09/21/2025: Disrupter U., Sculpting Evolution, Flight of the Monarchs

0:07Across America, everyone has an opinion on, quote, wokeness. Nowhere more than on our college campuses. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. In Texas, one new university is prioritizing open debate to reset the marketplace of ideas. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly.

0:34The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes. It is Lyme disease. Genetic engineers believe they found a way to slow the spread of the debilitating disease carried by ticks. It is amazing to see this. Tonight, a look at something that's never been attempted, genetically engineering wild mice to prevent people from getting sick. Do you worry about fooling around with Mother Nature?

1:06It's not easy to get to, and it's not easy to see at first, but then one of the most amazing migration stories in nature reveals itself.

1:19Towers of monarch butterflies Orange, twisting, soaring And one of the most remarkable things we've ever seen

1:33I'm Scott Pelley I'm Bill Whitaker I'm Anderson Cooper I'm Sharon Alfonsi I'm John Wertheim I'm Cecilia Vega I'm Leslie Stahl Those stories and a preview of what's coming up in our 58th season tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:56These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for campus culture, the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, helped swing the election, a political win aided in part by the work of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. His assassination 11 days ago has prompted a nationwide conversation on free speech, which, as correspondent John Murtheim first reported last year, is a founding principal of the University of Austin, a college startup touting open debate, a shout-nothing-but-say-anything philosophy, and for now, free tuition. Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right, or a true disruptor resetting the marketplace of ideas?

2:56141 years old, the University of Texas at Austin ranks among the country's largest schools.

3:05Football games draw more than 100 ,000 fans. But blocks away, in between a Ruth's Chris and a Velvet Taco, on a floor of what was once a downtown department store, one of America's smallest universities, UATX, the University of Austin. How would you describe members of the founding class? Very outspoken. You'll never enter a conversation and leave without something that you didn't know before. talking to someone. Olivia Altonis, Dylan Wu, Constantine Whitmire, Grace Price, and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class. If UT is celebrated for Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX…

3:48Pursuing the truth. So you stop by telling the truth. Pursuit of truth. Fairlift pursuit of truth to me is, I have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life is to always assume that you're wrong in some capacity. You're prepared for that. Right. To be challenged and stress tested and confronted? It's not just even prepared. It's, I, that's why I'm at this school. I want them to be challenged because I know that I'm wrong in some way. What are some things that differentiate you guys? We're very intellectually diverse. I've met people of every political persuasion here from like far left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal.

4:28Roughly half the students come from Texas, a third are female. They share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT. Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago in Georgetown, but chose UATX for what it is and is not. I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the U.S. and the student guiding me there was like, ah, we have different dorms for different student groups. I didn't want to go to a space that was like that. Why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted and tolerated, but welcome? We're actually listening to the other side and understanding each other.

5:08Still, we're friends with each other. I vehemently disagree with many of the things Jacob says, and I think you do, too. I don't want to... It's like what? You still belong pretty well, and it's a beautiful thing. Not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses. Long before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, colleges have been sites of protest and have leaned left. But the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade.

5:43Speakers shouted down. You're not listening. Professors canceled when students feel unheard. Hamas, now! Then the reckoning. Campus chaos led first to congressional hearings. Ms. McGill, the fact is that Penn regulates speech that it doesn't like. Then to the resignation of the presidents at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. From a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities. Scottish-born, Oxford-educated, and recently knighted, Neil Ferguson is one of the founders of UATX. An historian, also known for his conservative views, Ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at Harvard and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

6:34You say something is rotten in the state of academia. What do you mean by that? Right up until, I guess, the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely and speak most freely and take the most intellectual risk. And at some point in the last 10 years, that changed. And it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression. We came across some data that less than 3 % of the Harvard faculty identifies as conservative, more than 75 % identifies as liberal. Wildly out of proportion with the American public. There's a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter.

7:15Ferguson says this political imbalance, plus social media, plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech, equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80 % of today's students self-censor on campus for fear of being ostracized. Faculty feels the chill too. The president of a university I won't name once told me that he received, on average, one email a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they'd said. That reminds me vividly of the bad old days of Stalin's Soviet Union, and yet it's happening on American campuses. The stakes are that high?

7:57I think if a university system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations. University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly. In 2021, Ferguson launched UATX with founder of the free press, Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir, and Pano Canelos, the former president of St. John's College in Maryland.

8:36Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary under Clinton, became an advisor. In this ad, they announced they were, quote, done waiting for America's universities to fix themselves. UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly$200 million from private donors, in part to cover tuition. Good morning, everyone. Canelos was named president. Our work is to stir up settled ideas. Now the school's chancellor, he says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. What is going on on campuses that are leading you to draw this conclusion?

9:14It's as if people have come to expect that they're just sort of two versions of everything. And therefore, there's a right version and a wrong version, depending on which side you stand. But the truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn't leave us with two opinions. It should leave us with better opinions. What do you mean by that exactly? The Christian values that we have. To combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class, UATX comes armed with a weapon. Tell an American audience, what do you mean by Chatham House rule? The Chatham House rule is a great British invention. And it says that if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing.

9:55You can refer to the information that you've gleaned, but you can't attribute it to a person. People fear that the thing they said that was not right was politically incorrect ends up on X, or for that matter, on Instagram. And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom. At UATX, classes are small, seminar-style, and based in Western civilization. The Bible, Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox priest, Father Maximus teaches a class on chaos and civilization, and a tech entrepreneur. You're trying to play the Steve Jobs role here, right?

10:35There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink. How do you take this cutting-edge research? And helping the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas. We have both a nonprofit and a startup side. To stem the scandalously high cost of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones.

11:04No dorms. The students live in apartments next to UT undergrads. And no meal plan. Cook for yourselves, kids. The closest thing we found to a college rager, students learning the Texas two-step. When the guys next door are playing beer pong and you're reading Aristotle and working with lasers. Playing chess. Any envy? That's not to say that we're all prudes and we just spend our whole day reading Aristotle. We have fun. As for admissions, UATX swaps DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, for what some call MEI, Merit, Excellence and Intelligence. Gender, race, ethnicity, what is the factor of that in your admissions decisions?

11:51We don't take any of that into consideration in admissions. The primary thing that we're interested in is the mind. Meaning what? The kind of capacity to think deeply, to answer questions, to challenge norms. I've got to tell you, we did not see a particularly diverse student body. We are putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. And if you're interested in diversity, I recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students, at the family circumstances of our students. High-profile UATX donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who vocally criticized his school after October 7th, and Harlan Crow, close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

12:41Critics attack UATX as a right-wing university simply wearing the cloak of free speech. UATX has been called the anti-woke university. Harvard is a liberal university. UATX is going to be a conservative university. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission. The pushback might be, are you going to be too dependent to donors? We've seen on other campuses what happens when the donor class gets dissatisfied. Are you worried about that? If donors are ever pushing us in a way that is not aligned with our mission and that, somebody's going to call us out on it.

13:21And the backers aren't solely from the right. A liberal legal scholar, Nadine Strassen, was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years and was until recently a UATX advisor. The most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus, including abortion, immigration, police practices, anything to do with race and gender. Provided it comes with no serious harm, Strassen argues all speech should be allowed. You think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech? My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes.

14:07You don't do that by punishing expression. You do that through education, through more speech, not less. Free-range, free speech resonated. When UATX announced its founding, thousands sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX's academics were disciplined, canceled, they may say, at their previous schools. Some of the advisors and faculty came here under some clouds of controversy. I mean, that's not what we're seeking. I mean, we're not, you know, shelter for, you know, even for people who have canceled. But many of the people who are pushing boundaries in academic culture, let's say in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard.

14:51UATX's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class is graduated, a standard for new universities. Meanwhile new student applications are open, tuition still free. So is the speech.

15:14Now, Dr. John LePouc on assignment for 60 minutes. Biologist Charles Darwin began crafting his theory of evolution on a trip to the Galapagos Islands, where he discovered animals had developed unique traits that varied from island to island. Nearly two centuries later, on a different island, scientists aren't just observing evolution, they now have the technology to shape it. This past year, we met a team of modern-day Darwins on Nantucket, where they're hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness found primarily in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but also throughout the United States.

15:56The scientist's target may surprise you. It's not the deer often associated with the disease or even the ticks, but wild mice, the main carriers of Lyme. It's a first-of-its-kind approach, where scientists and locals are working together to decide whether to sculpt evolution. 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is the island of Nantucket, a 14-mile-long, 3-mile-wide oasis known for its natural beauty, pristine shorelines, and protected landscape. But hidden is a scourge that's afflicted 15 % of its residents. The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes.

16:39It is Lyme disease. It is the one plague that might be severe enough that communities might want to engineer a wild organism in order to get rid of it, or at least reduce the level of Lyme. Last October, deep in the island's brush, we found MIT associate professor Kevin Esfeldt, a pioneer in genetic engineering, waving a white flag in search of ticks. So we just grab it. These tiny vectors of Lyme disease were not hard to find. You just pop it in. These are the big ones because these are largely adults. If the adults are this small, imagine the tiny, tiny, what are they called, nymphs? Nymphs, yeah.

17:20You often think of poppy seed sized. Esfeldt's collaborator is Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University who's been studying ticks on Nantucket for the last 40 years. There's a 50 % chance, maybe more, that this is actually carrying Lyme disease. But you're not afraid because it has to be embedded and attached. It has to be attached for more than 24 hours. Right. To infect you. That's correct. These guys will swell up. Yeah. 50 to 100 times that size with blood, you know. It becomes that big. And that's how you know when they're engorged, you know that they've been feeding on you. If you see it that big, then you're in trouble.

18:02The scientists aren't here just to collect ticks. They're interested in this critter. This is a wild mouse? This is a wild, white-footed mouse. And you've tagged it? I've tagged it, so when I come back in April or May of next year, we get an idea of what overwintering success is. Telford is tracking the mouse population on Nantucket as part of a novel project. The scientists want to use genetic engineering to interrupt the cycle of infection necessary for Lyme disease to flourish. White-footed mice are the main host of Lyme bacteria. When an uninfected tick bites an infected mouse, the bacteria transfer to the tick.

18:42When that infected tick then bites an uninfected mouse, the cycle continues. Deer don't get infected, but they help spread the disease because ticks embed on them to feed, then reproduce, with a single female tick laying as many as 2 ,000 eggs. Here's Esfeldt and Telford's big idea. Change the genetic makeup of the mice so they're immune to Lyme. That way, the ticks that bite them won't get infected. You don't have to kill the mouse in order to interrupt the cycle. It'd be so much more economical and straightforward to just go out and poison all the mice, right? Get rid of the mice. But then there's a whole food chain that might depend on these mice that would be impacted.

19:24The dream is that we can use new technologies to ensure that wild creatures can live in peace, playing their normal ecological role, but without causing disease that make people suffer. Come on in, Winnie. If Esfeld's dream becomes a reality, 80-year-old Dr. Timothy Lepre might finally be able to retire. So how did you get Lyme disease, do you think, Winnie? Uh, wasn't because of your tape back, right here? Over the past 40 years, he's been the island's emergency room head, sole surgeon, even its medical examiner. Today, Dr. Lepre runs the only private practice on Nantucket, where he treats dozens of patients with Lyme disease each year.

20:11Fall my finger. And yes, that's a giant tick in his waiting room. Being in private practice, it is, while not well paid, it's paid in like what, chickens and donuts and... We prefer lobsters. Actually, lobsters, clams, and scallops. But you'll take anything, right? I will take anything. Come on down, Shauna. Lyme disease can be treated with antibiotics, but if left untreated, the infection can spread to the heart, joints, and nervous system, as it did for 33-year-old Shauna Asplint. My body hurts all the time. I don't know if that's for my Lyme disease or what. My neck is stiff, my ankles are sore, and my hips.

20:59Asplint was first diagnosed with Lyme when she was 10 years old. A few years later, the left side of her face stopped moving. A residual effect from the disease is still noticeable today. Let's see your smile. It's still a little off, and then if I raise my eyebrows, it just doesn't move. We see people with facial palsies. We see little kids with swollen knees. We see people with Lyme rashes. So it alters people's behavior and activities. The problem on Nantucket can be traced back to 1926, when locals voted to import two female deer to the island to give a lone buck company. As the deer population grew, so did the ticks.

21:45On top of that, by the 1950s, half the land on the island was put into conservation. The untamed brush and wild grasslands create an ideal ecosystem for Lyme's host to thrive. We have a problem with tick-borne disease because we engineered the environment to maximize the number of ticks and to maximize the number of mice that are the best host of Lyme disease. And it came back and bit us. Literally. A trip at age 11 to the Galapagos Islands sparked Esfeldt's lifelong obsession with evolution. In 2013, he was the first to propose that CRISPR, a revolutionary technology that enables scientists to edit DNA, could be used to change a species' genetics in perpetuity, hacking the laws of inheritance.

22:32I mean, it's not like we want a fitness advantage. This idea led to the project they call Mice Against Ticks in the sculpting evolution lab Esvelt runs at MIT. For the last nine years, he and researcher Joanna Buckthold have been studying whether they could add a gene for an antibody that prevents Lyme infection to a mouse embryo that, as we see here, has progressed into two cells. Is it going to be into one of those cells or both of them? So our technique involves injecting both cells to maximize the likelihood that we get the antibody gene in their DNA. Buckthall and embryologist Zach Hill showed us how they genetically engineer lab mice.

23:15He's going to actually inject through the plasma membrane and into the nucleus for both of these cells. How are you at darts? Not very good. But you're going to hit the center of this. Oh yeah, okay. So I already have an embryo set up on the dish here. So I'm just trying to find the nucleus here. It is amazing to see this. So that little burst that you can see in the nucleus is when he's actually injecting the genome engineering tools directly into the nucleus where the DNA is. The injection mix contains both the antibody gene and CRISPR, which acts like molecular scissors. After CRISPR finds and cuts the targeted area of DNA, the cell inserts the gene into the mouse's genetic code.

24:04When this mouse is born, it will be immune to Lyme disease, and so will its children. If I get a polio vaccine, my kids aren't going to be immune to polio unless they get the vaccine too. That's exactly right. So this is a heritable immunization. What do you mean by that? What we're actually doing is we're encoding immunity so that that immunity is passed on generationally, and every mouse that gets the antibody gene is actually immune. Typical standard evolution happened very slowly, right? Over thousands, maybe millions of years. Are you speeding up evolution here? We are absolutely speeding up evolution, and that's precisely why we have to be careful, because we are doing things that couldn't happen naturally.

24:51The plan is to release thousands of engineered mice on Nantucket over time, starting during the winter months, when the native mouse population is low. But first, Esvelt needs community buy-in.

25:10He chose Nantucket not only for its high rate of line, but also for its tight-knit, well-educated community with the tradition of town hall democracy. I am going to call the October 23rd select board meeting to order at 5.30 p.m. We also need to start small. We saw this in action last fall when, for the 10th time, the scientists presented their latest findings to locals. So it appears that we have indeed produced the first heritably Lyme-immune laboratory mice capable of breaking the disease transmission cycle. Followed by a public Q &A. We have a huge population of field mice here. Shall we expect a larger population?