Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Jess.
And Ryan. Tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now.
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Let's travel back to the summer. It's late July. We're in the Bay Area in San Francisco at this ultra luxury restaurant called Quince.
Our colleague Emily Glazer is describing a dinner she learned about a while ago. She talked to some of the people who were there.
There was a whole group of Silicon Valley elite and scientists that were in a private room at the back of this restaurant, which had vintage Finnish furniture.
At the center of the group was the evening's host.
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Chapter 2: What is the embryo editing dinner and who was involved?
You know what? It was actually neither of those. It was we are going to edit an embryo.
So one more big picture question before we dig into the details. What's at stake here?
Life as we know it?
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, March 27th. Coming up, one final story from the fringes of the fertility industry. And this one is very fringe. Today, Silicon Valley's quest to genetically engineer a baby When it comes to reproductive technology, we are on the threshold of a new frontier.
Today's gene editing techniques allow scientists to cut, edit, and insert DNA with remarkable precision. It's now possible to rewrite a child's genetic code before they're even born. But while this has been technically possible for a while now, it's only known to have been done once, by one scientist.
A Chinese researcher has shaken the international science community. He claims to have created the world's first genetically edited babies.
There is a Chinese scientist named He Zhenkui, who in 2018 claimed to have done embryo editing. He shocked the world with this news that he had produced children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV.
The embryos were then implanted into the mother, and Lulu and Nana were born earlier this month.
As you perhaps could imagine, there were a lot of people that were very upset about this for a wide variety of reasons.
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Chapter 3: How does embryo editing work and why is it controversial?
Yeah, we'll cure some diseases and we'll also get, you know, some taller, more handsome people with full heads of hair.
Yeah.
Yes. And, you know, they might talk about that more like muscle mass or, you know, stronger hearts. You know, he has made comparisons to the movie Gattaca, the sci-fi classic.
First of all, if you haven't seen Gattaca, highly recommend. The movie stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. And it's set in a future where embryos are carefully screened and selected to produce the best babies.
I've taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions, premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc.
We didn't want, I mean, diseases, yes, but... Armstrong seems to have taken some inspiration from the movie. In a tweet last April, Armstrong wrote about his vision for an IVF clinic of the future, powered by a combination of technologies that he described as, quote, the Gattaca stack.
He has referenced that. It's out in the open. He's not necessarily trying to hide it.
Among the tools he envisioned in this Gattaca stack was embryo editing for, quote, disease prevention or enhancement. People who were at that embryo editing dinner told Emily that enhancements were a topic of conversation. And there was also some thinking out loud about strategy, how to introduce embryo editing to the world.
One plan that Brian Armstrong had floated was for a venture to work in secret and then reveal a healthy, genetically engineered baby before the scientific and medical establishment had a chance to object. And it was almost like this leap that was meant to shock the world into acceptance.
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