Michael Discovered A New Way To Make Twins

Is there a new way to make twins? If there is, Michael's might just have discovered it. And hint: it's going to hard work. From Hannah’s twin-like sister to the most famous cells in human history, in this episode Hannah and Michael continue to explore whether we truly own of ourselves, this time at a microscopic level. From our genome, to our cells and even our personalities, what happens in a future where cloning is the norm? Where Zygotes might be used to create mini-Michaels? And where reproduction as we know it now is...optional. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens. Today, I want to tell you about something I've discovered.

• 0:07Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 0:07Michael Stevens?

  A new way to make twins.

• 0:11Hannah Fry?

  Is it ethical?

• 0:12Michael Stevens?

  Oh, it's ethical. It's not easy.

• 0:14Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 0:16Michael Stevens?

  There's two ways to make twins.

• 0:18Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 0:18Michael Stevens?

  And the first way is the normal way. You and your partner just really hope that that zygote splits into two babies.

• 0:26Hannah Fry?

  Genetically identical.

• 0:27Michael Stevens?

  Genetically identical individuals. The second way is for you and your partner to have about 70 trillion children.

• 0:35Hannah Fry?

  Okay, that, that sounds like quite a lot of work.

• 0:37Michael Stevens?

  It's not that bad. All it requires is birthing 70,000 children a second.

• 0:44Hannah Fry?

  What, for your, your entire fertile life?

• 0:46Michael Stevens?

  Well, I mean, for, for your entire fertile life. Not mine, my partner's, luckily.

• 0:51Hannah Fry?

  You're a, you're not going to get much else done.

• 0:54Michael Stevens?

  No, no, but wouldn't it be cool? I'll talk about how this works in a moment.

• 1:03Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:06Michael Stevens?

  Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.

• 1:26Hannah Fry?

  But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.

• 1:37Michael Stevens?

  It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 1:56Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, The Rest Is Science. This is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies, most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.

• 3:05Hannah Fry?

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• 3:50Hannah Fry?

  flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 4:11Hannah Fry?

  That, I mean, I think for all of us, went in a different direction than we were expecting.

• 4:15Michael Stevens?

  Well, there's two kinds of twins. There's the fraternal twin, which is also called the dizygotic twin. And what happens there is that two zygotes form. What's a zygote? When the sperm and the egg mix, they make a zygote. That's the very first stage, and it contains the unique genetic sequence for an individual. Now, if two eggs happen to get fertilized by two different sperm, you get two zygotes, dizygotic. And they're both in the womb, and they both become kids who have like the same birthday, but are like siblings to each other genetically.

• 4:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Michael Stevens?

  However.

• 4:48Hannah Fry?

  You just so happen to be sharing a womb.

• 4:50Michael Stevens?

  You just so happen to be sharing a womb with no view. Well, limited view.

• 4:54Hannah Fry?

  Well, you can see each other.

• 4:55Michael Stevens?

  You can see each other. That's kind of cute. But if one zygote forms, okay, one genetic sequence for one individual, and then that zygote splits into two, you now have two of the same individual that gestate and get born and have the same DNA, more or less. Of course, over time, through epigenetics, their DNA will diverge. But that's what we call monozygotic twins, and they are identical twins.

• 5:24Hannah Fry?

  Mono meaning one zygote.

• 5:26Michael Stevens?

  Mono meaning one. But what I'm interested in is a kind of twin that I invented, that I call not dizygotic, not monozygotic, but doppelzygotic.

• 5:37Hannah Fry?

  Doppels, as in like doppelganger.

• 5:39Michael Stevens?

  We've doubled a zygote. So we have two zygotes that are identical, but not because one split at the same time into two, but because at two different times, the same zygote randomly happened to be made.

• 5:52Hannah Fry?

  So, hold on. Where did you get this 70 trillion number from? Is it because you take two parents, right? Mother, father, and the number of different combinations of ways that you can combine their genes?

• 6:01Michael Stevens?

  More or less, yes. We don't know enough about genetic science and reproduction to give really concrete numbers. So 70 trillion is within a degree of magnitude or so, one way or the other. What I'm getting at is how many different genetic variations can two parents make?

• 6:19Hannah Fry?

  Because they have to come from the same individual. Or two parents.

• 6:21Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 6:22Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:22Michael Stevens?

  But when you have a kid with someone else, exactly which half they get from the mom and the dad is up to chance. And how the chromosomes change during that conception process is up to chance. But there are only so many variations and there are only so many that are viable. There are only so many combinations that will turn into a kid. And there are only so many that will turn into a human. Like, some of these variations might be like a different species, for all we know. But 70 trillion is a pretty good estimate, based on my important research on Reddit, for how many viable, unique progeny two people could have.

• 7:01Hannah Fry?

  I wonder how many siblings there have ever been, you know? Like, how close are we to 70 trillion?

• 7:07Michael Stevens?

  Not close at all.

• 7:07Hannah Fry?

  I mean, nowhere near.

• 7:08Michael Stevens?

  There have only been about 110 billion humans to have ever been born in the history of our species. But we can also grab on to the birthday problem. You don't actually need to have 70 trillion kids. In order to get a specific possible kid, you'll have to try like 70 trillion times.

• 7:28Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Michael Stevens?

  But to get kids such that you can find a pair that match, you only need to have about 10 million kids.

• 7:34Hannah Fry?

  Oh, hang on, suddenly this sounds achievable.

• 7:37Michael Stevens?

  Suddenly, it's looking like it's gonna happen. 10 million children, the chance that there will be a pair that have the same genome is about 50%. So, it's like a coin flip.

• 7:49Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Now, okay, you can't compare that 10 million number to 110 billion, right?

• 7:54Michael Stevens?

  No, because this is 10 million children from the same parents.

• 7:58Hannah Fry?

  From the same parents.

• 7:59Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 7:59Hannah Fry?

  But even so, actually, suddenly, the chances of two siblings being essentially very, at least very, very, very close, if not completely identical, despite not having come from a single zygote, I mean, it's starting to look quite likely.

• 8:11Michael Stevens?

  It's... But here's the thing that makes it even more complicated. I'm talking about people sharing their genome. But really, when it comes to looking at them, it's the phenotype that makes them unique. It's the expression, the behavior, the things that we can observe. And someone can have a very different genome than someone else. And yet, their nose, their eyes, their hair, their... All that stuff can be really similar. And that's why siblings so often look alike, even though we can genetically tell them apart.

• 8:42Hannah Fry?

  I can open my sister's Face ID on her phone.

• 8:45Michael Stevens?

  Are you serious?

• 8:46Hannah Fry?

  She finds it... Extremely annoying, by the way. Not that I'm opening her phone all the time, just that she shares my face.

• 8:52Michael Stevens?

  I would not confuse you two, though.

• 8:54Hannah Fry?

  No, no, you wouldn't confuse us, but in like our mannerisms and on Face ID, yeah, Face ID. Because Face ID is, a lot of it is about your orbital bone.

• 9:04Michael Stevens?

  Oh, is it?

• 9:05Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, because it's a structure that doesn't change.

• 9:07Michael Stevens?

  My sister, I don't think she looks anything like me, but I think our mannerisms, like you said, very similar. My daughter picks that up. She only wants me or my sister to read her bedtime stories. Because she says that we deliver them in the same way, I guess so.

• 9:22Hannah Fry?

  Or is it?

• 9:23Michael Stevens?

  Or is it, says my sister and me. But the point I'm getting at here is that randomly conceiving a child who is genetically identical to a child you've already had, not impossible in principle, in theory, but practically, it's never going to happen, okay? We all share DNA for the most part, because a lot of the genes that we have do the same thing in all of us. And they don't cause a noticeable difference. We've heard this before, that like 99.9% of our DNA is the same amongst every human.

• 9:58Hannah Fry?

  It's just the marginal differences.

• 10:00Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's that 0.1% that really codes for the things that make me recognizably a unique individual. I can pass some of that to my children, and some of that might appear in my grandchildren, but it decreases very quickly. And it's not an amount that just keeps getting cut in half, and therefore it never becomes zero. My grandkids aren't going to have a quarter of my DNA, even though mathematically you could easily kind of hand wave into that. Grandchildren have anywhere from 23 to 27% of their grandparents, each grandparents' DNA.

• 10:33Hannah Fry?

  And this is because even though you get 50/50 of your mother and your father, there's nothing saying which 50% of your mother and father you're getting.

• 10:40Michael Stevens?

  Exactly.

• 10:41Hannah Fry?

  So you're not definitely getting 25% of their mother and their father.

• 10:44Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. You're getting somewhere between 23 and 27%. The half you get from your mom could be like a little weighted towards her dad and less her mom. For example, your great-grandchildren will only have between 9 and 14%

• 10:58Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 10:59Michael Stevens?

  of what makes you unique. By seven generations, your seven great-great-great-great-grandchild is

• 11:06Michael Stevens?

  Statistically, no more like you are right now than a stranger on the street.

• 11:11Hannah Fry?

  No, by which, how many generations did you say?

• 11:13Michael Stevens?

  Seven.

• 11:13Hannah Fry?

  Seven, really?

• 11:14Michael Stevens?

  By seven. After seven generations, we reach a point where it's possible for your progeny to have absolutely none of your personal genetic variation.

• 11:23Hannah Fry?

  That's so interesting.

• 11:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Hannah Fry?

  You know, I've thought this quite a few times, actually, about ancestors, right? So if you go seven generations back, because I've done some work in the past where I've tried to find their names and tried to find out where they're from and all of this kind of thing, let's think, seven generations back, so we're talking about 1700s or so? Maybe a little bit earlier?

• 11:41Michael Stevens?

  I guess it'd be like almost 200 plus years ago.

• 11:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. I don't feel like I have an emotional connection to those people, you know? Like, I can hear about their story, but I don't feel emotionally connected to their plight in the same way as I do, you know, when I look back to sort of my great-grandparents, for instance. But now, what you're saying is, I mean, that's fine, because I don't even have a sort of genetic connection to them either.

• 12:04Michael Stevens?

  I mean, you might, but it's going to be small, but it could very potentially be zero. Seven generations is the first distance, the closest distance at which we can expect 0% of the personal genetic variation to have persisted. But if you go back 11 generations, 70% of your ancestors from 11 generations ago are not in you at all. So when you think about your legacy being about your genes passing on, it's a temporary extension of your life. And it's a very quickly shrinking one.

• 12:37Hannah Fry?

  This does make sense, though, as well, because I think if you imagine, okay, you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on and so on and so on, and that number is essentially doubling every generation you go back. What that means is, if you have sort of turned that upside down, there comes a point where the number of potential ancestors you have is more than the number of people who are alive, and thus there was some crossover.

• 12:59Michael Stevens?

  Of course, yeah.

• 13:00Hannah Fry?

  And if you do this calculation, you can work out that there's a point where you go back far enough in history where there are some people who are essentially, everyone alive in modern Britain, for instance, is descended from that person, Charlemagne being one example, right? But not just because Charlemagne's Everybody who was around at that time, there's so much folding over and overlapping of our ancestors that essentially there's an inevitability that you're related to everybody who was around at that point. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense then, because otherwise we just all look the same, right? If Charlemagne's DNA really persisted for a much longer time, then we would all look like Charlemagne.

• 13:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that's right. And there would be literally doppelzygotic twins.

• 13:44Hannah Fry?

  Everywhere.

• 13:45Michael Stevens?

  Everywhere. But that doesn't happen. And so the more you think about it, the more it feels like your genetic sequence is really, arguably, very much yours. And if anyone randomly had it.

• 14:01Hannah Fry?

  Like, found a way to sort of profit off it?

• 14:05Michael Stevens?

  Just by chance.

• 14:06Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 14:07Michael Stevens?

  The chromosomes all contained and it happened to be the exact same sequence of base pairs that you had, wouldn't be impossible. It could happen. It could happen from some parents that aren't even my parents, but probably not on this planet. The planet couldn't even support the amount of people required for us to feel like this would happen. But if we colonized other planets and we found a way for the species to last for trillions of years, it could happen. So, something to look forward to.

• 14:34Hannah Fry?

  And that feels like a quite far-fetched reason to not say that it's not yours, you know what I mean? Like, as a sort of philosophical discussion, I'm comfortable with accepting that that's not going to happen.

• 14:44Michael Stevens?

  So, to what extent do we own our genetic sequence? If it is so uniquely mine, and it's so unlikely to naturally happen again, what kind of claim do I have to own it?

• 14:57Hannah Fry?

  But it belongs to you, surely. Surely this is a one and done. This is an open-shut case, Michael.

• 15:03Michael Stevens?

  It seems that way. However, it's theoretically possible that another human could be born with my exact sequence, and I wouldn't, I clearly wouldn't have any right to say, hey, I had that first, give it back.

• 15:18Hannah Fry?

  I've got the patent. I mean, the twin thing, you're right, though, you do get natural twins, and you can't have one twin that owns it more than the other.

• 15:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that's right. Twins don't share their DNA exactly. This is like a fun little party thing to bring up if you want to be pedantic. Because of mutations that happen epigenetically through life. They're not going to be exactly identical. Also, they have different fingerprints. We've talked about this before. Fingerprints are not designed by your DNA. They're not coded by a gene. They just form randomly in the womb.

• 15:51Hannah Fry?

  It's a process.

• 15:52Michael Stevens?

  So you can tell twins apart by their fingerprints. Twins make for a really interesting case because which twin can claim that they own the genome? Wouldn't would this even come up legally? Like if one set of a twin was like, hey, I want to sell the personally unique part of my genome for this company to create digital versions or even real flesh and blood versions, like clones of me. Would the other twin be like, uh, but I don't want that. And I'm the same in appearance in many ways. People are going to confuse me with all these clones that you're allowing to have made. I feel like courts would have a pretty easy time with that one.

• 16:36Hannah Fry?

  What, saying no, you're not allowed to?

• 16:37Michael Stevens?

  I think veto power would be given. But what can they do with, let's start with just cells. What can they do with my cells? We've already talked about body parts. People can do a lot with my body parts after I'm dead. But what about while I'm alive? They don't take a body part. They just take some cells from me.

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm. What could they do with it?

• 16:57Michael Stevens?

  What could they do with it?

• 16:58Hannah Fry?

  Would they still belong to you?

• 16:59Michael Stevens?

  Would they still belong to me?

• 17:00Hannah Fry?

  Well, the thing you're describing has actually happened, right? In the case of Henrietta Lacks.

• 17:06Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 17:06Hannah Fry?

  Very famous story and we'll come to it after the break.

• 17:15Michael Stevens?

  I live 7,636 kilometers away from Hannah. So we rarely get to see each other in person. That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us and maybe for you too. Because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live onstage at Goalhanger's inaugural festival. It's going to be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh. The Rest Is Fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre. General Sale goes live on the 2nd of June at 10 a.m. So get some tickets and get ready for some fun.

• 17:55Michael Stevens?

  Some serious fun. Go to southbankcentre.co.uk to find out more.

• 18:04Speaker 03

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• 18:40Hannah Fry?

  Welcome back. Okay, Henrietta Lacks. It's quite a dark story in a lot of ways. I mean, not in a lot of ways, in, in, in almost everywhere.

• 18:47Michael Stevens?

  In the way.

• 18:48Hannah Fry?

  In the way. This is the 1950s and up until this point in history, people had tried to grow human cells in a lab and really struggled with doing so. They would die after a couple of days. And there was this, this one surgeon, this is at John Hopkins Hospital in America, where unusually they would treat black patients, poor black patients in particular, but they, they did so in these really segregated wards. I mean, as you say, in the way, this is a really dark story. And the, the unspoken, really unethical rule in all of this was that these patients were essentially paying for their free medical care by, by unknowingly acting as clinical research patients. Right?

• 19:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Hannah Fry?

  As subjects effectively. So this, this doctor, Richard Talindi, he was called, he was trying to understand the causes of cervical cancer. And so he ordered that every patient who came into the hospital and was treated for cervical cancer, he would take a sample from their bodies and would send it off to his lab assistant, who would then try and either experiment on the cells or try and get them to grow. So this is 1951. There was a young mother. She was called Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from, from America. And she had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer. And so during her treatment, during her, you know, when they sort of cut her. Open and tried to to to remove the tumor.

• 20:16Hannah Fry?

  As was standard, under this this doctor's care, they took this about a dime sized piece of tissue and they sent it off to the lab to.

• 20:23Michael Stevens?

  From her cervix.

• 20:24Hannah Fry?

  From her cervix, but specifically from the the cancerous part of her cervix.

• 20:29Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 20:30Hannah Fry?

  What was really strange when they took it to the lab was that whereas normally these cells would, you know, die after twenty four hours, forty eight hours, something like that. There was something about Henrietta's cells that meant that they actually just kept replicating. They just kept replicating and kept replicating and kept replicating. It didn't matter how many generations of replication they would go through, they just didn't, they were essentially immortal. Henrietta's cancer cells were essentially immortal.

• 20:57Michael Stevens?

  Immortal outside of her body.

• 20:59Hannah Fry?

  Outside of her body.

• 20:59Michael Stevens?

  In the hospital.

• 21:00Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Now, really tragically, Henrietta died of this this cancer really soon after all of this happened. But her cells remained in the laboratory and the scientists there really understood how strange and unusual this this thing was. Initially, they were interested in this from a sort of really scientific perspective, like what is it about these cells that that makes them so unusual? And it turns out that it all comes down to something called telomeres. So the way that I've had this described, my friend Adam Rutherford's Genesis is really good on this stuff. And he described telomeres as, you know, when you have a shoelace, the very end of a shoelace that sort of caps it and stops it from fraying.

• 21:43Hannah Fry?

  This is like the idea of telomeres, that every single time that you have your cells dividing, that degrades ever so slightly, right? You get you get your your, there's a limit to how short the shoelace can get, right? Before the cells just just end up dying. And what had happened in this, I mean, it really was a sort of one in a billion fluke chance. That the way that the cancer had interacted with Henrietta Lacks's cells meant that she had had that the the viral DNA, human papillomavirus, which is the thing that causes cervical cancer in the most part, had sort of invaded her own DNA next to this incredibly.

• 22:23Hannah Fry?

  Sensitive point along along the DNA chain. And so next to the bit that essentially acts as the master growth switch for a regular cell division and replication. So it altered her DNA in a way that meant that it could carry on forever, that it would end up being immortal. So, okay, initially, it's like this, this, this um scientific interest. But very soon, they realized that if they have these immortal cells, there is profit to be made from this. And so a company was started, uh, which essentially sold Henrietta Lacks's cells.

• 23:01Michael Stevens?

  Like literally a portion of the culture.

• 23:03Hannah Fry?

  Literally a portion of her cells. Her name was stripped from it. It's now called uh Hila. I don't know whether you say it like that, but it's spelt H E L A.

• 23:10Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Hannah Fry?

  And this stuff is all over the world.

• 23:15Michael Stevens?

  Right. And it wasn't sold as a curiosity. It was sold to other researchers, to universities to also learn from and study.

• 23:21Hannah Fry?

  And to pharmaceutical companies particularly. Because because the thing about this is that uh so many drugs have been tested on her cells. Her cells have been sold and sold and sold and sold again. I mean, we're really talking probably billions of dollars of of profit have been made purely from the kind of unusualness of her cells.

• 23:43Michael Stevens?

  Well, her family must have made a killing.

• 23:46Hannah Fry?

  How nice it would be if that were the case. Her family didn't even know that this had happened until uh many years later, when researchers started calling up and asking for additional blood tests just to work out what was going on with the body. It's estimated that scientists since nineteen fifty one have grown fifty million metric tons of her biological material in laboratories around the world.

• 24:10Michael Stevens?

  My gosh, so we keep calling them her cells. If these are her cells, they're part of her, then at this point. Her existence has mainly been as these cells.

• 24:24Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I mean, her, her actual existence as a human body is sort of a statistical anomaly.

• 24:30Michael Stevens?

  As a continuous human that can like drive a car and like eat breakfast. That was a blip of her existence.

• 24:35Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 24:36Michael Stevens?

  She is immortal in the form of these tons and tons and tons of ever growing cells of hers, whose genetic sequence is basically hers, with the, with the difference, of course, that they don't die.

• 24:48Hannah Fry?

  Right, exactly, exactly. But the genetic sequence is exactly hers. Now, I, I need to tell you, right, that, that the difference that her cells have made to the world is, you can't understate this, you know, the polio vaccine was tested on her cells, the COVID-19 vaccine was tested on her cells. You know, her cells have been used in CRISPR gene editing, in sickle cell anemia. I mean, every, I, I don't think this is an overstatement to, to say this, but, but pretty much every major advance that has happened with genetics and, uh, you know, with, with, with this sort of type of biology has in some, uh, somewhere along the line, had Henrietta Lacks's cells to thank. But yeah, as you say, the family just completely cut out of this altogether.

• 25:32Michael Stevens?

  So in so many ways, she is a hero.

• 25:34Hannah Fry?

  Totally.

• 25:35Michael Stevens?

  And our health and wellbeing has been because of her.

• 25:40Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:40Michael Stevens?

  And yet she didn't know any of this was happening. She had no consent in the matter, no knowledge it was even happening. Until later.

• 25:49Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 25:49Michael Stevens?

  Her family finds out.

• 25:51Hannah Fry?

  Well, because this is the thing, she's given this incredible gift to the world without knowing it. I mean, it was taken from her.

• 25:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Hannah Fry?

  But meanwhile, her family were unable to pay for health insurance, you know? Like, all of us, all of our health has increased thanks to, thanks to her cells, but her own family were, were left unable to pay for health insurance. So yeah, this, this big court case, there's, there's actually been a, uh, another couple that have gone through just this year with different pharmaceutical companies. No one knows the, the, it, they settled for an undisclosed amount.

• 26:22Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 26:23Hannah Fry?

  But the family, when they initially sued, they sued for all of the net profits that were gained directly by selling her cells. Um, I mean, who knows what they actually got in the end? The law came down very firmly on the family's side, that actually the ownership of that intellectual property, I mean, I'm not sure how to even really describe it, that sort of owned the property side of her cells. Belong to her family.

• 26:48Michael Stevens?

  And that, I love trying to figure out what word to use because it's. Her cells are uniquely hers because they have the same genome in them. But I guess it's it's not intellectual property. She didn't think it up. She, in a way, I would say it's almost like abandoned property. Like, when you're born, you have been given this whole new kind of genome. And slowly, your consciousness matures and you're like, oh, hey, look, I found this and it's mine, finder's keepers. So, you know, she, I think, should have that right to herself. Well, her property was then taken against her knowledge and without her knowledge and then used.

• 27:33Michael Stevens?

  Now, the family got a settlement from at least one, maybe more companies. But has the court actually decided or has has any legislation come down to help us with future cases?

• 27:46Hannah Fry?

  I don't know if it has, you know, because the other thing on the flip side of this is, you know, we did the episode last week that was about whether you still own something that was a part of your body after you died. The answer was no. I mean, it was a resounding no. It's your skeleton. It can be it can be bought and sold and pushed around and, you know, posed in funny poses and someone could put a hat on it and drink out of it if they want to. And so why is this different? Because these cells, look, I think that her and her family were treated as appallingly. That's really clear. But I think you could also say, well, the cells never actually belonged to her body. And even if they did, well, then doesn't the same thing apply about skeletons?

• 28:28Hannah Fry?

  I guess perhaps the difference is that it's the information within the cells, right?

• 28:33Michael Stevens?

  Well, I know that in nineteen ninety, there was a big California Supreme Court case, Moore versus the Regents of the University of California, where a guy who, back in the late seventies, had a form of cancer, had his spleen removed. And then, without his knowledge, cells from that spleen were also cultured. And then this whole cell line began and it was sold to. Other universities to do tests and studies on. And I think a lot of really important medical knowledge came from it.

• 29:02Hannah Fry?

  Similar in a lot of ways to.

• 29:03Michael Stevens?

  Very similar.

• 29:04Hannah Fry?

  Sorry, yeah.

• 29:04Michael Stevens?

  But in this case, what happened is in in nineteen ninety, he sued the university for not telling him exactly what they were going to be doing with his cells and then for profiting off of them. He went to court and the first case was decided that like, no, you know, nothing happened here wrong. Like, they they have the right to do this.

• 29:30Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 29:30Michael Stevens?

  He appealed it. The appeals court was like, oh, my gosh, no, you're totally in the right. They went on his side and they argued that he deserved to to know, first of all, that all this was happening and should be paid. The California Supreme Court took it on and they said, no. These cells are the property of the university. And you don't deserve anything from it. Uh, one of the reasons they gave is that if we decide otherwise, then medical innovation gets slowed down.

• 30:03Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 30:03Michael Stevens?

  Because now researchers can't work on a cell line without having to constantly work with and do everything at the direction of the person the cells came from.

• 30:13Hannah Fry?

  Right, because you have to work on human cells in a in a petri dish.

• 30:17Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Hannah Fry?

  And those human cells, you can't just manufacture them out of nowhere. They have to come from a human. Right? And if you are continually asking for permission from the person who gave them, I can see that argument.

• 30:29Michael Stevens?

  Yes, I think part of it was the idea that like, yes, the cells that are in your body right now, they're totally yours. But if you consent to having some of them removed, in Moore's case, it was his spleen, in order to prolong his life. And and that did help him, by the way, like his cancer went into remission because they removed the spleen. It was a a white blood cell cancer. And they're stored in the spleen. I'm not a doctor, but blah blah. Anyway.

• 30:55Michael Stevens?

  I'm not gonna be removing spleens from anyone who asks.

• 31:00Michael Stevens?

  But.

• 31:03Michael Stevens?

  But he consented to that surgery. And then in the process of removing cells and I don't know if culturing is the right word, but in creating this cell line, a new thing was invented as far as the California Supreme Court was concerned. And that new thing did not belong to the original human whose genome and life was responsible for its existence at first.

• 31:28Hannah Fry?

  Is that where things stand now then?

• 31:31Michael Stevens?

  Well, I mean, that was in the 90s.

• 31:34Hannah Fry?

  But so this, I mean, this must be, because I know that the Henrietta Lacks settlements are just, I mean, fascinating to legal scholars. Because I think you're right that the law says, hey, it's not yours, no big deal. But if you're a pharmaceutical company, and this is dodgy, dodgy dealings.

• 31:54Michael Stevens?

  Well, I think in the case of Henrietta Lacks and in the case of more, there wasn't enough information given to the patients about what exactly they were signing away. Today, I think a lot of that is told to people because we use cell lines, especially from fetuses, a lot. And we test different medications on them. And so the fact that it's definitely happening today more than ever means that, I mean, it probably has fallen on the side of the university can own it. Other people can own your cells even long after you've died and while you're alive, so long as you've given them permission to.

• 32:34Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. What about your DNA, though?

• 32:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Can they, can they clone me?

• 32:40Hannah Fry?

  Right. If they have your DNA sequence, can that be owned without you?

• 32:44Michael Stevens?

  That's still very much unexplored. So while I could certainly donate some cells to a research hospital and tell them, hey, do whatever you want with these for as long as you want.

• 32:59Hannah Fry?

  The silly hat.

• 33:00Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, put silly hats on them, insult them, whatever. And in some ways, I might think that that's really worth it. If this is going to really help medicine advance, then I'm all for it. But at a certain point, they could start to say, hey, technology's advancing. We can take some of this DNA and we can literally create a zygote that matches Michael's genome. Plant that in a womb, boom, we got a new Michael. And would I be okay with that?

• 33:26Hannah Fry?

  Little baby B sauce.

• 33:27Michael Stevens?

  A little baby B sauce.

• 33:29Hannah Fry?

  Would you be okay with that?

• 33:30Michael Stevens?

  Um, I think that I would not be so okay with it for two reasons. One is the selfish right to publicity that I want to have. I want to be in control of myself and my personality, my image and.

• 33:44Hannah Fry?

  Michael, I think it'd be pretty good publicity to have a mini you. Like a literal mini, I think that's pretty good publicity.

• 33:49Michael Stevens?

  But that brings me to the second problem I have with it, which is that the mini me deserves their own life.

• 33:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Michael Stevens?

  They would live their whole life as, whoa, you're like, you're just like Michael. Hey, do, do some of his catchphrases. No, that wouldn't be fair to them.

• 34:04Hannah Fry?

  Raise your eyebrow.

• 34:05Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, can you raise your, oh, he can't raise his eyebrows yet. Whoa, whoa, and then the person's like, why do I have to live up to this thing? Why can't I be an individual?

• 34:13Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Michael Stevens?

  The thing is, I don't know if the, the paperwork that's signed by people who donate cells even includes the possibility of future things like cloning.

• 34:23Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 34:24Michael Stevens?

  It might circumscribe what can be done with the cells actually quite finely to not include cloning. But when it comes to cloning, I looked into the legality of it. And there's two different types of cloning. One is therapeutic cloning, where I clone someone's cells in order to make them, you know, new tissue or a new organ for transplant. And that is legal in the UK. It's legal in much of the United States. There are parts of the US where it's illegal, but it's very different country by country. Reproductive cloning is a whole different measure. This is where you don't just create tissue that matches. This is where you obviously create a person who can be born and is now a baby with the same genome as someone else. So I guess this is.

• 35:09Michael Stevens?

  This is a third, a third way of cloning.

• 35:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Michael Stevens?

  This, this, by the way, is the doppelzygotic twin that I was joking about earlier. Not created by chance and a lot of attempts, but through science. And cloning for reproductive purposes is actually surprisingly not illegal everywhere. It's illegal here. In the United States, it depends what state you live in.

• 35:33Hannah Fry?

  Really? What, human cloning?

• 35:35Michael Stevens?

  Human cloning.

• 35:36Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 35:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So as it turns out, there are, many states have made it illegal. But most states don't have a statute one way or the other. They just haven't decided it. Idaho has no law against it. But they do have a law saying that if you are a healthcare worker, you can, due to your own conscience, not be forced to participate in human cloning. Should it happen? If it happens, you can't lose your job because you don't want to be a part of it. Louisiana made human cloning illegal, but it recently expired, that prohibition. So legally, you can go clone humans in Louisiana.

• 36:16Hannah Fry?

  No one's actually done this, though, have they?

• 36:18Michael Stevens?

  Well, no. No one's done this for reproductive. No one's, no one's done reproductive cloning.

• 36:24Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Michael Stevens?

  As far as we know, right? You can, you can imagine that some scientists where we're not looking are like, hey, guys, like, we created this zygote out of Hannah's DNA. And we're gonna put it into a mother and it's gonna be born. And it will be a doppelzygotic twin. It will be identical genetically to Hannah Frye, though of course, it's a newborn baby.

• 36:46Hannah Fry?

  I think this is one of the things that is so difficult when it comes to creating legislation for future scientific advances. I mean, cloning has felt like science fiction for a really, I mean, for a really long time, right? People have written stories about this idea. But actually now, especially with things like, you know, gene editing. And there was a really big news story last year, I think, of where you could create a new baby using three parents, essentially, combining the genes of three different parents. You know, we are really at the stage where you can technically do this, you know? You can techn- Technically do this, but how are you supposed to create legislation to carve off every potential future scientific advance before it even actually happens?

• 37:28Michael Stevens?

  I don't think you should because you don't really know exactly what the context will be for future scientific applications. I think you just have to kind of deal with it as it happens. But that means there will always be this vanguard of a few people who are stuck in the middle. We don't have laws yet, but we need them. And it's going to be my court case that decides the precedent. Interestingly, reproductive cloning, here's where it is not prohibited. Besides the US states I mentioned, it's allowed in Iran, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Ukraine, and New Zealand.

• 38:00Hannah Fry?

  Okay. Well, of that list, two of them Donald Trump's invaded. So maybe, maybe we found a secret reason.

• 38:06Michael Stevens?

  Is that what he's up to? Is that what's going on? J D Vance wants so many more mini versions of themselves?

• 38:12Hannah Fry?

  A J D Vance army. We promised we would not be topical in this show.

• 38:19Michael Stevens?

  We promised we wouldn't be topical, and yet here we are talking about the most accurate and likely current event, which is J D Vance.

• 38:28Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 38:29Michael Stevens?

  Creating J D Vance two, three, four, five.

• 38:32Hannah Fry?

  Up to 70 trillion.

• 38:33Michael Stevens?

  It's really surprising that human cloning isn't as illegal as I thought it was. I just think that it hasn't come up enough that anyone's really ready to say, yep, we're going to pass legislation on this. I guess whether or not there are laws against human cloning, there are already laws about who owns genetic sequences. So you might say, hey, it's not against the law for our company to clone a human. It's like, technically, yeah, that's true, but what human are you going to clone? Because, as decided by the Supreme Court in 2013, in a case called the Association for Molecular Pathology versus Myriad Genetics, human genes and DNA sequences cannot be patented. They are products of

• 39:16Michael Stevens?

  nature, not inventions.

• 39:19Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 39:19Michael Stevens?

  Prior to that court case, a company, a biotech company, could literally patent a gene that they had found in nature that's in all of our bodies.

• 39:28Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 39:29Michael Stevens?

  The reason was to advance scientific progress.

• 39:32Hannah Fry?

  What? So you could say, for example, M C one R G. The gene that makes people ginger. You could say, OK, I found it. I own it now.

• 39:39Michael Stevens?

  Yes, you could do that. Why was that allowed? The idea was that, first of all, isolating the gene responsible for ginger hair was not easy. And it cost a lot of money and took a lot of time. And so if a company is going to try to find it, why would a company do that? That sounds like a government would do it. A company is only going to do it if they can then recoup all the money that it took, all the resources it took for them to find it. And that means that they need to be able to have rights to study and try different therapies on it or whatever, whatever they want to do with the gene for red hair.

• 40:14Hannah Fry?

  Give it to everybody.

• 40:14Michael Stevens?

  Give it to everybody, right? Whatever they want. They want the exclusive rights to pursue that research and sell such therapies and products. And so governments around the world said, fine, you can do that. We'll give you a patent on that gene. And that doesn't mean that they owned the red hair gene and that they could go up to redheaded people and like take it. It's mine. But it meant that they were the only company

• 40:37Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 40:37Michael Stevens?

  who could study it, work on it, do all that kind of stuff. But in 2013, in the US, and then I think later on in other countries, they've made similar decisions, which is to say, OK, that's over. Like, we all did a good job. Thanks for finding so many genes. But like, this is weird and it's potentially like very unethical. So you can no longer patent them.

• 40:57Hannah Fry?

  But, OK, then, in conclusion, if you can't patent a gene, if somebody can't own a genetic sequence, a company can't own a genetic sequence, and from that Moore case, it sort of looks like the cells that have left your body kind of don't belong to you, I mean, don't belong to you, they belong to the university, then we're back in the same place as skeletons then, right? You don't own your own anything.

• 41:20Michael Stevens?

  Here's the thing. You don't own your skeleton. You don't own your cells. You don't, because of that, you don't really own your genome. It can't be patented, but someone could still have it. They could physically possess it in cells.

• 41:35Hannah Fry?

  And buy it, yeah.

• 41:36Michael Stevens?

  But here's what you do own, and we have celebrities to thank for this. You own your right to publicity.

• 41:45Michael Stevens?

  Someone could totally have Hannah Frye cells and they could do whatever they wanted with them. They could sell them so long as you had given them consent.

• 41:53Hannah Fry?

  In the first place, yeah.

• 41:54Michael Stevens?

  In the first place. They could have these long after your death and they could sell them to universities and make billions of dollars and never give a cent to your children or your grandchildren or whatever.

• 42:05Hannah Fry?

  Let's say you actually do it then. You go to one of these places where it's technically not illegal. I mean, could just everybody, could, could all of these different people just have their own, I don't know, mini David Bowie?

• 42:17Michael Stevens?

  Only if David Bowie before he died or the, the people who run his estate give someone permission to do that. Not just to create the clone and to use his genome, but also to create new publicity around him, to use his, his likeness to, you know, do things in the world, looking like him. However, I think that if you're going to create a human non-reproductively, like completely sci-fi future style in a lab where you have like a little machine that puts the base pairs together. One thing that would be interesting to do would be to just make your own brand new person and not clone an individual like David Bowie, but literally say, hmm, uh, let's make the, uh, the orbital of the eye this shape.

• 43:02Michael Stevens?

  And you put in the little base pairs the way you want. And here's what's cool. If you do it that way, not only is it your kid, but it's your thing.

• 43:11Hannah Fry?

  Well, because it's your intellectual property then.

• 43:13Michael Stevens?

  You have invented their genome.

• 43:15Hannah Fry?

  Oh, no, that's horrible.

• 43:16Michael Stevens?

  In 2013, it was decided by the US Supreme Court that a gene cannot be patented. However, there have been companies that have taken genes and they've gone in and they've like, changed a few of the pieces of it into a thing that doesn't naturally appear. And it's been decided that they can patent and own those.

• 43:35Hannah Fry?

  But at the same time, you're not allowed to go in and edit the genome of a baby. Because that happened in China, remember that?

• 43:43Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 43:44Hannah Fry?

  So this is, once this became possible with CRISPR, which is where, I mean, you can literally go in and you have like, you have your DNA speakers and you can just go in and you can say, right, snip that bit out, snip that bit out, insert this instead. I mean, that's literally what you're able to do. And there was a case in China, let me get these details up actually. But a case in China where basically a rogue doctor decided to do this, to edit the genome of an embryo in advance of its birth.

• 44:10Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 44:11Hannah Fry?

  And the, there's like very strict global rules about this. And the entire scientific community really came down very hard about it. You're not allowed to do that.

• 44:23Michael Stevens?

  If you, as a scientist, edit a gene into something that's now considered an invention of yours, that's one thing. But if it becomes part of an individual who has their own like consciousness and rights, then they own it, which, which is kind of obvious. Like, I own the rights to my genome. However, my parents don't, even though they're the ones who invented it.

• 44:50Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, or if you're doing IVF, you own your embryo until it's born, right?

• 44:55Michael Stevens?

  That's right, that's right. And if you have embryos created, you and your partner have to make a lot of decisions before those embryos are even made about what's going to happen. Because those embryos contain the genetic sequence for an individual. And if both of you die and that embryo is left, you need to decide ahead of time what you want to have happen with it. And you could just decide thaw and discard. Or if both of us are gone, donate them to a couple who can't have kids. And in cases like that, where only one partner dies, you also have to decide what happens. For example, I think in general, veto power rules. So if, if one partner is like, yeah, I want to use them, and the other one's like, no,

• 45:40Michael Stevens?

  the one who said no gets their way. Yeah, so you can own and patent a gene. So long as it's not part of a conscious, living human. As soon as it is, it becomes theirs and like, sorry, it's been public domained. Or it's been, it's been transferred, rights have been transferred. And you can't own them if they already naturally exist because then it's just a part of nature that you found. It wasn't actually that long ago that as soon as a person died, they lost all rights to their personality. Like literally, when Marilyn Monroe died, Marilyn Monroe became public domain.

• 46:14Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 46:15Michael Stevens?

  Not her movies, but her likeness. You could, you could make posters of her and not give any money to her family.

• 46:22Hannah Fry?

  Many people did.

• 46:23Michael Stevens?

  Many people did. And I think she's still public domain in that sense because she died before the law was passed saying that for, at first 50 years after death. Now, it's 70 years after death, the right to your likeness is an actual thing that passes on to your estate, to your family. And they can make decisions about how your image is replicated.

• 46:45Hannah Fry?

  Is that, is that where, really where we are?

• 46:47Michael Stevens?

  That's where we are.

• 46:48Hannah Fry?

  In the great battle of unethical uses of science and technology that are extremely dystopian, such as cloning. The people we have to thank for protecting us from vastly over powerful companies are celebs. That's, uh, that's basically where we are.

• 47:06Michael Stevens?

  That's the truth. And, and it's either the, what you said, or it's the celebs that are holding down our ability to just do crazy cloning experiments.

• 47:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much, celebs.

• 47:19Michael Stevens?

  They're just like us.

• 47:20Hannah Fry?

  They're just.

• 47:23Hannah Fry?

  They're just like us.

• 47:24Michael Stevens?

  And we'll see you, see you next time.

• 47:26Hannah Fry?

  Certainly will. Next time.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  There we are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board. The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 48:05Hannah Fry?

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 48:21Speaker 04

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia? Yes.

• 48:39Speaker 05

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• 48:54Speaker 05

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• 49:01Speaker 02

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• 49:06Speaker 05

  Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.