Postdoctoral Researcher Tixeira

How do you think Gene Editing should be used in the future? 0:09

-”Gene editing is changing something basic to nature and tampering with something that we don’t have a fully understanding of and until we do it should not be allowed outside of a laboratory”

-”People, especially scientists are beginning to understand that there needs to be some sort of rules regarding to when and where you can use gene editing”

 

What limits do you think should be put on gene editing? 2:28

-”It should be really strictly ethically controlled”

-”At the moment universities have their own ethics but we do need more central ethics that surround it not only on the level of countries but internationally because their are certain countries that are not stable enough to have ethical regulations of their own”

-”This is where somebody like the W.H.O, U.N or even a different sort of governing body need to step in and say what can and can’t be done”

 

Do you thing tampering with human genes is morally wrong? 3:18

-”You don’t want to tamper with anything that could eventually be an organism like a human being for instance”

-”In other forms of gene editing, as long as we are in a controlled environment understand all the risk factors we can then use it for therapy and I clearly think C.R.I.S.P.R is not one of them”

 

How big of a part should our morals play in Gene Editing? 4:50 (Should we decide what’s right by our morals or what can possibly save someone or advance us to a better point?)

-”Morals are a bit fluffy because they change going from one society to another”

-”Science needs to be a bit more open, it needs to be a bit more understandable by the public”

 

Should Gene Editing be specifically used for disease and survivability over our own benefits like cosmetics? 6:33

-”If we ever get to the stage where we take it out of the laboratory then it should purley be used to help somebody in an end-stage crisis or something that is incurable”

-”I’m not supportive of gene editing to be used to enhance somebody”

-”Once we have a better understanding of it that will be the decision of the future generations to make”

 

What are you working on now? 8:39

-”We are observing the life cycle of zebrafish especially the embryonic stages in order to see the process of dead cells being cleared up by macrophages”

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What do you believe C.R.I.S.P.R is going to help the most with in the future? 9:50 (Preventive vs Treatments)

-”It has the potential to work for both”

-”For example we know there’s is one mutation that causes sickle cell anemia in people and if we understand C.R.I.S.P.R enough then we can confidently change this mutation before the embryo stage”

-”Once we know someone is at risk of breast cancer we could extract cells from them and use C.R.I.S.P.R to find out if they are more likely to get breast cancer”

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Should we attempt germline editing or is it too soon? 11:40

-”It is too soon however it has been already been done”

-”We still do not understand the functions of may cells, the environmental factors of these genes and DNA sequences that we thought were useless but have actually been proven to be an important part in gene regulation”

-”We don’t understand genetics enough to go anywhere near the germline”

 

Do you thing gene editing will ever come out of the lab and how long should it take? 12:42

-”In ten years we have moved through three different technologies, one of the first being ZFN’s which took 6 months with little to no results whereas now we have C.R.I.S.P.R where the same process takes a little less than a week”

-”We are already at that point where we are using genetically modified cells for therapy, but as far as C.R.I.S.P.R goes we are not ready or for anything that edits the gene of the organism

 

End at 14:45