Why We ALL Need to Be Scientists to Take Part in the Future!

Huge change is underway within the academic fields that govern how we live. Most change will spring forth from the science and technology community. One of the most important vehicles for managing change is open dialogue within the scientific community and from the scientific community to the public and vice versa. We interview Dr. Ellen Jorgensen, founder of Biotech Without Borders to find out why we all need to be scientists to take part in the future.

Genome editing is just one of the scientific disciplines bringing massive change. It is a powerful new tool for altering an organism’s genetic material. And we’ve only just scratched the surface of its potential.

Recent scientific breakthroughs make genome editing much more efficient and precise than before. This leaves some terrified by the speed with which these technologies are being developed and applied. The public, media, policymakers and stakeholders express concern about the lack of appropriate systems to govern these areas of scientific and technological advance. How and when should the public be engaged and take part in the decision making process that affects how science and technology is carried and effects the way that we live?

Why the urgency for public engagement?

The National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine (USA) decided to find out. Report Human Genome Editing: Science Ethics and Governance suggests public engagement with urgency by communicating, informing, consulting and inviting participation.

“Public education and engagement are crucial in the process of assessing and applying societal values to the risks and benefits of genome editing technologies and the ethical dimensions they involve. For somatic genome editing, the committee concludes that transparent and inclusive public policy debates should precede any consideration of whether to authorize clinical trials for indications that go beyond treatment or prevention of disease and disability (e.g. for enhancement). With respect to heritable germline editing, in addition to the strict criteria and stringent oversight discussed above, broad participation and input by the public, along with ongoing reassessment of both health and societal benefits and risks, should be a condition for moving clinical trials forward”.

Why we all need to be scientists to take part in the future

To explore the importance of engaging the public in science, in particular bio science ideaXme interviewed Ellen Jorgensen, founder of Biotech Without Borders, one of the world’s leading influencers in biotech and a strong campaigner to increase science literacy in both adults and students.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:00:00] I am the founder of ideaXme. With me is a person who moves the human story forward. Who are you?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:00:10] I am Dr. Ellen Jorgensen. I’m a molecular biologist. My aim is to democratise bio science.

Democratising science and moving the human story forward

Andrea Macdonald: [00:00:19] Why do you want to democratise science?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:00:23] The objective is to get as many people as possible engaged ‘hands on’ in biotechnology and bioscience. So, engaged with all the new technological advancements, mostly based on DNA science that are moving us forward in the world in terms of biomedical technology, bio material technology, and agricultural technology.

What are the key advances in biotechnology?

Andrea Macdonald: [00:00:55] Can you take us through the key advances within this area?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:01:01] Recent ones that have made the news are genome editing systems. They act almost like word processors for DNA although I hate that analogy because it’s very simplistic. It does, however, give you a visceral feel of the differences between this technology and past technology which was much cruder.

[00:01:27] There’s also a movement to be more high throughput with these sorts of experiments with all the different technologies that are coming together. We have AI, imaging technologies and the ability to see atoms now. It’s amazing how fast things are moving and how they’re playing off each other.

Programming people’s immune systems 

[00:01:53] In medicine we are now reprogramming people’s immune system cells to attack our own cancers which was unthinkable a decade ago. I’m interested in that. Taking materials that are produced in one species and producing them in a very user friendly and ‘cruelty free’ way. An example is the whole movement for in vitro meat production. There are a lot of wild ideas out there that are finally coming to fruition. It is a very exciting time to be scientist.

Theories behind CRISPR technology

Andrea Macdonald: [00:02:35] Can you talk to us about the theories behind CRISPR technology and how it is done?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:02:44] I like to think of it as a guided missile. It’s a two-part system made from proteins which a lot of biological technology relies on. In this case, it is a combination of protein and a nucleic acid called RNA, a close chemical cousin to DNA.

RNA

[00:03:13] And the beauty of it is that the protein never changes. It’s pretty much the same whatever species you put into, or whatever editing you want to do. It doesn’t change. And that’s the expensive and hard to change part of these systems. There were some earlier systems which did genome editing but they were clunkier. You had to change the whole thing. In this case it seems to work in every species we’ve tried it on and the targeting mechanism is this little piece of RNA. You can buy it for $100 and get in the mail within a few days.

A catastrophic event for a cell

So, it’s very easy to do a design, build and test cycle if you try to test a product, if you are trying and test a new therapy where you are trying to edit away a person’s bad gene. You can do your experiments, original experiments without too much outlay of time and materials. It speeds up the whole process. The way it works is the targeting mechanism targets this protein to a specific place in your DNA. It makes a cut through both strands of the DNA. That’s a catastrophic event for a cell.

Hijacking the repair processes

[00:04:39] So, it sends in its natural repair processes. You can hijack those processes to get them to do what you want. It’s a combination of something external and something internal. And so far, it’s been used mostly in cells that you can take out of the body and put back like the cells I was talking about. The immune system cells are reprogrammed to fight the cancer. CRISPR is being used to reprogram them. So, that’s an example of its biomedical use.

[00:05:14] It’s also being used in agricultural tech to more efficiently produce genetically modified plants and animals that have valuable characteristics like drought resistance. It’s pretty much a tool that can be used in any workflow involving any kind of ‘messing’ with DNA. CRISPR is important for right now which is why it’s such a big deal.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:05:45] Where do you see this going in the next 10 years. What are the best-case and worst-case scenarios?

Human genome editing

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:05:51] The real hot button and hot topic, you said it before the interview, is of course in human genome engineering. So, that’s being discussed repeatedly, both within the scientific community and in the press. The whole designer baby thing.

[00:06:11] Right now the bottle neck for most therapy with CRISPR, is delivery. If a person has a disease like cystic fibrosis, a disease for which we know the cause, we know exactly what the letter in the DNA we need to change is. It would be great if we could go into that person’s lungs and change it over to a more normal lung. But the delivery is the problem. You have to get inside the cells.

Hurdles for gene therapy

[00:06:44] The hurdle for gene therapy and a lot of other advances is finding a way to target the right cells. How do you get the system inside the cells? And right now, we’re using technology that we’ve used for many years in the past, so you can deliver it with the virus. You can deliver it as a Nano-particle, but nobody really knows how efficient those deliveries are.

[00:07:08] There’s also a problem with potential ‘off target’ effects, where in a small proportion of cases, it edits what it is not supposed to edit. The edit produces something catastrophic, produces a cancer cell. That is of course bad.

[00:07:25] Although, they’re working on those problems, the easier way to go about getting rid of genetic diseases is to do it at the embryo level. That level is very controversial. There are people who don’t believe in embryo editing for a variety of different reasons. They don’t think that it’s a procedure that is morally responsible. It’s also something that would have to be proven extremely safe for it to be used wisely. But the biggest fear for people is that it will work. It is going to work very well. Preliminary experiments indicate that it will.

Where do you draw the line?

[00:08:12] Where do we draw the line? So, right now everyone is talking about editing away diseases but if you take that further and you say, “What is considered something that needs to be edited away?” Or, “Do we want to think about enhancements?” If you think about the lengths that people go through to make sure their kid gets every advantage in life. Would you want to make your kids smarter or taller or more athletic? Is it ethical and desirable to change the bell curve of the world’s population where you have people on the two ends of the bell curve who may be unusual in one way or another? We need to ask ourselves the question: “Is it good for society in general to make everybody more uniform?”

Medical ethics

[00:09:13] This argument can be applied to a lot of different things, not just genome editing. The last thing is the economics of it. So far, the only way you can do this is through in vitro fertilisation and that’s a $30,000 procedure. So, are we going to create a society that has different classes? Will you, based your economic wealth, be able to ensure that not only you but your descendants forevermore will not get a genetic disease? Whilst people who can’t afford that procedure are doomed to have their families riddled with that disease forevermore. Who pays for it?

Rules, regulations and monitoring

Andrea Macdonald: [00:10:06] Several reports have come out including Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics and Governance by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine (USA) which focus on genome editing, the things that we need to be looking at, the recommendations, touching on the things that you have mentioned. There’s one thing issuing a report and making recommendations. How can this process be overseen to make sure people act? What are the practical tools that we can put in place to ensure things are being done properly?

Gene Drive

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:10:46] Well it’s a very interesting question. Another controversial area is editing an entire species. Gene Drive is like a perpetual motion machine for genome editing. One individual organism can spread a genetic characteristic through a population of the same species extremely quickly. So, it overrides normal Mendelian inheritance and all its progeny no matter what organism it mates with, whether they have the gene or not. All the progeny will carry the new edit.

Enforcing directives

[00:11:37] With a lethal edit you can make an organism less able to produce. Within 10 generations you can completely change over a species, even eliminate it. Work is being carried out with the mosquito strain that carries malaria in Zika in this area. It becomes a matter of how do you bound (fence in) something like that? A mosquito isn’t going to recognize the boundaries of a country or a city. You could decide to deploy it somewhere in a particular region but there’s no way once you deploy it that the problem doesn’t become something that is potentially world-wide. So, the United Nations has issued directives, but they don’t necessarily have enforcement power.

Who is the regulator?

[00:12:42] The huge question is “Who regulates the stuff. Who should be given the remit to regulate it?” I don’t have a ready answer for that but it’s something that’s up in the air right now. If you want the public to ‘weigh in’ they have to know that it exists. If you ask the average person on the street, unless they are the type of person who is glued to the Discovery Channel or similar, they are not necessarily going to know what was regarded as science fiction for generations is now close to happening. One of my missions in life is to spread the word how fast the science is moving. I tell people that they should form their opinions of it.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:13:34] Could you tell us about your work in this area?

Engaging the Public in science

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:13:38] I’m on my second community lab. It’s called Biotech Without Borders. It is a standalone laboratory, not part of a university or a company. It’s a non-profit entity that exists to serve the public. One of the things we do is to provide lab space for people who want to do projects who may not otherwise have access to a lab. The other important part of the mission is outreach in the form of hosting all sorts of lectures and public forums around the technology and getting people involved in it ‘hands on’ within classes and workshops.

[00:14:25] I think that’s critical. If you don’t understand a technology and it is imposed on you it is frightening.

Why we should all be scientists

[00:14:58] The process of doing some of the science yourself, even at a low level, has the potential to demystify it. So, at Biotech Without Borders we invite the public to do some of the science themselves. I have a CRISPR workshop where participants ‘knock out’ a gene in the yeast genome.

[00:15:26] We also have posted a number of public forums around CRISPR. There is an excellent public forum prepared in response to the report you were talking about by the Museum of Science in Boston. People are invited to look at a few scenarios that may or may not be likely. Everybody shares their views at the end of the process.

Engaging the public in science

[00:16:09] People are asked to consider scenarios. For example, “If you had a genetic disorder would you be open to some sort of CRISPR based therapy? If you had a child would you be open to enhancing them? If it were possible to make them more athletic, would you do that? Where people have a genetic disorder that is a burden on the health care industry, using sickle cell anaemia as the example, do you think that they should be given a choice of having gene therapy if it gets to the point where treatment of that disease works with CRISPR? Who should pay for it? Should it be mandatory?”

Andrea Macdonald: [00:17:09] You gave a talk in Dubai this year and spoke about a development that might happen within China in the next two years. Could you elaborate?

The fearlessness of China in pushing forward with new technologies

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:17:20] The extent to which the Chinese have embraced technology is interesting. I really get the sense that they want to be the world leader. The government has invested considerable resources. They seem a lot more fearless than we are about going forward with these new technologies.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:17:45] What’s your opinion of that?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:17:48] There are good points and bad points. I like how they are moving the needle forward. However, often they don’t do as good a technological job as we do. For example, the first two editing experiments with human embryos were in China but they were non-viable embryos. We had to wait for the one in the United States to be the first. That was almost a year ago. It was supposedly an implantable quality embryo, although as far as I know, it hasn’t been repeated.

[00:18:30] The Chinese have done experiments in monkeys now. We’re waiting to see how the monkeys develop. My prediction in the Dubai talk was the first CRISPR baby would be born in China. I still hold that opinion. There is a big push to use these technologies to improve the health of their population. They have a monolithic government structure. Their system enables them to make decrees ‘make it so and it becomes so’, without a lot of debate.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:19:12] In one of your other talks you mentioned legal battles around CRISPR.

Legal battles around CRISPR 

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:19:36] There has been a settlement relating to a case between the Broad Institute and Berkeley. I think it came down on the side of the Broad Institute.

[00:19:54] Normally, when two universities have overlapping technology patents, the lawyers will get together, and they’ll divide up the pie up. I think it’s indicative of how transformational and valuable CRISPR technology is. They went to such lengths and head to head for so long. It cost them a ridiculous amount of money in legal fees. What’s interesting is all sides are making it free for researchers to use. So, the technology is not being suppressed, everyone is using it.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:20:43] Is it open access?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:20:45] Well, not so much open access. It’s readily available to anyone who is doing research but if they invent something that is patentable that’s when the licensing fees are going to come into play.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:21:06] As I explained in our offline discussion before this interview, ideaXme‘s audience is made up of subject matter experts within the specific fields in which we interview people. It also includes everyone else who is interested in what’s happening next, that is the big ideas and humans who Move the human story forward! ideaXme Ltd.

Scientific papers and further reading for the public and for scientists

Are you able to recommend scientific papers for people within your area of interest, biotech? Perhaps, suggest a book or two for the public to bring them up to speed with developments in this area?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen [00:21:38] Jennifer A Doudna (and Samuel H Sternberg) just published A Crack in Creation, Gene Editing And The Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. It’s about CRISPR and genome editing technologies. She also published a review on the subject for people in the field. I would read papers written by Jennifer, Feng Zang and a number of other scientists, who were credited with discovering the technology and are the subject matter experts in this field.

[00:22:17] I think that the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine’s report that you mentioned might be interesting for people to read. It is thoughtfully written at a level the public can understand. I recommend that report as well.

[00:22:40] There is also some very interesting material online. The New York Genome Center has a series of videos and they published online regarding CRISPR. They explain the science at different levels depending on the audience. For example, it starts out the level of a 10-year-old and then level of like a high school student, then the level of college student, then maybe a graduate student in the area and then an expert. So, it’s like a series of five different explanations of the same technology increasing in complexity and scope each time.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:23:28] That sounds brilliant. So, what are your plans with Biotech Without Borders over the next five years?

Plans for Biotech Without Borders

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:23:34] I would love to expand our reach. Further to attending a number of sustainable development conferences at the U.N, I was struck by a number of things. There are so many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, that really could benefit from having more capacity for biotech internally. There are a number of amazing people working to make that happen. I would like my organisation to be able to participate in that in some way. I’m trying to work towards that. But it’s an area that I don’t know much about in terms of delivering non-profit services or liaising with people.

Hacking the Helix

[00:24:25] I would like Biotech Without Borders to be more global in its reach than my first non-profit. Also, I enjoy and focus a lot of attention on teaching the teachers. We have a great program called Hack the Helix, that we’re expanding this year. It provides New York city public school teachers with access to a real lab. They can swap tricks and techniques with each other and broaden what they are teaching.

[00:25:00] High school students who study the sciences encounter a much more sophisticated subject than just a few years back. I mean, when I was in high school I was making macaroni models of DNA. These people are doing experiments that twenty, thirty years ago were Nobel Prize winning experiments. It’s part of the school curriculum. To prepare them to be the scientists of the future, the savvier stem teachers are trying to open themselves up more to hacking the helix.

Ellen’s plans to create online science classrooms

Andrea Macdonald: [00:25:49] Do you think that any aspect of what you do could be brought online? Are you planning to create online classrooms, or is this high risk given the nature of some experiments?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:26:07] This is a very interesting topic. Recently, I made the decision to put some classes online. I regularly receive requests to offer our classes online, particularly from people in countries who can’t come to the United States and take classes at Biotech Without Borders.

Encouraging ethical behaviour

[00:26:38] The information is available piecemeal anyway. So, it’s not like I’m revealing secrets. All my work involves encouraging ethical behaviour and safety in bioscience. The online courses will be no different. You can’t contain this stuff. I briefed a U.N. Disarmament Committee once. I remember their faces when I said that you could spot DNA on a piece of paper and mail it anywhere in the world. Their mouths dropped open.

[00:27:35] It’s not something that you can suppress. The hardest thing to figure out is what changes to make in an organism to get whatever result that you want. It’s not easy to create a super pathogen. If you think of all the millions of microbe species there are and how Mother Nature is experimenting with them all the time. You only have a handful of what the FBI calls “select agents”, things that are so dangerous that they must be tightly regulated.

[00:28:27] So, if Mother Nature with all her power has really failed to create huge threats, it’s not easy to imagine an amateur stumbling onto something or even deliberately creating something. There was a debate about whether papers revealing the specific letters that were changed in the flu virus H5N1 to make it super infectious should be published. A decision was made to publish because the information was extremely important, and nobody could figure out who would be the gatekeeper for it.

[00:29:24] Obviously, health services all over the world needed to know and still need to know the details, as detailed monitoring of flu strains is necessary. If three out of the five mutations start appearing, they know there are two mutations away from a potential pandemic. You can’t suppress that information.

The dual uses of technology

[00:29:48] It’s always challenging. If a technology is sufficiently powerful it’s always going to be dual use. You have to take a deep breath and do the best you can. I applaud DNA synthesis companies for not just sending out any sequence that anyone asks for. I applaud that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping, that they’re not going to send someone genes for ricin or small pox without very good reason. But at the same time, I don’t think that it should be heavily regulated.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:30:28] What are the barriers to this openness that you are promoting?

Barrier to open science

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:30:41] The biggest barrier to open science in general is the reward system. Right now if you were a young professor at a university, your tenure is dependent on publishing papers that are yours, unique and important. So, if you are working on something and you’re discovering something it’s not to your advantage to share that knowledge and have someone with more resources potentially scoop you.

[00:31:15] So there’s a built-in barrier to collaboration in that if you want to get ahead, your university wants you to be the first author on the publication or the last author on the publication, not stuffed somewhere in the middle. Industry it is based on patents. If you have a technology that’s patentable you’re likely to get investors because they figure that you have a competitive advantage.

[00:31:47] If you make it open source you must be very clever about how you go about marketing the company. Arduino, an open source hardware and software company comes to mind. Arduino works well because it is open source. It is also at a price point and a difficulty point where most people would rather just buy an Arduino than trying to make it from scratch themselves.

[00:32:13] Having said that, they have run into competition with Raspberry Pi and many other small computer companies. The whole system is set up, so openness and sharing are not encouraged. That is the biggest barrier with overcoming obstacles to openness.

Managing the advancement of new technologies

Andrea Macdonald: [00:32:33] If you were given the job of heading up a world-wide committee but unlike the U.N. you were able to enter into implementation of the findings of a report. What would you do as head of that committee in ensuring that the growth of these technologies can be managed to the advantage of everybody and to reduce the risk?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:33:05] There’s an interesting experiment being done by Assistant Professor Kevin M Esvelt who is now at MIT Media Lab (audio mentions Harvard where he did his PhD). He’s working with Gene Drives. He is trying to create a framework for the work to go forward transparently. The meetings with local communities are documented. Everything is made public. There’s a level of transparency that you normally don’t see in scientific research associated with his projects. I think that’s a step in the right direction.

The negative impact of fear mongering

[00:33:54] I believe in democratic societies, but I also worry that the public can be swayed by fear. There are a lot of people who are good at fear mongering. One of the reasons I entered into this field was I was very frightened by how effective fear mongering has been in GMO food. There is absolutely no evidence that food containing modified DNA is bad for people to consume.

[00:34:36] The idea that somehow the edited DNA is going to get into your DNA is so outside the bounds of what we know about how food enters the body. We have hundreds of years of research. It’s laughable. On numerous occasions, I’ve seen a specific publication with rats and cancers cited. When you study the paper, it says no such thing. The data is completely inconclusive. They use words like “possible” “might’, a lot of soft (vague) words in the discussion section to describe the findings.

The importance of being well informed and reading the scientific background

[00:35:24] No one ever bothers to click through and actually read the paper or has scientific background and knowledge to understand the terminology. That drives me nuts. So, I don’t want the torches and pitchforks to come up the hill and shut down this research which is critical to our survival on the planet. Yet I know a lot of people don’t like the idea that we’re going to use one technology to fix the mistakes of another technology. We’ve either got to reduce the number of people living on this planet drastically, or we’re going to have to find high tech solutions to feed everyone, keep them clothed and housed and comfortable. There isn’t enough going on right now to do it that.

[00:36:23] The imbalance of technology, where you have countries that have it and countries that don’t is also frightening. If it gets sufficiently imbalanced, that’s a recipe for a political imbalance too.

Equitable distribution of technology

[00:36:43] I would like to see a more equitable distribution of the technology. There’s a lot of work being done in certain countries to try and educate people that GMO doesn’t make people sick. Whole economic systems are in danger of going down. An example, is the papaya crop in Hawaii which was almost was obliterated by a particular disease. The fix is a genetically modified papaya which is perfectly safe to eat, doesn’t do anything bad to the environment but is resistant to this virus.

[00:37:26] Yet the anti GMO lobby almost shut it down. That really frightens me. I want to do something about that, not just by spreading the word about the science but by getting people to do some simple genetic engineering and in doing so they realise that it isn’t this incredibly evil brew of witchcraft. It’s just another technology. A rock is a dual use. You can build something with it, or you can hit someone on the head with it. So, people should not be scared of this stuff and that’s one of the big reasons that I like these community labs.

Andrea Macdonald: [00:38:06] What is it in your history that brought you to this point? What drives you to do what you do? You did a PhD in molecular biology. But when did this passion, this fascination begin?

Ellen Jorgensen’s career in biotech

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:38:24] I had a very typical career for most of my life. I worked in the biotech industry for many years. I worked in a number of areas, from inhaled insulin formulations to looking at tobacco related disease markers and virology.

[00:38:46] You get to an age when you just don’t want to be a brick in the wall anymore. It became obvious, although I was doing solid work, that I wasn’t on the road to a Nobel Prize. I heard about this movement of democratise biotech and it appealed to me. The context was a scary profound trend towards anti-technology and anti-intellectualism.

Motivation to become involved in democratising biotech

[00:39:46] I became involved in the biotech movement by accident. We managed to start a lab quickly, really because I had the skills. I was reading one of these ‘news of the weird’ columns in a local paper when I came across a piece describing how people were trying to make glowing green yoghurt. They were doing this from labs in their closets. I thought “This is something that I do for a living. It’s great that people are enamoured enough of it to do it as a hobby. Maybe this should be supported to counteract that anti tech feeling”.

[00:40:29] That’s what drew me in originally. Two of the people that showed up to our original meeting were students that couldn’t find any lab space to test ideas. When I was younger, I had similar experience. I had to go from lab to lab to see if one would take me on as a volunteer. I thought there should be a space for them to test their inventions.

[00:40:56] Over the years we’ve learned that these labs were good for a number of things, including very early ‘proof of concept’ experiments. They are used by a broad spectrum of people from differing backgrounds. For example, by entrepreneurs who may not have the most typical career path, or individuals who are not scientists but have partnered with friends who are.

Furthermore, in another area it’s nice to see people use these facilities who ‘think outside of the box’ on the arts science interface. It really jump starts creativity.

Whom would Ellen like to meet?

Andrea Macdonald: [00:41:32] You’ve of course been featured in many of the world’s media, talk regularly on this subject and advise the U.N. so, meet many fascinating people. Whom would you like to meet who you haven’t already met and what question would you like to ask that person?

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:41:58] This is going to sound strange. My first passion, a long time ago in the early years at school, was astronomy. I would really like to meet someone from another planet; to know definitively if there’s any intelligent life out there. I think of this often.

What is the question that Ellen would like to ask that person?

[00:42:24] Unfortunately, the rule of the universe is that by the time any species gets sufficiently technologically advanced they end up destroying themselves. So, we’re never going to see anyone from another planet that has life forms. But I would really like to know, to meet someone or some entity and ask them what their life is like? Find out how their consciousness is structured, whether they have the same emotional circuits that we do. Do they love, hate, aspire to things? That would be a really interesting thing to do. (laughs)

Andrea Macdonald: [00:43:22] Ellen Jorgensen founder of Biotech Without Borders thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen: [00:43:32] It’s been a pleasure for me too. Thank you.

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Credits: Andrea Macdonald interview video, text, and audio

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