The Secrets of Life

On February 28, 1953, Sir Francis Crick and Dr James Watson stumbled upon a double helix in their lab which can save the Secrets of Life in the Ribo Nucleic Acid codes. They called it DNA. 

Today we know that every secret of our life is stored in the triplet codes of DNA in the nucleus of our cell. There are 23 pairs of such Genes. We further know that in the short arm of chromosome 11 at position 15.5 lies the code for insulin. Its short address is 11p15. Any defect in this chromosome stops insulin production in our body and causes Diabetes. In those days, we weren’t able to manufacture insulin chemically inside a lab. Instead, we have to sacrifice a pig and powder its pancreas to get one ounce of pig insulin.

The Recombinant DNA – 

Herbert Boyer and Stanely Cohen discovered an enzyme to cut and paste DNA at any random point. Today we can cut the 11p15 chromosome and paste it to the chromosome of one bacteria named E Coli. We know one E Coli bacterium divides into two in just half hour. Our insulin tagged E Coli will multiply into 2 raised to the power of 48 numbers just in 24 hours inside our lab. The number is simply mind boggling. We now can set up a factory in our lab and manufacture insulin on demand. This is the Recombinant Insulin that is available over the counter of any drug store round the corner. Genetic engineering started.

The CRISPR CAS-9 (2012)- 

Dr Jennifer Doudna discovered that CRISPR like a google search engine can search and find any segment in the chromosome of a living cell as per our request. Then Cas-9 can cut that point and remove the defect.

Doudna and her team were able to change the color of the babies of the black mice to white in their lab by precise editing the melanin gene that gives us the tan. 

Editing Humanity was not far from this point. Designer babies on demand were a reality.

The Genetically modified child (July 2019)-

Sickling is a common blood disorder. It is rampant in western Odisha. The child’s RBC in blood are destroyed due to a genetic defect in the scaffolding that supports its circular dome. Once inherited, it continues over generations. There was no treatment. The child had to live on regular blood transfusion for his entire life. Even today, their life is short and painful.

In July 2019, For the first time the gene of a baby suffering from sickle cell anaemia is edited. CRISPR Cas-9 enzyme homed in to the gene defect in his bone marrow ( A secret place, where our body manufactures our RBCs that carry oxygen and gives us the pink glow) and delete the defect. What is important, it was a permanent cure for his blood disease and for rest of his future generations as well. Isn’t that great?

An Ethical Dilemma–

This created the ethical dilemmas of editing humankind ? What will stop us from editing the unborn child in the mother’s womb to create a Frankenstein.

The scientific community and media  ( pic) of the world were divided into two. While the Chinese proceeded on to modify human embryo, rest of the world paused.

( Nobody knows how much the Chinese have achieved. It is rumoured that the Chinese are creating an invincible army.)

In November 2019, Covid-19 started from the area around a place where one of the most advanced genetic labs of our world operates. The Wuhan, China. The gene of an innocuous Corona virus got modified and a novel Corona virus inundated the life on our earth. It does have its the Silver Lining though.

Remember 2020. Remember the  days, when the most well connected and influential person of Bhubaneswar would be waiting for 72 hours with bated breath for the RTPCR report of his Nasal Swab. Forget about the village people. Today in 2024, India uses CRISPR based TataMD check ( Feluda) in 20 CSIR labs around the country, particularly targeting the rural people. Tata’s Feluda is a paper strip based test that gives results in 30 minutes and can be done in your drawing room. Its accuracy is comparable to the mammoth cyclotrons of our RTPCR labs. The CRISPR technology can be applied in fields as varied as from Cancer to Infectious diseases and Hemoglobin defects. Thanks to the COVID-19, a cutting edge technology from the sophisticated labs of USA is now available in the small towns of India.

Epilogue-

Decoding the secrets of life inside a molecule biology lab.

It took our ancestors 2.4 million years to harness fire from nature inside their kitchen and cook raw food into readily digestible power food. Cooked food is a quicker source of energy than the raw food. While a monkey uses its whole day to gather food and chew them, we humans take hardly an hour for preparing our food and use the rest of our days in innovating.

Cooking on fire hastened the growth of the pea size neo cortex of the incongruous Neanderthal to the huge 3 pounds of grey matter inside the brain of a Homo Sapien. These 3 pounds of grey matter of a modern man consumes almost 80% calorie required by a 90 kg human being. While the Neanderthal man used 18 hours of his day in gathering food to meet his daily caloric demand, cooked food enabled the modern man to devote one hour for preparing food and seventeen hours for thinking, innovating and improving his life.

The result is obvious.

“It took less than a decade for the CRISPR technology to descend from the advanced labs of the department of Molecular Biology of the University of California, Berkeley to be used in the fields of rural India.
While the Chimpanzees are still waiting inside our zoos, we the Sapiens are out to colonise the moon.

What started inside a small lab inside the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge by Watson and Crick in 1953 has matured into a moving behemoth in the labs of Jennifer Doudna at the University of California of Berkeley in 2013.

But we have still miles to go.