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COY WIRE: Hello, lovely people.
Terrific Tuesday to you.
Coy Wire.
Thank you for spending part of your day with us
right here on "CNN 10," the best 10 minutes in news.
Now, we have to start today with some sad and concerning
news out of North Korea.
Experts say that North Korea's chronic food shortages
are growing and so is the number of citizens potentially dying
due to starvation.
Trade data, satellite images, and assessments from the United
Nations and South Korea suggest that the nation is grappling
with their lowest food supply since the famine of the 1990s,
a famine that caused mass starvation, killing hundreds
of thousands of people.
Experts say the current food shortage is likely
due to complications from the COVID pandemic, three years
of closed borders and strict isolation,
as well as floods and storms, which offset planting.
North Korea is a self-isolated and very secretive country.
So it's difficult to assess or prove
what's really going on there.
Experts say that equal distribution
of any available food there is unlikely
because the elite and military are prioritized.
Now, despite the food shortage, which few experts deny,
North Korea continues to spend money
on missile tests instead of food and refuses
aid from neighboring countries.
Here's CNN's Paula Hancocks with more.
PAULA HANCOCKS: Concerns about North Korea's food crisis
are growing.
Reports from multiple sources say deaths due to starvation
are likely.
LUCAS RENGIFO-KELLER: Probably its worst point
since the famine in the 1990s, which killed 3% to 5%
of the population.
PAULA HANCOCKS: Attention's being paid at the very top.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held a Workers' Party meeting
this week, calling for a fundamental change
in farming and state economic plans.
But many say it is his regime, its chronic mismanagement,
and isolation that has caused this crisis.
LINA YOON: We're really talking about three years
of no imports of fertilizer.
There's been no imports of tools or components
to fix the outdated machinery that they have.
PAULA HANCOCKS: An extensive shutdown
of borders due to the COVID pandemic
meant almost no food or aid was getting into the country.
Only in recent months has minimal trade
restarted with China.
South Korean officials said last month
they believe deaths from starvation
are occurring in certain areas, though provided no evidence.
Its rural development agency estimates that the North's
food production dropped almost 4% last year from the year
before.
LUCAS RENGIFO-KELLER: Food has dipped
below the amount needed to satisfy
the minimum human needs.
So as it stands by that measure, even if you distributed food
perfectly equally, which is totally inconceivable,
you would have hunger-related deaths.
PAULA HANCOCKS: Speaking to South Korea's foreign minister
last week, he said Pyongyang has to decide
to help its own people.
PARK JIN: The only way that North Korea can get out
of this trouble is to come back to the dialogue table
and accept our humanitarian offer to the North
and make a better choice for the future.
PAULA HANCOCKS: The regime's focus
remains on its nuclear and missile program.
Seoul's Ministry of Unification says if Pyongyang had used
the money spent on launching missiles last year for food,
it could have bought 1 million tons, more than enough to cover
the annual food shortage.
But that focus is unlikely to shift.
LINA YOON: As the time goes on, the capacity for North Koreans
to endure hardship becomes harder and harder.
Their resilience runs off.
And, you know, their resources also decrease.
COY WIRE: 10-second trivia.
In biology, a complete set of DNA in an organism
is called what, genome, chromosome, genetic code,
or interphase?
Genome is the term for the entire set of DNA instructions
for a cell or organism.
Thanks to recent breakthroughs in genetics, scientists
say they will soon be able to bring back
prehistoric creatures that have been
extinct for thousands of years.
We could see a woolly mammoth roaming
the Earth in as little as four years,
according to researchers.
Now, woolly mammoths were the huge hairy-looking,
elephant-type beasts marching through the Ice Age snow
about 10,000 years ago.
One company, Colossal Biosciences,
says it plans to reincarnate the mammoth using
gene editing technology in a process called de-extinction.
And there are other extinct creatures
scientists could bring back as well, like the Tasmanian
Tiger or the dodo bird.
But should they?
As you can imagine, there are plenty
of ethical questions about these recent genetic advancements.
Here's CNN's Rachel Crane with more.
RACHEL CRANE: Your body contains 37.2 trillion cells.
And within each is a copy of a code
consisting of more than 20,000 genes
and billions of strands of DNA.
This code is your genome.
And it determines everything that makes you you.
What if you could modify that code,
bring back extinct species, eliminate hereditary diseases?
That is precisely what molecular engineers
and geneticists around the world are working on.
GEORGE CHURCH: Genes are what we get.
And we're stuck with them.
And the environment is the only thing we can change.
And there's kind of a limit to how much we can do.
But now if we can change our genes,
too, we're really in much closer to total control of our biology
and physiology.
RACHEL CRANE: George Church is one
of many using a revolutionary gene editing
technique called CRISPR Cas9, which allows
you to modify DNA sequences.
GEORGE CHURCH: CRISPR is a way that you can design and target
a particular part of your genome and change it to something
else, or you can delete a gene.
You can make all sorts of edits very precisely.
RACHEL CRANE: CRISPR is kind of like having
the find-delete-replace function for DNA.
No one actually invented the process.
It happens naturally.
Scientists discovered that bacteria alter their DNA
to defend against viruses, essentially storing part
of a virus so they can identify, target, and attack
the virus if it comes back.
Researchers realized the tools bacteria used to do this
were Cas proteins, nature's genetic scissors.
Geneticists are now using these proteins
to make their own targeted changes to DNA.
Scientists have been messing with genomes for years.
So what's the big deal with CRISPR?
GEORGE CHURCH: This is dramatically different.
I mean, it's like 10,000 times easier.
This can be used in agriculture, where you
can change any plant or animal.
It can be used to eliminate invasive species.
What's most exciting about CRISPR
is our ability to alter longstanding epidemics
like malaria and HIV.
RACHEL CRANE: And that could potentially
save millions of lives.
GEORGE CHURCH: So here we grow human cells, elephant cells.
We can do cloning procedures.
RACHEL CRANE: It turns out that you
can make pretty big things by tweaking small strands of DNA.
By making changes to the DNA of the Asian elephant,
researchers in Church's lab are working
to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.
GEORGE CHURCH: The difference between
a woolly mammoth and Asian elephant
is actually quite subtle at the DNA level.
RACHEL CRANE: When am I going to see a woolly mammoth
in Jurassic Park?
JOE GETSY: Right.
So an actual full woolly mammoth, I think,
is still a few years down the road.
If we can just change one gene and then the next gene,
and then soon we have thousands of genes that are changed,
the elephant cell will have the exact same DNA sequence
as the woolly mammoth cell.
RACHEL CRANE: Paint this picture of what
the future looks like as a result of CRISPR in your eyes.
GEORGE CHURCH: I suppose the wildest description would
be that you have some 150-year-old people that
look like they're 20-year-old riding on a mammoth.
Is that wild enough?
RACHEL CRANE: But CRISPR is not without controversy.
If you can make a mammoth, consider what
you can do with a person's DNA.
For the first time, scientists in China
used CRISPR to edit the genomes of human embryos.
People fear CRISPR could lead to designer babies.
How do we prevent that from happening?
GEORGE CHURCH: We shouldn't be playing.
We should be engineering.
And I think that's what we are doing.
RACHEL CRANE: Where do you think the moral and ethical boundary
is?
GEORGE CHURCH: Safety.
I think safety is number one.
Just like any new technology or new drug,
we should try to make it as safe as possible.
If we don't do anything, then people are definitely going
to die of malaria next year.
A lot of people are going to die of HIV
if we don't do something.
If we focus on why it's useful, then
that changes the conversation to,
you know, what's the alternative?
COY WIRE: And for today's story getting a 10
out of 10, ice cream lovers that will
not be denied their treats.
This Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota
opens every year on March 1, no matter what the weather is.
And if you've ever been to Minnesota in March,
and it's not warm and toasty.
These faithful fans lining up on opening day
all bundled up ready to dominate some Dairy Queen
Blizzards in all sorts of snow.
I scream. You scream.
We all scream for ice cream.
No, matter what the weather.
My favorite flavor's Oreo, well, at least for now.
What's yours?
I want to give a special shout out to Springdale Middle
School in Springdale, Arkansas.
Rise up.
Also, for all the students out there,
get you some teacher time this Tuesday.
Go on and dap up your teacher, give
them a handshake or high five.
Let them know you appreciate them.
See you tomorrow, everyone.
I'm Coy Wire.
And we are "CNN 10."
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