This Biotech Scientist Says Washington Needs to Remember the Basics

Caroline Chen: The biotech industry has seen a boom of new technologies and drugs in the past few years. What technologies are you most excited about?
George Yancopoulos: It’s all about genetics and DNA. Regeneron has now sequenced a quarter of a million people and has their health records. This is a resource that’s never been possible or available before. It used to take 10 to 15 years to do the genetics testing, and then you’d start the drug development, which takes another 10 to 15 years. Now we’ve cut out those first 15.

Are there ethical issues or other drawbacks to increasing the accessibility of these technologies? One guy recently injected his arm muscles with the gene-editing tool Crispr to see if he could make himself more buff.
Well, I don’t think it’ll work for that guy. At most, he’ll get injection-site inflammation and some soreness. Biology is one of the most complicated things we’ve tried to tackle as humanity. The danger of unintended consequences is so high. We have to go by the rulebook of Hippocrates: Do no harm. We’ve had older gene-editing technology for decades and could have edited human embryos, but we haven’t for that reason. It’s so easy to screw things up. We’ve screwed up our health, our environment. Social media has maybe destroyed the minds of the next generation. We’ve shown how interventions can so easily go awry. But it’s so hard to fix things. Crispr is still at the earliest stages, and it’s going to be years before we see large-scale interventions.