Will CRISPR spirit us away?

CATHERINE COSTE

Published in

The French Tech Comedy

9 min readOct 14, 2017

This is episode 24 of The French Tech Comedy, by DNA cowgirl.

For Bruno Bellamy: The Anti-Ageing Bellaminette

Episode 1: The Science of Sakura

Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation

Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate

Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch

Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project

Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome

Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference

Episode 8: religA.I.on

Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center

Episode 10: Mao’s Robots

Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen

Episode 12: The Last (French) Samurai

Episode 13: To Humanity and Beyond

Episode 14: The Music of Genomic Origami

Episode 15: Direct-to-consumer Ikigami Genetics

Episode 16: Underground Science

Episode 17: Gene Karaoke Groove

Episode 18: The Osaka Forever-Young Army

Episode 19: The Toilet Slippers

Episode 20: Ichi Efu

Episode 21: The Human Sapienome with the French touch

Episode 22: The World of Sin and The World of Shin

Episode 23: Final Fantasy and the last-ditch effort in the DNA game industry

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Previously in The French Tech Comedy: Yuki, a Japanese geisha and musician from Tokyo will get married to Nono, a French engineer, talented at raising funds that are aimed at fueling the efforts of cutting-edge science in medicine, ageing, sustainable energy and more. Nono is interested in A.I. and deep learning. Science in his view amounts to a video game, just like anything else. The wedding is scheduled to take place in just two months but the new couple, now living in Singapore, is starting to feel the pressure. As she admires her brother Taka, a scientist aimed at disrupting cancer treatment, Yuki has started broadcasting videos about science and society on her YouTube channel: A Geisha Lost Between Two Worlds. She gets in touch with Geronimo Faber PhD, who is spearheading the global crusade to defeat ageing. Faber had promised he would answer personally during a Ask me anything on Reddit session, but when he sees Yuki’s questions, he finds himself lost in translation. The geisha seeks the help of her friend Koba, a manga artist. Both of them are working on a book project: The French Tech manga.

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Faber’s answer to Yuki’s query was not helpful. I think our attitude toward old people is very wrong, generally speaking. And it is backfiring, impacting us, young people. In her mind, this was a question, but Faber was regarding this as the mere expression of opinions. She decided she should try to be more specific. Maybe her idea — we should stop the Ikigami madness — was not so clear? She sent him another message:

Dear Faber PhD,

I am sorry I could make time to answer your message. Also, I am sorry to bother you again with the invention of my friend the manga artist Koba: the illegal ageing vats and tanks. But I think it is important. Do you know French drawing artist Bruno Bellamy? He is the author of the Bellaminettes and a friend of mine. I think we need anti-ageing bellaminettes. What do you think?

Here, girls want to use CRISPR to have cat ears, cat paws and cat fur. I believe this cat obsession is annoying and really misses the point. I want to use CRISPR to stay young; not to resemble a cat or a unicorn. I am sorry I am taking this opportunity to ask you: what do you think? Let me give you a few examples.

Manga book cover, pic taken in a bookstore in Kyoto, Oct. 2017

OK, maybe I could use this mask for my Anonymous ID. I mean, the anti-ageing cause will need Anonymous hackers, right? This is why I am currently learning computer coding, Swift, thanks to the PlayGrounds app by Apple.

But I don’t want to end up being CRISPRed into any of these (they are famous in Japan, do you know them?):

I prefer the Monster High dolls. But we don’t have them in Japan.

Heeee ^^Seriously?!

Do you think CRISPR will make all of us perfect? But isn’t perfection boring?

Also, I don’t think this is how cyborgs will look like:

Manga book cover, pic taken in a bookstore in Osaka

I believe the illegal ageing vats and tanks Koba thought about could be used in Final Fantasy and real life in the near future.

Most of those bioengineered bodies were made with DNA data that had been hacked on the internet, on open-access databases but not only. Then the hacked DNA data was being re-engineered in the lab, and put into some kind of second-hand (hacked) and illegal high-tech vats or tanks aimed at accelerating the human ageing process. Then… voila, you had a brand new body, that would last for a few months, or years — or decades, if you were lucky. Downloading your consciousness into your own DNA was no big deal, most people were learning about this basic knowledge in middle school, all around the world.

Episode: The World of Sin and The World of Shin.

I think megacities or megalopolis are compacting time. Everything has to happen very quickly. You rush to do things, all the time. Go to work, work, go shopping, go to the restaurant, have sex, sleep (not enough!), then start all over again. That kind of life is not like onsen life in a Ryokan, you know onsen, right? They are very popular in Japan, they are beautiful and can be very expensive too. In my humble opinion, Tokyo and Osaka lifestyle is like those illegal high-tech vats or tanks aimed at accelerating the human ageing process. Super-ageing vats. If we want to stay young, we should live Kyoto style instead — country style. I mean life like in the anime Totoro. Countryside is a good anti-ageing tool, and there is perfection in nature, with hard work we can show this perfection, be inspired by it and make the most of it for our own life. Same thing for ageing, right?

My Neighbor **Totoro** is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio **Ghibli**.

Here in Japan, we only have one Ghibli museum (in Tokyo), but we do have Ghibli museum shops all around Japan, in the malls. I think anti-ageing should do the same thing. Imagine popular anti-ageing goodies that could be sold all around the world!

In my opinion, this is not a realistic picture, as fruit and vegetables are very expensive in Japan! People only want perfectly well formed products, even if they are expensive and if a lot of chemicals are being used in the process. I’m all about organic, this is why I got into CRISPR and anti-ageing and microbiome and genome sequencing and genomic precision medicine… But still, I think we do have a transition problem, and this is the reason why I started broadcasting on my YouTube channel, “A Geisha Lost Between Two Worlds”. This is actually for my brother Taka. He is working in precision medicine, and he is amazing. Right now, he is involved in taking the guesswork out of cancer treatment! The startup, Ourotech, is working to help doctors identify in advance which drugs are most likely to have the biggest impact killing a type of cancer. With proprietary synthetic gels, Ourotech is able to remove cancer cells from the body and test them against a variety of possible treatments! In cancer more than in anything else, maybe, time is of the essence. Despite having dozens of cancer treatments available, we don’t have great processes for determining what treatments to prioritise. Maybe cancer is just one of those super-ageing vats or tanks my friend Koba, the manga artist, came up with in his fiction? Ageing is a disease, people saying it isn’t are just plain wrong.

Doctors traditionally have guidelines for how to treat cancer patients. In the case of breast cancer, as you know, they will first check if the cancer is HER2 positive or HER2 negative — the presence or absence of this protein dictates which of the 30 breast cancer treatments approved by the FDA should be prioritized. Unfortunately, even after the test, if you’re HER2 positive, there are still five preferred treatments and eight backups.

The process for picking between those five preferred treatments is anything but an exact science. Once selected, treatments consist of three to six drugs administered over the course of a year so it can be a long time before doctors realize they picked the wrong treatment.

So instead, Ourotech is enabling doctors to test drugs for effectiveness by removing cancer from the body, cutting it up into small samples, and getting it growing again inside a specialty gel. This process can cut that year long process down to just a week.

The gel in this equation is incredibly important because it has to emulate the exact conditions within the body at the site of the cancer to serve as an accurate proxy for the real cancer. This means that, in the case of breast cancer, the gel can’t just emulate human tissue, it has to emulate human breast tissue.

Traditionally, approaches to this type of testing have relied on gene matching. If a drug has been FDA approved to treat a specific gene, you can try to determine what drug to use by searching for that target gene within the patients cancer. Unfortunately this only allows you to infer which drug is best. In reality, many factors are at play when a series of cancer treatment drugs enter the body. The only way to know a treatment will work for sure is to actually test it.

As you know, hydrogels are not new. Popular hydrogels used today come from mice. But this too presents a problem, because these hydrogels are not a perfect proxy for the human body. It’s well known that many treatments that are tested on mice do not cause the same effects in humans.

It’s for this reason that Ourotech opted to create a synthetically modified gel based on bacteria for its tests. This increases the likelihood that a test done in the gel will be representative of the actual treatment outcome in a human.” (Source)

I think that bacteria are the wisest creatures on Earth, due to evolution. We still have a lot to learn from them.

Spirited Away: http://www.mytinyphone.com/wallpaper/539761/

In a nutshell, this is how I see myself, reflecting about anti-ageing strategies. Venus Mc Flytrap, my favorite Monster High doll, in Himeji castle — the only genuine warrior castle we have in Japan. The other castles used to be home to generations of shoguns.

And this is me wanting to step out of the super-ageing vats and tanks.

Street art in Himeji, pic taken in September 2017

I think life in big cities plunges us straight into super-ageing vats or tanks, and when I read about Final Fantasy 9, this is exactly how I feel.

“Final Fantasy 9 works hard to show the effects of Alexandria’s warmongering on the lives of its many denizens. Heads of the state become involved in espionage and sabotage. Average townspeople like Part Time Worker Mary, a character we see several times over the course of the game, try to maintain normalcy while anxiously waiting for the worst to happen. The people in between — the world-spanning thieves, the scholars and the rich card-playing nobles — seem to try to ignore it altogether, hoping that it will all blow over.”