Preventing the Unknown: Genetic Testing with Dr. Stuart Kim

Can you predict your future health using genetics? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore advances in genetic testing, polygenic risk scores, and the future of genetics with geneticist Dr. Stuart Kim.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're on the topic of genetics. And I got with me my co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, former soccer pro over in the UK, turned announcer. And he's sharing his time with us. And I still can't stop thinking of your Wiki page.

• 0:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Please do.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A great shot of you and with your sexy legs playing soccer.

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  That'd scar you for life.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course Chuck Nice, Chucky Baby, how you doing, man?

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, what's happening?

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 0:53Chuck Nice?

  No pictures of my sexy legs anywhere.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck has no sports street cred, at all.

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  I hate us.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a big fan, fan of sports.

• 1:03Gary O'Reilly?

  That's enough, but no sport without the fans.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true, very good.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  The whole thing is, without me, it doesn't exist.

• 1:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, you and your producers came up with this genetics theme.

• 1:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where are you going to take us with it?

• 1:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so it's always in the back of our mind as to, you know, how do we do this? How do we make it go faster? How can we make these things better? And so we landed in the field of genetics, but sports genetics. Now analyzing your own genetics, we know can give you access to your ancestry, et cetera, et cetera. But what if genetic analysis could help predict vulnerability to certain illnesses, to certain injuries? What if the data could help naturally enhance our strength and conditioning by tailoring specific programs of exercise for you? Now, line these two things up and you're getting what some people are dubbing, right at this moment, a new Moneyball.

• 2:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, we'll get into that aspect later on in the show. We'll either explode that theory as bunkum, or we'll embrace it and see how we take that forward. But we're gonna need someone-

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is, a person could be really good at a high school or college, but I look at their genetic profile and they have a tendency to, to, to drop a tendon. And they, so they could be on the injury list and I don't want to have to pay for that.

• 2:30Gary O'Reilly?

  And see, the thing is, that everyone's treating your injury, but you don't know that you've got, in your internal structure, an exposure to having this injury. So you need to do specific things that help ward off that potential injury.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or I'm not hiring you, right? I mean, that's an ethical thing.

• 2:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, now we're into the ethics of stuff.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, alright, so we might go there too.

• 2:54Chuck Nice?

  Starting to get dangerously close to sports genetics.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 2:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so now you've jumped to chapter four.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, gotcha, gotcha.

• 3:03Gary O'Reilly?

  We're still on the preface.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all there, it's all there.

• 3:05Gary O'Reilly?

  It's all there, it's all there. Now, we're gonna need someone with some serious chops to, to guide us through this particular area. And it is a particular area with a lawful lot into it. So that expert is Dr Stuart Kim. Now, if you remember, Dr Kim's been with us before a couple of times, so we're honoured to have him back. He is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the genetics of muscular skeletal injuries. Former professor of genetics and developmental biology at Stanford University. He's also co-founder and CEO of XGen, a sports genetics business. So, uh, please, let's meet, or meet again, Dr Stuart Kim.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Stuart, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you very much, it's a pleasure. Man, you're, you're, you're into some stuff here. I mean, who would have thought that this is even something that you could be an expert in a few decades ago? I just gotta, just, just remind me, in your background, did you grow up saying, gee, I wanna do sport genetics? I mean, how, how do you, how do you land where you did?

• 4:07Chuck Nice?

  Did you, did you have posters of Watson and Crick on your wall?

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, exactly. Um, my entire life, I was a hardcore geneticist. So in a way, Neil, I think of athletes as the new mouse. They're, they're, they're a great thing, model organism. Yeah. I mean, the thing is that, you know, for, for now, athletes, I know an incredible about their phenotype. I know how fast they are, how strong they are, how tall they are. And, you know, if you're a professional like Gary, you know, they poke and prod you all these different ways, which for us scientists is just data. And so for most people, I don't know very much about them.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  But for an athlete, in principle, I could know and interrogate all of their medical records and find out what causes them to, to, to do it. So.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now you're getting creepy now.

• 5:14Gary O'Reilly?

  This, this is it, Neil. You see, if I am at the, if I am the 2% of the 2%, right? You know, the real high end, the Usain Boltz, the guys who sit. LeBron James. LeBron, the Brady. And, right, if I'm in that caliber, I have a need to know.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and like Stuart said, we have more data on you than we would ever have on most people ever in the history of the world. So this is, this is an amazing, amazing fact. All right. So, so what, so where do we start here, Gary? What's our first question to the good doctor?

• 5:50Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So if, if we look at detection of specific markers as kind of being a precursor to prevention, right? How long has science been able to get into this area of, of analysis and identify vulnerabilities or to be at illness or to be at injury? So how long have we been here, doctor?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  I would say in 2015, everything before 2015 is obsolete. So in 2015, um, something new happened. It's really fascinating. So the Brits came along and have really paved the way. They made this giant databank that all scientists all over the world can, can use called the UK Biobank.

• 6:35Chuck Nice?

  Let me guess, let me guess, if it's British, they learned how to colonize the double helix.

• 6:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Somewhere along the line, that's gonna cost us, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This can't end well, I'm pretty sure. But, alright, go on.

• 6:54Chuck Nice?

  Go on, go on.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  So, I guess that started probably around 2015. By 2017, all the scientists, lots of the scientists were accessing it. That led you up the ante. And so now the results started to become pretty serious and significant, starting around 2016, 2017. So, by significant, like a million fold more significant than in 2015. So, famously, I ignore everything.

• 7:25Gary O'Reilly?

  That much, that much level of, of, of knowledge?

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Oh, it gets better. In 2018, in 2018, around that time, scientists figured out a new way to think about genetics that just blew my mind. And everything I was taught about genetics only explains like a small fraction of what you really wanna know. So, basically, before, before this, this revolution, all the genetics is what we call Mendelian genetics. Mendelian genetics is like Mendel's G that causes a P to be wrinkled. It's, it's, you know, causes, it can cause, it explains why some flies have white eyes.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Or it explains, again, a mutant, and it explains why some people have a disease like cystic fibrosis. What happened in 2018 is geneticists figured out something called complex genetics. And they can now explain height. So, height isn't due to one gene or even a small number of genes. It's a million different. Changes in your genome than really dial in your height within an inch or so. So most of your height is genetic, little bit is, you know, how well you eat. But now it's clear that there's something like a million inputs into your height.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Each input gives you a millimeter plus minus in your height.

• 8:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So doctor, if I gave you-

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. That means I'm a, I'm a million millimeters tall?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Ah. No, sometimes it's minus of my own two.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus a milli-

• 9:07Speaker 03

  And then you add them all up and yeah, you do either, you know, plus ten, minus ten.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the net.

• 9:13Chuck Nice?

  It's a game of tennis. It's, it's, it's like genetic tennis, back and forth, plus and minus.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus and minus.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  And don't you know the, uh, the statisticians and mathematicians are going nuts and trying to figure out the best way to add a million different things together?

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So just to be clear, what, what you're saying is up until 2015, the Mendelian-

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, understanding had to, it was stuck on the, there being one gene for one-

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Effect.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but we've always known that many effects are more complex than that.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you saying that in 2018, we figured out how to get there?

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, the Brits gave us the data and then the Brits and the Australians and a couple of Americans figured out how to analyze the data. And now they can actually prove they can predict our height if they have a million data points.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, just so we're on the same page here. Statistically, for every new variable you want to, to corral and contain, you need like manifold more data to do that.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Otherwise, yeah.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, right, in order to contain two variables relative to one variable. And for every add-on variable, you need that much more data. And so this is all playing into what you're saying.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, still, right?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  It's not, yeah, they didn't screw up. It's not overfitting. And it can really predict the height of a new person never before seen. So.

• 10:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So what methods are we using for screening? I mean, I, I give you someone's genome, you know, whoever it is, me, Chuck Neil. LeBron James.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, so how, what, what method have you, is now the go-to method for your screening? Because there's something called a CGS, candidate gene studies.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:06Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's something, I think it's called a polygenetic risk score.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, what's the difference between them and which one came out as the best screening process?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. The candidate gene studies is this before 2015 thing that I'm gonna argue is obsolete. I'll give you an example. Polygenic risk score, in the, in the 2000s, they, let's say you want to know how strong a person is at birth. And in the 2000s, they figured out that there was a G called actinin 3, muscle protein. And depending on which type you had, you know, it kind of inch you towards an endurance athlete versus a power athlete. So you would have wanted the power athlete version for your soccer skills. The thing is that it has an incredibly tiny effect.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Now, I think it's of all of your genes, of all of these markers that inform about how endure, you know, how much endurance and power you have, I think it's number 30,000 on the list. So I could tell you your actinin 3 genotype, 23 and E will sell you your actinin information, but it's number 30,000 on your list in terms of the genetics of whether you're powerful or long-lasting. So then, you know, in 2015, you could do a study and look for the most significant genes in your genome,

• 12:45Speaker 03

  the top one, not, so actinin 3 is number 30,000, 2015, you got the top one. And then, now they have the top 175, that's where polygenic risk score comes in. And the best way to do it is to add together all 175, it's like a vote. You get all 175 of these top hits and have them all vote. And together, they gives you a much better idea of your muscle strength.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what does injury come into this? Is that risk score, is that a risk of injury? What is the risk measuring here?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Well, I just talked about strength. So this is just how much strength. Injury is not how strong you are, but you take everybody that got hurt and everybody that didn't get hurt and see if there's a genetic difference. And that's, that's what was done. And so now you can look at for 13 different injuries. You know, you can see if they have the marker for, and these would be the strongest markers in the genome. So they're, these are the kinds that are a million times stronger than the kind of the gene studies.

• 13:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, wouldn't you need a huge data set?

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:01Chuck Nice?

  In order to make that determination?

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  Because there are so many variables that go into injury itself.

• 14:08Gary O'Reilly?

  So this is, this is prime field for AI, surely? You must be using algorithms all day long because there's no, there's no one individual or a team of individuals sitting there scouring through all of these variables. This has to be fodder for AI, surely?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  AI and then, you know, the statisticians are all having a, they're really paving the way.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense. That makes sense because instead you, really what you want to look at is a probability.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  More than, more than, you know, it's more of a likelihood than anything else.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 14:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So you take your circumstances, you look at the likelihood, and then you change your circumstances based on that likelihood.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So who got here first, doctor? Elite sport, which is possible, or general medicine? Because I'm guessing that general medicine would be searching for these answers as well as the elite athletes.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:07Gary O'Reilly?

  The organizations that are in.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Um, well, get there first is height, Gary. And then, once they figured out, hi, a heart doctor from Harvard figured out, oh, we're going to do heart disease. And now, once the heart disease doctor, you know, made a really, had a really influential publication, and everybody says, yeah, let me do it for my disease. And so there are hundreds, thousands of polygenic risk scores for lots and lots of different diseases. I V two diabetes, neotriplefibal, all sorts of different diseases. This all is from the UK Biobank. It was like a gift to scientists across the world. The problem is that there aren't very many elite athletes in UK Biobank.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  What you really want is a lot of athletes. Then we could do the genetics of athletes. But until you start to get a lot of data, it's hard to do this type of statistics.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the UK, the UK list was like an existence proof, that it's something that can be done.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Provided. And, and the UK, were those just UK athletes?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  No, it was UK citizens. So it's 500,000 people, I think 600 professional athletes.

• 16:22Chuck Nice?

  So they weren't even real athletes, because they were British? Stop. Stop. Stop. I'm sorry, Gary, I had to do it.

• 16:33Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 16:34Chuck Nice?

  I had to do it. I couldn't, I couldn't just let it sit there.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was dangling. Yeah. As a comedian, it's dangling there, you can't let that go.

• 16:42Gary O'Reilly?

  I heard a knock on the door, and I thought, this is going to be Chuck.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's going to be Chuck.

• 16:46Gary O'Reilly?

  This is definitely going to be Chuck. So, all right, Doc, so let's, let's take a specific injury risk here. So if we, if we look to ACL, PCL injuries.

• 16:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Which is anterior cruciate ligament, posterior cruciate ligament, if you're not familiar, if you've never had that kind of knee smash up. Um, what are you looking for? Um, and what is it that says, you know, is it ligament strength? Is it bone density? Is it, well, are there other variables in there that we really, really need to be aware of?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Maybe, but the first thing you do is you just take something like in this databank from the UK, there was something like 10,000 people who had an ACL tear.

• 17:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  And then you take all of those people and compare it to all the people that didn't have an ACL tear and say, what's the difference? You don't have to make any presuppositions and you just come up with

• 17:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  two genes that really seem to be different a little bit. It's not a lot. It's not going to, you know, but if you're a pro athlete, so there you have an incredibly valuable commodity, your ability to perform as an elite athlete versus a tiny effect on a small effect on whether or not you're going to get it. But it's still, it's still worth integrating that into your training regimen, since it's so easy to do.

• 18:13Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't it benefit me, not even from a genetic standpoint, couldn't I achieve almost the same thing by creating a data set where, because everything is filmed now, everything, where I just looked at every single ACL injury?

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:32Chuck Nice?

  And then every single circumstance where an ACL in that very similar circumstance did not tear?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:39Chuck Nice?

  And wouldn't I be able to deduce, you know, some best practices from that data set?

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Well, that's the done. I mean, you know, people look and they say-

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  I'm in the wrong damn business.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Right? So there's a, there's a, there's a training regimen, well-known. It's called the FIFA 11 plus, I think. And so, you know, the trainers all tell mostly soccer players on how to not get an ACL.

• 19:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Sorry, Dr. FIFA being the International Football Association being soccer.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:15Gary O'Reilly?

  So the world governing body, so as everybody sort of works out what that thing is.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Right, right. So Chuck, if you look, I mean, if you look at an athlete and you see how they move, that's a lot of information. That's really strong at predicting. And, you know, there are some organizations around that are really good at this. And they, they put the biosensors up and down the athletes and they say, you know, are you jumping? When you jump, do you land on one foot or do you land funny? They say that's really bad. They can train basketball players and volleyball players how to, how to jump. Okay, so I'm, I'm talking about DNA. And I just want to know, when you were born, was there something about how your femur and how your ligaments are all attached?

• 20:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's everything we can see, right? With the naked eye or with the high-speed cameras that we can use now, in terms of your technique. I jump, I land in a certain way. If I don't land in a certain way, well, guess what? Ankles, knees, hips, everything structurally is going to have an issue. That's okay. I might have the 10 out of 10 perfect Nadia Comanets technique.

• 20:27Gary O'Reilly?

  But if it's going wrong inside where we can't see, I'm getting problems. I am gonna get compound problem after problem after problem. And there's nothing that can be solved. It's because I'm always getting torn up from the inside out, not the outside in.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  And that, that kind of makes sense. Like, okay, this is anecdotal, and I'm not sure if it applies at all. But Dr. Kim, you can tell me. So I had a root canal done on my front left tooth. My father had a root canal done on his front left tooth. His father had a root canal done on the front. Now, I'm thinking like what Gary just said, like, you know, maybe that's coincidence, or maybe that's one of these things where there might be a genetic marker that in a certain age.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the same dentist, and it was the only surgery he knew how to do.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we gotta take a quick break.

• 21:24Chuck Nice?

  Look at Neil. Neil's on fire today.

• 21:26Gary O'Reilly?

  He's nailed it.

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  What is happening? What is going on?

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My Netflix special is coming out.

• 21:33Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we take a quick break. We're going to find out how much this genetics, my knowledge of this genetics can be exploited to boost our own performance in whatever it is we do when StarTalk Sports Edition returns with Dr. Stuart Kim.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. This is an entire episode on genetics with a genetics expert, Dr. Stuart Kim. And Stuart, what is the, either the ethics, or before we get to the ethics, how much are people invoking your data, your analysis, your knowledge of their genetics to enhance their performance in ways that they could not have otherwise done without that information?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Well, that's a great question. My feeling is it's hard to beat a stopwatch. So I don't think, it's hard for genetics to be what Gary already knows about how fast and how strong he is. So I've tried hard to find something about genetics that would tell you. But, you know, these athletes know exactly how fast they are. They know exactly how much weight they can lift. And not only that, but they're already trying their best to be fast and strong. So it's kind of not easy for genetics to really add in that arena. What you don't know at all is where you're going to get hurt. You don't know if you're

• 23:23Speaker 03

  liable for a shoulder injury, which a soccer player doesn't care about, but a knee injury or ankle injury. And if you couldn't know if you were, you know, if you had a knee injury issue, you know, you might want to try to train that down so that you're less likely to get a knee injury. So that's, it's easier to be-

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but that's, it's one thing to just not- Mess up, do all you can to not die and do all you can to not break. But I'm talking about, I'm completely healthy.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I want to use your information to break my own record. Is there something you can tell me that can make that happen? For example, is there something as prosaic as, does my chemistry differ from yours? And how I metabolize sugar to draw energy from it? Or is that just something I trained to do rather than was born with the genetics to enable?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Well, there's lots of theoretically possible, yeah. So in principle, we could, there could be information today. You know, I'm trying hard to try to find an instance. You know, the best example, but it only affects a few people in Finland is Iiro Montiranka.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Gary, you know about this guy. So he was a Finnish cross-country skier. He was the world's best. He won, you know, Olympic medals, world championships by a lot. And then along comes the Anti-Doping Association who took a look at him and said, "You must be doping because nobody has red blood cells as much as you do." And athletes try their hardest to get a lot of red blood cells because it helps you.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oxygen.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  Ski, oxygen. You know, bicyclists try hard to get either, you know, some of them cheat to try and be able to ride a long time.

• 25:24Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the EPO. Blood doping.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, Iiro got, you know, accused of blood doping and he said, "No, no, no, I don't dope." And finally, it was another, a British geneticist came to his rescue. And he found out that Eero had a mutation, a natural mutation, one he was born with, from his mom and his dad, that activated something called an EPO receptor. So the dopers inject EPO. Eero had always turned on the EPO receptor. So he's always a zip. He had EPO in his blood. And so his stem cells were making red blood cells to the max. And he became world champion.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  So that's, that's one example where if you were born with Eero's mutation, I would say just go for something where, you know, climb Mount Everest, fight top, you know, Tour de France, and, and, and cross-country ski, because you have a really good chance of being good at it.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but wait. So maybe we can save this for section three, Gary, you tell me. But let me just ask. That means he's genetically cheating.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he's not on the, he's not on the level playing field with the other competitors.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Well.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so, so therefore, let me dope my blood so that it does what his blood does. And that way, we got apples and apples here. And, and, and it's, we have a level playing field.

• 26:58Gary O'Reilly?

  No, there's no, it's not level. It's not level. If, if, this is a naturally occurring situation. It's like someone who's born and all of a sudden they develop this massive, immense muscle mass.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuart Kim has knowledge of genetics that in the future, I'm going to say, I want to be cross-country skier champion. Give me this genetic anomaly in utero. Okay?

• 27:22Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, but that's different. That's, that's a different thing altogether, Neil. When, when you're looking at someone who is born with as someone who has then gone away and gone, you know what, this is exactly, this is my shopping list.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  But what if you're born with because someone put it there?

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. That's the difference.

• 27:37Chuck Nice?

  It, it, it's not the, it's not just a random occurrence. Someone put it there. Now you're born with it.

• 27:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, this becomes a doping program in utero, obviously, but this is genetic.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the Russians will do it. The Russians are gonna do it.

• 27:51Gary O'Reilly?

  This is engineering. We are, we're in the field of engineering. It's, I mean, it's different, Neil, to the point you were making earlier on, where, you know, all I'm trying to do is stay alive, which in sporting terms is all I'm trying to do is perform at my best. You see, I might be training in a certain way in terms of developing certain muscle strength in a certain way, which, once I go to someone like Dr. Kim's organization, says to me, you know what? That's detrimental. You've got an exposure to this kind of injury where this is debilitating this. It's taking away. You need to strengthen certain areas. This strengthening, muscle strengthening, hips, and it might be muscles around your hips that align the way that you actually run on your gait, something along those lines. That then gives you that ability. Now, what

• 28:34Gary O'Reilly?

  you're saying here, if you go in utero and start to change these things, then, well, this is malice aforethought. This is...

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Gary, I'm just trying to be blunt here.

• 28:43Gary O'Reilly?

  No, that's fine. I get it.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you come out genetically different from me, that gives you an advantage, that's not a level playing field. And, and, and the whole point of anti-doping laws is so that everyone is on a level playing field.

• 28:58Gary O'Reilly?

  But you can't get that because people are naturally born with, like Hiro, the Nordic cross-country skier, who are naturally born with this going on. They've not gone out of their way to have it engineered. So, the playing field is as level as possible, but it's never going to be there. You're never gonna put a...

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then what you're saying is, you're, you're, you're projecting a future, and let me get, we're talking, I wanna, we, we got Stuart here to talk about. Stuart, Stuart, Stuart.

• 29:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Please, yeah, jump in because my knowledge is minimal.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. The point is, what you're saying, in the limit of this, every winner of every sport is gonna be a genetic freak with genetic profile that favors their performance in that event relative to everyone else. And so, we're cheering genetics, not hard work, not, oh, because they grew up in a way and they ran the, you know, up the mountain to, to, to go to school and it's in, no, we're just, it's the Genetic Freak Olympics. That's what you're telling me in the limit here. Stuart, is that what the future of this is?

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I don't think that's exactly so it's it's every it's part um nature.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I exaggerate of course, I'm exaggerating of course.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  So Eero like his mutation is in all of his in in his relatives. So his sisters and his brothers had the same mutation. Eero won the gold medals. That's because he was out skiing all the time. So it's part how you train and part how you were born. Um, and then part of it is this this Eero thing I brought up because it's this N'Delian type. I think most of athleticism is going to be complex type. So if you want to ask about why is LeBron so great? I think it might be a million inputs about what makes him great, not just one mutation. And then a geneticist doesn't believe all people are created equal.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  And so when a sports geneticist will just point out that there's gotta be differences based on your ethnicity. So Asians, African Americans, Caucasians, you know, we're not created equal. And there was nothing I could ever do in training that would let me play in the NBA.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Me neither.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I don't have the uh you could, oh, you could possibly.

• 31:25Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, it's not, it's not, to my mind, having been a professional athlete and I've been around all different shapes and sizes in my own particular sport and gone, you know what, you don't look like you're the kind of identical shape to be an elite soccer player.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, look at Messi.

• 31:41Gary O'Reilly?

  You surprised me, you know, and then it, and so this thing is, okay, so you you've got the ideal body shape, you've got technique that is mind boggling, yet you drink all night and you smoke sixty cigarettes a day.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still gotta wanna do it.

• 31:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, and then so so it becomes environmental, then it becomes a mental thing. The dangerous space is the bit between your ears. What goes on in there that allows you, I mean, there's all, there's this kind of sort of urban myth that there's probably sprinters in Jamaica that are faster than Usain Bolt. They just never got into the program.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, it's a, all right, so let me just bring some focus to this. So, yes, every human is unique, genetically unique. No one is disputing that. We, uh, and we have. No end of systems in place in society to sort us based on some ability or talent. And in any meritocracy, this is foundational in how they work. So no one is arguing that. What I just wonder is of what value are you? What is the value of you to say? You have to go up to someone, you have the genetics to be a world-class whatever.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the person says, well, I don't feel like it. I wanna, you know, I wanna read, I wanna read.

• 33:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then what, what, what good are you? What, what is the value of your advice here? Are you, so in other words, you're gonna tell people you should or shouldn't do something in their lives? If they wanna excel in the way you think they will. I, I heard long ago, a geneticist is someone who tells you why you look like your parents. And if you don't, they tell you why you should have looked like your parents. Right? And so this is, so, so what good are you? I, I don't need you. It's, it's my ambition between me and what I wanna achieve.

• 33:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Then it becomes personal, Neil. I mean, I've been around a lot of guys growing up who were so talented, silly talented. They never got into a professional system, even through the academies.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, right? So, so what, are you gonna run after them and say, you should do this? Because our genetic profile shows it.

• 33:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Personal choice, you know?

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Personal choice.

• 33:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And you, you look at it and go, thank you for that information.

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  You run after them and you tell them, this is why your father never loved you. See? Okay. At that dream.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Look at, look at what you're doing. You look at how you are just wasting all of this world-class talent. This is why your dad hates you.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Stuart, I think I said this last time you were on. My father in gym class in high school was pointed out by the gym instructor when they were transitioning to this, the, the track and field unit. And my, he pointed out, said Cyril Tyson, for example, has the kind of body that would never excel at track.

• 34:32Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my father heard that and he said, no one is gonna tell me what I cannot do in my life.

• 34:38Chuck Nice?

  You're a crack ass cracker.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So on that day, he took up running and and he became world class with the fifth fastest time in the world in his event, a middle distance sprint. And so I'm just so I'm just wondering, what, why do we need geneticists? If all you're gonna do is tell me what I should do, and if I don't do it, you tell me why I should have done it, and you're not measuring my ambition.

• 35:08Gary O'Reilly?

  See, people now, people now are coming along, and they are data hungry. They want to know, they need to know. You think about all of the things people access in terms of information about themselves now, not just ancestry. They want to know about this, they want to know about that, they want to be able to do this, they want to be able to do that. And now all of a sudden, you know what, what is my tolerance for caffeine? Am I that sort of person that can metabolize caffeine quickly or slowly? Am I the sort of person that, you know what, needs vitamin B12? But you know what? I don't have a really good capacity to metabolize that quickly. I need to know that. So people want this information. People,

• 35:48Gary O'Reilly?

  they're not just there to be elite athletes. This is there for general consumption of understanding of

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 35:56Gary O'Reilly?

  an intimate self.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if so, but what I'm saying is, if if you're gonna use the genetics to sort people, not just to show that we're different, because we know that, you just we get more detail for why we're different, we've been doing to sort people for who's gonna get access to opportunity and who is not, and in that equation is not their ambition to achieve, then that's that's like eugenics

• 36:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  at that level.

• 36:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so Stuart, getting back to Chuck's earlier point, are you skirting the line between sort of moral invocation of genetics and what the eugenics folks did a century ago?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  No, and you know, in action.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good answer.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Everybody but me is an elite athlete. So we're all players, thank you. You know, the simple idea is to help them not get hurt. So they get to, they get to win more and they get a better career at the end of the day.

• 37:00Chuck Nice?

  That's interesting that you say that because what you're saying is what you're dealing with are people who already made it to an elite level.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 37:08Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. So yeah, it has nothing to do with what, what a choice.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starting from scratch.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  Starting from scratch. They're already there.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 37:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And the thing is Chuck, they want to stay there. I remember listening to a radio interview with Olympic gold medal long jumper. Right? And he obviously wasn't bad at jumping into the sand from a long distance away. However, he went to a university in the U S and I do not remember which one it was. And investigated his own self through the genetics. Because long jump, the pounds per square inch through your thing when you're landing, the sprinting, everything about you. So he needed to go away and find that information so as he could train better because it's all about sprinting.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 37:55Gary O'Reilly?

  He needed to improve his sprint and therefore were there, were there ways for him to train and develop? So as he could actually gain that extra bit and stay at the very top of long jump. So yes, it is elite athletes who wish to stay elite. It is these guys that, you know what? They want to extend the bell curve of their career. They don't want a Mount Everest peak. They want a nice long plateau before it sort of just tapers away. So, and I don't know, we think we'll get into this in the next section, but I think, you know, maybe the Dr. Kim will, will enlighten us. Are athletes like LeBron, are athletes like Chuck's friend, Tom Brady, who may or may not have retired this time?

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Friend.

• 38:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Are, are they the vanguard of where athletes are going now in the future? Or are these just, you know what, these are outliers, dude. These guys just come around, they're like hen's teeth. You know, we see them every so often, but not very often.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to see how Dr. Stuart Kim's expertise might just be adopted into.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better living through the knowledge of our genetics when StarTalk Sports Edition returns.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, the third and final segment of StarTalk Sports Edition Genetics with Dr. Stuart Kim, who specializes in how understanding your genetics can change how you live and what you do and improve your risks of injury, or reduce your risk of injury in whatever is your walk in life. And in this segment, we just want to ask whether, Stuart, whether your knowledge, a person's knowledge of their own genetic profile, how can they take that into their twilight years? Either as an athlete prolonging their, how long they can be at

• 40:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the top of their game, or in their game at all, or for the rest of us who just want to live a long, healthy life?

• 40:06Speaker 03

  There is the hero project. Let me tell you about the hero project. Athletes are at really one end of a distribution. They're faster, they're stronger. So our cross-country runners, our endurance runners, they are thin. They will never be obese. They will not get type 2 diabetes. Our NFL players will not get weak muscle disease, called sarcopenia. And so there's diseases like, you know, all of us are worrying about putting on weight, type 2 diabetes, or losing our strength as we get older. And the athletes might have clues about how they were so strong. And some of these endurance runners, we know,

• 40:51Speaker 03

  they eat 6,000 calories a day and they cannot put on weight. And it's not just because they're running so much. But what if we could learn from them and figure out, either mental or physical, what is it that lets you stay so thin, or dial in your weight to within a pound? I mean, what if we all had the mental... fortitude to control our diet like Tom Brady. So that, I mean, there's no way I could, I could, you know, lead that kind of regimen. But he can stick to, you know, his, his regimen and, and, and training.

• 41:28Chuck Nice?

  Because he, he rightfully hates himself. And so that's why he's able to do that.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  He hates himself?

• 41:33Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, Chuck, for your Tom Brady analysis.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  How could Tom Brady hate himself? What, what more could that guy want that he doesn't have?

• 41:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's the whole point. He's totally overcompensating for his self-hatred and self-loathing.

• 41:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, we, we, we said at the top of the show, Dr. Kim, about, you know, what people are calling this kind of area where you've got injury and illness potentially being able to be detected in advance of it happening because of something that's going on in your genes. And then, you know what, we're, we're analyzing foodstuffs and lifestyles and environments that may impact upon you as an individual and how this could be the new Moneyball for sports organizations, for athletes themselves. Oh, oh, is that just a false dawn or is, is this actually got a legitimate backup to, to it being the new level and new generation of analytics?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Well, in Moneyball, um, the Oakland A's in 2001 said they had a different way of evaluating athletes, not this, not, you know, um, RDIs and averages. They said, you know, they came up with all these other stats and they tried to find value to how to evaluate a player that wasn't in their traditional stats. And so I think genetics is a way that you could evaluate people with a new kind of stats and it could give you an edge, uh, one way or another. In this case, you know, the edge would be to not get hurt. So you play more games and win more games.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, you're not looking at it as, it's, it's really because when you look at those markers, it doesn't mean that it's going to happen.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 43:20Chuck Nice?

  It means that it's far more likely to happen.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 43:24Chuck Nice?

  And so if you start taking preventative measures to keep it from happening, then you're ahead of the game, right? That's, yeah, it's, that's simple.

• 43:32Gary O'Reilly?

  This is the LeBron Brady scenario. I mean, they've, they've, they've tapped into this situation where they've gone, you know what? If they've done this analysis and the data's come back and they've gone, all right, I need to work this way and I need to be able to do this. I mean, the great thing is, we've always said it, knowledge is power. Now, who has control of this power? We know the athlete will know their own profile and how they can possibly go about working, developing, training, strengthening and conditioning. But what if the coach has this power? What if the coach goes, you know what, his cruciate ligaments could explode at any moment. Um, I'd better not play him. You know what, trade him. And this, this becomes

• 44:16Gary O'Reilly?

  an ethical situation. You know, who's allowed to keep this data? How much of this data can get out? Because it's, it's personal. This becomes a data protection issue.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  That's a great idea.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in short, so in short, Stuart, is, do you have an ethicist in your lab looking over your shoulder? That's what this comes down to.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Not in my lab, but you know, I have lawyers that I collaborate with and are writing the ethics. I mean, this is an incredibly important point. You know, it's, it's genetic discrimination. So for normal people, you know, I'm, I have a law that says my genes can't prevent my insurance company from insuring me. So it's called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

• 44:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  So we need the same thing for athletes. We need something that, you know, your DNA cannot let your, the owners discriminate against you in your contract. Then it's still a good idea because everybody wins. The owners should like this because their players, if they have their coaches and trainers have this information and in principle, they could train the players in a smarter way and the players wouldn't get so hurt. And then they wouldn't have to pay for injured players. They would win more. Their team would be up in value. The owners are going to win anyways. They don't have to screw around with contracts. And so there's a way to set this up, just like our health care is set up,

• 45:43Speaker 03

  that there's no discrimination in professional sports. And that's only for team sports with owners. So the tennis players should love this and, you know, they should know about shoulder injuries and knee injuries.

• 45:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So we're at this point now. And you've got ahead of the game in terms of, you know, what we need to protect genetic profiles, et cetera, et cetera. Where are we going to go with this moving forward? I mean, are we done now? I mean, this, this bio bank guarded by corgis and butlers in the UK with a very, very crystal cut accent, sounds fabulous, but where do we, where do we go? Because I can't imagine people said, oh, that's, we've learned enough now. That's not, that's not how this works. So what are we going to get exposed to? What are people going to be looking for in the future in your field?

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus Brady and LeBron were, aren't they each over 40?

• 46:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, Brady's 45.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh.

• 46:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I believe.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 46:42Gary O'Reilly?

  And LeBron is ancient. He's 38.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he's only 38. Okay. Yeah, but still, I mean, so we're talking about bringing this into our twilight years. Yeah. So what's, what's, what's?

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's not Brady and LeBron that we want to think about. It's a guy named Robert Griffin the third. You remember him? He was a superstar.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  RG3.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  RG3, he was a superstar quarterback and he tore up his knee in his first year and you never heard of him. So it's like, it's like, he was like a Tom Brady to be, but he, he got hurt and he, you know, he's not, never had a professional career. So it's really for all of the best that never were, uh, that we're trying to, we're trying to work with. Tom Brady, Tom Brady didn't get hurt mostly and LeBron had a successful career, but what if they got hurt in college or high school and never got a, you know, never got a scholarship? You never would have heard of them.

• 47:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So are high schools looking at this kind of analytics and using it for their, their athletes? Are we seeing this at college level as well?

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Uh, not yet. I mean, this is brand new and it's going to take a while for it to, uh, filter down. But, you know, the younger you get, the more useful this is. Like, you know, if you were a high school athlete wannabe and you said, who knows what my upper end is going to be? I could make it into the premier league, but only if you don't get hurt. The younger you are, the more potential you have to protect. And then, you know, doing this training or that training, if you had a personalized training regimen from young that would optimize your chance of staying injury free, at least you have a chance to go as far as you want you could go in your professional career.

• 48:33Gary O'Reilly?

  See, I'll speak to that, Neil. And if you sort of found this program at the age 28, 29, what you'll have to do first is undo all of the bad stuff you've done prior.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:45Gary O'Reilly?

  And rather than tapping into this at sort of like 15, 16 years of age and going, you know what, I'm still growing, but we can work with that. We can build in all of the good stuff that will protect me going forward and enable me to have a potentially better career if that's what it is I want to do. Because as I said before, you know what, I might turn around and go, nah, I'm going to walk away and do something else.

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's another side of this, by the way. We've had Lindsey Vonn as a guest on StarTalk Sports Edition. And I was just dumbstruck when she described that she took a spill on one of her downhill races and had to be airlifted off the side of the mountain, was taken to the hospital. And she said, I don't want to lose any time in this tournament, or whatever they call them. And she, I don't know what she, they taped her up or something, and she was skiing again the next day. And I'm trying to think to myself, beyond injury, there is the drive.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you don't, just, you know, I got a broken bone, just tape, you know, duct tape it, whatever, whatever doctors use. And then you go back out, and there's a whole other mental state. Can you genetically code for mental states?

• 50:02Speaker 03

  You can. You know, one of the most, there's all sorts of, and they have fairly controversial studies. There is genetics or...

• 50:12Speaker 03

  They call it educational attainment, so they take everybody that has a PhD compared to everybody else, and they can find the genes for that. Um, and, you know, and it's kind of controversial about whether at birth you can figure out what your, what your, you know, educational attainment could be. And, yeah, so.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is like a temperament, it's kind of like a temperament for one thing versus another, in a sense, right?

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you know, from the athletes, I know, it's clear they have a different temperament. They, you know, they can just control their whims and urges and things so that they can, you know, they can get out and do this exercise every day, they can control their diet, they can really sculpt themselves in a way I cannot.

• 51:01Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the thing is, Neil, that is, yeah, there is that.

• 51:04Chuck Nice?

  Angela, what's her name?

• 51:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Duckworth.

• 51:06Chuck Nice?

  Angela Duckworth. The doctor that we had on talking about grit.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Gary O'Reilly?

  The coach can work with you, the strength and conditioning guys can work with you, all of that side of the sport can be, can be controlled to a certain extent. I don't know when that athlete walks into the stadium, what's going on in here? As the coach, am I gonna get game-ready Gary, or am I gonna get Gary who's got six girlfriends, a problem in over there, and this there, and they're all arguing, they're all gonna turn up to the game, and I've gotta try and put them all in different boxes, so as I don't get together. And, I mean, I, where?

• 51:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you came up with that example way too easy.

• 51:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say. Game-ready Gary lost out to horny giddy Gary.

• 51:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So, this is, this is the thing, right? My, my head's not in my game. My head's somewhere else. It might be a business that I've got back, you know, somewhere that's failing. So that's now, you know, there's something, there's a lawsuit going on. It could be a number of things, right? So, all of a sudden, if I can have that kind of alchemy as a coach to know, you know what, this guy's gonna be predisposed to going. AWOL. Now, sometimes you know from behavior that you have observed during camp, during training, during games, that certain players, certain athletes are gonna be a little bit more vulnerable. That's just required knowledge through observation.

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're being their parent. You're parenting them at that level, yeah.

• 52:35Gary O'Reilly?

  But you know, if you can get into that point where you can, you know, apart from what we can see visually from an athlete, go back to the jumping scenario, that might be perfect. But the stuff that's going on inside, we can't see. That's the stuff that's really scary.

• 52:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's something that, that, that you can quantify there to like holding fast to focus.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm getting there. I'm getting there. So Stuart, if, take us into the future. So obviously height is a very measurable thing that where there's no ambiguity what it means, how to measure it, and you've got your genetic factors that contribute to it. Part of what we're describing here is a person's drive, such as what my father exhibited when he said he was told he couldn't run, what Lindsey Vonn exhibited when she was airlifted off the mountain and returned the next day. There, there are people who have focus. Is there a future of genetic, uh, genetic knowledge that can tell you about a person's, uh, personality?

• 53:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A person's motives, a person's morality, a person, any of this. And if there is, what kind of future is that? That then, I, I, now I fear you.

• 53:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The power that you'll have over us all.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot packed into that, Neil. I mean, part of what you're asking is, is knowledge always power, or is it always gonna sometimes be evil? That's one question. The other thing about these things is if you can quantify it and you can get enough people into a data bank, we, you know, Genesis can know it. So let's imagine you quantify drive in, in everything. And it's not just athlete drive to be able, I mean, these athletes are incredibly driven. Uh, to be a long, every, everyone that's a long distance runner has, has a drive to just get up and exercise a little bit. But it could be Oscar businesses, you know, they need a drive to make it through

• 54:42Speaker 03

  that, or, you know, to make it to be. And all these different everywhere, you could quantify drive and you could take everybody with a lot of drive versus everybody who didn't have a lot of drive. Eventually, if you had enough people, you'd be able to figure out the DNA that gave some people an inherently more drive. A lot, and then, and then the other part is going to be parenting, how, how much, you know, how much your parents influenced your drive. But you could know it.

• 55:09Chuck Nice?

  In principle. In principle, it is knowable. It's knowable.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  It's knowable.

• 55:14Chuck Nice?

  Well, what about this? Let's say I were able to create some kind of biological surgery, okay, where I could restore anyone to perfect health, uh, using whatever, some type of cellular manipulation, right? So I can go in, I can rebuild the knee, I can do whatever, like that. Would that eliminate the need to know the information that we're talking about right now?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  Well, I, you'd think you'd want to know what you at or at, and then that would tell you how you could change it. You know, there's this new gene editing technology that's coming online.

• 55:50Chuck Nice?

  That's where I was going next.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  That's where you're going. And so now you can't do it, but in the future you could, you know, change your DNA. You could, um, you know, change your EPO receptor to look like Eero Monte Rock and then go out running. Um, and it's not going to make you a world-class gear, but it's going to get you a lot closer. It's going to give you a potential you didn't used to have. So everybody, and then that's where the Mendelian things, it's going to be way, I don't know what you would do if it's a million things. That's the difference between us and Tom Brady. I don't know how you would change your DNA, but the difference between us and Eero Monte Rock is one nuclear target. And so you just have to go in and change that one thing. Now we have.

• 56:36Chuck Nice?

  Put one in.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Put one in.

• 56:38Chuck Nice?

  It's literally cut and paste.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Cut and paste. And we know exactly, you know.

• 56:44Chuck Nice?

  Stuart, did you, did you create your kids?

• 56:50Chuck Nice?

  Well, I did. He's my kid.

• 56:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just, I was letting you answer that in whatever way you felt that you were comfortable.

• 57:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so this is clearly a brave new world. Yeah. On a whole other level with this knowledge of genetics. And I think we have enough historical cautions on route to just keep an eye on this. Because humans, if they get the chance, will sort you in such a way that oppression follows immediately after. This is, the Nazis did it, the, you know, the eugenicists did it, the anthropologists did it, European anthropologists. So, so, yeah, it's got a really ugly past.

• 57:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, one would have to tread carefully here, I think, to not repeat the errors of the ways of our predecessors.

• 57:47Chuck Nice?

  I think the past is ugly because we're ugly. So, you know, if, if...

• 57:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and it means we're capable of doing it again. That's right. That's right. But we will note, Stuart, that if your kids start winning cross-country tournaments and think, "I have nothing to do with it."

• 58:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got an eye on you, Stuart.

• 58:10Chuck Nice?

  Why does your son run as fast as that kid in the Incredibles movie?

• 58:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, we gotta end it there. Stuart, great to have you back on StarTalk. Thank you so much. We love finding out all these inroads onto what it is we talk about and how it could be influenced now and in the future. Alright, Chuck, always good to see you. Always a pleasure. Alright, Gary.

• 58:33Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 58:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You've been listening to and possibly even watching StarTalk Sports Edition, all about genetics, with our friend, Dr. Stuart Kim. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep looking up.