Saturday, April 28, 2018

60 Minutes 4/29 on CBS

04.26.2018


“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.

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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.”

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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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