Okay. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's quite thrilling to go back.
I actually had my these we had Oxford and I used to go to something called the Wolfson Philosophy Society, where people were literally reading papers.
I remember that was very difficult for me because they actually came to the parapet,
sat for more than an hour and a monotonous voice reading it out, and I completely lost it.
And I always said, Why don't you use PowerPoint if I was needed?
But now I'm taking revenge. I'm a Wilson giving a PowerPoint.
It feels very good. My talk is slightly different.
Also, you can see for the compositional sense.
I mean, of course there is a smart philosopher at the end there, but it's helped me doing some of the thinking for that.
But I also have two people who are actually cattle breeders, people who as living work, I'm kind of breeding so.
So I got their advice just because I want to see how practical this was.
And Paul Little, who is an animal biotechnology as to who actually works on reproductive technologies and gene editing.
So I have a whole team here and I'm going to achieve the title.
Sorry, but I found a better title and I was like, This should be good.
And the question is whether if you're thinking about the issue of this cattle with a gene, editing is the right solution or the best solution.
And first, I'm going to discuss a bit with a couple, to be honest, because as we already heard from Sarah,
they are not by nature then whether gene editing is a promising way to achieve own business always are.
There are better ways and when you compare these different approaches, whether it's ethically acceptable and then there's the issue.
But actually a way and partnership of the law is legally allowed.
And the last thing that people really discussed, but which is really what we were in commercial terms when it actually hit the market.
And that's what I need in my category. But you cannot be on this.
This is an hour. It's actually from the National Museum in Copenhagen.
It's a skeleton. And you can see this bull has huge horns, but also that the cows would have had horns.
So. So aurochs were horned animals not.
There was the denial on this.
Homelessness was actually in the species, but it wasn't expressed probably because it gave them a competitive advantage having horns.
So that's what we can say from Darwinian reasons.
I think that the reason they all had horns, even though they had the genetic possibility not to have,
was that having these weapons actually gave them an advantage in survival.
Interestingly, I don't know if you visit dairy farms. But if you visit a typical dairy farm, you will typically meet this one Holstein feature,
which is the dominant dairy cow in the Western world, and you rarely see all Friesian cows with horns on this go park and dairy farms.
But apart from some weird organic farms, they all have no horns.
But actually, these guys naturally grow horns. So something that's happened to them.
Because in most cases, homelessness in America is an artefact.
The reason why this happened, it was actually until 1960s.
They all had horns because until the 1960s, the typical way of keeping their cattle was in the title.
So the all the winter they stood in boxes with the tie down, couldn't move.
Just get up and lay down. And in the summer, they went pasture.
And that system worked well, the haunts,
because either they were so confined that they couldn't fight or they were all so much space that they could keep a distance.
Then in the seventies and sixties came loose housing system, that's indoor systems where they walk around in the barn.
That's the typical system you have for paedophile today and the those systems that had a free space but not much space.
So fighting became a problem and also work safety because it was risk as a worker and one of these boss,
it could be corner and suddenly you could be hit by a horn of a car, which can be quite dangerous.
And today in Europe and the US, I guess the same rest of the world.
So these are places where I can get numbers. About 80% of dairy cows undergo some form of intervention to enhance small number of beef cattle.
I'll come back to that because beef cattle have a higher prevalence of homelessness and homelessness.
And the state of what if you're a nice person, I can discuss, well, that's nice.
But the nicest way you can be as a cattle farmer is using what's called this body.
This flooding, you know, this is the instrument you use. So you have a little thing that's completely wrecked from heat.
She was called culturally the specific system that actually burn away the ability to grow a horn on a calf.
So Jankowski had not yet to do a whole second thoughts and the generative tissue I destroyed by means of burning and other waste chemicals.
But putting you put some sort of paste on, but that's really nasty because it's very, very uncertain.
You can get the right place and that means it will destroy some of the tissue or honey oil that my wife and practice and get.
I remember when she was farmers who couldn't get the act because then some you had to start taking horns of older cattle and that's really,
really nasty and and hard work. So the best way and I figured million of animals etc. is what for that that's probably disrupting a coterie.
It's done in cops 4 to 12 weeks old.
So you take this glowing thing and put it prior to the vote.
You may take take a knife and cut off a layer and then you bite.
And it's really unpleasant. I've been doing it must not have been standing next pie.
It smells a bit like when you burn hair. It's a really nasty smell, really unpleasant.
About 20 seconds. You keep the thing on, didn't say the other side.
And that, of course, as you can imagine, has some welfare effects without anaesthesia pain relief.
The intervention is extremely painful, strong acute pain, followed by more moderate pain for about 8 hours.
And then there may be some long term pain, which is not well understood.
I look at the literature, they all see that something, but they haven't been able to quantify it.
So there's also an element of something that hasn't been quantified with probably believed to be there.
If you're a nice, very nice guy, if you live in Denmark, for example, some of you are required by law to use local anaesthesia prior to the spotting.
So you will inject anaesthetic prior to doing that.
And these days it's also seen as good practice to acquire nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,
which means that the animals will be covered for about 8 hours. And far from the leaders.
You can read that with that you can take away so all the back pain.
But there will still be a problem about long term pain.
But all the pain and the severe pain from the first hours will be taken away and I think at least civilised countries should at least,
at least in place requiring these things. But then you could ask, shouldn't cows have horns?
This is a guy from Switzerland. I mean, a couple he actually organised a campaign, you know, Switzerland,
you can have referendums not only about whether to leave the EU, they can't leave the EU because they are not in there.
But but you can have referendums about a lot of things.
And actually, this guy, they made it that they had a referendum about whether the whether about the holding of capital in Switzerland.
His suggestion was not to band behind it, but rather giving an economic insight, giving money to people, didn't he?
Because if you have capital in systems where that haunts, you need more space and they're more costly.
So the idea was making it economically feasible to have a whole.
He lost the vote. But this shows that there is some temporary movement towards it.
And even people who work on animal welfare research, a famous German animal welfare research researcher,
has written a paper that she argues actually this is bad because she thinks that horns play a role in social behaviour.
Kettl. And see this putting is a mere systematic measure to adjust them.
I mean, the cows husbandry conditions that are insufficiently adapted to the species specific needs of cattle.
So you have we can have a debate about whether they should have holds.
And I agree on that debate. But this is not my focus. Because I'm going to narrow my question now and I'm going to do that twice.
It will be slightly irritating some of you, but I'm just asking a question of the following.
So. Okay. There's a debate to be had, but the rest of the talk.
The question we will ask is, if we want on this house, what is the best way of doing it?
So ask yourself. Okay. We live in a world where for a long while we will have cows without horns.
What is the best way of achieving that? Does that make sense? So and this is, by the way, I mean, some of the biodynamics people do have goals,
but to avoid the problems and think that you can glue these things on on the hunted so they are less dangerous.
Be another solution.
So the question I'm going to ask is whether gene editing is a promising way to achieve homelessness, promising alternative to this rather brutal way.
You just describe it. Firstly, as I said, holiness always is a technical term for having to make this decision not to blow horns.
That's actually a naturally occurring genotype. Some cattle are born without the disposition to grow horns.
This is actually the beef cow from us of a breed called Mary Facts.
And these are a matter of fact. Cows typically don't have homes that born without horns.
Did you know this which naturally occurs cattle and cattle also has a via autosomal recessive gene for politeness which is dominant.
That means a bull carrying two copies of the gene for openness will give full offspring.
So that's clear genetic. We know exactly how the genes work. And it is either they have one gene and it's called the gene,
and half of the costs will be the F because if they have a double gene, then all the offspring of those bulls.
So you have a, you know, the way cattle breeding is organised is that you have a pool station.
So if all the elite bulls are, quote, all the offspring, look, it doesn't matter what the cows are like because this is a dominant team.
So it's all the all the bulls useful beating up, then all the offspring will be told.
Interesting, too. That is actually and that's why my my friends in the dynamic business I think they're some
of the breeding business come in they notice a growing demand the other farmers in Denmark,
Sweden, Norway where the company waste could replace these hats and bulls that would give all this cattle,
but strangely, not another economic incentive to make sure it costs about €7.
I mean to to teach this bought a cattle car costs about €7.
That's not a lot. So if that will never pay. So it's for the change of breeding goals.
I think the main reason may be ethical, but maybe property rather is a dirty job.
As I said, I've been out with my wife. The honey is really smelt badly.
You feel like a horrible person and a lot of farmers don't like to do it.
So there is a demand. But as I'm going to argue a little bit later, if you're going to use traditional breeding methods,
that's a long way to go and invariably not in defeat, but in debates.
That's actually a long way to go. And that's where gene editing comes in.
Why can't we just as you see, editing to make this move a bit faster?
And as a matter of fact, as this was watching our show that was actually in the paper in Nature Biotechnology, that group of researchers,
some of them coming from a company called Re Re Company Networks and some of them coming
for UC Davis together published a paper showing that they succeeded in doing exactly that.
So they actually produced two. Well, Cash, Spotify and Blu-Ray.
So these are the other two suite guys. And they actually with one of them show they got offspring and all the offspring was was pulled.
So they actually proved it. They actually had two bulls on the ground, won this lot at two to measure its tissue.
The other one they use for experience will be addicted for reasons I'm going to talk about later.
They couldn't get into the food chain, but they actually managed to show it worked.
And one of the reasons why works in cattle and will not work in chicken, for example,
or fish or picks, is that cattle already use a lot of reproductive technologies, which.
Now we're going to show you a bit about technology. So how do you do this?
There are two ways to reach the guys who did the original one that actually took the long route.
They took out cells fibroblasts. And then you do the gene editing on the fibroblasts and afterwards you clean the cells.
Because if you do teenagers on a cell line, they will not all be genetically modified,
but then you can sort of select them and be solved when you have a pure cell line.
You can use the same technique they used for the sheep, used for the sheep body, so they can take an out of a cow,
take out the nucleus at one of the cells and do the little tricks that it
would call it and turn it into a foetus and then take it to improve transfer.
I think that's a very costly way. That's why my friends say that it will be really, really expensive.
That's an issue we. That's using a taking out on fertilised egg.
They already do that even though very young have you know,
the problems we have breathing is this takes several years, generations of others very long.
Unlike the chicken or the long duration, as long as it's speeded up,
they have now methods where they can take out some fertilised eggs from their young heifers so that the female side,
they can do in-vitro fertilisation, and then they can do it through the genetics and directly on the fertilised egg,
which is in many ways much easier.
And what they can do afterwards is then they can grow these eggs and then they can do implementation biopsies that could take out the cancer cells.
And they can not only measure whether the gene has been inserted, but they can also make sure that you have something called genomic selection so
that a lot of reasons why you like to do that anyway and then you could happen.
So that leads to routes by means of which you can do this two particular routes.
And, and that's the reason why this is going to work in practice.
A lot of this together, all of this is already happening.
I mean, the reason why I probably at least he has a fantastic ethics guy who who does
all the ethics taking stuff on the side and social science stuff on the side.
But they actually do these things already. And it's becoming routine in both of Europe and United States to do these things.
So this is just a little add on to a bunch of things you already do in dairy.
So this is a quotation from some of the guys who put in the nature paper, nature,
biotechnology paper say although it's funding, I'd be very concerned as founders with this One Nation approach.
In addition to that, their industry,
they also represent a proof the integration of this protein into elite animals to be used to eliminate the need for.
And by the way, that Marion asked me a while ago, it's just a simple thing. It's one thing.
It's also one of these very nice properties. You just have one gene and you at it, okay, you're done this solution.
So the only problem would be economically viable and would potentially improve the welfare of cattle in the United States.
Wow. And they actually made it to one of the daughters of a brewery, actually made it to the front page of a journal called Wyatt.
I've been told that they can use. So it's getting the front page wide.
It's nice and that beautiful post poll that if I got in there and that was a story, a more humane livestock industry brought to you by Chris.
But by the way, they didn't use Chris, but they use something called Talon if you're a bit into the nerdy stuff.
Talyn was a criticism.
Chris But but today I think they use CRISPR cas Liam Taylor in the state of the art in the in the mid-nineties mid-twenties with and
so around 2015 when they did this stuff today you use CRISPR-Cas9 so stealing is just a criticism of CRISPR as I understand it.
Okay. That done. Then comes the question.
Is that ethically and legally acceptable? And now I've got to tell you again that I'm concerned that the context.
So we already decided not to discuss whether speaking cabinet should have horns.
And also we will not hear discuss the existing application of reproductive technologies and all the things you saw.
You can also discuss it, but that's not my focus.
My focus will be about adding the gene editing part to something that you already do in the cattle industry.
And the ethics part. I think we've found four things to discuss.
Is this not your only display respect for human integrity?
Will it be compatible with a concern for animal welfare? And will it look after human health and safety?
Naturalness. Well, D.N.A., pole polecat and so on, that showed in a very trivial sense.
As a group, they would not have existed for human intervention.
But this they have in common with all other domestic animals. I mean, there would be no German shepherds.
There would be no giant. The rabbits.
There would be no, no, no broiler chicken if it wasn't for succulents.
Eventually, six marriages ago, a while ago. So that doesn't do things for them.
And unlike the charity case that Sarah talked about, this, at least two already filed in default.
So it's actually not bringing something into the thesis that didn't exist in advance.
It's just making a more rapid route to something that could actually happen.
And based on that,
I think it's difficult to argue that in terms of the genes that carry these cows and significantly more unnatural than other categories,
because as you see, naturalness comes in degrees. If you're against anything unnatural, you should be against any sort of medication.
But it's very difficult to argue that something specifically more natural about these actions.
Then there could be the concern for the integrity of the animals.
I mean, integrity is often used to say that we should respect individual animals, including the bodies, and not alter them just as human purposes.
But the whole point here is that that we are not altering an animal, be creating an animal.
The point is that when Spotify and agree with me, it's not as if you took an existing animal station, you created that animal, this property.
So you could not cannot say that that's an individual animal whose integrity has been harmed.
Unlike all the costs which have been discarded, I mean, you could say you did something really horrible to them.
So no individual is not being respected. Then you could talk and some people like to talk about a about integrity of whole species.
But my point is that in terms of species, this issue could spread anyway.
I mean, those that already found the species. It's not enough time, enough money.
You could do it naturally. So even from a species point of view, it's difficult to say that you have to violate that thesis.
Unlike the blind chicken case, where, of course, this, by the way, excludes the extreme branches where naturally occurring.
But forgetting about that, if you introduce that change into the animals,
that will not occur naturally, that you could say that you violated the integrity of the species.
But you cannot do that. You. Then comes the concern for animal welfare.
At first sight you can say, Well, that's fantastic because you don't don, you don't depart the spot, so you avoid some horrible things.
But it's important to be aware that that the are some the problems.
I mean, if you read the paper because some of it I referred to for me to biotechnology, it took 26 embryos to get to offspring.
And that means on the way there were a number of miscarriages which we often have with this kind of.
I mean, as soon as you use in-vitro fertilisation, because people are the scientists getting better and better,
but there's still things they don't understand perfectly. So cloning.
I think cloning the things that are not well understood and you get a number of malformed animals that are being aborted late in pregnancy.
I happen to think for four reasons I would love to talk about you interested that the foetus system attention.
So I don't think they have a problem.
But I do think that the couples in both camps opposes if your cow, which has a late abortion, of course, that cow would have, what's a problem?
So there are some welfare problems on top of that.
That could be what's called deleterious non-target effects.
That means that people do this in a less than perfect way and as a consequence gets get some really unpleasant side effects.
And that in a way links up with it with the other concerned content for human health and safety.
Technically speaking, these days, gene editing is a form of genetic modification.
In principle, this is no different as to what you expect from a nature.
But in practice, these things may not go as expected. And tragically, this was actually the case.
They wrote this wonderful piece saying everything is under control. There were a lot of hubris that we all get at as we have tested everything.
And then, unfortunately, scientists at FDA found something they hadn't found.
Sound a bit of. So they claimed in the original paper this is completely free of off target effects.
But subsequently at FDA, a scientist in burst genome found a stretch of bacterial DNA, including a gene conferring resistance.
I talked to several people about it. It doesn't seem to be a case of it's not the case that this would sort of kill anyone, the cost of it.
But it just shows that there's there's always the danger that you don't understand, fully understand what you're doing.
You may do things inadvertently, despite all your perfection that can cause trouble so that I'm life.
So that calls for precaution. And that's where in real life the actual imitation is right now.
You may know that the Swedes, not one is the very precocious, but they were quite bravia.
They tried to put through legislation saying that it is not in the form of such devices,
but they were hit by the decision of the European Court of Justice.
I think there were several mentioned that which actually said sorry,
it falls under the GMO directive and that means that the next cow will be seen as GMO.
And that means that you have to do very extensive safety testing, which means that it will be completely expensive to bring into the food chain.
Because before you when your faced with doing all that, first the cow will be that. Secondly, you've used about 200 times.
Then you would expect the Americans to be able to contest and to be much more brave.
But that's not the case. Actually, the FDA has ruled that.
And I want to be clear when I talk about the American special court that actually, you know,
as a Brit who just happens to live in the US and the FDA actually has ruled that that is mandatory pre-market,
new animal drug regulatory regulation, that means in all your language that you have to test the message of a drugs that's very, very extensive.
The similar thing as in Europe, where the US regulatory forces are very lenient on plants, they actually are stringent on animals as the US are.
So for the time being, this is not going to happen unless someone changes that these laws,
there'll be no gene edited cattle on the ground because that would be far too expensive for some.
So now I have to become a bit hyper. Okay. Assuming that someone changed those laws.
Wouldn't that be interesting from an economic point of view? Or would it be acceptable?
I mean, one question is whether it's a worldwide scandal.
There's always this concern about new technology. She said it's a Stone Age imagination.
So we'll know. We'll see. We don't want that.
And even even if the technology is superior by technical standards, it must meet resistance from key stakeholders.
We have a lot of the technologies in the food and food area that have been rejected by them in various ways.
Containment of contaminated food has been rejected even though they make great food.
Radiation, for example, is something that all the experts on. Everything is brilliant, but it's not allowed.
And we don't know whether the public will accept it. We know that in some other case with the cloning,
there was a big debate when when they stopped cloning a thousand us and they stopped exporting to Europe.
That was the reaction. Both the US and Europe people didn't want milk from John Powers.
You may even remember that debate.
But it's very unclear whether that will make a difference at the cost of using it for the conduct themselves to use it.
Just like actually a lot of the calls today or the culture would probably somewhere be related to a close call.
People care about that. For some funny, we don't care about the actual cow giving the milk, so we don't know that.
So it remains an open question whether this will be acceptable by the market.
What we know much more about is what I want to talk about now, whether it would be feasible for easy company for my friends in Viking Genetics.
And yes, that's the really interesting part. I'm going to tell you a bit about reading.
This is a figure don't you look at this stripe once. These are these are sort of their genetic merit.
That's sort of is what you what you sort of get out of terms of dollars.
All of a sudden you talk and you can see that hold. Once you get nearly $800, the super pot, once that's your current, you get $620.
So this difference about $70, that doesn't sound like a lot, but I have to say that's astronomic.
Because if you actually choose tomorrow to only use those pills, that means that for for once, you will take a loss of 120.
And for every generation that will be added on to the interest and interest interest.
And that I have to say, it's going to be billions of dollars be very expensive,
because as soon as you have a cumulative effect of going back into the breeding, it costs a lot of money.
And that was actually my friends in the breathing company this office,
while this is a piece of cake but that was convinced and wow that means that even though our farmers won't hold cattle,
we're not going to do it because the loss in breeding value will be such.
So unless they can find a smart way of using other technologies to get beyond that, they will.
This will not happen. And also the other problem is inbreeding.
I mean, if you work in cattle grazing, you're concerned about two things genetic progress and avoiding inbreeding,
because inbreeding is something that's a risk of trouble later on in your life.
So for both those reasons, they actually ended up in our discussion.
This is not because we are not in the foreseeable future going to use traditional breeding
openness in health sufficient because it will cost too much in lost breeding value.
And I have a 50 year journey. That's a very complicated one.
But one thing is A, B and C and D are ways where you sort of just use A is where you don't have an oldest like once before.
That's no place the half like once it's a single team at the very top,
which means that you have dungeon and you can see here and these curves means how much in in value you can see to get maximum kinetic value.
You have no no pulled animals. Then you move they move to a scenario where you get a certain amount, but that's you can see as loss.
So as soon as you start breathing to get more hotness into the species, you have to do that lots.
And that means lots of money that's accumulate and turns into a astronomic sum of money.
But if you're not, you it this one you end up with the same level of economic income and two totally pulled animals.
So what this figure shows is that providing the tenens works and providing there's no legal obstacles,
you can actually make a lot of money by using it because you can get the site or you can get it without facing the loss in intellect purpose.
So that's the argument. Why my friends like genetics and this fantastic reputation.
As long as it doesn't face consumer problems.
And as long as the lawyers, the legal people try to change the law, haven't done that yet.
And interestingly enough, what's also interesting about this, this one shows that the black wants you out of the gate.
And what happens is that after about nine years, they will die out.
So Gene would only be required for a short while. Then they will do their job, go out of business.
And that means that that that gene editing will no longer be necessary to maintain the.
And I think that would mean something to the public that you do something for a while,
but you don't have to go on modify these animals and the modified animals themselves.
They would die out. So my conclusions are our conclusions while Callahan's because these give them a competitive advantage.
However, no one production system normal.
That's what we have had in the western world since the sixties, cause we suffer from high levels of injury if they have horns.
The normal way of getting rid of the horns through this body gives rise to welfare problems, even with the best of systems,
with painkillers and things like that, and absurd rootlessness by breeding animals which carry the naturally occurring g bonus.
However, for dairy beets, the cost of doing this with a short time horizon would be astronomical.
That's not going to happen. So gene editing appears to be a viable tool to speed up without these costs.
So that's a real life application that will make a difference, both for animal welfare and economics and provided perfection of technology.
And I think unlike this case, we're not that far.
I think they used an earlier technology, Taylor. I think those are you who's who, who do these things with testify to.
I hope that this is moving very, very quickly.
So the idea that you could do this in an okay way and not run into the trouble that guys did in the night 2016 paper is likely so.
So that seems to be a really good case provided that the law is providing that that these regulatory impediments I'm no longer there.
Okay, folks, that was my argument.