Cattle

Hornless cattle were once the poster animals for a gene-editing revolution, until the FDA found a pesky mistake in their DNA. In this episode, we go to a California research farm to  explore unintended consequences.

Clarification: The FDA has an established process for researchers to request authorization to put animals with investigational genomic alterations, including those made with CRISPR, into the food supply. But the FDA does not issue orders to incinerate those animals. The cattle at the heart of this story were ultimately incinerated. 

Interviews:

• Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam, Extension Specialist: Animal Biotechnology and Genomics, Department of Animal Science, University of California Davis
  • Her 2022 study "Animal Health and Food Safety Analyses of Six Offspring of a Genome-Edited Hornless Bull."
• Dr. Alexis L. Norris, Division of Animal Bioengineering and Cellular Therapies Center for Veterinary Medicine, The Food and Drug Administration

Credits

A CRISPR Bite is supported by the Jean Monnet Network, which is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union through the GEAP-3 Network of scientists. More about our project here. This podcast does not reflect the views of our funders. 

This podcast was co-written and hosted by Dr. Lauren Crossland-Marr. Our executive producer is Corinne Ruff. She co-wrote, edited and produced the show. Jake Harper edited this episode. The show was sound designed and engineered by Adriene Lilly. Aaron Crossland made our theme music. Rachael Marr designed our logo.  Legal support from New Media Rights and marketing help from Tink Media. Maya Tsingos fact checked this episode.

Thank you to the GEAP-3 team! Special thanks to Matthew Schnurr, Klara Fischer, and Glenn Stone for their support and advice on this podcast. 

Leave a 5-star rating and review of this episode on Apple podcasts to help us spread the word. Have more to say? Email us at acrisprbitepodcast@gmail.com. Follow for updates on Instagram @acrisprbite

Transcript

Lauren Crossland-Marr: I spend a lot of time thinking about the connection between what ends up on our plates and where it comes from. On this show, we've talked about how scientists are using a new gene editing technology called CRISPR. I've been taking you into labs, corporate offices, and universities to give you a look at how researchers are genetically engineering plants with CRISPR.

But if you didn't know this, animals are also being modified in this way. Name an animal used for food, and there's likely a company or university working on changing its genome. It's all really experimental stuff, and editing animals raises even more complicated ethical concerns in this ongoing debate over gene editing and food. Are the animals being treated humanely? How will they affect the environment? Are there other potentially unforeseen consequences? This is a CRISPR bite and I'm your host. Today on the show, we're talking about cattle.

You wouldn't know this from driving by a farm, but there are breeds of cattle that must get their horns removed when they're young, so they don't hurt other animals or people. But what if scientists can engineer an animal to be born without horns? Well, it turns out they can. In fact, it's already happened.

This is the story of the very first gene edited animal to be modified with a new technology that's really similar to CRISPR. It's called TALEN. Scientists tested it out on twin bulls named Buri and Spottiguy. In 2014, a researcher named Alison Van Eenennaam worked with a company, Recombinetics, to use TALEN technology to change the genome of the bulls, so they wouldn't have horns.

If you haven't listened to the first episode of this podcast, hit pause and go back to hear the breakdown of GMOs, TALEN, and CRISPR. If you've already heard that episode, you probably remember that TALEN is very similar to CRISPR. While it uses Spacing in the genetic code like CRISPR, it is fairly limited.

It can only perform simple mutations, and in both cases, there is a double strand break, and the organism will, ideally, repair itself in the way researchers hope. However, in this episode, we follow a story of unintended consequences.

Our producer Jonah Goldberg drove to Davis, California in the summer of 2021 to a research lab and farm run by Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam, who is at the center of the controversy over gene edited animals.

Jonah Goldberg: I drove up to the UC Davis campus outside Sacramento, California, to meet the researcher who developed hornless cattle. The weather was in the high 90s and incredibly dry. Despite being a Californian myself, I was anxious to get indoors. On the door of the biology building, I saw a sign that said, Stay one cow apart, to encourage social distancing.That's where I met Alison Van Eenennaam. She's tall, and she kind of fits the mold for a farmer scientist, greeting me in a lab coat and blue jeans. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: My name is Alison Van Eenennaam, and I am a geneticist at the University of California in Davis, and I work in livestock genetics. 

Jonah Goldberg: Her work spanned four floors of this building and a section of the farmland surrounding campus on all sides. Two of the projects she's developed at UC Davis, hornless cattle and all male cattle, have been very controversial. She's passionate about GMOs and gene editing, and she's grown used to defending her research. She started the Hornless Cattle Project in 2014, when she was approached by a gene editing solutions company, Recombinetics, to do this research. The debate about their project continues to today. I was curious first about the motivation behind designing hornless cattle. We're used to GMOs being about traits that affect food directly. So I asked her, what do horns on cattle have to do with their beef or milk? 

Alison Van Eenennaam: Horns on cattle are quite dangerous and they can harm the other animals that the animals are with or also their human handlers. And so typically, Horns are removed physically when calves are quite young, so that they don't hurt each other or other animals. 

Jonah Goldberg: So Van Eenennaam figured out a way to remove the horns before they could even grow, using TALEN. That's an acronym for a technology closely related to CRISPR. Both use enzymes to target specific genes, just with different spacing in the genetic code. While CRISPR is newer, some researchers still prefer to use TALEN. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: This lab here is where we do the embryo production. 

Jonah Goldberg: She took me on a tour of her lab and showed me how to, to edit a cow. The walls were taken up floor to ceiling by complex machinery on top of your typical lab equipment wanting to use as a male.

Alison Van Eenennaam: Um, we've got cows in there and then sheep and goats over here. Um, and they're just a little straw that we can add to that to get a sense of just how much was going on in here. 

Jonah Goldberg: Let me quickly tell you how babies are made in a lab. As a reminder, we need eggs and sperm. One lucky undergrad student in the lab drives twice a week from Davis to Fresno, leaving at 6am and returning at 2pm with a few bucketfuls of sperm. I can't imagine how that conversation would go if they were ever pulled over. The sperm comes similarly, from a different cattle farm. The eggs are carefully swabbed from the ovaries, incubated for a day, fertilized in petri dishes by the sperm, then placed in a different incubator that allows for precise regulation of oxygen levels, where they sit for seven days.

Alison Van Eenennaam: It's actually pretty cool, so if you... Um, you can see, so there's some embryos that are acculturing from last week. And now I'm going to put this back down again and the chamber will automatically refill itself with mixed gas. And so basically I opened it up and exposed it to normal levels of oxygen, which is not good for embryos. And so now it's pumping the mixed gas in so it gets back down to 5 percent O2. 

Jonah Goldberg: This is tricky business. Not every embryo survives up to this point. Once we've got at least some fertilized eggs, we can move on to the injection. The actual genetic editing. There are a few ways to do this, but Van Eenennaam's lab uses micro injection. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: And basically you're doing all your movements with these little guys, which kind of look like joysticks that you use for video games, right? That's what a micro manipulator is. It enables you to do tiny little movements with these, the needles, using these joystick controllers.

Jonah Goldberg: If researchers want the genetic edit to be expressed in the entire cow, they can't just target one of the trillions of cells in a fully formed animal. They have to do it when the cow is at its earliest life stage, a single celled, fertilized zygote, so that the gene makes it into every cell in the body as new cells keep dividing. Embryos are then placed in yet another incubator that doubles as a microscope, and the researchers keep an eye on it for a week. Once the organism grows into a ball of a few cells, called a blastocyst, the researchers can see through the microscope whether an edit came in correctly. Often, that's all Van Eenennaam's lab is looking for. Most of her experiments never get past the incubators. Since she doesn't need to see the adult cow to know that the experiment worked. But a few lucky blastocysts are put into surrogate mothers. The timing has to be perfect for this. The cow also needs to be 7 days post ovulation, matching the age of the egg to trick her body into recognizing the egg as her own. Everything has to go exactly right to get a horn free calf nine months later. The fact that she can do all this is huge. This is how twin hornless bulls named Buri and Spottiguy came into the world. And to Van Eenennaam, they promised a massive benefit to farmers and consumers.

Is there a part of the process that's more difficult than others? 

Alison Van Eenennaam: Oh, every part of the process is difficult. Yeah, like if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. 

Jonah Goldberg: As we'll see later, something did go wrong and slip past the attention of her team. She believes that gene editing technology, like CRISPR, will allow us to feed a growing global population. She says the technology is safe, and that edited products, like hornless cattle, are all more efficient. Some non GMO watchdogs and organic food activists question whether what she's doing is ethical, or even necessary. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: I feel like I'm in the middle of the biggest tsunami of dislike that I could have ever imagined. And I would have thought agricultural science was a fairly safe career choice in terms of not doing anything controversial.

Jonah Goldberg: So how did we get from the promise of this tech to a major backlash? Safety aside, there's a lot of questions out there about whether CRISPR is really needed to solve the major problems in our food system. For many, the problem is efficiency. Critics say work like Van Eenennaam supports a massive meat production system that's bad for the environment and shouldn't exist in the first place. And then there's criticism about whether the technology is being used safely. The company that partnered with Van Eenennaam on the Hornless Cattle Experiment, Recombinetics, publicly claimed that this edit was completely accurate. They wanted expedited approval from U. S. regulatory agencies to sell the hornless cows to farmers across the country. Three years later... The FDA took a closer look, and found that Recombinetics had promised more than they had delivered. Their finding would undermine the US government's trust in gene editing, affecting regulation for all products like this. By complete accident, the FDA found there were other genetic changes to those famous bulls I mentioned earlier, Buri and Spotty Guy, than just the horn removal.

As I was leaving the farm, I thought about what could have gone wrong in this complex process. So, I set up an interview over Zoom with experts at the FDA to get some answers. 

Can you please introduce yourself and say what you do at the FDA? 

Alexis Norris: My name is Alexis Nurse, and I'm a biologist with the FDA.

Jonah Goldberg: Norris works in the FDA's Division of Animal Bioengineering and Cellular Therapies as a bioinformatician. Back in 2018, her job was to create a new data analysis method to verify the genetic code of modified animals. 

Alexis Norris: Actually, my analysis finding was completely incidental. 

Jonah Goldberg: When it came time to test the method, she just so happened to use the data set from Recombinetics for the Hornless Cattle Project. The data was publicly available and considered to be very clean and useful for study. 

Alexis Norris: Once you map the sample data to the reference genome, then you look for differences. 

Jonah Goldberg: So she ran the program and she found the gene edit, the one that says cows shouldn't have horns, right where it was supposed to be. 

Alexis Norris: So that was good. That told me that my method was working, that I was able to detect these changes to the DNA. 

Jonah Goldberg: But she also found something Else. At first, she thought her method wasn't working, but she tweaked and tried again and again. The data kept telling her there was a difference in the genetic makeup of these cows that wasn't reported by the company, and something that's not naturally found in any cow. Imagine CRISPR or TALEN as a letter that scientists deliver into a cell. To protect the letter, It is put in a biological envelope, usually bacterial DNA called a plasmid. One issue that can come from CRISPR delivery is that a piece of the envelope gets stuck to the letter, instead of cleanly taking the letter out of the envelope. The genes there were from this plasmid, which are standardly used to basically deliver a sequence of DNA to be inserted into the cow genome, so in this case it was that sequence that would make the cow hornless. The bacterial plasmid genes that stuck in the cows were a sequence that coded for antibiotic resistance. The company missed the change in the sequence because they were only looking at a fragment of the genome that had to do with horns, instead of the entire genome. One less helpful note on how the genome makes up a living thing is that it's rarely one gene per one trait. Six different genes very far away from each other on a DNA molecule can work together to make one thing happen in the body. So we don't know if this plasmid gene alone can would have added antibiotic resistance, which would have made it harder to treat the cows when they got sick. And we do know that Buri and Spottiguy were born without unexpected health issues. But it poses an important question. Was this small, accidental addition an acceptable risk for an animal that would eventually be turned into beef?

The FDA didn't think so. So what came of that finding? For the FDA, researchers and cows each had their own ending. First, the FDA. The agency didn't go on any kind of crusade with this finding. Norris and her team quietly published the findings in a technical paper for other bioinformaticians. It showed however Buri may have missed the unintended edit in their own analysis and how to look for these sneaky extra edits. The agency continues to try to balance ensuring safety for the consumer, while not restricting developers too much. Things didn't turn out so great for Van Eenennaam and the cows. The FDA finding became widely known. Recombinetics promised that the technology was 100 percent accurate, but they were wrong. This simple mistake scared governments and anti -gene editing groups all over again about the risks of rewriting DNA. Recombinetics has turned its attention to heat resistant kettle, edited to survive warming global temperatures. The company is working out the idea in Brazil. 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: I'm chiming in here with a quick update. Since Jonah reported this story back in 2021, Recombinetics has made a lot of progress on the heat resistant cattle idea. In 2022, the United States FDA actually gave its approval. The government body said that the heat resistant cattle are safe to eat, and that gene edited beef could be on the market in as little as two years. So that could be next year. Okay, let's get back to Jonah and the story of the hornless cattle. 

Jonah Goldberg: Van Eenennaam is still dedicated to animal research. She spends a lot of time raising awareness about the promise of gene editing technologies, but she also describes facing years of public backlash. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: You know, the pushback and the reputational harassment, I have not spoken up as much in the last few years just because I've got a lab to run and grants to write and I don't need to spend a lot of time going through my emails and turning them over to activist groups and so to some extent they've been successful in in their quest to try to silence voices. 

Jonah Goldberg: As for the cows, well one of the twins, Buri, sired 17 offspring before he died, one of whom posed for the cover of Wired Magazine in April 2019. But keeping the cows and caring for them in retirement for the rest of their lives, Was an expense that the research budget couldn't handle. Spotty guy was slaughtered in order to examine his tissue. According to an MIT Technology Review article, about half of brewery's offspring had that unintended gene that the F D A found, so they weren't allowed to enter the food supply. At the end of the experiment, the F D A ordered that the cows be incinerated.

Lauren Crossland-Marr: It's been almost two years since Jonah visited Alison's lab, so I decided to follow up with her on Zoom. The calves at the center of the story were born in 2015, so I wanted to ask her what she's learned since the experiment and also get her take on the controversy over it. The first thing she made really clear was that the Hornless Cattle Project was not her lab's work. A private company named Recombinetics asked her to explore whether it's possible to genetically engineer cattle to be born without horns. We reached out to Recombinetics a few times for comment, and they never got back to us. Alison says the main goal was never to sell the meat from genetically edited cattle to consumers.

Alison Van Eenennaam: If you ever saw the bull, it was not your elite genetics. So you are going to do this for real, like. Yeah, okay, I'm going to commercialize this. She would edit an elite, top of the line sire, and then that would be what you would market. You wouldn't edit the guy that was edited. It was never intended to be like the showcase. It was an experiment, really, um, and it was a proof of concept. 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: She's not super happy with how things went down with the FDA. I wanted to know what she thought about that extra genetic change that the FDA found. The off-target change didn't seem to matter to her. Because it wasn't harmful. Alison says the issue with the cattle that the FDA found was a plasmid used for cloning sequences. This is done in a bacteria not in the cattle genome, so it was a foreign piece of DNA that presented in only a portion of the cattle. Because it was a recessive trait. When I asked about the potential consequences of the off-target change, she explained that if she had introduced the toxin by accident, for example, the animal would die. There is no chance it would breed further and make it into our food system, so the risks with the technology are relatively low. Sure, that makes sense and I can't argue with that. And other scientists do agree with this assessment.

Alison Van Eenennaam: This is not a food safety hazard that's just neutral variation that exists between breeds and, and across the generations of, or, you know, across the timescale of animals like old beef, you know, is chewy and not as good as young. Beef and veal is obviously really different to grain finished animals. They're all different, but they're not dangerous. 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: The FDA basically asked her to prove it. To me, she seemed kind of annoyed she had to do this in the first place. But last year, she wrapped up a study showing that the milk and meat from the cattle she successfully edited were in fact safe to consume despite that extra gene change.

Alison Van Eenennaam: There was nothing unexpected there. And you know, when you it's affected, I mean, it wasn't exactly, but when you publish negative results, it's not like everyone goes, Oh my gosh, negative results, how exciting. But there wasn't much exciting there. There was nothing New there. 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: Okay, remember when the FDA ordered the genetically edited cattle to be incinerated? Well, Alison says that's because the FDA decided to treat the animals modified with TALEN and CRISPR as new animal drugs. It wasn't what Alison was expecting, and she feels like it really restricted her options. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: They didn't have horns. They kept not having horns. It's not a very interesting phenotype at the end of the day. And so we would have just finished them and had them go to market. And that would have been the end of that experiment, right? And yet they didn't grow horns. But when they became new animal drugs, I knew that that wasn't going to be an option.

Lauren Crossland-Marr: I'm not sure I totally buy that they wouldn't have taken the edited cattle to market eventually if this the FDA. She was working with a private company, which is inherently profit driven, and it would have been a huge deal for her career and the company's reputation to say they successfully got a TALEN edited animal to market. While making this podcast, I've interviewed many scientists about the pros and cons of CRISPR and TALEN. And the biggest concern I've heard from them is that the technology isn't as precise as some scientists like Alison are trying to reassure the public. And I'm reminded of a big study that came out in 2015 in a journal affiliated with the National Institutes of Health. In it, biologists said they found that the use of CRISPR technology has a high frequency of off-target changes. Basically, even though scientists intend to make one specific change, something in the genome shifts too. To be fair, since then, scientists have been working on how to help each other identify and mitigate off-target changes. But again, a lot of scientists I spoke with for this podcast worry that off-target changes could actually end up being a really big deal. Alison very much disagrees. 

Alison Van Eenennaam: I mean, I'll sound like a bit of a cowboy here, but I'm like, okay, I designed my guides very carefully to only target my gene of interest and to have a lot of mismatches with every other known gene in the bovine genome. Let's just hypothetically play along with that and say, okay, it did an off-target edit, as in it cut at a sequence somewhere else in the genome. Okay, so what? Like, if the cow's healthy, and that's our criteria for whether animals can go in the food supply or not, is they have to be healthy, and it got through birth and lives, so you didn't hit an essential gene, let's not pretend that mutations aren't happening all the time, and that every single animal has 30 de novo off-target mutations done by nature, yeah? That don't constitute a food safety hazard. And so to me, proving that you didn't do any off-targets is again, what is the hazard? Why am I being asked to do this if the animal's perfectly healthy? And these are not. Human patients, these are food animals, and if a food animal is ill, then it is not going into the food supply. So, I guess I think that the off-target discussion is the new boogeyman. 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: The thing that worries me about her perspective is that you can be so careful, and things can still go wrong. And if you're not testing everything, you probably won't even know what went wrong, and whether there could be long term consequences. I'm worried that no one is doing the boring science of looking out for the worst case scenario. Thank It's a lot sexier to play around with these new technologies and see what big problems they can solve. So there are two specific things that ring alarm bells to me. 

First, changing the genome of a cattle or a plant or anything for that matter and not knowing the consequences Sounds super risky. It's not just that we're changing the genes right now, but that those genes will be passed down and could impact an entire genome of species. The second thing is antibiotic resistance. Alison showed in her new study that this wasn't a problem, but it's something to be aware of, that the bacteria used Could have broader implications. Modern farming already overuses antibiotics, and there's a possibility that these new technologies could accidentally introduce D N A that carry resistance to an antibiotic. That means it could become even harder to treat sick animals and people. And in the worst case scenario, it could create an environment for superbugs to reproduce even faster. You may not be familiar with the term superbugs, but these are bacteria resistant to antibiotics. For example, there is a type of staph infection known as MRSA that is one of the most common in livestock and humans. 

Alison is a passionate scientist working on issues she believes are important. She sees the hornless cattle experiment as an example of the potential use of gene editing technologies. At the moment, breeders and farmers burn cattle horns off. This is a painful procedure for the animals, and it isn't easy for the farmers either. She sees little difference between traditional breeding Where farmers are breeding cattle for desirable traits and using technologies like Talen and crispr. To her, the technology is just speeding up the process. Yeah, I don't know about that. That's a really simplifying it a bit too much for me. But there's a broader issue she's been grappling with for most of her career. The conflation of the. So, were these technologies really necessary as a tool to remove horns from cattle? Was it worth it? 

Alison Van Eenennaam: Well, we can keep burning them off. Fine. It's like, this is how we do it now. There's an approach that we could address it with genetics. You tell me which is better. I look at it and I say, well, there's actually a permanent way we could. eliminate this painful procedure that neither the dairy cattle nor the farmers enjoy, that would actually address the problem. And if we could, shouldn't we? Or why would we not? You know, I think using it for welfare traits and disease resistance is a laudable use of the technology. And if we could, why not? 

Lauren Crossland-Marr: Well, why not? The mistake we're discussing here is that Recombinetics skipped a step, a test that's commonly done to make sure nothing else was added to the genome by mistake. Ellison called this test 101 in gene editing, basic stuff. She assured me that this happens only rarely, and she shrugged it off because the company was a young startup at the time. But maybe the problem is we've been thinking about how Science will affect us and not how society affects the science. 

As a cultural anthropologist, I actually think a lot about this. Cultural anthropology provides some tools to help us understand the bigger picture of the complicated relationship between the need to push forward on innovation and also remain cautious for ethical reasons. I first thought of this while teaching my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class during our week on magic and witchcraft. 

One anthropologist I highlight in that lecture is Alfred Gell. In 1988, he published a short article called Technology and Magic. In it, he argued that technology is also magic, art, and enchantment. To him, technology is neither rational nor just physical. It is a magical operation that requires a creation of a mythology to support the desire to use it. Of course, Alfred was writing before cell phones, tablets, and Wi Fi, but I think his point is an important one. To him, magical thinking imposes an organization to technological advances. And I couldn't help but think of Alfred's work when speaking with Alison, especially our mutual process of creating order in the midst of risk and uncertainty.

Anthropologists have known for a long time that magic is most important when humans are unable to control an outcome. Think about it. How many times have you seen people following their favorite team stick to superstitious rituals like always wearing the same jersey or doing the same thing while the big game is on? In fact, an anthropologist and ex pro baseballer, George Gmelch, investigated the use of magic to control outcomes in baseball. He showed that batters use lots of magic to control outcomes, because batting averages are typically incredibly low. A major league baseball player hits the ball only a third of the time. If my students evaluated me as doing a third of my job, I'm not sure I'd be able to keep teaching. But the point is, batters use lucky charms like an unwashed hat and rituals like tapping the plate four times. to feel in control of their performance because of how much uncertainty there is. Contrast this to fielding, where players are much more likely to catch hits. 95 percent is standard performance in the minor leagues, so less magic is needed. Basically, whether it's sports or technology, Magical thinking gives us a sense of control. And looking back at the Hornless Cattle Experiment, I can't help but think that that's what scientists like Alison are doing.

Controlling the uncontrollable through a narrative, a mythology, an enchanting speech that convinces us that such incidences will never happen again. Yet the fact remains that a double strand break in the DNA leaves room for many possibilities. And many uncertainties. 

Although this was an experimental population, these cattle were the first step in realizing a for profit goal. The research was backed by a private company after all. Companies play a major role in the development of research in United States universities. This has become a comfortable relationship. For universities, they get funding for sexy programs like biotechnology. For scientists, they patent their technologies for personal financial gain and continue their own prestige with funding for experiments that lead to papers and conference presentations.

For companies, they get products created with less overhead because the scientists and their team are paid by universities. But experiments do fall in the realm of much magic, like the batters who really need to help improve their odds. But right now, new gene editing experimenters want to appear like they're in full control and nothing can go wrong. This reassurance scares me. Because, well, that takes a lot of magic.

This is our last episode, so I wanted to take a minute to think beyond the case of hornless cattle and say something about what we've learned. You're probably wondering, what's my final take? Well, honestly, I learned that CRISPR isn't good or bad. But a human innovation that comes with a lot of baggage. Many people are excited about the possibilities CRISPR holds. And on the flip side, we learn others are worried that there's still so much we don't know. CRISPR is a very powerful tool, and I do hope it's used for good to solve big problems in our world. But looking at the history of how corporations have previously used these kinds of major tech advances, With profits as the main goal, I don't know whether CRISPR will be used for things that could help society the most. There's no way I can know what CRISPR's impact will be on farmers and consumers in the long run, but it's unlikely the public's interest will be at the center of this debate unless we start asking questions, and making sure we're part of the conversation too.

So what do you think about CRISPR after listening to this series? Are there CRISPR edited foods you try or you want to see on the market? We want to hear from you. Leave us a review on Apple podcasts and let us know your thoughts and questions. And if you like this show, you could really help us out by sharing it with a friend. Our small but mighty team put in a lot of work into making this show. So thanks in advance. We really appreciate it. 

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CREDITS

A CRISPR bite is supported by the Jean Monnet network, which is funded by the Erasmus program of the European Union through the Jeep three network of scientists. This podcast does not reflect the views of our funders. This podcast was co-written and hosted by me, Dr. Lauren Crossland Marr. Our executive producer is Corinne Ruff. She co-wrote, edited and produced the show. Jonah Goldberg reported and co wrote this episode. Jack Harper and Willow Belden edited this episode. The show was sound design and engineered by Adriene Lilly. Aaron Crossland made our theme music, Maya Tsingos fact check this episode, and Rachel Marr designed our logo, legal support from New Media Rights, and marketing help from our friends at Tink Media. Thank you to the GEAP3 team, special thanks to Matthew Schnurr, Clara Fischer, and Glenn Stone for their support and advice on this podcast.