Humanity’s Awesome, Terrifying Takeover of Evolution

For years now, I’ve had the same recurring worry: Am I focusing on the trivial? When future generations look back on this moment in history, will they remember the daily political fights — or will everything just look like a sideshow compared to humans being able to edit genetic code? The technology I’m referring to, known as CRISPR, could cure genetic diseases like sickle-cell anemia and Huntington’s. It could let us regulate height, hair color, and vulnerabilities in our children. And, one day, it has the potential to imbue human beings with superhuman characteristics — making us stronger, faster, smarter. Nor is it just us. CRISPR lets us edit other animals and plants, with all kinds of beckoning possibilities, some wonderful, some terrible. We cannot do all this yet. But it’s coming, and soon. Walter Isaacson is the former editor of Time magazine, the former head of CNN, and author of biographies of everyone from Albert Einstein to Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs. However, his newest book, “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” is much more than a biography of Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who was essential to developing CRISPR. It’s a biography of the scientific process that led to CRISPR, and the people trying to understand its moral, political and human implications. In this conversation, I get to ask Isaacson the questions I’ve wanted to focus on myself: Is it wrong to edit your kid’s genes? Is it cruel not to? What happens when CRISPR and capitalism collide? Will we witness the rise of a superhuman genetic elite? And what kind of political and economic systems do we need to start building to ensure this technology is used in just ways? Recommendations: "The Bully Pulpit" by Doris Kearns Goodwin "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy "The Eighth Day of Creation" by Horace Freeland Judson "Winnie the Pooh" by A. A. Milne You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:18Ezra Klein?

  So over the past couple of years, there's been this worry stalking my own work. But if I'm just wasting my time covering taxes and public options and Donald Trump and filibuster form, what if the thing, the only thing that really matters right now is CRISPR? That everything else comparatively is just a sideshow. CRISPR. Over the past few decades, scientists have studied this enzyme bacteria use to recognize viruses and just cut them apart. It is wild how this works. So bacteria, they fight off viruses by snatching fragments of the virus's own DNA and then loading these sequences into these enzymes. And these sequences, they then program the enzymes to patrol the cell, looking for a viral match, like looking for that virus again.

• 1:01Ezra Klein?

  And when it finds it, the enzyme cuts the viral DNA and saves the cell from infection. But here's the thing that won Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. They figured out, along with many, many other scientists, how to code these enzymes with whatever genetic sequence we want. And then we can make these incredibly precise cuts wherever that sequence is located. And we can actually replace that sequence. We can replace it with new genetic information of our choice. We can make these very precise edits in genetic code and not just our code, but the code of mice, of plants, of pigs, of mosquitoes. We're learning how to take control of not just human evolution, but arguably every

• 1:46Ezra Klein?

  species evolution with a precision we have never had before. We've had the ability to shape genetics by breeding plants together, dogs together, doing this very crude genetic editing in recent decades, but nothing like this. What's becoming possible now is everything from curing genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and Huntington's, all the way up to imbuing humans with characteristics we've never had before, making us stronger, faster, smarter, giving us better memories, allowing us to see in new light spectrums. We really don't know what's possible here, but it seems like the answer is a lot, a lot, a lot. There are still technical problems. It's expensive and there are issues to work out.

• 2:29Ezra Klein?

  But, but we are talking when, not if, for all of this. And so for years now, there's been this part of me that thought, I just need to drop everything and try to understand CRISPR and its moral and political and human and economic, I guess, implications. Short story, I didn't do that. But, but luckily Walter Isaacson did do that. Isaacson is the former editor of Time Magazine, the former head of CNN, one of the great living biographers. He's written, you know, biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein and Steve Jobs. And his new one is called The Codebreaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, which sounds like a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who I've had on an older iteration of the show before. But this is really a biography of the scientific process that led to CRISPR and the people

• 3:13Ezra Klein?

  trying to answer the questions it poses. So now I get to ask him all the questions I've wanted to spend the time to answer myself. As always, my email is [email protected]. Here's Walter Isaacson.

• 3:29Ezra Klein?

  I've heard you talk about there being three technological revolutions: atoms, bits, and genes. Tell me what those were and why I should see genes on that list.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  These are the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, which are binary digits that can encode information, and the gene. So you get the first half of the 20th century is a revolution driven by the atom and Einstein's theories. Everything from the atom bomb to space travel to semiconductors come out of that. Second half of the 20th century I grew up in was the digital revolution where computers, the internet, and the microchip all combined so that we can process anything in digital bits. And now we're about to enter the age of the genetic revolution where the code of life,

• 4:18Speaker 01

  the genetic code, will replace the digital code as being the core thing we're going to program and we'll be programming molecules, not just microchips. And I think this is going to have even more of an impact than being able to get an iPhone or a personal computer. It's going to allow us to rewrite our own genes and certainly cure genetic diseases.

• 4:44Ezra Klein?

  How well do we understand the coding language here? When we're coding software on a computer, we've created these languages. We have a sense of what the computers can do. Obviously, coding requires solving some hard problems, but it's within a universe we understand pretty well. How well do we understand the coding instructions we might want to give something like CRISPR or some of these other technologies?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  As you know, we have about 3 billion pairs of letters that make up our DNA. And beginning in the late 1990s, groups of scientists, including the US government, decided, all right, let's sequence the entire human genome. Now, that didn't get us too much. You needed another step to say, all right, each three-letter sequence usually has some meaning to it. Let's try to map out of the 3 billion letters what each of these sequences might do. Like, one might help make a hormone, or a neuron, or make your hair blonde and mine brown, or something. We can map the human genome pretty well now.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  This is particularly easy for single gene properties or for that matter, mutations. Like sickle cell. Sickle cell is just one letter off, and we know exactly where that letter is in the human genome. And if it switches from one letter to another, you've got a real bug in the system. Not just a bug, but a very dangerous and deadly bug in the system. Likewise, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, those are pretty easy to spot, the little flaws in the 3 billion base pairs we have. If you want to get to something more complicated, you can just move up the gradation. Muscle mass is pretty easy to regulate. Height is pretty well determined, but those are multiple sequences that do it, and we

• 6:33Speaker 01

  don't understand those very well. And then you get to the most complex of all, where things like schizophrenia, bipolar disease, what predisposes us to that? What predisposes us to have a high IQ? Is that mainly genetic or mainly environmental? So those are the parts of the genome we don't fully understand.

• 6:53Ezra Klein?

  So it sounds to me there's almost a ladder of programming complexity here. There's, as you say, a set of conditions that, you know, we understand there is a mistake in the code. And we can look at it, we can look at normal code, we can look at code that has this error in it, and then you say, okay, we're going to just change that little mistake. Then there are things where we pretty well understand how it works, like, you know, say muscle mass, we know there are certain things we can turn on and off because we've watched it happen in people. Then there are things we know people currently have, right? Like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or high IQ, but we don't really know how it works. And then I assume there are things that people don't currently have. You bring this up in the book, like, one can imagine in the future us understanding how to give people capabilities they don't currently have through genomic editing. But because

• 7:36Ezra Klein?

  we can't currently look at people and see that, we don't know how to do that coding. Is that a reasonable way of framing the latter?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And the interesting thing about the latter is we could create new things for human capabilities, maybe even to hear different frequencies, or be able to see colors that are off the normal visible spectrum. But the important thing you put your finger on is, we say it's not in the wild. In other words, nobody really has it. And so it's far safer to edit the human genome to create a genome that already exists in other people, you know, in the wild form. But if you're going to edit something that's never existed before, I think we got a few decades before we're going to try to cross that line.

• 8:21Ezra Klein?

  So as you gestured towards, we've had the capacity to do some level of genetic editing or changing for some decades now. What did CRISPR add to our capabilities here? Like, what made CRISPR different?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  What made CRISPR different is it's not just recombining DNA, or even using the old clunky tools we used to have that could try to cut DNA and make an edit, known as ZFNs or Talends and things like that. What made it different is that it's easily reprogrammed. You can say, okay, I want to do it right here at this sequence. And so you have this guide RNA, and the guide RNA can just be much more precise, and it can be done much more quickly. It's like the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is a really great one. But that's an engineered virus that carries a gene to help do it. I got the Pfizer. That meant it just used messenger RNA.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  And if the spike protein continues to mutate in ways, it is much quicker to just reprogram that messenger RNA to build a fragment of the new shape of the spike protein. When you're using something that's an RNA programmed device, whether it be a CRISPR tool or a vaccine.

• 9:40Ezra Klein?

  And tell me if this is wrong, because it probably is going to be. But I think it's actually good to use it vaccines here because people have a lot of familiarity. One of the issues is the way the Johnson Johnson vaccine works is you really have to grow this sort of semi inert virus to do it. Whereas the mRNA vaccines are much more of a programming challenge. I mean, very famously, I think Moderna made theirs in like a weekend. And so there's this capacity really not just to treat this as life, but to treat it as programming. Is that fair? Or is that an unbelievably poor way of putting it?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  No, it's exactly fair. And the fact that you can do it over a weekend makes it a lot better than growing or doing genetic engineering or recombinant DNA or growing a virus, a whole bunch of viruses. Those are the type of vaccines we've had in the past. With the genetic vaccines, as you say, it was done by Moderna over a weekend. Once they got the sequence from China of what the spike protein looked like, it was pretty fast to do it.

• 10:37Ezra Klein?

  So whenever I have a conversation with anybody who knows anything about CRISPR, I will hear them explain it. And it will sound like we can do absolutely anything we want. And then you'll ask them if we can do these amazing things. And they'll say, well, no, it's not safe. It makes mistakes. It's very expensive to do something like, say, curing sickle cell anemia in somebody. So what makes using CRISPR hard? What are the difficulties? What can go wrong?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Well, the hardest thing is the delivery system. Now, you talk about sickle cell. It actually has been done. It was done finally. Five or six months ago, in a woman named Victoria Gray from Mississippi, she becomes the first patient where they use CRISPR to edit her genes. So she no longer is producing sickled cells. And she's now producing healthy blood cells. What made it difficult was not the editing of her cells, but you have to take the stem cells, you know, and take it out of the blood and some bone marrow. And then you have to put it back into her system. So that's what costs a whole lot, just as any, you know, stem cell transplants would do.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  What Jennifer Doudna, the hero of my book, is doing is gathering a group of people saying, well, how can we do it much faster and easier? Well, the first simplest way to do it much faster and easier is don't take the cells out of the body and then have to re-insert them in the body. Let's do it instead of in vitro, as it's called when you do it out of the body, do it in vivo, which means make the edits in the body. Now, that's a year or two down the road, but that brings the cost down exponentially. But as you can see, the editing, we've done it. A Chinese doctor did it in embryos. Take out the receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. We've done it now in clinical trials in Portland

• 12:27Speaker 01

  to do it in eye cells for people who have congenital blindness, to reverse those. So the actual editing is not only easy, it has been done. The difficulty for medicine is you got to get it in the right cell. For example, CRISPR comes from a system that bacteria use to kill viruses. Well, that's something we would love to have. And so you could say, instead of having an immune system, the human immune system, be jacked up and kicked into orbit by vaccines, which is a tricky thing to do, why don't we just have pills or inhalers or something that say whenever that virus comes in, chop it up and kill it?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  That would be a simpler, safer way to do it. And we will have that in a couple of years. But the difficulty is not doing that through CRISPR. The difficulty is getting it into the right cells in the lungs or the right cells in the body where the virus may exist. So that's the less exciting frontier, but the important frontier is delivery systems.

• 13:35Ezra Klein?

  You talk in the book about this biohacker who on a live YouTube stream or something injects himself with the CRISPR edit that would allow for radical increases in muscle mass, but it doesn't really work and you didn't expect it to work because you'd have to be doing that over a long period of time. Why would you have to be doing that repeatedly? Why can't you just like hit yourself with that injection and all of a sudden you're the rock?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Because our blood cells in our body tend to replenish themselves. They tend to regenerate and if they, if you get new ones that haven't been edited, that means the treatment wears off. Now, some cells in the body aren't that way, including our eye cells. We don't make new eye cells, you know, much. So once you edit the eye cells for congenital blindness, it's once and done, like your Johnson and Johnson phrase. When it comes to sickle cell, now if you do it in stem cells, that may work and it may be permanent in the sense that this, if once the stem cells are edited, the new blood cells will all be sickle free. The only way to make it permanent, and I'm about to cross an ethical line here, is to

• 14:42Speaker 01

  do it in all the cells of the human body, which means doing it in early stage embryos is the easiest way to do that, or in reproductive cells like sperm or eggs, at which point all cells in the body have the edit and you don't have to worry about refresher courses.

• 14:57Ezra Klein?

  So, and just to ping on this for another second, is it's going to become real important in our conversation later on. This is the germ line somatic distinction.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Bingo. Germ line means you've done it so that it's in reproductive cells. You've done it, you know, before a patient is born, you've edited the eggs or the sperm or very early stage embryos. And that means not only will it be every cell in the body will carry the edit, if you do it right, it means that children will have those edits and all descendants will have those edits. So, once you cross the germ line, meaning the line of inheritable edits, you've edited the human species. Somatic simply means in the body, like Victoria Gray down in Mississippi. It was done in her body, but it wasn't done for reproductive purposes.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Now, a sickle cell we're already talking about, well, let's edit it out. Let's say Victoria Gray wants to have more children. You could edit it out of her fertilized eggs or reproductive cells, and so her children would have inheritable, good blood cells rather than sickled cells.

• 16:08Ezra Klein?

  Let's say you had unlimited money and few ethical strictures. What could CRISPR actually probably do right now?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Right now, it's best at single gene mutations. But if you really had a doctor in a clinic somewhere with no ethical guidelines, certainly there are things at clearly predisposed height, for example, or muscle mass, as we talked about with our friend, the biohacker. That's just a myostatin regulator. And certainly, by the way, if we can make cells so that they aren't sickled in the blood and carry more oxygen, that might make muscle mass or blood or endurance much better. And then, obviously, the type of diseases we have, Tay-Sachs, muscular dystrophy, you'd edit those out of your children if you wanted to.

• 17:02Ezra Klein?

  What are you pretty sure, then, that we will be able to do at a price point available to, say, non-billionaires in the next 25 years?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Oh, in the next 25 years, we could certainly do things like hair color, eye color, skin color. You could probably enhance memory. And you could get perilously close to things like neurons that give you faster mental processing power, which combined with better memory, may get you close to what we call intelligence. Those are the things that I think would be simple enough if you're giving a 25-year horizon.

• 17:46Ezra Klein?

  It is at least plausible that in the next 25 years, we will face a question of if you could make an edit, so your children would have, let's just call it photographic memory, should you?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could. And the answer would be no, no. One of the joys of my life is I don't have a photographic memory. So I don't remember if you've ever written anything, you know, bad about me in your life. Or in fact, there's a wonderful book I just read about the joys of not having perfect memories. So, but I say that not just jokingly. I think it's a be careful of what you wish for phenomenon. For example, muscle mass is pretty easy, as we said, and it's already been done in cattle and in mice and double muscling and stuff. So you could do that for kids. And then you'd have athletes who had better muscle mass and better twitch movement. And would that destroy athletics where instead of admiring the athlete, we're admiring their genetic engineer?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Likewise, if you decide on height, I mean, that's an interesting one to think about. Because let's suppose, and it wouldn't be that hard genetically to do it, that you could edit a gene so somebody could be taller, eight inches taller. That would be really good if your kid, instead of being five foot eight, was, you know, six foot four or something. And you'd say, all right, you know, I got a basketball player in the family. But suppose everybody did that. It's actually only a positional benefit or a relative benefit. Because if everybody, if every kid in 40 years starts being eight inches taller, that's not going to help anybody. And given the size of airline seats, it's really not going to be good for anybody.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  It would just help carpenters who have to raise door jams. So you have to decide what is good for all of society, such as maybe editing out receptors for viruses. That could be good for all of society. You could even argue making people have better memory or better mental processing power. That could be good for all of society, even if not everybody gets it. But there are certain things that if the rich can buy it and the poor can't, it gives a positional advantage. But if everybody can get it, it doesn't help society as a whole.

• 19:58Ezra Klein?

  There are ways of thinking about CRISPR, which is that it is a frightening but remarkable new technology. And we want to put the strictures on it for it to be rare. And then there's another way of thinking about it, which is that it is a remarkable new technology which can do all of these things. And we want to wrap it in a politics, a distributional politics, such that it could be common. Because what we're afraid of is that the people who have wealth and privilege now will use it to create a genetic elite. And those are really, really quite different approaches. And I hear a lot more of the first, being afraid people are going to get out ahead of their skis on it. But I don't see too many people wrestling with the second and trying to think of this

• 20:40Ezra Klein?

  question of, okay, we want this, but what we want is for it to be widely available. So, you know, the children of the rich and poor alike can be taller, can have better memory, or whatever it might be.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yes, you should have George Church on your podcast.

• 20:56Ezra Klein?

  I would love to have George Church on my podcast.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we will work on this. I will, I will call George. He's been very helpful since the book came out because he's one of the main characters in the book and was at Harvard and when Jennifer Doudna was a young student there. And George Church will say, excuse me, what's wrong with adding some IQ points or adding some strength or muscle mass or enhancement so that you can see infrared light if you want to. And then he would agree that the main ethical problem is the distribution problem in the sense that if it's unequally distributed, you get to Brave New World, that's science fiction, you get to the time machine, you get to the movie Gattaca. If there's a genetic elite that can afford to have their kids enhanced and a subspecies

• 21:43Speaker 01

  that's not genetically enhanced. But that's not a problem with the technology. That's a problem with our policy and our politics.

• 22:12Ezra Klein?

  So I just did a podcast with the science fiction writer Ted Chang. And we were talking about artificial intelligence and the attraction to the question of it'll take all the jobs or it'll kill us all. And I was asking him what he thinks of this. And he said that one of the problems when people discuss technology is that they often speak as if they're afraid of technology when what they're afraid of is capitalism. And I actually don't think that's a great argument on AI, but I think it's a very good argument on CRISPR, which is to say that a lot of the questions on CRISPR are a little bit less about CRISPR, or at least what some of the ones I worry about most than they are about capitalism, which is to say how it will be distributed.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the book, I don't use capitalism because both it's a loaded word and a more complex word. But I talk about state eugenics, creating the master race where the governments, you know, were doing it, and this is the Nazis, and for that matter, at Cold Spring Harbor in the early 1900s in the US. And I say, that's not the big fear now. I mean, you know, we're not going to have government mandated child editing like in Brave New World. The fear is what I would call a free market eugenics. And that's probably what you're calling the capitalist eugenics. And by free market, I mean, as Robert Nozick writes about this, everybody can go to the genetic supermarket and they can buy what they can afford. And companies will market it, you know, cool things that you can get if you go to your

• 23:38Speaker 01

  fertility clinic and you're given the shopping list from the genetic supermarket. And in the privacy of that genetic clinic, they shut the door, they promise not to tell people what you chose. They say, you know, what skin color do you want? What sexual orientation do you want? What height? What eye color? What, you know, IQ? And you know, you'd be a good moral person Ezra, and so would I. I would make sure I'd check off no bad genetic diseases. And I'd wrestle with maybe congenital deafness because I would consider that a disability, but I'd pause and think, well, people in the deaf community don't consider it a disability. Maybe it's a interesting thing for our species.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And as we go down the list, you know, I wouldn't dare choose, you know, some of the things that other people might choose. But as it got more and more private, and it's a free market choice, you may have more and more people saying, here's the sexual orientation I want my kids, here's the gender I want, here's the height I want, the skin color I want, and these sort of things. They won't be free. And so the rich would be able to buy taller children and, you know, whatever other types of things they would want. So we would do two things that would be bad if you had free market gene editing, or as you might call it capitalist gene editing. A, we would let the rich not only get better

• 24:59Speaker 01

  genes, but they would encode it into their families, so that you would have families with a genetic elite and families without it. And the second thing you might do, if you had a free market eugenics like this, is you might edit out diversity. You might find there'd be a lot fewer deaf people, or fewer people who are short or fat. And you could go down the list, where people may not want to go, where you just let the free market edit out the diversity of our society. And as I sit here in New Orleans, and I'm sitting on the balcony overlooking Royal Street, I look at all the diversity. I see people, you know, gay and straight and trans and tall and short and fat and skinny

• 25:41Speaker 01

  and black and white and creole and cafe au lait colored and, you know, people from Gallaudet University were by and they were, you know, sign languaging. And I think, well, the diversity of the human species makes it really creative. It's really the wonderful, colorful thing about our species. And by the way, not being emotional about it, it's also a good thing for the safety of our species, the health of our species, that we have a lot of genetic diversity. And so you could march down a path of free market choice and free market eugenics with gene editing that would give us a genetically encoded elite and edit out the diversity of our species. Those are the two things I most worry about in the future of gene editing, both of which

• 26:25Speaker 01

  could be solved by policy. It's not something you need to solve by shunning the technology.

• 26:31Ezra Klein?

  Well, there's so much here. So, so one concern here that you're, I think, gesturing towards is you get into like a human monoculture, right? We've done this with agriculture many, many times where we begin to select for, say, a kind of potato that's very good at growing in a particular condition. And all, and we've gone now from hundreds of kinds of potatoes to one, and then a particular kind of blight comes and it turns out that we've edited out the genes that we didn't think were doing anything, but that gave us potatoes that were resistant to this blight. But I also want to touch on this question, not just of diversity, but, but of, you know, what we think of as disabilities. While preparing to chat with you, I, I read this editorial by, by Sandy Sufian and Rosemary Garland Thompson, who are two scholars who live with conditions of a sort that many

• 27:16Ezra Klein?

  would be excited to use CRISPR to eliminate. And they write, and I want to quote this, "Our genetic conditions are not simply entities that can be clipped away from us as if they were some kind of misspelled word or an awkward sentence in a document. We are whole beings with our genetic conditions forming a fundamental part of who we are. Still, many Americans, including medical providers and even some people with genetic differences, consider lives such as ours as not worth living as they are." That's the end of the quote. And so this gets into really tricky territory of who is the deciding agent. The choice a parent may make on behalf of an unborn child may not be the same choice that, that a child would make for themselves.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I quote them in the book and use them in the book because that's really an important thing about what we as society, or we as parents at the genetic supermarket with free markets, would choose as disabilities. One of the most interesting ethical philosophers in my book is a kid named David Sanchez. Now, he's only seventeen years old, and he loves playing basketball, but he's got sickle cell. And so, out at Stanford where he's being treated, they say, "All right, we can edit this in you and fix it." And then they tell him, "And by the way, we can edit it probably so that by the time you have children, we can make sure we've edited it out of your reproductive cells

• 28:43Speaker 01

  and your children will not have sickle cell anemia." And he first says, "Oh, wow, that's wonderful, that'd be great." Then he has a second thought, and he says, "Maybe it should be up to the kid later on, after the kid is born, to decide that." And you say, "Well, what do you mean? Would you want your kid to have sickle cell?" And he says, "Well, probably not, but sickle cell forged me. It forged who I am. It's part of who I am. It made me empathetic, more than most of my friends are. It made me resilient. I know how to get up off the floor. So, I'm not sure we should edit it out of my children before they decide whether they want that or not."

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And I'm going, "Whoa, holy cow, he's as good as the professional bioethicist you just quoted." And I talked to him later. Months later, I get back to him, and I ask him again, "You'd really want to not edit it out so that your kids might be born with sickle cell?" He said, "No," and it's like on third thought, "I don't want them to have sickle cell. So, yeah, I'd do that." I said, "Well, what about the empathy?" Well, he said, "I'd try to teach them empathy, but I don't want them to have to suffer the pain I've suffered." And my point here is that we have first thoughts, and second thoughts, and maybe third thoughts, and so we have to figure out, what is it that we call disabilities?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And do those forge our characters in ways that we want to keep? And who makes that decision? Is it the parent? Is it society? Can you wait until the kid's already born? Well, no, not really, if it's a bad genetic disease. And so I hate to tell you, I'm going to spoil my book sales here. I don't have a last chapter that says, here's the seven easy answers. We go with David Chanshess and other people hand in hand. And I hope have first, second, and third thoughts, especially when it comes to making inheritable edits about things we call disabilities.

• 30:43Ezra Klein?

  I want to bring up, say, an obvious objection, or even maybe a charge of hypocrisy here against myself. So I'm pro-choice, within reasonable boundaries. And isn't there something odd about worrying over giving parents control of genetic questions that are marginal compared to the question of whether a child exists or not? And then one step beyond that, people now do a lot of genetic testing. And I mean, there's been lots of reporting on this. People often abort children who show with Down syndrome on the, on the testing. So aren't we doing a lot of this in broader, cruder ways already?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're doing it in broader, cruder ways, like aborting kids that might have Down syndrome, or even pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, meaning you create in an IV clinic fertilized eggs, and then you can sort of screen them to say which ones don't have Huntington's or something, and implant the ones that are healthy. That's very crude and is very, you know, if you're trying to produce a whole lot of fertilized eggs and you have multiple characteristics, it's almost impossible to do. But yeah, we've faced these types of things before. And you're right, our default, when I say our, I mean, yours and mine, and probably 70% of your listeners, our default is choice, parental choice, individual choice.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Abortion, that should be a matter of the mother's choice. And so when it comes to reproductive decisions, we generally, especially in this society, and especially after the eugenic horrors of the 20th century, we say, let's leave that to individual families to make their own reproductive choices. But then you get to the point where you say, oh, and let's hand them this shopping list at the genetic supermarket and see what choices they might be able to afford. Does that take us into a brave new world? Or is that just the same as we've had before, but just a little bit more than we've had before? I think we're getting into a brave new world now that we can make a whole lot of edits

• 32:46Speaker 01

  rather than just abort or not implant Down syndrome.

• 32:50Ezra Klein?

  But I think choice rapidly becomes, I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it is not free. So life is positional, and life for your children is really positional. And so if the other parents are making their kids taller and smarter and able to run further, and you don't, you are setting your kid up for a much harder life. Or I also think about this in terms of international competition. If China decides that as part of their national destiny, they want to begin enhancing Chinese children, and they want that to be like something that is encouraged. There's going to be pressure on other countries

• 33:32Ezra Klein?

  simply to keep up as a geopolitical strategy. I mean, imagine if this is going on during the USSR-America competition of the Cold War. And so I don't know that choice is going to be as relevant here as what other people are doing. Our choices are very structured by the context in which they happen and the people and countries we're trying to compete with.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Well, we see it all the time, like college admissions scandals, you know, all right? Well, I don't necessarily want to fake my kid as a lacrosse player, but other parents are doing it, and I've got to get her into Princeton or something. So yeah, if you look at what parents will go through in order to get their kids into what they think are elite universities, imagine what they'll do if they're handed a shopping list at a genetic supermarket, and societal pressure is, hey, you got to keep up. You can't let your neighbor have a kid who's six inches taller without buying your kids the genes to be six inches taller. Now, you could also then say, well, maybe societal pressure can work the other

• 34:34Speaker 01

  way, which is, we don't allow this type of genetic enhancement. We allow it for fighting diseases only. And let's say that we can make this into an international accord, just like we might do on athletic doping. Say, okay, we're gonna have an international rules that say, these are the things that society just doesn't want to have happen. And some people are gonna sneak off to clinics in the Cayman Islands and try to do it. But generally, it's like smuggling of elephant tusks, or shoplifting at the corner store. We have a whole lot of restrictions against it, and we'll keep it in check. Those are

• 35:13Speaker 01

  the things I think we can decide as a society as a whole. Because when you get to the question of choice, as you pointed out, at a certain point, you're pressured to make every possible choice you can for your children. Now, let me give the counterargument, which is every species on this planet, for a million years at least, great and small, have done whatever they could to make sure that their offspring survive and carry on genetically. So, why should we be any different? Why shouldn't we produce superkids that will end up taking over our species? Well, I'm uncomfortable with that. And I think we should try to keep these genes or genie in the bottle.

• 35:57Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I want to play with a flip now. I want to take the superkid advocate position. Because, Walter, how dare you? How dare you tell me that if my child has the capacity to not grow up with, you know, on the one hand, maybe just like the level of anxiety that I and many of the people in my family have been racked with, like, that's an almost, I don't want to say an easy one. But then, you know, why shouldn't the human race get smarter, such that it can do more to invent renewable energy? Yeah, the George Church argument, and the argument of many, of many ethicists. I mean, we have Big problems like we have made the human race smarter again and again and again. If you don't think putting kids in school every single day in ways that are pushing on

• 36:39Ezra Klein?

  their analytical intelligence and then putting them in a, in a context where that changes which genes express themselves. I mean, we're way better at solving abstract problems and way better at knowing which direction we're walking in than, than we used to be or than sort of hunter gatherer societies that we see even in existence now are. We are changing gene expression all the time. We are changing humanities capabilities over time, all the time. And this idea that, you know, we should stop or that we should, you know, tell families or tell the race that, you know, that we've come this far and no further. You know, there's a, there's an argument that that's a crazy decision to make.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I agree that things that can make the human race better and smarter and healthier, that's a good thing. We should move forward on it. I think what we have to guard against is what we get back to the free market eugenics part, which is it helps the human race if everybody gets a bit smarter. It might help it if everybody got a bit taller, although that's more of a positional advantage than a societal advantage. But certainly it would be societally good if everybody were a little bit smarter. We'd solve climate change and, you know, do some good things. The problem comes if you say a genetic elite of 10% of the privileged families on earth

• 37:58Speaker 01

  get to have children that are twice as smart as the rest of the species, you get to exactly where we got in Brave New World or in the movie Gattaca. And do we really want to have subspecies that are genetically inferior?

• 38:13Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but this speaks to this idea that then what we're afraid of is not CRISPR but capitalism.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  And same is true. Yeah, I agree that my fear is not on CRISPR. Once we make it safe, I think you got a lot of unintended consequences. You start making somebody have better memory and God knows what's going to happen. But let us say we've determined that these genes are in the wild, that the people who have these genes are doing just fine. Therefore, we'll try to give everybody the gene to have intelligence. And certainly you might start by saying, all right, instead of making everybody taller, let's make people who have The disadvantage of being very short, give them the eight inches first. In other words, if you're going to be born at four foot, four inches tall, okay, we can, you know, give you the height.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And then we give it to positional advantages for people who want to be taller. Likewise, IQ. Certainly, most people would say, if you've got a birth defect or genetic defect that's going to affect your mental processing power, it would be great for all of society if we could fix those in a way that was healthy and safe. Then, if you say, maybe we can make all of society a little bit smarter, that becomes, as you said, a distributive justice question, not a is this technology good question.

• 39:35Ezra Klein?

  One of the other kinds of competition here, or at least questions here, comes from the other kind of code we're editing. I kept reading your book, thinking there's almost something poignant, that we were learning how to edit genetic code at the same time as we're getting pretty close to creating, if not life, then intelligence through code with AI. And whenever I tap into that conversation for five minutes, people are worried that, you know, humanity is going to become more and more occupationally obsolete. But so that might then create this pressure to augment humanity because we're almost creating our own competition at the same time.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'm one of those people who believes that artificial intelligence will not actually succeed as fast as augmented human intelligence, which is sort of the Ada Lovelace, Doug Engelbart, Steve Jobs school, is that if you combine our computational power and our enhanced mental processing powers, that the combination of machines and humans with good interfaces, so that they can share information and interact as seamlessly as possible, that will always do better than trying to invent machines that off on their own develop artificial intelligence and leave us behind.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  So I think the second half of the 21st century, and this book is only about the first half of the 21st century, will be about augmented intelligence in which the symbiosis

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Between the AI of our machines and the augmented intelligence of ourselves, try to get integrated seamlessly by a continuous process of better human computer interfaces, which now, you know, we're looking at graphical point and clicks on a screen, but if it can all be done by voice and telepathy or whatever, we can meld more seamlessly with our machines. But you've now taken me on a path that's far beyond either my pay grade or my imagination.

• 41:58Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that is implicit in the conversation we're having here, though we've questioned it a few times in a to be sure way, is whether or not we will understand what it is we're doing. And there are no massive technological leaps humanity has made without tremendous unintended consequences. And that's particularly true when we're dealing with things as complex as genetics, as our own brains. And so one thing that seems true to me here is that it may be real fun to be part of the humanity that exists on the other side of the long period of CRISPR trial and error. But it may really not be fun to be part of the humanity that exists in the middle of it. When we're trying things and we think we understand them, like, let's say we turn down the genes for anxiety.

• 42:43Ezra Klein?

  And it turns out people in that class, not that anxious, but really unmotivated, like really unmotivated and lethargic. There's a real chance for CRISPR screw ups that we thought things were doing one thing and we didn't understand, you know, as you say, with memory, that it's actually a really important part of creating a psychologically coherent person, that you can reshape your memories to fit a cohesive story about your own life in which you are the hero and not just the villain. That's a pretty scary piece of all this to me.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  I think the unintended consequences is the good pause button we should have each step of the way down this slippery slope. Because you're right, when you start editing out anxiety, you know, how many fewer podcasters will there be on the planet? Or if you edit out depression, how many fewer Hemingways will there be on the planet? We don't want to go marching in a direction unless we think through and even test out what are some of the consequences going to be. And so that, to me, argues for the cautious and go slow approach, which is first, let's

• 43:54Speaker 01

  do things that we truly know are health issues that are legitimate, like sickle cell or Huntington's. And let's do them carefully so we don't mess around with other genes. And as we go step by step, preferably hand in hand, we can avoid doing a massive cock up like an invention of a Facebook, something that's supposed to connect us, but turns out to divide us and has some genetic unintended consequence.

• 44:26Ezra Klein?

  But I think there's another step there that one needs to think about society. So like, let's take the vaccines that we're all dealing with now. We're not in a free market vaccine world. I mean, there's no doubt that rich people who understand how to game systems and, you know, have people like clicking on the refresh button, you know, that the richer people are getting vaccinated at a somewhat faster rate than poor people. That is, that is happening. But nevertheless, we did not do this such that you can just walk in and if you're willing to pay 10x the vaccine cost or 200x the vaccine cost, you get it. Instead, it's being apportioned out to state governments and they are portioning it out according to some criteria and people are arguing over the criteria, but broadly, that's creating some, some curbs on the system.

• 45:09Ezra Klein?

  I mean, does this argue for a world where these sorts of advances come out more like that? If, you know, for instance, if we don't have enough supply, you know, if, if the price is too large, then maybe this doesn't get accepted by the FDA. Or, you know, if we do have it, it gets rolled out to certain people in certain cases. In California right now, they are apportioning double the vaccine allotment to counties that are lower on their healthy places index. Maybe you actually have some level of reverse distribution. If we're going to come out with something here. It seems like it has a potential to increase the inequality. You actually roll it out in a way where more disadvantaged communities get more access to the treatment. Now, obviously, this would be easier within a nationalized or a single payer healthcare system.

• 45:53Ezra Klein?

  But I feel like this actually forces you into questions like that, much more structural questions than even just safety and cost questions.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And the good thing about this vaccine rollout is we've been able to wrestle with these questions. And I think in some ways, it's been very good because despite the fact that you say maybe some rich people can get it first, I just talked to one of the richest people I know yesterday, David Rubenstein, and he lives in Maryland. He said, I finally got my first dose of the vaccine. And he's chair of the board of more hospitals and colleges than you can imagine. So generally, we have made it so that fewer people have jumped the queue by greasing the palms and spending money than you might have expected if you had guessed six months ago, how is this going to happen? We can do these things by policy.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  We've just learned if we decide we have the political will to have distribution of society's goods done not simply by bidding it up in an eBay of a free market, but doing it by some sense of distributive justice that we decide politically to do. Our problem is not that it can't be done. Our problem is our politics doesn't always allow it to be done this way, which is why I push back against what I call the free market, genetic supermarket of getting enhancements. It's no, let's have society decide how we're going to allocate these resources when it comes to something so basic as the capabilities of life.

• 47:31Ezra Klein?

  This actually brings me to something bigger I've been reflecting on and struggling with. There are a series of technologies that we can see coming right now. CRISPR is one of them. AI is one of them. You know, I think a lot about lab and clean-based meats. I think a lot about some of the climate and transportation technologies. And it seems to me, we have to have political ideologies that are a little more oriented to how we want to think about these. And so let me ask the question this way, you're a broadly progressive guy, but you've spent years now writing biographies of technologists and scientists going back to Da Vinci, but also to people in the modern era like Steve

• 48:14Ezra Klein?

  Jobs and Jennifer Doudna too. How would you characterize the way today's liberalism thinks about technology and technologists?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  I think unfortunately, whether it's on the left or on the right, there's been a few things happen. One is a knee jerk anti-science sometimes, or anti-expert thing. Secondly, we don't revere the scientific method as much. It's something why I admire you and your work and your podcast is you say, okay, let's actually analyze the evidence and revise our theories, rather than have an ideology that gives us our theory and then we cherry pick evidence, which is the way it's been happening so much now. And you know, when we get into a world in which even wearing a mask, or using a vaccine, or climate change

• 49:05Speaker 01

  becomes an ideological issue, rather than something that should be assessed using the scientific method of having a theory, gathering evidence, revising the theory when the evidence tells you to, that's a huge problem of our society. And then we get to the problem, you know, sometimes of modern liberalism, there's either the neoliberal problem, which is, let's let the market figure out some of these issues, such as what genetic enhancements which kids can have. There's also the anti-market sentiment that can say, you know, we don't want companies and corporations to have patents and to advance these things, at which point

• 49:45Speaker 01

  you really crush the advancement of turning basic science discoveries into inventions and products that could improve our lives. So it comes to me to be more of an argument for a non-ideological.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Infusion into our body politic where we all pause a little bit from our positions and say, let's be guided by some evidence before we decide that, you know, Florida's doing something wrong or right, or California's or New York is or whatever, let's gather more evidence and have some more theories.

• 50:24Ezra Klein?

  I agree with you on the examples you just gave, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna shatter your, your nice conception of me. I think I've moved to wanting a more ideological infusion in the body politic when it comes to, to politics. And I, I mean that in this way. I'm at least circling the theory that progressivism has become a little bit anti-technic because it isn't imaginative enough about changing the context in which technologies are, are driven and funded, but then also rolled out and, and distributed. And so when people see, you know, the story of technology being that some founder, you know, usually like

• 51:05Ezra Klein?

  a young white guy makes a bazillion dollars and rolls something out and then like their incentive is always to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the world has more concentration of power and you have people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey making these tremendously consequential decisions, you know, about who can speak and who cannot, that it, it drives a kind of turning away from technology, you know, not just from technologists, but that at the same time, almost everything I care about from healthcare, quality and access to climate change, to animal suffering, to economic dignity, the politics get a lot easier if we really get the right technological advances and we get them quickly and we distribute

• 51:46Ezra Klein?

  them well. And so one of my concerns is I think you want a kind of techno-optimistic progressivism, but one that really thinks then about the distribution and the regulation. And instead what you're getting is a kind of techno-pessimistic progressivism because there have been such disappointments on the distribution and the regulation.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And I think the reason is people have become convinced that government's a problem, that it screws things up at all times. And my hope, my fervent hope, is not just Joe Biden, but it's in Jeff Zients and Ron Klein and whoever he may be bringing in that might actually say, we can actually triple the amount of vaccines we have out by next month. We're actually going to deliver it in ways that are fair. And if people see that government and politics can work again, I think government and politics is just as important as technology. We should celebrate them both. We should be techno-optimists, but we should also be

• 52:45Speaker 01

  political optimists, meaning if we have the will as a society, we should have political tools to implement what we do. And that's been knocked out of us, you know, since the age of Reagan, not just on the right, but on the left. And so I'm looking for us to believe that our politics can work again to solve the big issues you're talking about, which mainly are issues of equity and climate change and justice and distribution of society's goods.

• 53:16Ezra Klein?

  Let's do some book recommendations before I lose you here. You, I think, have become like one of the great biographers of our time. What is your favorite biography?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Favorite biography I have now is The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I dipped into again because I find that Teddy Roosevelt's progressivism and trying to do a squared deal for the American people and making it into a bully pulpit, and then the schisms you're having in the Republican Party of how to fight it, seems so timely now.

• 53:44Ezra Klein?

  How about your favorite book about your hometown, New Orleans?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, which is a gentle little fable, talking about a man in the neighborhood I grew up, who is on a search and looking for clues. Not a search for great scientific discoveries or the next stock tip, but a search for why are we here and what are we doing and what is our role in this cosmos?

• 54:12Ezra Klein?

  What's a book you read with the most professional envy?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Not too envious because the person's no longer with us, but when I read Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation, I almost paused in writing the book that I just finished because it was so damn good as a journey of discovery in which he inserts himself a little into the tale, but not in a bad way. And I say, man, that was a great style he wrote in.

• 54:37Ezra Klein?

  And then finally, always our final question. What is your favorite children's book?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Oh, by far, it's Winnie the Pooh. And I'm still very nostalgic about the last one when Christopher Robin decides he has to put the teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh, away forever. And he holds his paw and tries to explain. And I even get choked up thinking about it now. And you always think that somewhere on that enchanted forest, a boy and his teddy bear will always be playing.

• 55:06Ezra Klein?

  Walter Isaacson, what a pleasure.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Ezra, thank you so much.

• 55:20Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Clanchow is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roche Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.