actually this picture was on the cover of The Economist a few years ago under the banner Editing Humanity and they had a whole sort of article imagining what would happen if you could actually do this, right? And so just to explain this a little bit more clearly, I just want to point out for those of you that are not scientists that we can really define fundamentally two kinds of genome editing. One is called somatic cell editing and that means making changes to, you know, say the brains of patients or any other cells or tissues in a particular organism that are not part of the germline. They don't get transmitted to future generations versus what's called germline editing, which involves making heritable changes and once those changes are introduced it could be very difficult to, you know, to unchange them, right? And so those really become then part of the whole lineage of that organism and all of its future progeny. And just to show you sort of how this would work so the idea is that you could take a fertilized egg and this is actually an example from our own Russell Vance who works here at Berkeley in immunology so he was one of the early labs to adopt this for germline editing in mice and this is an experiment in his lab where they took a, you see a pipette tip coming in from the left it's holding onto a fertilized mouse egg still at the single cell stage and you see a needle coming in from the right that's injecting the gene editing molecules and they go into the cell they edit the DNA and then as the cell divides and makes more cells and it forms an embryo then all of those cells inherit that change to the DNA and so back in 2015 really, I guess it was even earlier than that, sort of 2014 I started talking with a number of my colleagues here at Berkeley about this and I found myself lying awake many nights thinking about the potential for this technology that I've been involved in developing being utilized in this fashion and I started to feel very uncomfortable about it because it seemed to raise a lot of fundamental questions about not only who we are as human beings but also things like eugenics and societal inequities something we're talking a lot about now and who decides who would have the access or ability to use that kind of genome editing and is it right to use it at all and so with some encouragement from colleagues we started through the Innovative Genomics Institute here we held a small meeting up in the Napa Valley in January of 2015 to discuss this question and that led to a much larger meeting sponsored by the National Academies of Science in the US the UK and China to discuss this and ultimately resulted in a report that was released in now almost about two years ago shown here about human genome editing and in particular human germline editing what did it mean who should be able to use this and what were the criteria for proceeding if some scientist wanted to use this type of idea for using this application in human embryos and even then it all seemed kind of you know it sort of seemed a little bit science fictiony to me and you know I knew the potential was real but it I sort of maybe was a bit under the illusion that scientists around the world would respect the guidelines that were put forward by this report but then around the end of November of last year I received an email it was I think the day after Thanksgiving with the subject line babies born and the email was from this fellow who is a scientist in China I had encountered on a few occasions I didn't know him well in fact he visited Berkeley a couple of times and he told me in a very terse email that he had been involved in a clinical study where they used CRISPR-Cas9 to make changes to the genome of babies who had actually been born and as circumstance would have it we were actually all on our way to Hong Kong for the second international meeting on human germline editing and it was apparent to me that his intention was to announce his work at this conference and that's exactly what happened and I'm sure all of you unless you've been you know asleep for the past few months you've probably seen articles about this because it's been written about quite a lot and it's really brought to the fore this question of using CRISPR-Cas9 or any other gene editing technology to alter the DNA of humans in a heritable fashion and I just wanted to just so that you are aware of what was actually done and maybe we'll discuss it a little bit I wanted to show you this picture which is was actually from the Twitter feed of a colleague of ours Sean Ryder at the University of Massachusetts who did a really nice service to the scientific community of going in and analyzing very carefully the actual claimed DNA edits that He Jin Kui reported completing in these twin girls that were born and what Sean Ryder showed is that although the stated purpose of this application of germline editing in these girls was to remove a gene called CCR5 or disrupt this gene that's responsible for that allows HIV virus to infect cells so his stated purpose was to give these girls protection against future HIV infection something that sounds reasonable it turns out that the actual edits that were introduced into these girls are changes to the DNA that have actually never been seen in humans at a detailed level these exact edits have never these changes have never been observed in humans and in fact they've never been tested in animals and so at the top is unmodified sequence of the gene this shows a naturally occurring deletion called delta 32 that has been observed in a few people and was the tip-off that this is a gene encoding a receptor protein for HIV but down here are the actual genetic changes that were created by He Jin Kui in these twin girls and what you can see is that these do not look like this right and so even if you don't look at the details there you can see that they're different and so that means that what he did was to actually make changes to the DNA and then implant those resulting embryos so that they resulted in pregnancies and live births such that the resulting people these young girls have changes to their DNA that have never been tested it's really a profound thing to think about and I can tell you that when I was sitting in the audience at that meeting in Hong Kong I literally had you know the hairs on my neck were standing up because it seemed so horrifying really what had been done and you know I think that we're at a point now where we have to think about how to move forward and I wanted to put this up to point out that the World Health Organization recently announced that they have convened an international forum of scientists to really think hard about where we go from here given that human germline editing is now a reality and frankly it appears not that difficult to have done right because this Huajunqui is not an MD for example and he was able to find various partners to help him do his work we clearly as a scientific community need to be thinking about how to you know what's the next step here and this forum is charged with putting in place some more you know detailed requirements I would say perhaps even regulations that would be necessary if anyone in the future wants to proceed down this path and the national academies in the US are doing the same thing they're also in the process of putting together an international forum to look at this there've also been calls for moratoria on this kind of application and maybe we'll have a discussion about this a little bit and I have views on this and I'm just going to close by pointing out three things first of all we're now in an era where you know we have powerful editing tools for changing DNA sequences precisely and accurately that are both advancing science at a pace that is really really incredibly exciting but also raises these profound questions that we really must grapple with as we move forward secondly that as I just said that you know to really advance genome editing to the next level we're going to have to understand better I think how it works and how to control its activities and when I say control I mean both in a chemical but also in a societal sense and then we have to really think hard about what kinds of regulations should be in place that will support science and allow the science to advance as quickly as possible to solve real problems but will also at the same time limit risk and I'm going to just stop there thank people that I've had the pleasure to work with this is my almost current group some of these folks have already left the lab this was taken a few months ago but wonderful students at every level that have been working with me over the years great colleagues here at Berkeley both scientific colleagues and also Immanuel Sharpentier of course but also colleagues who are helping us to think hard about these ethical challenges and then finally any scientific laboratory is dependent on funding to do our work and we are extremely grateful for all of these organizations for supporting our work thanks a lot we have microphones that we will circulate in the audience so please raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question and wait until the microphone gets to you this gentleman right back here so you talked a lot about regulations that need to be done for the CRISPR-Cas9 system there are obviously there have been two sides one has been to just some people would like to say they just completely outlaw CRISPR technology and research which would be pretty detrimental to the potential that technology has and would also be probably being effective and then there's the other side who wants to completely let loose with the technology and the research which again would raise a lot of ethical dilemmas so what do you think is the sweet spot in regulation wise for a way to respectfully approach this technology ethically and morally that's the so called $65,000 question you put your finger on it that's the challenge my personal view is that it's probably not enough to just say as some people there's an article by Steven Pinker at one point in the Boston Globe that said bioethicists should get out of the way and scientists should just do whatever they want and I think that's going too far but I think that we need to be thoughtful about the place appropriate guidelines and frankly I would say regulations that really establish a set of principles that are where there's some price to be paid if you cross that line and the challenge is always how to do that and of course science is global now it's very hard to imagine quite how we would regulate or maybe enforce regulations globally but the good news is that there are a lot of smart dedicated people that really grapple with that challenge including our own senator who is looking into this and contacted us at the IGI recently about legislation that she's or at least a statement that she's considering putting forward for consideration in the senate so I think we have to be just very thoughtful and thinking about how we can put in place a set of very clear requirements that might turn into regulations ultimately yes in the back please wait for the microphone there were news articles that said that scientists are trying to bring back extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth using the CRISPR technology so I had a couple of questions so what stage is that research at and secondly if that succeeds then what would the pros and cons of that be well yeah so the de-extinction movement is I think what you're referring to and it sounds exciting I think it's probably more in the realm of science fiction right now in my opinion now some of my colleagues like George Church who's doing this work might disagree but I think the likelihood of being able to actually bring back woolly mammoths is going to be challenging and I'm not sure where we would, what the habitat would be for those animals too it's a bit hard to imagine quite where we're going to put them but I think that but you raise a great question I've talked to other colleagues who have maybe less grandiose plans for de-extinction but nonetheless want to explore this and so there are people that are thinking about could you bring back the carrier pigeon for example or could you engineer birds to have properties that were extant in animals that have now gone extinct and so I think it's a the way I think about it is what a wonderful tool for doing research and trying to understand the evolutionary relationships between organisms but I don't think we're on the verge of Jurassic Park yes here please please while you're waiting to get the microphone please keep your hand up it'll be a little easier to get the microphone to you thank you thank you for a really interesting talk I so I think there's definitely some cultural differences between different countries that are going to make regulation very challenging just because regulations in one country might not match regulations in another country whether they're produced democratically or not and so as an outcome I think it's feasible that there's a scenario where this technology is going to be used you know to add a germline stem cells for a long very quickly for a while somewhere where we might not be able to control and so you being so involved in this technology how do you think our government and our scientific culture is dealing with the potential outcome of that like there are percussions of assuming that it will happen it's already happening what are some of the steps that our government is taking that you might know of that would actually be deal with this in some way well I'll just mention three things I think hopefully everybody heard that question it's really just about how do you think about regulation in a global sort of culture of science and given that individual countries are going to be approaching this potentially quite differently I think for me it comes down to starting with the community of scientists engaging that community to think together that's why I think having these international forums is so valuable to put in place what are seen as essential requirements for any use of for example human germline editing by folks in the future and then using that as a basis for both government regulations but also frankly for the behavior of journal editors let's say are involved in making decisions about what kinds of science gets published and there's a lot of discussion about should like in this case of he wrote a couple of scientific articles about his work that have not yet appeared in the peer reviewed literature should they be published or should they not be published there's debate on both sides but I think the scholarly journals will play a big role in disseminating information and also deciding what kind of work is worthy of being published in those in those sorts of forums and then I guess the third piece is really doing a lot more engagement of people that are outside of the scientific community and that's really a big challenge because people are I think everybody's busy and crisper sounds maybe scary complicated and so but I think it's really key that we have ways of communicating and I've been experimenting at the IGI at the Innovative Genomics Institute we now have an artist in residence program we have artists that have just arrived that are going to be helping to work with scientists to illustrate their work and explain it in a more maybe accessible fashion and we do a lot of interaction with screenwriters and science fiction writers and people like that who are probably going to be doing much more to disseminate information than any of us individual scientists will be able to do so I think working outside of our traditional comfort zones is also going to be key yes here please I'm not a member of the scientific community I'm a political scientist so I'm interested in public policy and you talked about balancing regulation and limiting risk and that's pretty straightforward who's working on that the concept of unintended consequences let's take those two little girls with the intent of eliminating HIV vulnerability what's going on with grappling with unintended consequences of this work yeah it's a great question the unintended consequences are potentially profound and you know so unfortunately right now I only have more I have more questions than answers about that I think all of us at the meeting in Hong Kong and since then have been wondering what's being done to follow up on the health of those girls to monitor their progression as they start to grow up how do we try to understand as you said sort of the unintended consequences of the genetic changes that they've received and how those genes that were potentially apparently disrupted might be affecting other aspects of their health beyond susceptibility to HIV infection and then you know more broadly how do we think about going forward you know I can tell you that there's tremendous interest in human germline editing you might be surprised or maybe you wouldn't be but I'm contacted almost daily by people that have questions about it even people that want to do it and are trying to figure out how and where and when they can get access to it so it's not going to go away and so I think the broader question is how do we approach unintended consequences of this type of genome editing in the future and there's no easy answer there I'm not quite sure how you do experiments to figure that out right so it's a tough question Yes please, right over here Yes So you mentioned earlier that CRISPR is mostly very accurate and how does it fail like does failing mean it's sticking that section of DNA somewhere it shouldn't or it just can't find the piece of DNA it's trying to untangle and it proverbially gives up Right yeah thank you for that question because it's really important so it fails or it induces what we call off target changes to DNA when it engages in a place in the genome that doesn't maybe perfectly match the guide RNA sequence and that does happen with some frequency and it depends the frequency of that really turns out to depend greatly on the way the tool these molecules are actually introduced into cells the amount of the editor that's in the cell the time that it stays active in the cell and all of those sorts of things and so it's been a very active area of research over the last few years to investigate off target editing and what how does it work and how do we prevent it and there have been a lot of advances I would say in the technology that make me think that today that's not really a bottleneck going forward even for clinical use it's not to say that we ignore it but we have to pay attention to the accuracy of the editor but there are better and better ways of both monitoring that as well as modified forms of these proteins that are even more accurate I think the other way to think about your question is what about and this kind of gets back to this earlier question about unintended consequences what about edits that are happening as you as we intend but they lead to a genetic alteration that has an undesired or unintended outcome right so you altered the gene that you intended to alter but it has an unpredictable or undesired outcome and that's a lot harder to figure out how to test yes over here please keep your hand up yes thank you for your presentation I'm from a startup community so I'd like to hear your view on how you see the responsibility and the role of the startups and the venture capital in the ecosystem I know that there are so many money coming into gene editing are you seeing a positive trend or do you see some risk startup or venture capital coming into this space I had a bit of difficulty hearing the question can you just repeat sorry can you hear me so yeah I have a question about how you see the role and the responsibility of startup and also venture capital there are many money coming into that space so I want to see how you see it's positive or negative trend so you're touching on a very important point and I didn't get a chance to talk about it today but there's a tremendous interest in the biotech and investor communities in gene editing as a technology that will enable all sorts of commercial opportunities and on the one hand very exciting and I think will lead to important advances especially in sort of the outcomes of this tool but at the same time it does raise challenges especially for things like conflicts of interest right because people like me and many of my colleagues are involved in some of those companies and so you could imagine conflicts arising between the research that we're doing and the you know business opportunities or models of those companies so I think it's just something that we have to be very you know cognizant of and paying very close attention to it starts with transparency about you know what you know engagements we all have but I also think that I want to point out that I think there's very exciting ways of advancing technology that involve partnering between academics and companies and I've you know this is something I really didn't know anything about until a few years ago right I had my work had never had any commercial you know implications whatsoever in the past but I've had to you know kind of learn about this and again I've benefited from a lot of experts here at Cal who have been able to talk to about you know different aspects of these kinds of partnerships but I think that you know there are times when there is research being done in academic labs that has potential commercially but is going in a direction that really couldn't be explored by an academic lab because we don't have the resources and frankly we maybe don't have the desire or the expertise to take the work in that kind of direction so by partnering with companies I think we can do things together that neither party would be able to do alone so I think the challenge is to look for those opportunities and always maintaining you know the transparency necessary to try to avoid conflicts so I'd like to go back my question was about what you discussed earlier you showed that there were mutations the edits that Hee-Jeon Kui made to the genome were human edits that had never before been seen in the human population and I was sort of wondering how you deal with the consequences of that where I mean obviously they've been edited now but these are human beings and they could live you know 30, 50, 100 years and obviously the genome isn't static and there's often mutations and so I was wondering number one how you deal with mutations in a genome that is different than what is in the normal population and then also if those children decide to have their own children you now have a lineage of genetically modified humans that we've introduced into the population like how you deal with that going forward and how that affects sort of the whole human population right well so to take the second question first you know I think it's important to appreciate that introducing a trait like that into the whole human population would take a really long time right so I think that's not going to happen but you're right that those children now could pass this trait on to their kids and it becomes part of their family lineage so going forward it will be essential to I think to monitor these girls health as they mature and try to figure out you know how in your first question how stable are these edits and what impact does that genetic change to their DNA have on their health not only in terms of their susceptibility to infection because it's a change that could affect the function of their immune cells but also might affect other aspects of their health so there's some publications now and some papers out very recently that suggests that the gene that was edited in these girls in addition to affecting their susceptibility to HIV infection might also affect other aspects of neural function you know and might in fact be in some way beneficial to their health and so that has to be that will have to be assessed going forward and I think that would have to be done in my opinion by a third party external to wouldn't be appropriate for that to be monitored by for the monitoring to be done by the scientists that actually did the work right it would need to be done by a third party now will that happen it's hard to say this gentleman right here yes thank you I'd like to touch on eugenics for a minute and given the really dark history in this state in particular do you envision the government taking a harsh stance early on or do you envision it being left open to the marketplace how do you kind of envision that aspect of the technology moving forward well I guess I imagine that it's likely to move forward analogous to the way that in vitro fertilization has unfolded so I'm old enough to remember when you know my parents would sit at the dinner table at night and debate the morality of test tube babies and talk about was it right for people to be conceived in a test tube and it seemed really weird but then over time that we had family friends who benefited from IVF and many other people as well and Louise Brown grew up and she seemed to be fine so over time in a very kind of grassroots way almost people came to accept that technology and I almost wonder if we'll see a similar thing with human germline editing that it'll perhaps start to be used in some IVF clinics I hope under much more stringent regulatory guidelines than has happened in this first instance and if the if those uses result in perceived benefits to kids and to families then you could imagine that that will start to be more widely adopted now does that mean that we're entering into an era of eugenics I don't really see that likely to be happening I think that it's probably going to be more you know sporadically utilized and I would hope that initial uses are limited to real medical need rather than what we might consider to be enhancements how close are we to kind of like hearing single gene diseases like Huntington's that you were talking about and how like how would you translate that from like in the lab to human like and also what are the difficulties both like in the policy side and like the scientific community since like healthcare is very like profit driven so I think your question is about how you said how close are we to being able to correct a single gene mutation is that was that your your question we're already there you know I mean it's amazing but but you know we're already there so I can give you just a couple of fast examples I mean right now in the in in animals you know in in in mice it's been possible to introduce genetic changes that correct a disease of the liver that's been done in in a couple of cases Eric Olson at the University of Texas recently published data showing that in a dog model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy you could actually introduce genetic changes that that alleviated the phenotype of that disease which is it's a crippling muscular degenerative disorder which you know was really a profound sort of you know he showed these results at a scientific conference a few months back and I think everybody in the room was you know just kind of stunned right but you know how do we go from that where we are now with that kind of application in animals and certainly in all kinds of stem cells and cells in the laboratory how do we go from that to actually having a treatment that will be available and useful for curing patients and this is where you know the expertise of many folks in the room goes far beyond what I know but you know it's certainly going to involve things like you know we have to figure out how to deliver gene editing molecules in the cells that's sort of a scientific and technical challenge but then there's the challenge of you know the cost of that kind of a treatment and you know how affordable will that be who pays for it is it's going to be covered by insurance and we decide that and then who who gets access to it right if these are you know for example patients that are afflicted with sickle cell disease I think we're on the verge of having a strategy that will actually be curative for sickle cell disease that's tremendous but you know there's a hundred thousand people in the US alone that are afflicted and then there's many many people in Sub-Saharan Africa that are afflicted and so how do we ensure that there's sort of an equitable distribution of a technology that you know potentially a cure these are profound questions and I think they have to be tackled and there's no again there's sort of no easy answers so wow so I had a question about food regulation so you just discussed how basically the removal of genes from food food genomes is not regulated by the US FDA why did they make that judgment and do you think that the removal of a certain gene can have unintended consequences that they aren't accounting for right so my understanding of that a decision by the US Department of Agriculture is that they basically look at a you know genetic changes that are made to a plant and they decided that if there's no distribution of foreign DNA that effectively you could argue that that genetic knock out is something that could happen naturally right it could you know you could have plant breeders that could you know knock out a gene it might take a really long time but you know they could get there through natural there could be a natural process towards that genetic knock out whereas a knock in where a new sort of foreign gene let's say that's not been in that plant before is introduced to imagine how that could happen naturally so I think that was sort of the basis of making that decision and you might wonder well how come in Europe the decision went a different direction and I think it's because in Europe they define genetic modification according to just the technology manipulation itself right if a plant was manipulated with some kind of a tool like a gene editing tool even if you ended up with exactly the same plant at the end of the experiment it would still be called genetically modified because it went through that process of being exposed to the technology does that make sense so it's just different ways of defining what we consider genetic modification but as you can see these are all in a way very subjective you know kinds of decisions and I think they're really going to come down in many cases to what you know all of us as the consumers of those potential products really want you know do people want to have access to those plant products that are the product of genetic manipulation or not and my personal feeling there is that you know if you think about how traditional plant breeding works it involves you know mutagenizing plants and you get lots of random changes to DNA and then you simply select for plants that have desired traits who knows what other genetic changes are coming along for the ride and as you know it results in things like they don't smell nice anymore because you know those genes have been lost in the process of removing thorns you know things like that so I think we have to just you know again be very thoughtful about what kind of regulation we might advocate for given the realities of how the technology works this gentleman here on the aisle hi good evening my name is Aiden Hill I'm a former candidate for Berkeley City Council representing this area so like many of the constituents here have concerns about the dual use applicability as well as the bio weaponry available with CRISPR technology but I'm curious has there been any trials of CRISPR technology with 5G technology and what are the circumstances of cellular radiation using this technology to enhance the genomic structure thank you okay I didn't entirely understand the details of your question but I think you're generally asking about the use of genome editing technology which basically means the potential for technology to be used both for the public good but also for harm and you know I've had a lot of discussions about this with people we've had a number of visits from government agencies that have come to Berkeley and talked with me and other folks as well as our colleagues around the country about this question and I feel that gene editing is you know it's sort of no different than other technologies that have the potential to do good and bad and they have to be monitored carefully for sure I think one of the challenges with gene editing and hopefully you took this away from my talk is that it's widely available it's really easy for people to get a hold of it right it's not something you can lock away in a box and even if we wanted to get rid of it and I think we don't but you know even if we wanted to say well we're not going to let scientists use this anymore for certain kinds of things it's going to be very very hard to actually do that so I think more effective is going to be really just being very transparent about uses that are contemplated and getting the scientific community to really engage in thinking about how to work together to encourage a culture of responsible use it's not a perfect solution but I think it's a good start Rex, could you please hand the microphone to this gentleman straight across from you down that row Thank you Thank you and Dr. Dutner thank you so much for all your work my question is this if you know the gene that is a cause of a particular disease in specific context that must be retinal degenerative disease and you're able to edit out the defective part of the gene where does the healthy gene that you're going to replace come from if that's an intelligent question and then secondly am I correct that the CRISPR has two aspects precluding the transfer of the inheritance of a gene that's defective editing it out but also the ability to get the new gene to express itself so you might have some immediate effect in that person thank you very much those are both really great questions and the first question is about where so I showed this example of a piece of DNA being inserted into a genome in the process of repairing a break introduced by this CRISPR-Cas9 protein where does that DNA come from it's a great question and basically it comes from there's two sources one is from the cell itself so you probably know that there are two alleles two copies of every gene in a diploid cell and so you could imagine a scenario where one of those alleles a change in the sequence that allows specific recognition and then you can have repair by the other alleles so that's one possibility and that's actually been demonstrated in animals to be a pathway for DNA repair but in many cases especially if we were going to use this kind of strategy clinically scientists can actually introduce that DNA repair template into cells externally so they can introduce it on a virus or kind of a piece of DNA that gets introduced into cells where it provides the template for DNA repair so that's how that's done and then your other question was remind me the second question yes, okay, right and this is also a great question because it really gets at this distinction between making heritable changes in the germline where those changes just become part of the individual and can be passed on to the future children of that individual but if we do the editing in somatic cells then that means we're making changes to DNA in a single individual and maybe just in one tissue of that individual, right so you could imagine some day being able to treat muscular dystrophy in patients that have that disease by just treating their muscle cells if you had a way to deliver gene editing into just those cells and then you could actually in this dog model you could actually turn on production of the normal protein that's missing in those people and in these dogs and restore muscle function thank you Rexelle to the young lady with her hand up there please I was just raising my hand for my friend whose arms got tired alright, that sounds like a good deal friendship at its best so I was kind of wondering like what future do you see for CRISPR-Cas9 in like just over the counter sort of cough and cold medicine and I was wondering what would happen if you tried to defend against mutations from gene editing by using more gene editing to put the genes back that you originally were yeah thank you both of those again are really great questions so how soon are we going to see over the counter gene editing and I have two answers to that one is that we already have that today if we're not talking about editing people because you can actually scientists can go to a non-profit organization called AdGene and for very inexpensive very low cost they can get access to these gene editing molecules and they can start doing experiments in their lab so in that sense it's over the counter how soon will that be you're going to the store and you have a headache and you need to buy CRISPR-Cas9 no, not very soon for lots of reasons and it's probably a good thing and then your second question was, remind me shout it out would it be possible to counteract mutations from gene editing with more gene editing yeah so I think the way I would answer that is that I think what you're asking is once you change the DNA in a cell can you change it back what do you do and so there's lots of interest in this right now in the scientific community there's lots of people that are thinking about that question actually how do we think about gene edits and what if you wanted to turn off a gene editor that you'd put into cells and allow either I don't know about reversing those genetic changes that might be harder but certainly not allowing the gene editor to go on indefinitely sort of modifying DNA in cells and so there's a really interesting biological phenomenon it turns out that in nature as I kind of talked about in the beginning of my talk so these crisper enzymes these proteins arose as a bacterial adaptive immune system they prevent viral infection in bugs well you can imagine the viruses don't like that very much and so they fight back and they actually make little proteins that inhibit the crisper enzymes so they have inhibitors and we call these anti-crispers and so there's kind of this natural kind of war going on between crisper proteins and then these anti-crispers and there's lots of research happening right now to understand how those work but also how you could actually use them in a protective way in cells to prevent undesirable genetic changes so thank you unfortunately the time has raced by and we have we have time for just one more question this person in the front row thank you so much I was just wondering earlier you mentioned that you know pigs are being genetically engineered to produce organs for organ donation and mosquitoes are being genetically altered to either become extinct or become sterile in terms of spreading disease to humans and I was just wondering what are your thoughts on the implications of altering altering the environment to aid in the extension of human life expectancy well I think in both those examples and especially in the case of a gene drive that could have big implications environmentally that could be hard to predict initially I think we have to proceed with extreme caution so I really favor careful evaluation under very defined laboratory settings before proceeding further and right now there are a number of studies going on in research labs to test especially gene drives and then there are some very controlled studies that are planned in isolated environmental settings just to kind of get a sense of how effective these will really be in a natural population that's something that really hasn't been explored yet but I think the key is proceeding carefully and with a lot of thought behind each step that's taken Please join me in thanking Professor Dowdow


Item number SCP-3922 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-3922 is to be contained in a standard containment locker at Site-59. Request for uses and research may be forwarded to Director Knysmith. Description SCP-3922 is a cylindrical object, three centimeters in diameter and 0.5 centimeters in depth, and composed of a nickel-aluminum alloy. On one side, the object had been engraved with an insignia of three crescent moons in a row. Research into potential connections with SCP-2578 is ongoing. On the other, the word REASSURANCE has been engraved. It was purchased at a garage sale in Kenosha, Wisconsin by an off-duty Foundation field agent on July 21, 2017. It had been described by the owner as some kind of morality filter for TV. After confirming the anomalous property to the object, the agent turned the object over to the Foundation for containment and research. In place within one meter of a television set or a computer, SCP-3922 will significantly alter the content of any fictional films, TV shows, online videos, or commercials, usually through the addition of actors and padded combat uniforms and gas masks. These additional elements, classified as SCP-3922-A, will impede and or punish any and all crimes as preceded by SCP-3922-A instances, committed by the cast. The severity of this punishment is always reflective of the MPAA or FCC rating of the video. SCP-3922-A instances are capable of appearing in live-action and animated works, often taking on the particular animation style of the latter. However, regardless of the time period portrayed in the video, SCP-3922-A instances are always in possession of high-powered energy-based weaponry, vehicles capable of interstellar flight, combat drones, and other futuristic elements, all of which bear the same triple moon insignia. At the end of every video affected by SCP-3922, an altered end-title card will play in the place of any end credits, including the triple moon symbol.  Video MPAA rating, SCP-3922-interference point, result Pinocchio, 1940, G The Pleasure Island sequence, shortly before the reveal that all the boys have been turned into donkeys. Several SCP-3922-A squadrons raid Pleasure Island from dropshifts, reconstituting the children's humanity with a sound-based device labeled Tactical Undonkification Ordinance, and the coachman is instantly vaporized after a heavy-energy rifle bombardment. The film ends ten minutes later, after Lampwick is taken to a substance abuse rehabilitation center. The other villains of the film are arrested in a montage. This throw-the-whale is disintegrated by orbital energy weapon. The Blue Fairy is arrested for unlicensed reanimation of plant tissue, and Pinocchio is informed by a tactical child psychiatry associate that real boyhood is subjective. The Dark Knight, 2008, PG-13, daring to pencil trick sequence involving Heath Ledger's adaptation of the Joker. Several SCP-3922-A combat drones breach the room and quickly decapitate the Joker with plasma-based weaponry. In the next scene, Bruce Wayne is taken into SCP-3922-A custody for 39 separate counts of extortion. The context of these charges are unknown. The film ends with SCP-3922-A troops announcing their military occupation of Gotham City until law and order can be restored. A Clockwork Orange, 1971, R. Daring the rape scene involved in Alex the Large and Adrian Corey's character. Several SCP-3922-A instances break into the room where the scene takes place. Alex and his three other gang members, Georgie, Dem, and Pete, are restrained and forcefully loaded into an SCP-3922-A drop ship. The scene shifts to an empty field in an undisclosed, presumably Midwestern location. As his friends watch, the character of Dem is summarily executed by three SCP-3922-A troops with submachine guns. The shooting lasts approximately 50 minutes, well past the death of Dem, with the soldiers reloading their guns as needed. The process is repeated with Georgie and Pete. Alex is then forced to consume the remains of his friends, then is also executed in the same manner. The film ends after this sequence, which lasts roughly three hours. Sallow, or the 120 days of Sodom, 1975, not rated. Halfway through the film, see Addendum. All 12 inches, 1999, not rated, pornography. From the beginning, video proceeds as normal, saved for the seven SCP-3922-A instances who stand guard to ensure that any sex remains consensual. Said SCP-3922-A instances are equipped with rocket launchers. Addendum 4-3922 clearance required. Reference on SCP-3922's interaction with Sallow, or the 120 days of Sodom. Due to SCP-3922 interference, the recording had been extended to over nine hours in length. The four masters were terminated by sniper fire from SCP-3922-A instances, as several squadrons were deployed via dropship to liberate their captives. The target is responsible for the capture and torture of 18 teenagers over the course of the film. The scene promptly cuts to a desert environment, analogous to the extra-dimensional space examined by the Foundation during Operation Gala Head. The masters, naked and agitated, are intercepted by SCP-3922-A aircraft and captured, and taken to a mountainous location following an hour-long travel sequence in which no dialogue is exchanged. The aircraft arrives in a large military staging area of human design, located in a massive crater surrounded by mountains and greenery, and topped with a stone monument in the shape of three crescent moons. Combat vehicles resembling SCP-2578-D are seen entering and exiting the facility. Upon landing, the four masters are taken to an underground storage facility, enforceably submerged in tanks, labeled Ubliet, of semi-transparent blue-green gel. The process is extremely painful for the prisoners, but no physical harm is apparent. The tanks are then stored into a series of numbered shelves along a large marble wall. The remainder of the film is approximately eight hours of detailed depiction of the prisoner's faces, distorted with pain and agony. The ending card has been altered slightly for this recording, reading simply, you have been warned, under a red triple moon logo. Based on these findings, I believe that connections between SCP-3922, SCP-2578 and SCP-2922 should be examined immediately. Researcher Paulson