Can lawyers save the planet? I asked the world’s foremost climate lawyer, Michael Gerrard, Professor at the Columbia Law School and Founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What a privilege it was to spend time with this lifelong advocate for sustainability! We discussed the current status of climate litigation, what’s next, and the role it can play in changing the behaviours of greenhouse gas emitters and securing the future of our planet.

Bruce McCabe: We're here to talk about climate change law and where we're going … it seems that litigation and legal pathways can potentially play as much or an even more important role in changing our behaviours, and that's what I really wanted to explore with you today by starting with a premise … “Can lawyers save the planet?”

In the fall of 2005 I drove 55 miles southeast of San Francisco to spend a happy day at IBM’s labs at Almaden, where I met all manner of remarkable people and learned about the latest microprocessor and storage developments, but it was the last agenda item of the day that made the greatest impression. So much of an impression that it changed, fundamentally, the way I work.

Bruce McCabe: Bruce McCabe: Dr. Demirkol, thank you so much for making time to talk to us. I wanted to talk to you about the future of gene therapies and eye diseases today because of what you're doing here ... I'd like to start very broad, can you tell us what's the dream? What... If everything comes to fruition over the next 20, 30 years, what could the world look like when it comes to treating eye diseases? How different could it be? …

Dr Aykut Demirkol is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Harkness Eye Institute, working with Professor Stephen Tsang on new gene therapies to correct retinal diseases. This is SUCH an important area in the future of medicine, as so many people around the world are debilitated by eye diseases. I asked if I could drop by for an update.

Bruce McCabe: Rodolphe Barrangou, you are a professor here at North Carolina State University and you are, to me, one of the gods of CRISPR. You were involved very early in the whole process of proving out the science. And particularly, you proved the linkage between the immunity effect and bacteria two phages. So your experimental work actually closed the loop on proving that was what CRISPR was for. So you are I guess the last so 10 or 20 people in the chain here of making the thing real, a tool that's changing humanity. I think that's fair to say.

If you want to understand the future of healthcare, a good place to start is with the past, and in particular the work of an amazing inventor who changed the world, Margaret Crane. One day in 1967 she was looking at pregnancy testing technology in the company she worked for when she had an epiphany …

I asked someone who was flying one. The person who made me think differently about electric aviation was an engineer by the name of Joshua Portlock. I had big lingering doubts about the battery/weight compromises, but here was this guy making noise about the subject, trying to get approvals to set up a commercial sightseeing service …

How do we feed a planet? How do we do it through peak population, without wreaking catastrophic destruction on the biosphere and losing all semblance of the planet we once had? In October 2022, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Distinguished Professor Rodolphe Barrangou and visiting his CRISPR lab at North Carolina State University …