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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: What is the mission of the biotech Barbie, Cathy Tai?
Today, the biotech Barbie and her mission to produce better, healthier babies.
On a Friday night in April, I was in Manhattan in New York City in Carnegie Hall at a very exclusive event, invite only.
Jenny Kleeman, a features writer for The Guardian, was in the Big Apple for a birthday party. And the birthday girl, Kathy Tai, was providing the entertainment herself. In fact, she'd even hired out the venue for the occasion.
She was wearing this pink shimmering gown with a cape on it. It was a Jenny Packham gown. I looked it up. It costs about 4,000 pounds. Playing this Steinway grand piano on stage at Carnegie Hall, backed by an orchestra. She was playing this Sasson's piece. She was playing it very beautifully, but slightly mechanically and very seriously. And then she stood up and bowed.
Then everyone in the orchestra and all of us sang happy birthday. It was a bit awkward and a bit weird. And we all went upstairs to have a champagne reception on one of the upper floors. And when I was at this champagne reception, I started talking to people and almost everybody I spoke to had never met Cathy or had only just met Cathy.
Jenny doesn't usually go to strangers' birthday parties halfway across the world, but she's wanted to interview Kathy Tai for a really long time. Because Kathy isn't just any 30-year-old. She is the self-described biotech Barbie. A serial entrepreneur who wants to edit human embryos to make healthier babies.
What we're deciding is whether our species will use the most precise biological tool ever developed to prevent suffering, or whether we will let fear, dressed up as caution, make that decision for us.
But gene editing could also create designer babies, taller babies, cleverer babies, babies with lighter skin. The technology has the power to alter the trajectory of human evolution forever. And when things go wrong, the consequences could scarcely be more serious. Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences.
We simply lack the tools... We're living in this world of hyper-optimization. We're all supposed to be hacking ourselves, and now we're hacking our babies too.
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Chapter 3: How did Cathy Tai rise to prominence in the biotech field?
I think the dial has shifted on what we are prepared to do to optimize our offspring, or what some people are prepared to do.
From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, baby hacking and the biological arms race. Jenny, welcome back to Today in Focus. Great to see you.
Very lovely to be back here.
So you're back in London after what sounds like an incredibly glamorous trip to New York to celebrate Kathy Tai's 30th birthday. And I don't remember playing a grand piano in concert to celebrate my 30th. I think I was in some dodgy pub in Hackney for mine. What's her backstory? How has she got to this position? What qualifications has she got?
And how can she already afford to hire out the Carnegie Hall for her 30th birthday?
She comes from a Chinese family. She wouldn't tell me exactly where she was born. She said it was just outside of Beijing. Her family moved to Canada when she was very young, four or five. And from what I can tell, she was a really, really good student. She's clearly brilliant at the She had her first scientific paper published when she was 16. She likes to say that a lot.
And in previous reporting about her, it always says, oh, she had her first scientific paper published before she was 16. But I actually looked up what paper this was, and it's in a journal for schoolchildren. So while she did have a scientific paper published, there's a bit of spin there. And that's something you need to bear in mind all the time with Kathy Tai. There's always a bit of spin.
She got in trouble once for missing a biology class because she was preparing for one of these fairs where she'd win lots of money. And her teacher was angry with her for missing the class. And she asked her teacher, well, what scientific papers have you published? I've had a paper published. She went to university when she was very young and she dropped out.
at age 18 because she won a fellowship offered by the very famous billionaire Peter Thiel. It's a Thiel Fellowship. At the time, it was a $100,000 fellowship. Now it's a quarter of a million dollars. He gives these fellowships to people aged under 22 who agree to drop out of university and build something. And it comes from this
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of germline gene editing?
It sounds like it wasn't hard to persuade her to open up to you. If she's on a PR mission to try to persuade people that this isn't as dangerous as it sounds.
I think it was quite difficult to get her to say anything at all because I think what she wanted was the publicity, but she didn't want to answer difficult questions. And there were a lot of difficult questions that I wanted to put to her.
She invited the wrong journalist then, didn't she?
Yeah.
I think so. I think so. And she looked genuinely uncomfortable during a lot of our conversation, particularly when I asked her about her marriage to her Jean-Claude. But there were other questions that she should have been more comfortable answering. When you go and interview people, you expect them to be able to answer basic questions. How many people work for you? who funds you?
And she kept saying, well, I'm not at liberty to discuss that at the moment. Our funders are extremely motivated. I've got pioneers working for me, but I'm unfortunately unable to name any of them at the moment, which doesn't really strike me as being very transparent. I mean, it wasn't the kind of response you'd expect from someone who's saying, hey, I'm an open book
Yeah. And you piqued my interest when you said that one of her earlier ventures was genetically modifying animals. Tell me about that.
She had a company called the Los Angeles Project, which sought to biohack pets. So making glow in the dark bunnies. What?
Why would you want to glow in the dark bunnies? You didn't lose them in the dark.
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