Jenny Kleeman
speaker
443 appearances
8 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 15 Jul
Jenny Kleeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
When I went to this Harvard debate where she was speaking at, there were people in the audience who are carriers of diseases where all of their offspring will have this condition.
So it's a choice between being a parent or not being a parent, this technology.
Yeah.
Cathy is insistent that she is at the moment only looking to stop severe monogenic diseases.
So that means things that are dictated by one gene and things like intelligence and height are polygenic.
There's many different genes that come into play there.
So she says the technology is too difficult for that.
The thing that really fascinates me, though, is if she says she's only looking to stop severe monogenic diseases, she thinks the word severe should be defined by parents, not doctors, because she says, why should doctors and ethicists get to decide what is serious enough to use this technology?
And you can imagine...
Not now, but in a time in the future, let's say that you know gene editing to be used to correct Huntington's disease or sickle cell anemia, that you could have down the line people saying, well, I don't want my kids to have osteoporosis.
I want them to have stronger bones or I don't want my kids to have heart disease.
I don't want them to have high cholesterol.
And, you know, that that could be classed as severe.
And what about a world in which, you know, the genetic lottery of not being an intelligent person in an increasingly high stakes competitive world, that could be seen as a really unfair defect.
If severity of a condition is defined by the parents, you know, you could take that almost anywhere.
She says it's not her problem.
She says it's up to regulators and governments to decide where to stop, where to put the guardrails.
Her job is to show that the science is safe and efficacious, and that's what she's trying to do.
But the rest of it, it's up to democratically elected governments to decide where to draw the line, not her.
It's limited only by our understanding of genetics.
Showing 261–280 of 443 · page 14 of 23
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