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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Today with David McCullagh · Gene editing: The woman trying to genetically modify babies · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

None of these are perfect, but there are other ways to avoid it.

And when you edit the genes of embryos or eggs and sperm, what you do is you change the course of human evolution because that edit is going to be present in all of the eggs and sperm produced by that human being that you're creating.

So it's a very, very big step to take.

And we need to think very carefully before we take it.

Well, I mean, she likes to draw parallels with the nuclear arms race.

Her first gene editing company was called the Manhattan Project, which is named after the project to create the first nuclear bomb.

And there's always this undercurrent in what she says is, if America doesn't do it, China will do it.

And it's the same sort of thing as AI, these AI entrepreneurs saying this is inevitable.

We need to be unregulated or have very light touch regulation because otherwise China with its light touch regulation is going to get there first and that's going to be catastrophic.

I kind of believe in the power of scientists to make proper decisions.

And when things are driven by scientists and ethical boards rather than entrepreneurs, they tend to be done with more care.

So, I mean, when I was...

interviewing her spent two and a half hours in her office she used the word inevitable 12 times i think this is part of their their marketing is to say this is going to happen and they want us all to believe that but actually it's up to us whether or not it's inevitable and we still have time to choose whether or not we want this

Absolutely.

And it's already happening.

Whilst I was in New York interviewing Kathy Tai, I saw adverts on the subway for a company that does pre-implantation genetic testing.

So it's not gene editing, but they screen the embryos.

If you've had IVF, they screen the embryos and they can tell you which one has a higher percentage of being more intelligent, which one has a higher percentage of being taller.

And the strap line for this company advertised on the subway in New York was have your best baby.

So that is already happening.

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