Genetic Editing: Can We Create Perfect Humans? An Interview with Denis Rebrikov.

— Why do you believe that a scientific career should not be advertised and that we shouldn't encourage young people to pursue science?

— Science can be compared to playing musical instruments. If we start promoting enrollment in a conservatory, will we increase the number of brilliant violinists? Perhaps. But we will likely end up with a larger number of average violinists who will play in underappreciated orchestras. Only a few will become outstanding musicians. However, in music, there is room for everyone. Some will be appreciated by knowledgeable audiences, while others will perform for the general public.

In science, there is no mass production; we perform for one another. We do not need average violinists. Their role is filled by what Western science refers to as technicians: lab technicians and assistants. They are essential in science, as a scientist cannot accomplish anything without them. They set up reactions, press buttons, and rearrange test tubes. This is important, but it is not scientific activity. Admittedly, sometimes scientists, graduate students, and young researchers take up soldering irons, soldering, building circuits, but this happens when they are developing a new technology or approach. Once everything is figured out, instructions are written, and methods are established, it becomes the job of the lab assistants.

Therefore, promoting science and attracting everyone to it is detrimental. The harm lies in the fact that these "recruited" individuals realize by the end of their university courses that they do not want to pursue a career in science.

In music, there is room for everyone. But in science, there is no mass production; we perform for one another. We do not need average violinists.

Imagine that we advertise a scientific career path to school students, pushing them into it, only for them to become disillusioned at some point and realize they want to go into business instead. They would have already wasted time and energy. If such average students come to me, I will eventually filter them out, but they will have lost time that could have been spent pursuing what they truly wanted.

A separate question is how to properly guide them in their career choices. Because there is no universally accepted method to accurately determine the right path for a school student, graduate, or third-year student. They have devised a two-tier system with bachelor's and master's degrees to provide another opportunity to change paths. However, the issue of how to select those who genuinely need to go into science has not yet been resolved in a general sense.

— How did you get into science?

— For some reason, I immediately wanted to be a biologist; I was captivated by biology from the second grade. Somehow, I ended up with a biology textbook for university entrance on my shelf. How it got there is a mystery since there are no biologists in my family. I looked through it and was particularly fascinated by the topic of cells, the organelles within them, and how everything is structured.

In school, I also enjoyed natural science, where we had tasks like measuring the temperature of the environment with wet and dry thermometers. Organizing this required finding two thermometers and using cotton. I was quickly drawn to various experiments.

In my class, there was a girl whose father was a chemist. She gifted me a stand with test tubes. I loved pouring liquids from those test tubes.

Then there was backyard chemistry: we were always blowing things up; I would go to the agricultural store where at that time you could easily buy a bag of fertilizer-grade saltpeter. We soaked newspapers in the saltpeter; they wouldn't explode but would smolder quickly. My neighbor had ski poles made of magnesium, and we would blow up magnesium with saltpeter.

— Did you conduct biological experiments?

— Since the first grade, I had fish and three large aquariums. I also had snails and xenopuses. I was given a children's microscope, and I would go to Bitsevsky Park, where, like Duremar, I would catch daphnia with a net and then observe them under the microscope. Where did this interest come from? There was no one around to inspire me. It felt spontaneous.

Then in the fifth grade, I joined the "Sambo-70" school, which was nearby. My mother suggested, "There's a sports school; do you want to join?" I said, "I do." I trained at "Sambo-70" in Tepliy Stan for five years. Essentially, it was a school for Olympic reserve training. Back then, the USSR wanted to make Sambo an Olympic sport but didn't succeed, so everyone became judokas afterward.

But I did not forget biology; I even tried to take the biology exam externally but failed. I wanted to progress faster in biology. However, biology was poorly taught at "Sambo," and I feared I wouldn't get into Moscow State University, which I desperately wanted. So, I transferred to the biological class of the 43rd school in Yugo-Zapadnaya for two years.

I sat next to the smartest boy in the class, a straight-A student. I copied his work, and no one bullied him. I was accepted to the biology faculty on my first attempt, just barely meeting the minimum requirements.

— When you were at MSU, did you realize this was your profession? How did you envision your future then?

— I quickly realized that just studying at the biology faculty was boring, so in my second year, I enrolled in the evening psychology faculty as well. At that time, you could enroll for free in any second faculty. From my second year, I would finish my classes at LenGor and travel to the old MSU building in the city center for psychology classes, and then go to my laboratory.

— Where did your laboratory come from?

— Our biology class was assigned to practice in laboratories. We had one day a week cleared of classes specifically for this purpose. I ended up in a great laboratory. In our 43rd school, Lev Abramovich Osterman, an outstanding biophysicist who worked for a long time at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, taught physics. He would come to class and say, "Our lesson today is about this and that. Why don't you read the textbook about it? You can do that. I'll tell you something different." He shared interesting experiments and posed thought-provoking problems. His son worked at the Institute of Genetics and Selection of Industrial Microorganisms (GosNIIGenetics — editor) near the "Yuzhnaya" metro station.

When the assignment of students to laboratories began, Osterman suggested we go to his son's lab. So, one girl from my class and I went there for our practice.

And I was completely absorbed by the work with test tubes; I loved it. It was exhilarating to manipulate molecules. The mechanical work with test tubes, pipette tips, and pouring was thrilling. We mainly focused on classical cloning of DNA fragments in E. coli. We studied delta-endotoxins of Bacillus thuringiensis.

The mechanical work with test tubes, pipette tips, and pouring was thrilling.

These bacilli naturally parasitize insects. Usually, there are insects that love to eat a particular plant, like the Colorado potato beetle, and a bacterium that specifically parasitizes that insect, killing it with a toxin that perforates its intestines.

The Colorado potato beetle eats the leaf along with the bacterium's spores. The bacterium multiplies in its intestines, killing the intestinal cells, leading to perforation of the intestinal wall — the beetle dies. Essentially, the bacillus consumes it this way. Then it turns back into spores, the wind spreads the spores across the field, and the cycle repeats. We studied these very toxins, which create holes in the epithelial cell membrane, examined their three-dimensional structure, and performed X-ray crystallography.

There were always two teams working. The protein team, which produced the protein and obtained crystals, would do X-rays not at our lab but in Germany, sending samples there. Meanwhile, a parallel group of cloners would sequence the gene. The sequencing gives us the amino acid sequence, and we cloned these genes from specific bacteria, checked the protein's toxicity, and experimented on caterpillars.

After enrolling in the biology faculty, I returned to the same laboratory after a break of about six months. I was given tasks, but I wasn't officially registered. It was likely convenient for the lab not to spend time training me; they could just assign me tasks. This was primarily technical work. I didn't always understand why we were doing what we were doing. Strangely, I was rarely interested in the broader goal. Of course, if I had asked my supervisor, he would have explained why we were creating a phage library and selecting clones. But I was intrigued by the process itself; no one knows this sequence, and we will find out. That's cool! That alone was fascinating.