Gene genies: CRISPR’s critical moment

0:28The Economist show just how strong it is. We look past the cultural reasons for the love affair seeking the hard-nosed economic ones. And you may think of New Zealand as a blissful middle earth awash with natural wonders. But some New Zealanders are actually getting a bit sick of the country, and the number of emigrants is rising. Our correspondent finds out why.

1:02But first...

1:11Genes are the building blocks for all living things. By altering genetic code, you change an organism. For decades, scientists have been trying to do just that. But the techniques were often slow, expensive or imprecise. 13 years ago, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier found a way to borrow a form of molecular scissors from bacterial DNA These scissors allowed the scientists to cut out or paste in sections of DNA It meant they could change genes in highly specific and repeatable ways It was a huge step The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the development of a method for genome editing.

2:08The system they uncovered, known as CRISPR, laid the foundations for a gene editing revolution. CRISPR just allows gene editing that is way faster and way easier and way more accessible than any other tool we've had like this in the past. Emily Steinmark has been writing about CRISPR for our Technology Quarterly. It was, for some few scientists, possible to do gene editing. But with CRISPR, it was like the heavens opened and stuff completely changed. And what it allows you to do is to rewrite DNA, gene by gene or letter by letter, to remove harmful mutations. You can even add in protective ones.

2:49So it's really just a complete overhaul of how scientists have been able to deal with genetics. And what are some of the things that it's enabled us to do? What are some of the discoveries? Yeah, so last year, the first new CRISPR therapy went on the market. It uses classic CRISPR-Cas9. Cas9 is the protein in CRISPR that makes the cut in DNA. And it appears to be curative for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia to debilitating blood disorders that affect millions around the world, especially in the global south. A separate drug is in trials right now, which could mean a one-off therapy that would give you lifelong protection against heart attacks.

3:31We have clinical trials that are due to begin the summer on pig organs that have been edited to suit human bodies so that you could use pigs as organ donors. but it goes far beyond human health. I mean, CRISPR could raise crop yields and protect against climate change and disease for agriculture and improve nutrition. There are people working on creating wheat that has more fibre-like starch so you could get white bread that's actually good for you. There are also crispered mustard greens that don't have that really strong mustardy taste because that's been taken out of it. I had a go myself, which they were delicious, I have to say.

4:09non-browning varieties of all kinds of foods including avocados have been developed so all of this is on the cusp of breaking through. We have been talking about gene modification for a long time so what's the excitement about CRISPR in particular? GM or gene modification sounds the same but is different so for a GM crop or a GM plant what usually happens is that you take a gene from another species and you put it in so that might be a gene from a microbe that you put into corn say and then that corn is protected against some pest right so that's a trait that comes from the microbe that's put into it but with gene editing it's not so much that you put in genes from a foreign organism it's that you edit the genes that are already there so there might be lots of different varieties of particular plant let's say wheat across the world and also just if you have a field, there's going to be mutations all the time, some of which may be beneficial.

5:08What CRISPR does is really allow you to control that, right, and bring in the edits that you want to see and put them straight into the plant. So lots of excitement around it and lots of potential possibilities, but so far only one human therapy on the market. Is that right? That's right. I think the thing to remember here is the big paper, the one that got the Nobel Prize came out in 2012. And that sounds like a long time ago now. But that was the first time that scientists discovered that Carissa had the potential to be a gene editor. I mean, it's the earliest of early days in 2012, right? Like just because somebody hands you a paintbrush doesn't make you a successful artist overnight.

5:51Not only did scientists have to learn how to use it, they also had to figure out what are the genetics that they want to alter. And all of that knowledge is separate from CRISPR itself. So it's actually, when you consider all of that, pretty fast progress. Now, there are things that are holding the technology back at the moment. One thing is, it's pretty expensive still. The first therapy on the market, Kisjevi, for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia is about$2 million a patient. It's also a very hard process on the patients. they have to have stem cells harvested they're sent away to a lab and edited and then before they can be put back in a patient has to go through really really harsh chemotherapy to get rid of the old unedited stem cells so new therapies ideally would be a lot kinder on the patient one way to do that is to do the editing in the body they're making huge progress on this but it is still early days for that.

6:48It's going to take a continued flow of investment, but it's probably also going to take a loosening of some regulation. And what sort of regulations are there at the moment? If you're looking at medicine, the issue is that there are some very sensible regulations in place to try and protect people from drugs that are not quite up to scratch, right? But the promise of CRISPR really is that you can target basically any mutation. So there are loads of people every year that are born with unique mutations. They will never benefit from a drug that is made for hundreds of thousands of people because their disease is unique.

7:24CRISPR can be targeted to fix their mutation. That's the big promise of it. But because the regulations are made for the big drugs that target all these people, they have a really, really long safety testing pathway, lots of regulations around, you know, what is the quality of the drug that's produced all of this sort of stuff. But if you have a test that lasts two years, that kid that was born with a unique mutation, you know, has died long ago. So you need to be able to kind of tweak those things to make it easier for small batch on demand medicines to reach those people quicker. In agriculture, you have the situation where lots of gene edited foods have fallen in under the GM regulations.

8:06So especially in Europe, there's always been scepticism towards GM foods, and that's affected countries elsewhere that want to sell to Europe. So right now there's this issue of gene-edited foods which are different from GM actually falling under GM regulations. And is there a way around some of this over-regulation? So in agriculture there are bills across the world that are coming in that are trying to exempt gene-edited foods from GM regulations. So in Britain for example there's the Precision Breeding Act, which is right now going through secondary legislation to implement the act that's already there, that would have a huge impact on streamlining access to the British market for gene-edited foods.

8:47A very similar bill is being discussed in the EU at the moment. Lots of other countries in the world are looking at this. There will be a method that works for different regions, I'm sure. Okay, Emily, so there are clearly some stumbling blocks, but you've spent months now thinking about CRISPR. Do you think it lives up to the hype? I mean, I'm still excited about it. I still think it's incredibly cool that we can edit, tweak, alter the very foundation of life that won't stop being called to me. I think that paintbrush I mentioned before, scientists are learning how to use it and they're also beginning to understand the ways in which they can use it.

9:28Because CRISPR has been so revolutionary in biological research, We're finding out more and more stuff about the genetics that underpin both rare and common diseases. And the more we know, the more ways in which CRISPR can be used, both for therapies and medicine and in agriculture. So I'm hopeful it's going to end up being really, really good. The technology is golden, that's for sure. Emily, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

10:09On tomorrow's Weekend Intelligence, we're going deep into America's pronatalist heartland. If you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation. I'm Barkley Bram, and I'm in Texas investigating how America's falling birth rate has sparked a movement to make babies great again. We need to have babies by whatever means, whether it's IVF, surrogacy, whatever the case may be, but we just can't go extinct. We'll explore the case for more kids and how the birthery is becoming another battle line in the culture wars. That's on The Weekend Intelligence, dropping Saturday.

10:48A few hours before Donald Trump went to the Rose Garden to unveil his so-called reciprocal tariffs, I was wandering around in the hot sun in South Bombay when I came across the local branch of Tanishq, which is India's biggest jewellery retail. Leo Marani is an Asia correspondent for The Economist and is based in Mumbai, which he insists still on calling Bombay. Outside, there was a sign that said, rising gold prices stopping your wedding jewellery purchase. Then it advertised, pay nothing for your dream with a festival of exchange. Later that day, the price of gold hit an all-time high, so I think they knew what was coming.

11:28I went in to chat with them about whether the rising price of gold in recent weeks had had an effect. And they said not really, but the exchange offer had certainly helped. I kind of wish I'd gone back because later that day, gold broke through to an all-time high price. Gold broke through the$3 ,000 an ounce milestone for the first time. Well, that was the highest price at the time, but in the days to come, it's broken even that record. So let's put some numbers to this, Leo. How much gold are Indians buying? tons, tons of gold. You know how people use the word tons loosely? Indians are literally buying tons of gold.

12:06Last year, when the price of gold hit 40 new highs, Indians bought 560 tons of gold jewelry and then another 240 tons of gold bars and coins. But it's not just Indians. Across Asia, gold is really, really popular as an investment and, of course, as jewelry. China bought 510 tons of gold in jewelry, for instance, and a lot more in gold bars and bullions. Thailand, not that big a place compared to these two, demand jumped 17 % because it's become a lot easier to buy gold online, it turns out. Put it all together, and Asians accounted for nearly two-thirds of global demand for gold jewelry and bullion last year, not including central bank purchases.

12:49And if you want a comparison, America bought about one-tenth of that. So what's going on here? What's behind the Asian lust for gold? Well, you know, people usually put it down to cultural reasons, which kind of annoys me because this is a very big continent with very, very different cultures. So that's not really a satisfying answer, but it's part of the answer. So in India, we have lots of people. Lots of people tend to make lots of new people and there's weddings involved and all of that. And at weddings, people buy a lot of gold. It's a part of the bridal trousseau. People buy gold jewelry to wear to the wedding.

13:23China, similarly, gold plays an important part in weddings, in the birth of a child, in various traditions. And this is true also amongst the Chinese diaspora, in Southeast Asia, and amongst Southeast Asians themselves. But underlying all of this, even cultural stuff, it's all rooted in some pretty solid economic and financial reasons. Basically the same ones as everybody else. It's a good store of value. Absolutely. So that's one part of it, right? Gold is a good store of value. I mean, even Americans who have all sorts of financial instruments they could invest in, they've been piling into gold in the past month.

14:00But in Asia, it serves an additional economic role, which is as a hedge against currency depreciation and as a way to gain exposure to assets not linked to the national economy. Because the thing is, it's very, very hard to invest in foreign markets or to move money out of many, many Asian countries. There's capital control or there's a lot of regulation. It's just very, very difficult. These are quite tightly controlled economies. The borders for money are quite tightly controlled. So really, it's just a sort of pragmatic decision around ease of investment. Well, yes, but also there's another element to it because not that many Indians, for example, have that much money to invest.

14:40It also plays a really, really important role in financial stability. In India, it's really hard to borrow money formally against land for various reasons, land records, lack of paperwork, this, that, and the other. Especially for people like farmers or small traders whose income is subject to all sorts of vagaries, climatic, trade, economic, so on and so forth, right? So for these guys, when they have a little bit of spare cash, they invest it in gold. If they're facing tough times, they can easily get loans against the gold. Gold is fantastic collateral. And in India, the gold loan market has become increasingly formal and pretty impressive.

15:19You can get a gold loan in about 15 minutes. It's also really important for women who very often are not allowed to work, are not allowed to own assets and are basically completely financially dependent. But here they can save up little bits, buy jewelry, which is acceptable, and then it gives them a little bit of security. Similarly, pension systems are not super developed in this part of the world, especially in India. And so saving up in gold over the course of your life can serve again as a safety net for when you're old. So in Asia, in sum, gold has really kind of figured into the economy a lot more in a lot more ways than it is elsewhere, where it's just the business of speculators and nerving investors.

16:00Precisely. In Asia, where there's a lot of sensible economic reasons, like I just laid out, that also has negative effects as a result of it being such a big part of people's portfolios. So number one is that you have to actually get the stuff. And not every country is able to produce gold. or if it is, it doesn't produce enough. So China is the world's biggest gold producer, but it can still only satisfy about 40 % of its own demand. India, the amount of gold it produces rounds to zero. And so this has a big impact on the trade deficit. There are some months when gold is the country's single largest import category, outpacing even fuel and energy.

16:36Gold accounts for 8 % of India's overall imports. It has really quite weird effects on the macroeconomic situation. And all of that then puts downward pressure on the rupee, which means people want to buy more gold to hedge against currency depreciation. It's kind of a vicious cycle. So in that sense, in India's case anyway, it sounds as if the government would be wise to almost discourage all of this gold buying. They've tried that from time to time. But the thing is, you can't really just say, don't do this very sensible thing, right? They could slap higher duties on gold, but that would just encourage smuggling.

17:08Just this week, there was a headline in the newspaper about a guy who tried to smuggle and about three quarters of a million dollars worth of gold in his fake shoe. So, you know, this stuff, it happens all the time. It's been going on for decades. What governments really should be doing is to allow capital to move out a little bit or fix land record systems, stuff that is either really difficult or stuff that it's unpalatable for them to do. But what it really comes down to is, for all the cultural reasons, it's the political economy that decides whether people are going to be big consumers of gold or not.

17:41Leo, thanks as ever for your time My pleasure, Jason

18:00New Zealand is facing an exodus Though the rest of us may think of it as an idyllic place full of natural wonders many of its residents are more concerned about rising unemployment and economic recession. And its already small population is getting even smaller. New Zealanders are leaving their country in record numbers at the moment. Eleanor Whitehead is our Australia and New Zealand correspondent. There were almost 129 ,000 of them that emigrated last year. That's about 40 % above the pre-pandemic average for this century. And that's revived a long-standing concern in New Zealand about brain drain.

18:38so what's going on now why are they all leaving new zealand's always been shaped by emigration as well as immigration it has a small economy it's got a relative lack of opportunity and that means that young new zealanders have always sought what they call the overseas experience and it does have relative to its population size a very big diaspora one of the biggest in the oecd and emigration has kind of ebbed and flowed as you would expect with new zealand's fortunes And there was a big spike in 2012 at the tail end of the financial crisis. And what is going on now is that New Zealand is, again, in a kind of economic rut.

19:14So it has been in recession. Its unemployment has risen very sharply with interest rates. You hear a lot of complaints from New Zealanders about their very costly housing, even compared to other Anglophone countries, about a surge of gang-related crime in New Zealand. And some of them grumble about the country going awry under Jacinda Ardern's Labour government. They complain about too much wokeness in New Zealand. There are others that complain about belt tightening and austerity under the current coalition government in New Zealand now. But the story is basically that they feel like the economy is not working for them.

19:50So where are they going? The biggest destination for them by far is Australia, so just across the Tasman Sea. And various Australian states have been running cheeky ads to try to lure New Zealanders across, particularly for frontline workers like police officers and healthcare workers. There was one from the state of Queensland, which encouraged people to ditch the winter chill and expand your horizons in sunny southeast Queensland. That was aimed at New Zealand healthcare workers. There was another last year by Queensland's police, which talked about warmer days and higher pays. It promised a relocation bonus for what it called policing in paradise.

20:26And for lots of New Zealanders, I guess this is a fairly easy sell because life in Australia seems pretty nice. There is an agreement between Australia and New Zealand called the Trans-Tasman Agreement, and it allows Kiwis and Australians to live and work freely on either side of the Tasman Sea. But what has happened over the years is that the economic gap, if you like, between Australia and New Zealand has been widening. The income gap has been growing for decades and Australian salaries are a lot higher than New Zealand salaries. its GDP per person is about a third higher than New Zealand's.

20:59Its health system works well, it has much more generous pensions. And you've got a Labour government in Australia that has also made it easier for New Zealanders to access benefits and to access passports as well. So that has been another draw for New Zealanders looking to move across the Tasman. And the common refrain that you hear from New Zealanders on this question is that life is basically just easier in Australia. It's a country that seems to work better and New Zealand, by comparison, is kind of a sinking ship. So what's happened to immigration to New Zealand? So recently, immigration has fallen quite sharply as well.

21:35There was in New Zealand, as in other rich countries, a big post-pandemic spike of immigrants coming in after the country opened its borders after COVID-19. But last year, immigration dropped by about a third. The population is still just growing, but that has added to these concerns about brain drain because historically, New Zealand has offset a lot of the loss of its own people by emigration, by letting in lots of skilled immigrants over the past decades from countries like India and China. But the concern now that immigration is slowing is that the brain exchange does turn to brain drain. And mightn't those New Zealanders who've gone to Australia just come back?

22:16They may well come back in the end. And the kind of longstanding trend in New Zealand has been that concerns about brain drain have proved overblown, partly because young expats do eventually come back home. Their overseas experience tends to be a temporary thing. But there is a risk of that changing now. And that's for a couple of reasons. One of those is that it's not just young New Zealanders who are leaving now. It's actually more experienced professionals deeper into their careers and extended families as well. So that's grandparents going to be with children and grandchildren in Australia, for example.

22:50So those trends are changing at the same time as the inward immigration is slowing. So historically, yes, New Zealanders have come back. The concern, I suppose, is as the gap between Australia particularly and New Zealand grows, there's less of a lure for them to return back home. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Thanks so much.

23:43The Intelligence for that weekend intelligence concluding our series on fertility. Nothing like some Saturday baby-making.