Affordable age-reversal. Xenotransplants to eliminate organ shortages. Rewriting health economics. Virus resistant livestock and crops. What are the imminent genomics pathways to a better future? I asked George Church, the greatest genomic pioneer in the world …

GEORGE CHURCH: two things I'd like to see happen, is affordable healthcare to get us up out of poverty, and then something that will solve the 90% of disease that will get us past our normal retirement age. If we extend life by 30 years, and we extend retirement by 30 years, then …

Designer babies, agricultural mishaps, extinction via gene-drive – all possible now that CRISPR has placed into our hands the awesome power to “edit life” in all its forms. So, how to keep the good while preventing the bad? How to safeguard our future? Is that even possible? I asked Jennifer Kuzma, global expert on biotech responsibility, to shed light on one of the most important governance challenges of our time …

JENNIFER KUZMA: We always have to be careful if we're adding an organism with a gene drive in the environment, in open ecosystems, that we can actually make sure that we have an ability to control it or recall it, because there have been a number of biological control introductions that have gone awry …

Bruce McCabe: Rodolphe Barrangou, you are a professor here at North Carolina State University and you are, to me, one of the gods of CRISPR. You were involved very early in the whole process of proving out the science. And particularly, you proved the linkage between the immunity effect and bacteria two phages. So your experimental work actually closed the loop on proving that was what CRISPR was for. So you are I guess the last so 10 or 20 people in the chain here of making the thing real, a tool that's changing humanity. I think that's fair to say.

How do we feed a planet? How do we do it through peak population, without wreaking catastrophic destruction on the biosphere and losing all semblance of the planet we once had? In October 2022, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Distinguished Professor Rodolphe Barrangou and visiting his CRISPR lab at North Carolina State University …