“60 MINUTES” LISTINGS FOR SUNDAY APRIL 29
CRISPR
– Can a discovery that has already restored sight in genetically bind
mice do the same for humans? Could this be used one day to edit out
hereditary illnesses, like heart disease, from an embryo? Bill Whitaker
reports on a new gene-editing tool that’s revolutionizing
biomedicine. Nichole Marks is the producer.
CLOSING THE GAP –
A new kind of affirmative action that helps low-income people to get
college degrees aims to close the gap between rich and poor. Bill and
Melinda Gates helped launch the movement with a scholarship program that
has sent 20,000 low-income students to college. Scott Pelley
reports. Denise Schrier Cetta is the producer.
SEAWEED – It’s nutritious, it
keeps the ocean healthy and it’s good for the environment. There’s very
little not to like about seaweed, a commodity that offers healthy
solutions to some of the Earth’s most vexing problems. Lesley Stahl
reports on a new type of farming. Shari Finkelstein is the producer.
04.26.2018
OCEANS OF FOOD IN OUR FUTURE? “60 MINUTES” REPORTS ON SEAWEED FARMING AND ITS SURPRISING POSSIBILITIES
Meet a Former Fisherman Who Now Farms Seaweed and Shellfish
It’s nutritious. It keeps the ocean healthy. It’s good for the
environment. There’s very little not to like about seaweed, a commodity
that offers healthy solutions to some of the Earth’s most vexing
problems. Lesley Stahl reports on a new type of farming, “ocean
farming,” and interviews a fisherman-turned-seaweed-farmer, on the next
edition of 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 29 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Seaweed, sometimes called “sea greens,” has some advantages over its
land-based cousins. It doesn’t use fertilizer or pesticides that are
costly and can harm the environment. It doesn’t require fresh water, and
it grows very fast. Plus, it is rich in calcium, iron and antioxidants,
and it’s a good source of fiber.
Bren Smith, the first commercial seaweed farmer in Connecticut, grows a
type of seaweed called sugar kelp. He started out as a fisherman, but
when stocks of staple fish began to be restricted as a result of
overfishing, he switched to growing oysters. But then hurricanes
destroyed his oyster crop two years in a row, and he knew he needed to
adapt in the era of climate change and find a new calling. “I’m a farmer
now…I’m an ocean farmer,” Smith tells Stahl.
Ocean farming requires less space than farming on land. “If you can
stack crops on top of each other, it’s just really efficient. You don’t
use…large plots of ocean, but you get so much food,” Smith says. He
grows his sugar kelp on horizontal lines suspended a few feet below the
ocean surface, supported by buoys. Below the seaweed, he grows
shellfish, using the “entire water column…You’ve got the kelp here, and
then we have the mussels [below],” he shows Stahl on a visit to his
offshore farm. “Off those same lines, we have scallops, and then below
the whole system, we have cages with oysters in them.”
As seaweed grows, it absorbs carbon dioxide and nitrogen, playing a
useful role in cleansing ocean waters. In Puget Sound outside Seattle,
sugar kelp is being tested as a potential remedy for the growing problem
of ocean acidification. Smith is so convinced of seaweed’s value that
he’s started a non-profit to encourage others to take up ocean farming.
“For my generation, this is a really exciting moment…I can farm and grow
food, but also I can soak up carbon and nitrogen, while creating
jobs…giving people the opportunity to create small businesses that they
can pass on to their kids.”
But will Americans eat seaweed? Chef Barton Seaver has written a
cookbook with recipes for “sea greens,” as he calls them. Asked by Stahl
whether he thinks seaweed will be a successful food, he replies, “I
do…you know, 10 years ago, kale wasn’t on the shelf.”
04.26.2018
REVOLUTIONARY GENE-EDITING TOOL MIGHT BE THE MOST
CONSEQUENTIAL DISCOVERY SO FAR THIS CENTURY, SAYS A LEADER OF THE HUMAN
GENOME PROJECT ON “60 MINUTES”
Hope Is to Use Gene-Editing Tool CRISPR to Treat Thousands of Diseases
Can a discovery that has already restored sight in genetically blind
mice do the same in humans? Could it one day be used to edit out
hereditary illnesses like heart disease from an embryo? These are very
real possibilities thanks to CRISPR. A leader of the Human Genome
Project believes this gene-editing tool could be the most consequential
discovery in biomedicine this century. Bill Whitaker reports on a new
tool that’s revolutionizing biomedical research on the next edition of
60 MINUTES Sunday, April 29 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., was a
leader in the project to map all the genes in the human body; without
that body of knowledge, CRISPR would not be possible. “During the Human
Genome Project, we could read out all the human DNA, and then, in the
years afterwards, find the misspellings that caused human diseases,” he
tells Whitaker. “But we had no way to think about how to fix them. And
then, pretty much on schedule, this mind-blowing discovery that bacteria
have a way to fix those misspellings appears.”
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic
Repeats. It was discovered by examining the way bacteria defends itself
against invading viruses. Bacteria keep a piece of that DNA as a
reminder, and if the same virus invades again, bacteria can identify it
and disable it. Feng Zhang has worked at the Broad Institute for seven
years and figured out how to make CRISPR work in human cells. Just as
bacteria are able to track down a virus, CRISPR can be programmed to
locate faulty DNA and edit it, adding in synthetic DNA. “You can give
the cell a new piece of DNA that carries the sequence you want to
incorporate into the genome,” says Zhang.
The possibilities of this process are wide and deep. It can be used on
practically any living thing. The technique has already created
malaria-resistant mosquitoes and modified rice to better withstand
droughts – just two of the countless applications. CRISPR is readily
available to medical researchers, some of whom have attacked diseases in
animals successfully. Zhang says the CRISPR from his lab has been sent
out over 45,000 times to 2,200 labs in 61 countries. “There are about
six thousand or more diseases that are caused by faulty genes. The hope
is that we will be able to address most, if not all of them.”
Lander says the implications of what could be been done with CRISPR in
embryos – editing out disease or editing in desirable traits before
birth – should not be the emphasis now. The focus should be on people
with disease. “I don’t think we’re close to ready to use it to go edit
the human population. I think we’ve got to use it for medicine for a
while. I think those are the urgent questions. That’s what people want
right now…cures for disease.”
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