George Church

It's sometimes just, you know, depending on how it's presented, it's dismissed as eugenics.

I think it's rarely that I heard Doria Shurim described that way, and rightly so.

What they're doing is standard medicine, you know, whether you, you know, cure these kids as soon as they are newborns, or whether you counsel the parents so the same disease is missing.

The problem with eugenics was that it was forced.

The government forced it on people.

It wasn't that it enabled people to make a choice.

It's that it removed the choice from the people.

That was what was wrong.

And that's the confusion.

But I don't think that's the explanation for why this is underhyped.

I think it's people, when they're dating, they're not thinking about reproduction necessarily.

And when they're thinking about reproduction, they're not...

You know, they're not necessarily thinking about serious genetic diseases because they're rare.

I think it's our difficulty with dealing with rare things.

It's like there was great resistance to seatbelts because less than 1% of people died in automobile accidents or even got hurt.

Great resistance to stopping smoking.

Really, it's hard even for us to imagine how great the resistance was for seatbelts and smoking.

And, but eventually we got over it.

I think this is a similar thing, which is that only 3% of children are severely affected by genetic diseases.

And I feel like, well, I'm not that unlucky.