11/30/2025: Polymarket, CRISPR Kids, Lamine Yamal

0:06This is the main page for Polymarket. Polymarket's users bet on all kinds of questions. Fed decision, Bolivia presidential election. Will Taylor Swift get married this year? When will there be a ceasefire in Ukraine? Who will win the 2028 election? And how accurate is it? It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball. America's future as a science leader may depend on students like the ones you are going to meet tonight. We're doing something in our high school lab that could potentially have a huge impact for, like, millions of people.

0:44This thing could help save lives. They did it to prove they are the best in the world at this prestigious international science competition. I'm hoping we finish top 10, but even that, I don't know. We'll see. How did the judges see it? So the winners are... Stay tuned.

1:0618-year-old Spanish soccer sensation La Minha Mal is not yet licensed to drive, not yet liberated from wearing braces. But already, the world, like the ball he dribbles, is at his feet. One thing we keep hearing is, this kid's got it, right? What is it? How do you describe moonlight? How do you describe candlelight? How do you count the bubbles in a glass of champagne? I don't know. I just know when I say it, it's bloody beautiful. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Anderson Cooper. Those stories and in our last minute, a breakthrough in tracking monarch butterflies tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:59Nearly a year before Donald Trump was elected in 2024, an online prediction market called Polymarket offered its users a chance to bet against each other on who would win the presidency. $3.6 billion was wagered on that one question. In the final month of the campaign, most pollsters were saying the race was too close to call. But that was conventional wisdom. Polymarket relied on the wisdom of crowds and correctly predicted the outcome. It's not just elections Polymarket helps its customers bet on. It's all kinds of questions. Who will win the Super Bowl? Will Taylor Swift get married this year?

2:37When will there be a ceasefire in Ukraine? The company was founded by a precocious college dropout named Shane Copeland, who started building Polymarket five years ago when he was just 21. Prediction markets aren't new, but not many have earned the backing of billionaire investors like Polymarket has. If it all sounds a bit confounding, it did to us too. So we started by asking Shane Copeland the most basic question of all. What is Polymarket? It's a site where you can basically bet on current events. Some sort of question about the future, like an election. And as a result, when a ton of people are betting, you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is.

3:22And how accurate is it? It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball. Shane Copeland may be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely on to something. The race is a dead heat. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, while pundits opined and pollsters canvassed, Polymarket posted a simple question for users to put money on. Who will be the presidential election winner in 2024? Donald Trump started pulling away in early October. I think one thing that's important to understand about Polymarket is it is not a poll. That's not the function of Polymarket.

4:01Correct. Polymarket is trying to predict the outcome. The percentage of people who are going to vote for a candidate is not the same as who's likely to win. And you would look at Polymarket and it would say 70-30 for Trump. And people are like, no way it's going to be 70-30. But he could win by one point, but he's 70 % likely to win. Which is a different question that pollsters are asking. Exactly. But it's the question people actually want to know. Polymarket posted another question months before President Biden's disastrous debate. Biden drops out a presidential race. Early on, the odds hovered between 10 and 30 percent.

4:38The market was pricing it that it was unlikely, but that it was possible. And ultimately, during the debate, the price started skyrocketing. You could watch it during the debate. Exactly. And everyone was talking about it. Because by that point, odds were on the market, he's going to drop out. Yes. The idea that this was able to go and surface this at a time when a lot of the mainstream media, and like no knock to mainstream media, but a lot of people were trying to say, hey, he's going to stay in. So the fact that Polymerica was able to be the signal through the noise there was our first step on the scene of mainstream politics.

5:10This is the main page for Polymerica. At first glance, the site is a lot to take in. There are 15 categories to choose from, like politics, culture, sports, and finance. Within each, there are a lot of boxes with simple questions about an upcoming event. Fed decision, Bolivia presidential election, Russia and Ukraine ceasefire in 2025. How many questions are there at any one time? It usually fluctuates around 10 ,000. 10 ,000? But a lot of them have multiple outcomes or multiple variations. Every question has a yes or no answer. To wager, you click on one of them. You make money if you're right, you lose money if you're wrong.

5:48And as a result, it creates this information that's really useful for people. The percentages next to the questions are the odds, determined by all the other bets that have already been made. As more people wager and news breaks, the odds change. How do you select the questions? Look, if something is being discussed in the news, if something is of importance, whether it's geopolitically, you know, macroeconomically, culturally, we want to have a polymarket for it. So you can go through and you can... There are questions, or markets, to bet on just about everything. Not just Taylor Swift's marriage, but when will she get pregnant?

6:26How many tweets will Elon Musk send in a week? This is predictions on who will be the top Spotify artist in 2025. Yeah, and the market's very confident it will be a bad bunny. Some markets are arguably in bad taste, wagers on conspiracies, even wars. Elections everywhere, however, are one of the platform's biggest draws. Here you go to global elections and you've got the Irish election is just... There's$135 million being bet on the Irish election? When we met with Copeland last month, more than$3.6 million had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, would be out of power by the end of the year.

7:04Polymarket users didn't think so. They gave it only a 23 % chance. And if you buy no on that and you're buying it at 78 cents and at the end of the year, he's still in power. Yeah, you get a dollar per share. So you've made a profit of 22 cents per share. I can see why this would be, I mean, I don't want to use the term addictive, but it would be compelling. I mean, maybe it is addictive. I don't know, but it's certainly compelling. This is how I see it. If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and try and get an edge. You grew up the west side?

7:40Uptown, yeah. Shane Copeland is a native New Yorker. He dropped out of NYU his freshman year, and when COVID hit, found himself looking for simple answers to complex questions. New York City was shut down, and it's like, when is this going to end? When's the vaccine going to be ready? When is shelter in place going to be over? And prediction markets can take all these disparate opinions that people are pontificating about or that they have really good reason to believe and distill it down into one probability. But if nobody knows for sure. Yeah, well, if people knew for sure, it would be 100%.

8:12But ultimately, it's going to get you something that's better than whatever you're seeing on the internet where it's just a complete free for all of open outcry. But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information. Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and sort of ethics. And we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen and there's a lot of benefits from it. And people will adapt. The site still has critics.

8:45Some worry certain questions could lead people to commit crimes to win a big enough bet. Polymarket was criticized for some of their markets about the LA wildfires earlier this year. There was a Polymarket bet about how many acres would burn in the LA wildfires. Some have labeled it like arson markets. Someone could, in order to win that, try to burn more acreage. There were a lot of conversations about it and there was a very select few of markets that felt that they were the most informational, with like the least sort of, you know, risk. These are really small markets, and there's tons of markets.

9:20And I understand this is really sensitive. It's the big markets that draw big bettors. And this is one of Polymarket's biggest. He's wagered more than$400 million so far. Online, he goes by the name Domer. I don't think of myself as a gambler. I mean, I'm taking very, very well-researched views on things. I feel like it's much more akin to investing. Betting is Domer's full-time job. He said he made nearly$3 million last year on Polymarket. He used to be a professional poker player, but gave it up. Prediction markets, he says, are more exciting. Every day I'm kind of going into battle. You wake up, I know you drink coffee, and you're in battle.

10:03You are wrong. I look at my phone within five seconds of waking up. What have I missed? My phone is my coffee. What has happened overnight? Yeah. Because the news doesn't sleep. Did you bet on the papal conclave? Yes, for sure. How, I mean, a papal conclave is a hermetically sealed environment. Information does not get out. Right. Nobody was putting money down that there'd be an American pope, but you were. Yeah, and his odds were 250 to 1. So he was a super, super, super long shot. He won$100 ,000 on the pope and even more picking J.D. Vance to be Donald Trump's running mate. He started betting on him five months before he was selected, when Polymarket was only giving Vance a 2 % chance.

10:45What did you see that made you think, oh, he might pick J.D. Vance? So that goes back to 2016, when he picked Mike Pence. And buried in one of the articles for why he picked Mike Pence is that Mike Pence had a one-syllable name. And Trump has a one-syllable name. And Trump is very into marketing. And so I was looking at the names, and I was like, who's one-syllable? And not only is Vance one syllable, he's only two letters off of Pence. So you bet$4 ,000 and you ended up winning$250 ,000? Yes. Yeah. It's a smart play. It is a good bet. Yeah. Shane Copeland made a risky bet when he built Polymarket in 2020.

11:23He did it fast in just three months and didn't seek regulatory approval as the law required. His chief competitor, Calci, did. In 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission launched an investigation into Polymarket. Copeland cooperated and ultimately paid a penalty. It was a$1.4 million fine. It was a settlement. And you could not have customers in the United States. Yeah, we had to go and geoblock trading in the U.S. and move certain operations offshore. And it wasn't, hey, you're banned from trading in the U.S. It's like until you're licensed. I mean, it was breaking the law. I mean, people say breaking the law.

11:59It's like which law, you know? So if anything, it's incompatible. It's incompatible with the law. Yeah, with the regulatory matrix that existed. The regulatory matrix was pretty clear. U.S. customers couldn't trade on Polymarket, but plenty continued to. All they needed was a VPN connection to mask their computer's location. In 2024, in the final weeks of the Biden administration, Copeland got a surprise visit at home from the FBI. It was a lot of, like, yelling and banging down the door. Like knocking, this is the FBI, or like? No, like a battering ram. He wasn't arrested, but agents seized his phones and computers.

12:39But with a new administration came a new appreciation for prediction markets. In July, the government dropped its investigations. And Polymarket was able to buy a fully licensed, legally compliant trading platform, paving the way for their U.S. customers to bet openly. Three months ago, Copeland named Donald Trump Jr., already an advisor to Calci, to Polymarket's advisory board. And Trump Jr.'s 1789 capital fund invested around$10 million in the company. I think there's going to be people watching who think that you put the president's son on your advisory board to get influence, to be able to protect yourself.

13:17So it's definitely not to protect myself. I mean, look, like they invested, right? We're in this admin. And this admin is very pro-innovation and pro-crypto and pro-Polymarket, which is amazing. The admin administration. Yeah. And, you know, I need help navigating that, right? I'm a young entrepreneur. If I have people who believe in what I do, who understand how politics works and can help guide me and teach me, you know, there's nothing wrong about that. Let's go! Last month, Polymarket got its biggest validation yet. The company that owns the New York Stock Exchange announced it was investing$2 billion in Polymarket.

13:52You like the floor. Days later, we met Copeland on the trading floor. What's it like to see your name up there? Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's cool, man. He told us Polymarket's data will soon be integrated into the exchange to help investors and traders get an edge. What valuation now has Polymarket been given? $9 billion post-money valuation. $9 billion. Did you anticipate that? I mean, I didn't start it to not get here, you know? Well, Shane Copeland is now a billionaire, at least on paper. And Polymarket, it still hasn't made any profit. It gives away its main product, its predictions, for free and doesn't charge fees on trades, at least not yet.

14:34How many people use Polymarket today? I mean, there's tens of millions of people who are looking at the odds, and it's mid-hundreds of thousands of people who are trading. But for you, the goal is a billion people? Yeah. So will Polymarket reach a billion people in five years, yes or no? It's a great question. What are the odds on it? I love it. A billion people is a lot. There's going to be a lot that we have to get right. The thing that drives me is that there are billions of people who could find value in this, which means until those people have Polymarket, are getting value from Polymarket, job's not done.

15:16America's future as a science leader may depend on students like the ones you're going to meet tonight, teenagers from Lambert High School in suburban Atlanta. They may have just found a better way to detect and treat Lyme disease, which affects nearly a half million Americans annually. Their primary tool? The revolutionary gene editing technique known as CRISPR. And these CRISPR kids did it to try to prove they are the best in the world, competing at a kind of science Olympics in Paris called iGEM, short for International Genetically Engineered Machine. But to win, they would have to go up against teams from China, the rising power in biotechnology.

16:02In Lambert High School's lab, Sean Lee and his classmates are teenage genetic engineers. manipulating the building blocks of life. And what we're going to do is we're going to move each of these samples into these mixes. And these mixes have everything we need in order to amplify our DNA. It's currently amplifying. Yes. All right. And we'll have to do this three more times for our different samples. So you would kind of swipe across. We went to check out the iGEM team's project for the big Paris competition. We first decided to map out where Lyme is most prevalent. Their presentation seemed more like a pitch from a biotech startup than a public high school science class.

16:49Along with Sean, senior Oveny Karthik is also a team captain. And so it's a novel wave CRISPR that detects. And so we have to create a guide RNA. And when that guide RNA is recognized, the protein gets activated and it collaterally cleaves or cuts everything around it. That just went right over my head. This is light years beyond my biology class, where the high point was dissecting frogs. So you're just going to measure out 50. This is called synthetic biology. A popular example of synthetic biology is golden rice, where you're able to engineer this rice to have the specific vitamins that you want, so that it's more nutrient-dense.

17:30And this would sound like cliché, but it's just endless possibilities. So you can just do whatever you want with it, as long as it's ethically correct. To compete at iGEM, you need to use synthetic biology to solve real-world problems. Lyme disease cases have doubled over the last decade. These teens set their sights on finding a better way to detect and treat Lyme disease, something that has eluded adult scientists for decades. Transmitted by infected ticks, Lyme can cause arthritis, nerve damage, and heart problems if left untreated. One of the biggest problems with Lyme is the lack of, like, being able to diagnose it.

18:10So a lot of people will go years, like, we've met someone who went 15 years without a diagnosis. Current tests make it difficult to detect Lyme in the first two weeks when it's easiest to treat. Lambert's big idea for better and earlier detection was to zero in on a protein generated by the infection. And this is the process where you work with CRISPR? Yes. Using the gene editing tool CRISPR and a simulated blood serum, they were able to target specific DNA strands where the protein hides, then snip away extraneous genetic material to expose the protein, enabling them to detect it with a simple kit-style test like a COVID or pregnancy strip.

18:54Did you guys ever think, this is way above my abilities, way above my area of knowledge, where you just dive right in. Yeah, so actually we did reach out to a bunch of different professors and stakeholders who gave feedback on our project, and they did tell us in the beginning that this might not be so feasible because you're trying to tackle such a big thing. They were also tackling how to treat Lyme. Standard therapy uses antibiotics, but Lambert planned to use CRISPR instead, targeting the bacteria that causes the disease. To make it work, they had to build software to model how best to use CRISPR.

19:35So as a teacher, is it easy to teach them because they're so smart? You teach me. Are you kidding? They are so smart that I can't keep up. Kate Scherer is their biotechnology teacher. Because they are still teenagers, so they're thinking so far out of the box. This project in particular, I warn them, this is very high-risk, high-reward. I can't imagine any of this working, but I'm happy to help you as much as I can. Oh, my God. Lambert's team had advantages beyond audacity and brainpower. Their lab is college-level, funded by taxpayers and donors. This is one of Georgia's most affluent, high-achieving school districts.

20:16The student body is majority Asian-American. The iGEM team is entirely Asian-American, children of immigrants. Lambert also is a sports juggernaut. You can't miss the signs, but the white iGEM lab coat might be the most coveted uniform of all. I understand that parents move to this district so their kids can get into the iGEM program, not just from Georgia, but from around the world. Yes, and there are families that move specifically thinking that, well, my kid will be in biotech and then they'll have a chance to try out for the iGEM team. About 100 students compete for roughly 10 spots on Lambert's iGEM team each year.

21:04Applicants submit a project proposal, take a test, and face an interview. Having a special skill like engineering or coding doesn't hurt. And you have to be willing to put in insanely long hours. I need that to work. With a month to go, they hit a string of successes. That stripe showed they could detect Lyme as early as two days after infection, far sooner than the two weeks with existing tests. Senior Claire Lee told us they also saw promising results in treating the disease. Doctors will be able to use this to identify Lyme disease and perhaps treat Lyme disease. That's the goal. What do you think of that?

21:51We're doing something in our high school lab that could potentially have a huge impact for millions of people. It's not like we're just saying, oh, I'm just doing this little thing that might help my grade. This thing could help save lives. What they found is just the first step. Much more testing will be needed. But they had more immediate concerns. They raced to finish before the international competition in Paris, pulling all-nighters to write results, code, and build a website explaining their project for the iGEM judges. It takes all that to be best in the world. The award Lambert won in 2022.

22:32Why do you do it? I like to win, and so a lot of this is a competition, so I like to win. You think you have a really good chance? I think it depends on what the other teams bring. Hopes were high as the Eiffel Tower when the students from Atlanta landed in Paris at the end of October. More than 400 teams, a third of them high schoolers, were competing in iGEM 2025, elite synthetic biology with a dash of nerd-proud culture. My first time coming here, I was so overwhelmed. This was Avani Karthik's third year at iGEM, and she was keeping an eye on the other teams. Is there a project here that has blown your mind?

23:14Almost every single one. One was just a few feet away from their booth, Great Bay in Shenzhen, China. Great Bay's project developed a new enzyme for treating indoor mold. Other high school projects included designing crops to grow on Mars and eye drops to treat cataracts. As iGEM teams filled the floor this year at the Paris Convention Center, one thing was easy to see. In the United States this year, we have 14 high school iGEM teams. Asia has 120. Janet Standevin runs iGEM's International High School Division. Before this, she taught at Lambert, created its iGEM program, and helped it win the grand prize in 2022.

24:06Are you thinking to yourself, this needs to be in every school? Yes. Oh, that's been our goal since day one, is let's start with Georgia as a little test bid and see what we can do here. She left Lambert three years ago after securing federal funding to take synthetic biology to high schools all across Georgia. But the Trump administration cut the money, claiming it fell under DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, A judge temporarily restored the funding, but Stan Devin told us she's not sure it will extend beyond 2026. What did you think when your funding got cut? I was devastated, absolutely devastated.

24:49I was angry. And, again, I think anybody that's involved in this work at the high school level realizes this is necessary work. In Paris, Lambert presented its work on stage. Caused by the genus Borrelium, Lyme is transmitted through the bites of infected ticks. And behind closed doors, the team dressed up to meet a panel of judges, answering questions about their lab work and its real-world implications. Is this what you imagined it would be 20 years ago? Hard to imagine this. Stanford professor Drew Endy was one of iGEM's founders. Back in the early 2000s, Endy was at MIT teaching genetic engineering, and his students had a competitive streak.

25:41So we started iGEM because the people who wanted to work with us were the 18-year-olds. iGEM thrived as biotech boomed. But Endy warned Congress America's lead in the field is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. How concerned are you that there are not more American participants in iGEM? I mean, it's a profound concern. It's urgent that leadership of the next generation of biotechnology has a strong presence in America and is represented by young American leaders. Endy was encouraged by the work done by the team from Georgia and wanted to know more. How do you deliver it?

26:24Yeah, so we want to deliver it through lipid nanoparticles. Endy echoed what other scientists told us, that Lambert's project could be a major scientific breakthrough if further testing pans out. This year they appear to have developed a better diagnostic for Lyme disease than anything I've seen before. It's not only applicable to Lyme disease, but anything you could find in your blood. As groundbreaking as their lab work was, Ovenny Karthik knew Lambert was being judged on everything from their website to their software. How do you think you're going to do? I'm hoping we finish top 10, but even that, I don't know.