The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, let’s engineer better human beings

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

This special episode features the Munk Debate on the Gene Editing, held before a live audience of 800 students and faculty at Deerfield Academy in April 2026.Arguing in favour of the motion was the biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine, Gregory Stock. His debate partner was the internationally acclaimed strategic philosopher and pioneering transhumanist Max More. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO and a former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH. His debate partner wass the award-winning educator, author, and Professor of Reproductive Science at University College London, Joyce Harper.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A child, it should not be a product that is optimized, designed, part of a parent's ambition, a social fashion, and someone who has not consented to have their genome manipulated. When we can build better humans and we will all have ideas of what better makes, I think we should go for it. I think it's a poor argument against the technology, say it has unknown consequences. Of course it does. We have to learn by doing things in technology. engineering better human beings is just updated eugenics for the rich. On this episode, we are airing for the first time on our podcast feed, the monk debate on gene editing. It took place at the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts this past spring in front of a live audience of 650 school students and faculty.

The debate's resolution was, be it resolved, let's engineer better human beings. and proposed a question once confined to the world of science fiction, should we enhance our children before birth? Arguing in favor, the motion was biophysicist and bestselling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the program on medicine, technology, and society at UCLA School of Bederson, Gregory Stock. His debate partner was Max Moore, an internationally-claimed philosopher and pioneering, humanist. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist, Ezekiel Emmanuel, special advisor to the Director General, the WHO, and former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Health Institute in the United States. His debate partner was Joyce Harper,

the award-winning educator, author, and professor of reproductive science at University College London. As with all our live debates, the audience voted on the resolution prior to to the debate. Initially, 29% were in favor. 35% were opposed. We did another poll after the debate to find out how many people had changed their minds. But before we give you those results, let's first dive into this rich and fascinating debate. We're going to join Gregory Stock with his opening statement in favor of the motion. Be it resolved. Let's engineer better human beings. So engineering better human beings, let's be clear.

what we're talking about. And I think the key word here is better. So, you know, all of you have been talking about this, and I think you can think of a lot of different things that you might mean by better. So rather than get into that tangle, let's pick something that I think we could all agree would be better.

Let's look at therapeutic enhancements. That's a class of interventions that are clearly enhancements, but they have therapeutic consequences. An example would be if you could increase cellular repair mechanisms so that we aged more slowly and we lived longer lives that were healthier and fewer diseases. That would be really great. Another example would be if we could enhance our immune systems so that they really didn't act up in the same way. They didn't attack our own bodies sometimes. They didn't get out of control with something that was really relatively harmless.

And they were able to fight off diseases in a much more solid way, a more aggressive way, a more effective way. Those would be really great. So let's take something like that that I think we can all agree on. And then there's a second quality. It has to be safe and reliable, relatively easy. Because if it's not, then, well, maybe nobody would want it. I mean, it's not like we can have great sacrifices to contain these things. But what if it's safe and easy and reliable, and it's also really good for us? So that's what I want to look into, and I think it's important to do. I think the way that we can look at what we think about that is a series of questions. I like questions.

First one is, what if I could give you a pill? You could take that pill, safe and reliable, and it would bump up your immune system, so that it was really fantastic, and you weren't going to suffer any of these diseases later in your life, or would be very unlikely to? Would you take that pill? I would. And if you would, then I have another question for you. Now you have a toddler, one years old.

and you have that same pill, but you only have a narrow window of time. You can give it for it to be effective. Would you give that benefit that you claimed for yourself? Would you give it to your toddler? There's no, you're acting as the guardian for them. So would you do that? I certainly would.

And then if you would do that, then now step back another stage. What happens if you're doing in vitro fertilization? And you have an ability to intervene genetically and confer that same benefit. Still safe, still reliable. Would you do that and protect the life of this child to be? I certainly would.

Now, if you've answered yes to that, then I think you're really in favor of building better human beings. Now, you may have a lot of issues that you don't want to do it unless it's safe enough, unless it's reliable enough, unless it's fair enough, unless it's cheap enough, all of those things. And those are really important issues. they're thorny issues, they're difficult issues,

but we don't even want to ask those issues unless you said yes. If you said no, then it's no, never. You know, if this is really easy and cheap and reliable, whatever, I still don't want to do it. But if it's available, and it's only interesting to talk about if it is, then there's a burden of responsibility, because now if you don't do that enhancement, if you said no, then you have to take responsibility for it.

that. There are consequences. So imagine now that you have a 15-year-old daughter and you did say no. And she has a serious autoimmune disease. Maybe it's type 1 diabetes, maybe it's lupus. There are many, many of them. And she has chronic fatigue. She has chronic pain. She has flare-ups that are really not nice. And she asks you and she said, I don't understand. Why didn't you protect me from this when you could have so easily? And what I'm interested in is what you would say in that situation, because we all have instincts as parents that we want to do much better for our children and help them, protect them. And so you're overriding that because you think there's something more important at work that you have to say no.

And for me, that's what I want to talk about today, is why we would say no to that. And I'm interested because presumably my colleagues here on the stage, they're very thoughtful and caring people, they would say no or otherwise it would only be another question, which if you said yes, then we can get into the details of how we can go about it responsibly, how we can do this. So I think that that is the crux of what we're talking about.

And you have to imagine that these things are possible, they're feasible, they're reliable, because otherwise it's just a morose. It's not very interesting as a question. So only if you say yes there, only if you say yes, can we get into that implementation issue. And then I think that there would be a lot of agreement for a lot of people and there are a lot of issues and that is really the thornyer issue for me.

But for me, I would definitely go forward and provide those enhancements. And these are enhancements that we're talking about. You know, they're not just therapies. their immune systems that are better, aging that is better. This is the kind of thing that we have the possibility of going forward with. So thank you. That I think defines the situation for us. Thank you, Gregory.

For the first of our opening statements, we're now going to come over to the con side. Joyce Harper, you're up next. We're going to put six minutes on your start clock there. And just a reminder of the audience, thank you again for clapping when you see those clocks count down on the side screens. Please keep our debaters on the toes, and that'll keep us moving along from one section to the next. Joyce. Thank you. I'm not against engineering a healthier human being, but I am against engineering a better human being.

So for me, this debate is about the word better. Now, I've been working in the field of IVF and pre-implantation genetic testing for 40 years. I have biopsied hundreds of embryos for numerous couples who were at risk of transmitting a particular disease. to their children, and I help them have a healthier child and a healthier family. But we're debating today the word better. And I've got three points I want to make. And the first is that genetics is not that simple. So we would be over-promising if we tell parents we are going to engineer them a better human being.

There are some diseases like sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis that are determined by one gene, That means that those genetic diseases, then genetic testing and genetic engineering is very powerful. We can easily control it. But a lot of characteristics that we would put in the bucket of better. And some diseases as well are what we call polygenic diseases. They are contributed to by a number of genes that work together, all contributing a small amount,

and they give that person a predisposition. So that person's not going to definitely get that disease, all that characteristic. It depends on their environment and how they lead their life. So we would really be over-promising. My second point is that for many people, we need to think about diversity. Diversity is really important. If any of you have read anything by Charles Darwin, he said that we need to have a wide genetic pool. If we start narrowing our genetic pool, we're going to end up with problems.

A great example is looking at the beauty industry. We have many women now, and some men, who are using technology, techniques and procedures, because they want to look better. What they're doing is becoming manufactured and homogenized. We've lost the diversity. They all start looking the same. And when they all start looking the same, what's going to happen? they are going to move on.

That's going to be a fashion that moves on. And if we look at pre-implantation genetic testing right now, we have always been able to sex human embryos. The very first cases I was involved with in the early 90s was to sex embryos for couples who were carrying a disease that affected the males. So we sexed the embryos and transferred the females. So that was for an inherited disease.

But this technology, right for the beginning, has been used by couples who don't need to go through the complex IVF procedure, but they do so because they want to choose the sex of their child. I think you can probably guess what sex most of them choose. And in the Middle East, this procedure is done a lot for all the couples that go through IVF. We've also got companies now who do pre-implantation genetic testing offering PGT for these polygenic diseases and characteristics. So there are people now who are having this technique right now

for certain diseases such as schizophrenia and heart disease and diabetes. But again, that's a predisposition. And they're also starting to do this test for some of the characteristics such as height and eye color. So I think we're walking on a very slippery slope. I go into lots of schools, and I give talks of students like you about your careers. And what I would always advise

is that you should do the career you want to do, not what your parents want you to do. So imagine if you have two musicians who have genetically engineered their child for musical ability, but that child then wants to be a footballer or the footballer's child who wants to be a poet. Children aren't projects.

children are people and we shouldn't treat them as so. My final point is accessibility. I've been, as I said, been working in this field for 40 years. Has fertility treatment got cheaper? Has it got more accessible to everybody? No, it hasn't. It's very expensive. In the USA and UK, there are thousands of couples every year who are suffering from the disease of infertility and they can't actually have fertility treatment because they can't afford it.

So would this technique become more accessible? I think probably not. And if we look in the UK now, there is a treatment of gene editing for sickle cell disease, and it costs £1.65 million, so only 50 people every year are going to be able to use that treatment. So is this inevitable? Are we just stopping progress when we should just let it flow?

I don't think just because we can do it, we should do it. I think we need to think about our future generations and treat them as real people. Thank you. Thank you, Joyce Harper, nicely on time, and we appreciate that at the Monk Debates. Max Moore, you're up next. Good evening.

the resolution before us is let's engineer better human beings. Now to some of you, that's going to conjure up some worrying images, if you've read Brave New World, this perfect day, many of those fictional stories, and that's quite understandable. That phrase does produce images, but those are misleading images.

Those are bringing up some false associations that we have to separate from the core issue here. I support this resolution because to me, better doesn't mean more control, or standardized or made into some mold, it means enhancing people's basic capabilities, their health, their freedom to choose. So it's not enforcing conformity,

it's actually enabling more diversity. That distinction is very important. So it's also important to realize that this isn't fundamentally new. Humans have always tried to change their environment, tried to make their lives better, so very recently in human history that primarily involved changing the environment. Only very recently are we beginning to develop the tools to change ourselves.

change ourselves. Now obviously the ways we do that makes a big difference, but it's fundamentally very human to do this. We repair hearts, we repair people's damaged eyes, we treat cancer, we correct all kinds of problems that biology presents us with. So I would be very clear about one point here, because those images you get from fiction are very vivid, I am absolutely opposed to coercion, I'm absolutely opposed to central control or central planning of what kind of people there should be. There is no one kind of perfect person. So, you know, let's put that aside. The book, This Perfect Day, if you haven't read it, I do recommend it, but there is no perfection in human nature and we're in human affairs. Perfection is a matter of mathematics and logic.

It doesn't apply to humans who have very different values and very different ways of being. What I favor is very simple genetic choice. I'm not sure how anybody could be against genetic choice. We certainly have concerns about affordability. We should certainly be concerned about centralized agencies trying to make people into a certain mold, but genetic choice seems to be something that's clearly a valuable thing. So that's not tyranny, that's autonomy. Now, critics ask, well, who decides what's better? Well, to me, the answer is very simple.

It should not be the state. It should not be any centralized organization. It should be individuals and families who make that decision. And if you don't allow that decision, if you enforce, if you ban these technologies, you're basically saying, know better than you and current human nature we should just accept it with all its flaws and suffering and misery children born with horrible diseases with holes in the park with depressive

conditions we should just accept that and I say no we shouldn't we can do better than that so this should be a matter of individual choice not of any kind of central control not of standardization now it's been suggested that if we give people these kind of powers everyone will become the same I just don't see that certainly in some countries people make cheers to have boys over girls But I think in general, people don't choose the same things. And you can see this as we've gained more capabilities, more technology, more wealth over time. We've seen more diversity. We see more beliefs, more fashions, more ideas, different approaches.

You know, the number of musical genres, if you go back a couple hundred years, there weren't that many. Today, there are thousands and thousands of different kinds of music. Each one has its own interest group. So as we've increased our capabilities, we haven't become more uniform. We've become more diverse. Why? Well, because constraint produces sameness, capability produces diversity. So yes, people will want to avoid severe limitations and the damage. We want to raise the floor, get rid of the awful suffering of the floor,

but it doesn't mean we're going to bring down the ceiling. We'll leave that open to people to make their choices. So there's a vast difference between those two, raising the floor and lowering the ceiling. Now, this brings me to an important moral point. Who benefits the most from genetic engineering? capabilities. It's not the people who are already very smart, very emotionally in control, very handsome. No, it's the people who have the least capability today. That's not something you can easily change, given your natural lot. This kind of technology will give you the capability

to improve yourself in ways that it wouldn't be possible otherwise. So if anything, it should reduce the distinction between the people currently who might call the elite, the most capable people, and those were not so well off. So, you know, think of the people who are born with these debilitating illnesses, tendencies towards depression, anxiety, all kinds of physical conditions, weak immune systems, and so on. There's nothing sacred about nature. We should thank Mother Nature. She's done an incredible job. She's remarkably creative, produces a lot of variety, but, you know, Mother Nature also doesn't return our calls, she doesn't listen to criticism, and she doesn't issue refunds for all the mistakes she makes. So nature is fantastic, but we can

improve on that. We are part of nature. It's kind of a false distinction that this is natural, we're changing nature, but we are natural as well. So it's part of our responsibility to make the best of nature. So should we proceed with caution? Of course. Should we try to make this affordable and accessible to people? Of course we should. But that doesn't mean sitting back and doing nothing. So to me, that's our responsibility. We can raise issues of cost and those can be dealt with and whether or not those, most things do go down in cost over time. There could be reasons why they don't for regulatory reasons and those can be tackled. But these are kind of side issues. The core issue here is should we enhance people? Should we enable people to enhance themselves,

perhaps I should say, because again, it's an individual choice. So there are many good reasons for making us feel more capable, more diverse, giving us more ability to enjoy our life and to flourish. And those are the reasons why I ask you to vote in favor of this resolution. Thank you. Thank you, Max Moore. We're going to now have our final opening statement from Ezekiel Manuel. Engineering better human beings is just updated eugenics for the rich. 150 years ago, we practiced eugenics in this country and many other countries, confident we knew who was not better. And it is seen to be quite a mistake and an amazing amount of hubris. And that's what we hear from the other side.

This is not a debate about healthier children, as much as they would like to make it. This is about making better human beings, and we agree with that. The idea of taking away genetic problems, we agree. That is not the point of the debate here. We already do genetically modify human beings to cure disease. Not too long ago, we had baby KJ with a rare genetic, disorder born and within nine days of birth and due to CRISPR had a personalized cure. That, no debate about.

That is not the issue today. Let's talk about the safety issue. We don't know the error rates or the long-term consequences of enhancing people and the first person, the second person, and on. We won't know, and it certainly won't be easy. We won't know whether it'll be safe, and you can damn well be sure it ain't going to be cheap. Let me offer you five reasons why we should not accept the proposition

that Greg and Max are proposing. The first is, as Joyce suggested, homogenization. You're going to give parents choices, and they are going to end up agreeing. We are not going to have a flood of diversity. I don't know about you, but every time I look at TikTok and Instagram, it looks a lot the same. We are going to get people's prejudice. We gravitate to the same thing.

Parents already have control over the environment. Now we're going to give them control over genetics, and there won't be a lot of freedom for children. There's a lot of hubris that we know that we're smarter than Mother Nature. Mother Nature gives us diversity for a very good reason. We don't know what the environment we'll end up in. And so you need diverse talents to be able to adapt. And what looks good in one environment will be bad in another. Let me just give you something that has been true in your lifetime.

Not too long ago, everyone thought everyone should learn how to code. We've got this computer science revolution, everyone should learn how to code. And then vibe coding can get along and it was a totally worthless trait. Second, there is a big harm of specialization. Although there are a few exceptions, early specialization training people to be good because you want a musician or you want an athlete, as Joyce put it, actually leads people to early burnout, psychological stress, and very rarely elite successes.

There are exceptions. Occasionally there is be a Mozart, but those are rare. Third, one of the things parents naturally want to do and was suggested by Greg and Max is to get rid of barriers for people, make it easier, take away their challenges, shouldn't have ADHD, shouldn't have dyslexia, shouldn't have problems. But those barriers are what give people character, and there's what make people do great and challenging things. Typically, children who don't have challenges, who don't have to overcome problems, are not exactly the great achievers that others are. Fourth, longevity. Oh, we should have people live a long life, you heard both Max and Greg say. But long is not in itself good. What we want is a fulfilling life, and a long life is not necessarily a fulfilling life.

people get to 75, 85, 95, 95 years, they can have enough time to have a fulfilling life. We don't need people living to 150 or 200 years. And let me just say, I challenge you to name lots of people you know who have made creative contributions, remained productive after 75. There are about 10 of them in human history. Having a lot of old people? All right. Finally, there's the question of autonomy, and who decides?

We've heard that the government shouldn't decide, okay? Who's guaranteeing that the government shouldn't decide once we have the technology? China? But parents already, as I mentioned, have the power to control the environment of their children, and now we're going to give them the power to control the other 50% of what children are. It's not nature or nurture, it's nature and nurture. They already control nurture. Now we're going to give them the power to control nature.

And we've seen the fabulous choices lots of parents make. No vaccines. Access to social media. Screen time at two years old. And that's when they only control the environment. Just imagine what will happen when they control the whole kitten caboodle. That is not individuality. That is going to be a lot of homogenous people on the hope.

be brilliant or great runners or great something. But that will take away people's personality, as Joyce mentioned. It'll take away the autonomy of the child. It'll make the child a product of the parent and not an offspring to flourish. Thank you. Great opening statements. We now move on to rebuttal. So this is an opportunity for each debater to come back on what they've just heard.

We're going to put three minutes on the clock this time. We're going to go in the same order. So, Gregory, you're up first. So many things. So first of all, let's talk about risk. There has not been a single medical procedure, including in vitro fertilization, for example, that wasn't opposed on the same basis.

And everything had risk. We always have risk. That's how we learn. That's how we move forward. Any action carries risk. So that's a very hollow, There are a lot of straw men that you set up. This is not a eugenics program.

This is not a governmental program. How do we protect from that? We protect from politics in the same way that we don't allow ourselves to be enslaved by government if we want to live in a free fashion. It has nothing to do with our capabilities to avoid diseases and such. Another, we had the idea of access. Well, I'll tell you, there is going to be inequitable access. And that inequitable access is going to be on the base of the basis

on the basis of one generation to the next. What the richest person in the world today has access to is going to be nothing compared what someone has access to 20 years from now. A very simple example of that is computers. The richest person in the world couldn't have anything like what you all have in your pocket for pennies. It's going to be the same way with any of these technologies. So the people that are using them initially and essentially they're like volunteer test pilots. They're going to show you up the possibilities, the dangers, the issues, and they're doing it voluntarily. The second is it's going to use to lead to homogeneity? No, it isn't. And I can give you many examples. One, I talk with people in the deaf community. You know what they want to do for enhancement? They want to make it so their children cannot hear because they really want them to be able

to relate to themselves. This is embryo selection, not even genetic engineering. So very, very different. And then the idea that you're going to have some sort of of a genetic elite from the wealthy, again, it doesn't happen. Because to enhance the people who are the most, the highest performers, that's a really hard technical issue. The people, if you take Michael Jordan and you're going to figure out how to make him a better

basketball player, good luck. But if you take somebody who has all sorts of problems and you're going to bring them up to the average, we have lots of examples of that. So the people who are basically what happens is you enable these technologies, you're going to under parental control, and what was a swing of separation like this, suddenly sort of becomes like that. You go up a little bit at the top and less, they're at the bottom. And in terms of choice, I've asked these questions to people all over the world.

And let me tell you, when I ask people in Nuevo Laredo, classic Catholic community, middle class, 80% of them said that they would try to enhance the well-being of their children and the physical and the emotional qualities of them. At Harvard and Yale, almost zero. They already have won the genetic lottery, and they're happy with their place in life. Gregory, we appreciate the passionate rebuttal, and I think we're going to get another one right now from Joyce.

Joyce, you're up. Thank you. Medicine is about disease, and our opposition has talked a lot about diseases, but that is not what we are debating today. We are debating the word, better, engineering better human beings. And let's look at some of these characteristics or these traits that are come under the polygenic

umbrella that I mentioned earlier. We could do this for height, intelligence, musical, artistic, sporting ability. They are all polygenic. But remember, we would only give those people a predisposition to having any of those traits. It's how they live their life that would really determine. whether they got that characteristic or not. But talking about diversity and homogenization, I do really feel there will be fashions.

So there's only about 2% of the world that have green eyes. I could absolutely imagine the rich and famous deciding when the first cohort go through, oh yes, let's have children with green eyes because this is so rare. Guess what? Within that community, they'd all have green eyes. And then the fashion would move on. Okay, let's do blue eyes.

Let's do brown eyes. Those children will be stuck with what you've done. This is irreversible. This is not a pill that we can stop them taking. They will be stuck with whatever we've done to them for their life. And my colleague mentioned neurodiversity. Now, neurodivergent people have contributed to our society in most brilliant ways,

including probably some of the people in this room, do you think parents would specifically choose a child who's neurodivergent? Would they engineer that characteristic? So I do not feel that this is going to be a small difference or narrow the difference between the elite and the rest of any population. I think it's going to make that big wedge between them become even bigger. And I think mistakes will be made. we're walking on a very fine line of what we've done to manipulate a human embryo.

And I'll talk more about this in my rebuttal, sorry, in my closing, but there are already examples of harm that have been done when we have manipulated human embryos. So I think we need to be very cautious about the safety of these technologies and how we, how you in this room, could create your future children. Thank you. Okay. Spirited rebuttals all round. Max Moore, let's put three minutes on the clock and see what you're up to. Well, no, we mustn't do this because there are a possible unknown consequences. Oh, my goodness, let's not have fire.

I mean, fire doesn't cause any problems, right? So I think it's a poor argument against the technology to say it has unknown consequences. Of course it does. We have to learn by doing things in technology. This is the failed precautionary principle. Basically, we don't do anything for the first time. If we debate that principle, we'd still be living in the caves without fire. So that's not a strong argument as far as I'm concerned.

One thing that's important to realize is we're not optimized for today. Evolution produced us over a long period of time. These three-pound pieces of meat we call our brains are basically pretty much the same as they were 100,000 years ago. There's not a whole lot of difference. It's not very well suited to the current environment. And you can only do a certain amount of education and thinking, but you can't change some basic structures of the brain

and where it functions without doing some engineering. So I think Joyce certainly makes a good thing Joyce certainly makes a good point that we have to distinguish between polygenic traits and single gene traits. That's certainly the case. But we're just in the very early stages of genetic engineering right now. Just only fairly recently did, there was the alpha, was it sorry, alpha genome, which allows you to actually look at the whole structure of genetic changes. So if you make a change here, how will that affect everything else? There's things like prime editing that allow you to make very specific changes.

but we're still at a very crude area. So I certainly don't disagree that we have to be very cautious in making changes to polygenic traits. But the question here is fundamentally, is this a good idea or not, given that we do it sensibly and cautiously. Now, there's the affordability issue, that's a complex one, but, okay, I'll take the example,

sickle cell anemia. Yeah, it costs a couple of million dollars or pounds to give a treatment of physical cell anemia, but it also costs 800,000 per year to treat it, which is cheaper? I think it's pretty clear the answer. Now, one thing to respond to Zika, we're not talking about specializing here. Certainly some parents will choose to do that, but I think for the most part, parents will choose to enhance all kinds of capabilities for their children.

There will be some foolish ones who insist on having a chess player or basketball player. But most parents who can enhance multiple traits give you higher levels of intellect, greater ability to concentrate, to remember things better, get better emotional balance, stronger immune system, more resistance to aging. All of those things, I don't see why people will choose to just do one. That seems kind of a bizarre choice. So some people no doubt will, but some people will always make those kind of choices. But most people want to enhance and give more capability to their children. I also heard the Van Gogh fallacy here, right? Misery does not help creativity.

That's not true. There are plenty of challenges in life. If you do away with misery, depression, extreme genetic diseases and problems, you're still going to have challenges. In fact, Joyce kind of contradicted Ezekiel because she pointed out that this is just a disposition, a tendency, right? You still have to act on it. You still have to actualize those genetic abilities.

It doesn't just put everything in your lap. So there is plenty of challenge in life, even when you have plenty of capabilities. And I think people can be productive after 75 if we fix the aging problem. Ezekiel is assuming that we'll do nothing about the aging problem. Okay. Let's get our last rebuttal in from Ezekiel,

and then we'll move to our moderated portion of our debate. You have three minutes on the clock. I'm not sure either of the opponent have read Brave New World and how people will be able to be able to be able to be able to be. and how people will embrace exactly the thing that will undermine them. I also think that they don't agree and can't get on the same page. One person says, it's easy, safe, and cheap.

That's when you should do it. The other says, we always have to take risks. It'll always be risky. Well, which is it? Going to be safe or risky? Furthermore, the risk here is very different than the risk in almost every other circumstance he's been talking about, because the risk is.

something the parent takes, the parent starts the risk, but it's the child who takes the consequences and imposes it on their child. That is a very different situation, and it seems to me that situation actually is, that's like me saying, oh, it's fine for Joyce to take this problem, right? She'll bear the bad consequences. Third, we were told parents will only want the best for their child. And then we're told, oh, but the death parents, they want to make sure that their children have a very severe disability and to actually perpetuate that disability rather than to eliminate that problem. Which is it? Parents are going to do good or parents are going to impose problems on their children because that's what they want. It doesn't seem to me this

is the optimal way to make progress. And finally, we're told, that we're going to guarantee that it's done cautiously, responsibly. It's not going to be used to oppress people. Who is going to do that guaranteeing after all? We have a lot of governments out there that are not so nice. They're going to guarantee that it's going to be done cautiously, responsibly? I seriously doubt it. Having that power in the hands of people has brought us very near to world annihilation

during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We're now at the cusp of climate change, and who knows where we're going to go with AI. Finally, let me say, it's not just a beauty, but there is an efficacy and importance for humanity and the Earth to have diversity. The environment's change, think of all of the people who have been different,

who have contributed to great lives. You might think Stephen Hawking's probably not going to be around, going to be enhanced. John Nash, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, who apparently was insufferable, right? Van Gogh, depressed, problematic, got rid of his ear, thought it was extra, right? We're going to get rid of all those people. Is the world going to be better off by trying to get everyone up close? Okay, well done, debaters. You've been working hard to get us here to the 50-minute mark.

We're now going to dig into a moderated conversation. I'm going to throw some questions at our two teams, and we're going to see if we can light this stage up. I have encouraged debaters to jump in if they've heard something that particularly excises them from the other side. And if things get too cacophonous, I will... I will level set and we'll start again. But Max, I want to come to you first.

Ezekiel raised something that I was thinking about going into this debate. I think we all agree that eugenics was the great moral stain of the 20th century. It led ultimately to the deaths of millions. How is what you're arguing for today different than many of the same arguments that you're, eugenesis made in the 20th century. Give us the philosophical and moral argument for why the type of selection and performance enhancement and all those characteristics that eugenics talked about in the last century should be allowed in this century through the technology of genetics and genetic engineering.

Well, Roger, I think I already addressed that right from the very beginning. I'm very clear that I'm utterly opposed to any kind of central control, central planning, standardization conformity imposed by governments. Now, there are bad governments, and no doubt if we have these technologies, some governments will abuse them. Let's be realistic. That will happen. But if we have that principle that we can't allow any technology could be misused,

again, we'd be back in the caves. What we can guarantee is in liberal societies, especially in a limited republic like the USA, we can have laws that actually restrict that. Next, who cares what you are opposed to? Once the technology is out, your opposition is irauching. The fact is, then governments have control of this, governments have the money, or even worse, billionaires get control of this and make their choices. Your opposition and the fact that you want it to be cautious and you don't want it to impose

risks on other people has no bearing on the way history is going to apply. So right now, right now you've made an argument that we don't want to eliminate diversity. You know, artists, it's wonderful that people are suffering from chronic illnesses and it needs to creativity. No, I did not say that. You said we don't want to eliminate. I say that we have a bell-shaped curve and we have a bell-shaped curve and that allows us to adapt to different environments that is very, very important. We don't know what the right environment's going to be or what our environment is going to be tomorrow. Of course we don't.

But therapy is what goes and has a much greater impact on those. And if you want to look at what the damp, what I'm talking about is if you treat somebody who has chronically depressed of Van Gogh, if he were under treatment, then he wouldn't have been out on the edge suffering in the same way. That's much more powerful and changes what happens in the population than genetic engineering and you're worried about some choice that somebody is going to make. If you're worried about government and the control that they have. I do now say, just a minute. Just a minute. No, no, I want to try to keep this debate focus. and I appreciate you guys jumping down on each other,

but let's just stick on this eugenics theme for a little bit longer here because, yes, aspects of the eugenics movement were state controlled, but there was a lot. Eugenics was a grassroots movement through much of America in the beginning of the last century. So, Joyce, talk to us about a concern that you have

as someone who's thought about these things from an ethical and moral perspective about the connection between that very dark chapter in our collective history and the type of technology that we're discussing on the stage today. Is there a connection or not? Have we learned something? Is this fundamentally different

what we're talking about now than what we were contemplating and what we unfortunately perpetrated on the disabled, on people with all kinds of conditions that we have now understand today are normalized or accepted into our society? I think they're absolutely on the same page.

I think we have to talk about eugenics if we're talking about engineering better human beings. There's no way around it. And I do think we are going to narrow diversity. I do think we're going to homogenize because we are not going to pick certain characteristics. And we must be clear. I think everyone here agrees that medicine is important and we need to reduce human suffering and reduce disease and treat disease and maybe engineer healthier human beings, but that's not the debate. The debate's better, and that's exactly where the eugenics argument was, because it was... But Joyce, healthier, you've said that you want healthier. I would certainly define that

in better in many, many ways, and you also are running, I assume you're doing pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in which potential parents are making decisions to abort. Hold on, let's just You're going to have to explain these acronyms to us. Okay, so just pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. So if you go in and you look at an embryo and you make a judgment that, oh, it has trisomy. It's going to end up with serious problems. And then you have an option to abort that. So that's far more powerful.

And that's what I would, and when you talk about eugenics and the problems of eugenics, I agree that those can be very real, that there are government issues. It sounds like you want to get rid of the dissonance. distinction between healthy and sick. Now, there is a fuzzy line, I give granted to you, that doesn't mean there's no line at all. And you're trying to say there's no line. Some people are healthier, and we can enhance them,

and it's still really just health there we're going to promote. That's not actually right. When she gets rid of trisomy, trisomy is clearly a defect, a natural defect, and that lead to lots of health problems. Is it early onset Alzheimer's a defect? Can I just go back? So you use the word abort.

Abort, so we're not aborting a fetus or anything. When we do pre-implantation genetic testing, we are testing the embryo when it's just a few days old. We remove the cells from the embryo. We do the genetic tests. The embryos are in the laboratory. They are not a baby yet. They are a potential baby.

We don't know. Most of them won't implant. We don't know they're going to make a baby or not. So people like me, we've been doing these genetic tests. Then we decide on the genetic profile of the embryo, whether we put that embryo back. And most of the couples are going through this, they want to avoid abortion, they want to avoid miscarriage, and they want to avoid transmitting a serious, we haven't really used the word serious. Serious, serious genetic disease. Because this is a question I had coming into this debate.

Why not germline edit that embryo to save that? that embryo, to remove that disease, Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, whatever you've identified, use the technologies that these gentlemen are advocating for to intervene in that embryo, and then that embryo goes forward. It creates a life because you've germline edited it. My biggest worry is the safety of messing around with the genome of an embryo. So if a couple are carrying something like cystic fibrosis, only roughly a quarter of their embryos are going to be. be at risk of having cystic fibrosis. So say if they have five or six embryos,

we're going to have a very good chance of having some embryos there that will be free from the disease that we can transfer. If that was me, I want you to think if this was you, what would you do? What would you do to your embryo? So if I was carrying cystic fibrosis and we went through the procedure, yes, I would be happy for that to happen.

But would I engineer an embryo? Would I mess around with the disease? DNA of my future child to generate more embryos. We don't need to do that. We're selecting what we've got there. There's a good chance. I've done hundreds of cases. We very rarely have cases where we don't have any to transfer. Mind you, I have heard of a number of cases, especially in certain countries, where they have tested a cohort of embryo. They've all been of the wrong sex. So they've thrown them away and the couple have gone through the whole thing again, the whole IVF cycle, which is really difficult to go through,

because they didn't have the right sex. Okay, let me tell you, Greger, because this germline editing is a really important part, I think, of this debate, because that's where, Greg, if I'm correct, that's where the more innovative technologies are happening right now, that you are able to intervene and select, either remove illness or, preference certain traits and pass that through an embryo into a womb and have that womb birth a child who carries both those preferential traits and or the removal of disease that's been identified through genetic analysis. Is that what you're advocating for? And if so,

why is that a transformative of transformative potential? Well, it's only transformative if you can actually do it well and do it very safely. Now you can't do that. I'm not making an argument. and trying to pretend that it's safe now when it isn't. We're talking about if you could have it safe, if you could have it reliable, and there are all sorts of ways of doing that without endangering by doing animal experimentation, all sorts of things that we use in all sorts of other procedures.

If you could get to that level, then is it worth doing? Is it something we should do? I don't agree. We have no way right now to determine that something we've done to an embryo is not going to affect you. the health of that embryo. How would you do that? How would you do that in humans?

I mean, with lots of drugs already, we do animal work. Yeah, and then we test them in humans and realize that it's doing something totally different. We're not a mouse. So let me give an example, one example. If I said, okay, should we set up a colony on Mars, a human colony on Mars, let's debate that. And you said, that's really ridiculous. Look at the rockets we have. You can't possibly get to Mars. Of course we can't discuss that. If you can't get there and you can't do it, I agree. I don't want to do germline engineering. I don't mind Elon Musk going to Mars and taking risk for himself.

I would actually prefer it. But the fact is, you're not actually doing that. You're saying I am going to impose the risk on my trogeny, and that's the difference. I didn't say I would impose it on anyone. What you're saying is you want to prevent anyone from accepting that risk. Not accepting and it's the same thing. What? Let me bring Max in on this.

Wait, wait, wait, no. But you're making a false choice here. By not taking advantage of a therapy, you are imposing the existing condition on the child. You're saying, if you've got a really lousy genome, too bad, I'm going to let you suffer. That's what you're saying. You're making a positive choice by not doing something as well.

You can't avoid that. The couple would have other embryos that would be free. If we're talking about disease, they would have other embryos that would be free from a disease. but I really don't think we're talking about disease today. I think we're talking about improving characteristics. And if the couple don't carry those, if they're two musicians

and they don't actually carry the genetic predisposition for musical ability, they probably do if they're both musicians, to be honest. But if they didn't, and they say, no, we want our child to have this, we want them to be also, as well as the musical ability, we want them to be sporty, and we're both five foot,

but we want them to be six foot, and we want all these other things That's the problem. That sounds awful. To me, oh gosh, why would you know what to do you do that? We're talking about engineering, not for disease. We're not talking about engineering for disease. We can sort that out now.

A question. Max's point in the opening statement is because I want to bring Max back in on this. We have engineered ourselves in all kinds of terms of ways. We've engineered our climate. We live in an anthropocene. We have literally changed the atmosphere. And is that for the good? No, but it's an example.

Exactly. Actually, yes. Thank you. That's a separate debate, guys. But I'm saying, Joyce, you're not off the hell. You've got to answer, why is this type of engineering wrong when prostheses are right, when the wheel is right, when other engineered enhancements of the human condition have been accepted by us, embraced by us?

Okay, those are things we are doing to ourselves. These are things we are doing to our future child. And our future child has not consented for you as a parent to mess around with it. Wait, wait a second. You as a parent. You as a parent. Doing a wheel is not changing a human being, okay? It is an augmented, it's a tool.

And there are many tools we've created that are perfectly good. There are also many tools we have now created that threaten the existence of human beings. And it is by the thinnest of hairs that we have avoided destroying. the earth. It doesn't seem to me that leaving this choice up to governments to decide who's going to, what traits are going to be good and what traits are going to be bad, what traits we're going to enhance is a wise decision. Nobody's saying leave it up to governments. I said exactly the opposite, in fact. We don't care what you say. Once the technology is out, you have no, you are irrelevant.

Well, in this country, in this country, we are all relevant because we have certain rights may have a constitution. But I'm very puzzled about one thing you say. You're complaining about reducing diversity and you're happy to cure disease. By curing disease, you're also reducing diversity. Why is that kind of reduction in diversity okay, but not giving people more more capabilities, less depression, more ability to be resilient, to be healthier? Why is that bad, but it's okay to cure diseases? All of the physicists who worked on the atomic bomb, minus one, were, you know, we're going to control it. We're not going to destroy the earth with it.

They had no power in the end. Zero. That decision went without, even though they objected to it. The scientists who create this, who push it forward, they will be totally irrelevant to how it is used. So you're saying that the only way to protect ourselves is to stop the technology from existing. That's what I'm hearing from you.

And Joyce is saying it's impossible for the technology to exist because it's too hard and we'll never accomplish it. No, no, I didn't say that. Who said that? You just said, as soon as it's created. Don't misquote me. I didn't say that. Well, you just said that if...

No, I said it won't be safe, it won't be easy, and it won't be cheap. That's what I said. So you're saying we shouldn't... It can be highly risky. It can be very expensive. I'm 100% in agreement with you if you just add the word now. Okay? Because that's the way technology works.

There are so many things that are going on. Right now, it is free... I work in medicine. It's free to take my cell phone and talk to anybody anywhere in the world. 50 years ago, you would have looked at that and said, that's crazy. How could you possibly have a window? I want to say it was dangerous. But even when now becomes now, how are we really going to be sure it's safe?

Who's going to be the first person? Would any of you in this room be the first parents to genetically engineer your child because you want them to be taller and sporty and musical. How were you sure that in vitro fertilization was safe? Yeah, we didn't, and it was risky, and I think over the decade. So, 1978. The first time. Yeah, 1978 was the world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown,

and everyone has looked, and I've certainly had huge concerns through those decades about what we are doing, what we've done, and there has been a lot of new technology that's come in, There was a technology in the 90s where we took a sperm and we injected it into the egg. And the scientists that did this, Palermo, he said, oh, when the baby was born, oh, come and show me the baby. Is it okay? I mean, is that how we want to do science and medicine?

That's what you did. What that realm of technology and research did, do you think we should not have gone forward and ever done in vitro fertilization? It sounds like you do. No, I do, but I think we are now at a really. really crucial, fine line that we are going to jump right over if we start manipulating a human genome. Okay, manipulating human embryos was one thing. It was risky. I think we've been damn lucky. And I think now manipulating the human genome of our future generations is off the scale.

Can I just say one thing? No, no, let me just ask you. Let Max come in and then I'm going to go to you, Zecchio, okay? Yeah, you're up. Just let me ask you. Let's say we had a former genetic. engineering that's not quite what we're talking about. So the synthetic genes, which have been talked about, where you could put it synthetic genes in, you don't even have to activate them until someone reaches adulthood. Would you oppose that? Put it into an embryo? Yeah, these are kind of synthetic genes which you can switch on later with a chemical trigger, and if they don't want to do it, they don't have to. Would you oppose that?

I can't. Yes, I would. That sounds like crazy madness to me. I think what he's saying is that it's an age-in-majority decision. It's not a parent in because one of your rightful, I think, ethical objections here is the imposition of choice by the parent on the child. He's saying if there was the technology to allow someone at the age of majority to then choose to have those enhancements, as an ethicist, would that change the way you think about that?

But that's not the way it's going to work. No, wait, so you're gonna deny her to answer the question. Let her answer the question. And what, to cure disease? To do what? To do whatever... To enhance immune systems, increase intelligence. That it can be turned off, in other words.

To enhance somebody. Yeah. Not for disease. Not for disease, because we can sort that out now. Yeah, to make them more intelligent, to better concentrate better, to have more resistance to disease, more assistance to aging, to have better emotional control. And how would we know that's safe?

How would we know that that's not interfering with the genome? How do we know it's not affecting their longevity? When we test anything, if you test a drug right now in humans, so yes, you mentioned we do animal experiments, eventually it's got to come off the mouse and put in a human and we monitor it. But we could talk about COVID, but maybe not. But then we have to monitor it in humans. And one thing that we rarely test is what the drug does to fertility.

So there are numerous examples that are happening right now in society. For example, the weight loss drugs where they were tested on fertility. They were tested on fertility in a rat. and they were seen to affect the fetuses. But what's happening now? There's loads of women that have been taking these weight loss drugs, got pregnant, and I tell you, it's another fine line about what's going to happen. So we have to be really, really careful of how we test anything in the human.

Joyce, I completely agree. Hold on, I promise, Ezekiel will come in, then I'll come to you, Gregory. I've been here patient, and that is not a genetic disorder I have. Look, promise to us that it's always going to get cheaper. Things are always going to get cheaper. The fact of the matter is in medicine, it's very hard to prove any technology has gotten cheaper at all. And as Joyce has pointed out,

IVF has been around for 40 years now. It has not gotten one cent cheaper. It's gotten a lot more expensive. And that raises fundamental justice concerns about who will be able to use this technology, how widespread it's going to be and the fact that it's going to be the rich chasing what they think is going to be better and the other part of society 99% of it is going to be deprived of doing something and going to be left behind

and that is a fundamental justice question that oh it'll be safe, cheap and easy No guarantee on that and it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to get anything cheap doing one person at a time, one genetic transfer at a time. Yes, many electronic technologies have gotten cheaper. No medical technologies, especially cell and gene-based medical technologies, have gotten one cent cheaper. Haven't antibiotics gotten pretty widely available? Yeah. Generics. Contact lenses.

This is not an antibiotic. You just said nothing medical. That is a small chemical. This you have to take a cell out, put it in. Let me just say, car tea therapy, where you actually have to manipulate the genes in a cell and then re-infuse it to fight a cancer, costs $160,000 per patient to develop.

It's not getting cheaper. I would say heart bypass operations have gotten much cheaper just about everywhere except in the United States. Okay? There are all sorts of technologies, medical technologies that we take as commonplace today. And when you talk about some person not having the consent, every decision that a parent makes for medical treatment of a young child

is without their consent. We do that all the time. But manipulate their genome? You can say you don't want to manipulate genome, but you were making a broad issue about consent. You can say you don't want to manipulate genome. I respect you for doing that. We're making a broad issue of imposing risks on the child,

not for their benefit. That's what you're doing when you do any treatment, any treatment. But it is for that benefit. If you were using that sensitive to depression or rage or... Again, right on number one. You have no guarantee you're actually going to do for their benefit. You just don't know. You don't know, I agree.

So now we're in agreement. That's this idea. It's going to be safe, easy... You don't know about anything. Okay? We do not know about anything that has... We know about a lot of things. Yeah, tell me what.

What do you have, tell me what? Tell me what? Would you have had computers? Would you have allowed fire? Would you allow computers? Would you allow metal working? I don't claim universal ignorance here. I think we actually know a lot of things in science, right?

We know about the structure of the genome. We know how a lot of genes turn on. We know exactly what the chemical sequences of them are. We know a lot. But would you also acknowledge there's been lots of rapid progress in understanding the genome? understanding the genome, mapping the genome, these technologies are leaping forward quickly. Yes, absolutely.

So I guess my question is, is this technology already out of the bottle? Is this controllable at this point? Do we have a choice as to whether we are going to- The question is, let us engineer better human beings, not what is going to happen in history. We're making a moral judgment, not a futuristic prediction here. If they're arguing that we should engineer better human beings,

and that is a de facto reality of what is staring us in the face in terms of the advances of this technology, are we not already there? We are there. Have we crossed the fuzzy lines? No, we are there, and it's so interesting what happened. So Dr. Hay from China, he went a bit rogue, and he engineered some embryos, not even for a disease, it was to do with HIV.

The fathers had HIV, and there is a genetic combination that you can have that makes you're immune to being affected by HIV and getting AIDS. So he decided, and there was no logical scientific reason to do this genetic engineering, but I think he just wanted to be the first. So he engineered the embryos so that they would be resistant to the HIV virus. So there were children born in China. And what happened? The whole world got together and made an agreement that we would not move this technology forward. It would be banned in every, as far as I'm aware, every country because it was not acceptable. It had not scientifically been tested, excepted.

That's just except for HIV. I don't understand why he was, I mean, he didn't go through proper channels and so on, but he did it correctly, right? Why was that such a terrible thing? Because we are not ready with this technology. We have no idea. Why do you think the whole world agreed that it wasn't, it had to be banned? We're not saying we're ready right now. We're talking about when we understand it better, when we've got advances like the alpha genome, which can now look at the interaction of different genes, so polygenic traits are more complicated.

We're still at the very embryonic stage of this technology. We're not saying let's go crazy and do all these massive changes tomorrow. we're saying in principle, if we can figure out these problems and do it safely and understand it, is this not a good thing? Is this not benefiting people and expanding their capabilities? I think the story says two things. First, that people can go rogue and then get a whole team of people. He didn't do it on his own. He did it with the whole team of people. And so you can get people who will go rogue. And the second thing it shows that people can agree to ban a procedure and a technology. It isn't inevitable that just because we can do it, so he did it, we can do it. We can do it.

and it got banned. Do you think it's actually banned? Do you think it right now there aren't labs? Yes. Yes. But there were definitely rogue people around this planet who do things that are still banned. So Joyce, the problem is that these are dual-use technologies.

If I were to say that I want to design a program to do germline genetic engineering and I could be given any amount of money and could design that program, I'd go, oh, well, I think, I think, let's explore the human genome. We want to find out as much as we can about the human genome. I'd say, I want to fund Joyce and all of her crew

so that we can really advance intra-featured fertilization. I want to do analytics. All of the things that I would say that I wanted to do are exactly what is going on today. And it's because it's not like there's some technology that can be applied to germline engineering, but nowhere else. It's because all of the learnings that we have about our bodies,

about how life works, about our molecular biology, all of these things have dual use. And so the idea that we ban it now, why would we want to do it now? We're incapable of doing it. It's a good idea to not do it, okay? But if you think that 100 years from now, or 50 years from now, I don't know how long it'll be,

we aren't gonna have the capacity to make interventions that are very desirable, that are likely quite safe, and that could be made available if we wanted them to, then I think you have your head in the sand. So this is not a moral argument anymore. This is about a prediction of what the likely evolution of human history is going to be. It's not the resolve whether we ought to do it. It is going to happen.

That could be, and it could be wrong, just like we've made many mistakes in human history before. That doesn't make it right because that's the way we're going to go. And I think that's just a mistake of a mistake. stake in view and it's basically saying look it's gonna happen we might as well get on that train now I said actually that I wanted you to think about it that when it is safe when it is reliable when we can do it responsibly should we do it now if you say no we shouldn't at that case then that's fine you have that I don't object to that there's going to be a case before that case and that's going to be case number one and the question is whether we want to do

case number one and that's why we're here today debating this topic Okay, so Zico, let's go back in time to the Bronze Asian. I've decided I'm going to invent metallurgy. Are you going to come up to say, Max, you can't do that? They're going to make horrible weapons out of this stuff. They're going to make bullets. We're not against technology. We're absolutely not against technology.

No one here is arguing against technology. He's going to say, well, can you prove it will be safe? And I'm going to say, well, of course I can't. So he's going to, well, we shouldn't do it then. We're talking about editing the human genome of our future children. I don't think it's the same. For us, we're talking about allowing them to suffer from things. things they don't have to suffer from.

We're not talking about disease. We're not going to be about disease. It's not going to be about disease. From depressive tendencies, from not being able to do things they want to do with their lives. And how much is what you said is genetic? I want to challenge this idea. There's a clear line between a therapy and enhancement because there really isn't, right? It depends on what is normal.

What's normal in one country might be not be normal in another. No, no, we're not cultural relative this year. So, you know, bringing someone from, say, a very depressed condition to, you know, not very happy, might be considered therapy. Or what about going from, you know, fairly miserable to much more resilient? Why? You might call that? enhancement, why is that suddenly bad? This debate is not, this debate

is not, should we engineer healthier human beings? Yes. It's better human beings. As we both said, it's about the word better, and it's provocative because the word better means a lot more than healthier. So I think we should stop

talking about disease. We agree on that. What do you think better means? What does it mean? Do you, you've talked about things like hair color, performance in athletics, is that what you think is better? What do you think is better? The healthier seems to be a much better candidate than that. But that's not the debate.

You just said better. What does better mean to you? I said what meant to me at the beginning. What does it mean to you? For me, it would be characteristics. It would be traits such as height, intelligence. Is it already being done? Is it better?

Is it better? Not in my view, no. But in some people. Most of humans. So you're actually agreed on that. Most of humans absolutely agree that being taller is better. We know that because almost all the presidents have been taller. Taller people make more money.

Taller people get, you know, just married better. So we're all going to be eight feet tall, is that right? I'll get my toe. Agree on that. That's only true within a certain range. That's just the fact. That's within a certain range. It's not a fact at all.

Having eight feet people tall is not good. They're not going to get through doorways. They can't get into cars. There's a limit on that. So yeah, being six, six two maybe, but being eight feet tall, no, there's a limit on that. So it's not just more is better. But having more emotional resilience,

having more capacity to resist disease, having less prone to aging. Those things seem to be there is no particular limit. We should draw a line there. And can we engineer that? Will we ever be able to engineer what you just said? Why would we not? Because it's not genetics. Well, it's not just genetics, but that's part of it, right?

Some people, we know there are super ages. There are people who live to 120, 110, and they clearly have different genes. They can be, like Marie Kalman, lived to 122, smoked, drank, you know, she lived to 1202. And what is the virtue of just being the oldest person? What is the good that that means? Because you're not old. You're vigorous and healthy at 80s. Wait a second.

We're not talking about keeping people. We're not taking... We're not talking about keeping people alive and misery. The fact of the matter is... Bigger... Most old age people are not vigorous. That's not what we're talking about, is it? We're not projecting today.

Most... ...centonarians are confined to a chair. So it's so funny, you guys are on the same side of it because you're saying that you don't want decrepit older people. And Max is saying, you do I. I want people that are, have an increased health span. And there are certainly very many people who are able to age very gracefully and very effectively. Okay. And that is, a lot of that is genetics. A lot of there are other things involved, but you can really see that in different families. Okay. Let me just try to, as we're counting down

here on time for this moderator middle, let me just try to come out this a different way because this has been a really rich debate, and I appreciate the back and forth. Potential. I think we all agree, would we not, that human potential is something that is a good, a collective good. It's something we try to encourage. We do it at educational institutions like this and our society in so many different ways. Why isn't what Max and Gregory talking about not about increasing the scope of potential? That, yes, there are risks, there are tradeoffs, but fundamentally it comes back to one of our grand civilizational projects, which is to expand our potential, each of us individually,

and to benefit from that collectively. I would bring up the neurodivergent argument again. So I don't know how many people in the room are. I'm pretty sure I am. I've never been tested. But brains need to work in different ways. And would parents welcome that? No, they wouldn't.

They wouldn't select a child. I don't believe. Maybe some of them would. they would because some kind of careers actually benefit from people who are heavily focused, autistically focused, if that's in a popular job, then they might well choose that, right? Absolutely. But I don't think if parents are going to be paying $50,000 to genetically engineer their

child, they're going to pick one that's neurodivergent. 50,000. Ah, should we have some more on? At a zero. $500,000. There may be some limits to what humans can achieve with our, you know, I talked about these pieces of meat we have in our brains that haven't changed very much. we can't really be sure that we can solve the mysteries of physics or the universe

given the kind of brains we have that may require some enhancement right we may never have will peace or get rid of wars because we've been too stupid we've got these tribalistic impulses which maybe we can only do away with through genetic enhancements or some other means look I think part of the problem here is again the word potential in some societies potential was you were a great warrior we wanted to enhance that skill and we cultivated in people in other societies, it turns out that the skills we want to cultivate are more intellectual or athletic or something else.

And part of the issue is that cultivating some of those things are not such a hazy-tazzi idea, and we shouldn't be doing that. I don't think we uniformly want to cultivate whatever potential human beings have. We have some evil potentials as well as good potentials. You know, that's been recognized forever and in most religions. Part of what we want to do is to definitely improve ourselves and to get rid of the unhealthy parts. But some of the divergence, right, is because the environment is different, right?

People who have, I mean, you know, dyslexia, see the world in a different light. And that turns out in some environments to be incredibly, and so you would say, well, it's not good for reading. You're damn right it's not good for reading, but it may be very good for other abilities. It's so pervasive and has been conserved, there's got to be other benefits to it.

And one of the problems is we have a very notion of better and worse, and we're going to homogenize the people So you're making an assumption, and I don't think you have any data behind it. I'm looking at how, what we're saying You're saying we're going to homogenize, okay? And it's like access. Another thing was that the wealthy are going to have access. Actually, when you talk to people,

it's not the wealthy that are going to have access even now. It depends on your philosophy. There are a lot of people who are not very open to this, and no matter how much wealth they have, they're not going to do it. If you go to some place like Asia, it's very, very popular the notion. They will go forward.

They say, why wouldn't you do something like that? Here, we have all sorts of constraints about it. We have all sorts of issues about it. You're saying, oh, we're going to homogenize. You're just throwing that out. I don't see that at all. When you have choice in a lot of things, Max mentioned the idea of music.

You see it in art. You see it in fashion. There are all sorts of things going on. Maybe you don't see them all on TikTok, how much time you spend there, but you see these little... Well, I'm saying you don't see them, but I'm saying you go into all these sub-communities.

you get down into these sort of black holes of browsing around. It's amazing the diversity that there is around, and I think it would be increased. But regardless, we're just making assumptions. The way we would find that out is to move forward, and how do you buy knowledge about these things? We could argue back and forth about it, and you could think, oh, it's better that we don't have these technologies. The fact is they're not going to come overnight, and the way you're going to get evidence for it is to make mistakes. We have to make mistakes and learn from them and find information about what the challenges are

and how to go forward. If you wait and you try and blockade these things, eventually the technology is going to be so easy that it's going to be applied very broadly and nobody is going to know what's going to happen. And that's where you're going to have the most massive sort of dangers in these technologies because we're not going to stop this time.

Okay, we're three minutes off closing statement. So I just want to give Max and Joyce an opportunity to kind of wrap up this moderated middle portion. Why don't you come in, Joyce, on anything you've heard in the last five minutes? Yeah, I want to come in on longevity. So we talked a lot about that. And I think there's a number of people on this planet who think that we can have a quick fix. We can take a pill, a potion, lots of supplements, whatever, to help our longevity.

There is no quick fits to longevity. It's a great example of we've got to work at it. We've got to get back to basics. We've got to exercise. We've got to sleep. We've got to eat well. That's what we need to be thinking about for a healthy population, not a quick fix. And I look at genetically engineering a better human as a quick fix.

Excellent. Max, we can give you the last word in this moderated metal portion. Well, yeah, unfortunately, there isn't a quick fix. I wish there was. I agree the basics of sleep, lack of stress, eating well, exercising. Those are very important. There is no quick fix. But it doesn't mean that that's a bad thing.

if we could actually get rid of diseases, if we could solve aging, or make aging a lot more graceful. If there was a quick fix, I don't think that would be a terrible thing at all. So I'm going to argue that we can do this today, that we can do things very easily or quickly today. We're saying this is a good ideal.

If you can relieve suffering, if you can increase capability, increase choice, why is that a bad thing? Let's do the reversal test here. Imagine that you've had those changes made. Imagine that you've all been genetically engineered, and you're really smart, you're really emotionally stable,

you're really zealient. You're not going to age. Would you say, oh, I hate my parents for doing that. I want to go back to being like the old human beings who are weak and uncomfortable and unhealthy and age rapidly. Would you want to undo that? If not, then you're in favor of the proposition.

Let's go to closing statements. Zecchio, you're up first. We're going to put your minutes on the clock here and we'll abide by our audience applause rule. Four minutes to give us your concluding. As I began, this really is a debate about eugenics. Eugenics 150 years ago is we killed people who we thought were inferior and we were wrong and millions of people suffered. And by the way, yes, it started as a ground, as a view among some people, but it became employed by governments.

And the proposition that if we want to make humans better through genetic engineering and other techniques, It may start out with individuals wanting it, but governments will take it over. And I think Joyce said it excellently. Better and worse are social categories. They're not natural categories. And we impose our view, just like we think. Taller is better. Smaller is not better.

And that's not a natural category. That's one we decide. And when we give people the power to decide these things, they will all gravitate to the same place. That is a homogeneous view about what's better. It won't be the diversity. The other side claims, that's not what we see today,

and that's not what we see in other circumstances where people choose. Let's not be confused by the claims that we are going to impose, we want to accept suffering and impose suffering on people. Joyce and I have said very clearly, from our standpoint,

intervening to get rid of an illness, a disability is exactly acceptable. There's not a debate about that. The other side is trying to say, oh, I want a therapeutic enhancement to make the line fuzzy. And I agree, the line is not crystal clear between therapy and enhancement.

But that doesn't mean there's not a distinction. And when there's a fuzzy line, you can stay far away from that line and not get close. And I think that's the place we should be. We want to decrease suffering. We want to cure diseases. We don't want deaf parents imposing their deathness on their child and giving them a disability in the name of we think this is better. It's not better.

No one thinks it's better. That's why we invented hearing aids. The third point we've made is a point about justice. This will never be cheap like antibiotics. It's a very complicated thing to do to genetically manipulate cells, and it will not happen without lots of labor, and it will be expensive. That does mean it'll be eugenics for the rich, not for the masses.

And if it becomes eugenics for the masses, it turns out that's again going to be government control. I think we lose something, and society itself loses something big, if we allow people to do this to their children, control both the environment and the genetics of their children. I want to end by asking the audience to do some reading when you leave here. Maybe when you were a child, someone was nice enough to read you Dr. Seuss's book, The Sneeches.

You remember a star upon ours? We're better than you because we have a star upon ours. And then someone comes up with a machine and says, Oh, I can put a star upon you. And all the Sneeches without a star race up to get the star. And then the sneeches with the stars say, we want to take it off. They take it off. And then they go round and round about this, all trying to get to be better.

and better. That doesn't seem to be the place we're going to go. Thank you. Thank you, Ezekiel. I love it. Okay, Max, you're up next, four minutes on the clock. Give us your closing thoughts on this evening's debate. Well, I hear a lot of fear. I hear a lot of let's not do things for the first time. Technologies are risky. We don't know the future. All true, of course. We don't. We didn't know the the future when we invented fire or metal or many other devices, they had bad effects as well as good effects. We can only learn by moving forward, by being intelligent, by having good institutions and wisdom,

and being careful in how we move forward. But lack of certainty about the future, the possibility of danger is not a reason not to make progress. Again, we would still be very primitive if we had that view. We do need to move forward. Nature is not sacrosanct. We are part of nature. We're an intelligent, self-conscious part of nature,

at least some of us, somewhat self-conscious, and we can improve nature, especially our own. Now, this idea that we're forcing things on our children, to me is absurd. When we don't make choices to improve people, just as now with education or medicine or vaccines, if we don't do these for our children, we're making choices for them.

So not giving them advantage. It is not helping to have a stronger immune system, more intelligence, better emotional stability, or resistance to aging. That is making a choice. That is imposing the existing conditions. when you could have done otherwise. So let's not hear anything about imposing things to our children

because you're doing it either way. If you don't do something when you could, that's also an imposition. Instead, we're talking about making an intelligent choice based on a perfectly sensible idea of better. It doesn't have to be better in some weird sense. Better in a way that we can all agree on, healthier, more capable, more resilient.

And it doesn't mean the end of suffering, the end of struggle. We'll have plenty of things to struggle about. I mean, just getting to Mars is going to be a pretty huge struggle. There's plenty of work to do in the world, but honestly, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're sick, if you're aging rapidly, you're not going to better do these things. The challenge is all beyond you.

So I'm not talking about doing away with challenge. We're talking about giving people the power, the capability to do better in life. Now, we do a lot better than we did in the past. Yeah, solving aging is not a quick fix, but we live a lot longer than we did, right? Part of that is because fewer children are dying, but we also live longer because of better public health, better medicine, and so on. And there's no particular reason why that shouldn't continue. So we're talking about the continuation of humans doing what humans do, which is to improve life, to make things better. It's very

half for me to see how you could oppose that. Yes, we can do it in bad ways, we can do it in unsafe ways, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about doing it at a time when we have a reasonable understanding of what's going on. It's not risk-free. Nothing is ever risk-free. So if somebody tells you we shouldn't do something because there are risks, that argument again would prevent all progress of any change. So we can't do that. Now the cost issue is another matter again if it's very expensive right now that may be the case We don't know what the future will bring we're starting to understand How genes work a lot better. We have you know alpha fold which we're predicting that way the protein's folding. There's now alpha genome Which actually will look at the interaction of different genes. So when you have polygenic traits we actually already are beginning to get a better idea of how certain changes will interact with the whole genome But again this is a very early stage and nobody here neither Greg norio saying let's just go ahead

a while and just do this without concern about the risks or doing it properly. We're talking about in principle if you can do this in a way that makes people's lives better, makes them more resilient, more capable, that we should go ahead and do that. And I really actually resent this flinging of the idea of eugenics. Right from the beginning, I've said I absolutely reject central control, and I would absolutely champion, even if you need a new constitution, we shouldn't need it because it's already implicit, but either to the constitutional amendment, that this should be something for individuals, right?

In this country, at least, we're supposed to make individual choices. The government doesn't decide what the good life is for us. And that includes not compelling people by force of law. Are you going to throw someone in jail because they want to help their children make them more capable or more healthy? That's what is being said here. Those people should be thrown in jail because we ought to make this technology illegal. No, we should give them the choice, make life healthier, better, more resilient. That's why I'm asking you to vote in favor of this proposition.

Well done, Max. Right on time. Joyce, four minutes. Take us away. I'm going to go back to the word better. So who decides who is better? And we have talked a lot about inherited disease. I think we leave the medicine behind. And I am going to go back to eugenics. Eugenics was about power and inequality. We were told that it was scientific, rational, beneficial and was going to improve humanity.

I'm also going to pick up again on Brave New World. So Aldox Huxley wrote Brave New World just over 100 years ago. And you probably, I don't know how many have read it. You probably haven't read it. It's very short. That's some homework. Read Brave New World. In that book, it was the embryologist.

I used to be an embryologist. When I started my career, that was my role. I was the embryologist, the person in the lab that helped create the embryos and who manipulated the embryos. And in Brave New World, it was the embryologist who played God, who decided whether the embryo was going to be better than the other embryo. So was that embryo going to be an alpha, beta or gamma? The embryologist decided. And did that lead to utopia or dystopia? And I think we have to think about that. So what we have been talking about is not predictions, but they are

warnings. A child should not be a product that is optimized, designed, part of a parent's ambition, a social fashion and someone who has not consented to have their genome manipulated. And I do want to bring up the discussion about safety. So as I said, I've been working in IVF for 40 years. I have manipulated thousands of human embryos, many of which went on to make children. I have frozen them, I've made holes in them, I've taken cells out for them to do the pre-implantation genetic testing. And for my whole career, I have been worried about the safety of what I've been doing. Now, I mentioned Bob Edwards was the embryologist who was responsible for making Louise Brown,

the world's first IVF baby. I had many conversations with Bob about the safety of what we were doing. And whether we were causing or could be causing any issues to the health, the fertility, or the longevity of future generations. We were all very relieved when it was, I believe Louise Brown's sister was the first IVF baby, well, IVF person in the world who then had a child. And we all had a sigh of relief. Well, the fertility seems to be working, but that was just when the first started. And I mentioned reproductive cloning earlier. Dolly the sheep, there have been huge abnormalities in the fetuses and the offspring that have resulted from reproductive

cloning. We have to learn from our mistakes. I do worry that we could end up for the rich and powerful with a situation like The Handmaid's Tale. So again, you may not have read this book. Margaret Atwood wrote a book called The Handmaid's Tale and in this book, the rich and powerful could no longer get pregnant naturally. We really don't know what manipulation of those embryos would do and we wouldn't know until we got there. I am the mother of three IVF children, and my twins had been frozen embryos. I have been both sides of this table

with how we look after our human embryos and how we reproduce. And I've asked many parents, what do you want for your future child? And myself included, I would say, I want my children to be happy. Can we engineer happiness? No, we can't.

So agree with us. on this motion. Thank you. Okay. Joyce gets half a bonus point for mentioning a Canadian author at the Canadian Monk Debates. We appreciate that. Gregory Stock, we're going to give you the closing word in tonight's fantastic debate. Four minutes on the stage. Take us away. Thank you. So really potent genomic technologies and informatic technologies were a lot of hand-waving until fairly recently. And then we have this massive infusion of AI into every aspect of our lives and the acceleration of the potency of that and that has shifted the ground beneath our feet and it is making

things very very challenging that there are going to be lots of challenges for us going forward and there are a lot of people that are afraid and they say we should stop we are not going to stop with any of these technologies and that's because we as humans we take all of the tools and the technologies that we have and we try and use them to better our lot in life in some way or another. That's what we do. And, you know, I would click my feet if I could have a few extra years of healthy life of another 50 years or something. I'm 76 years old. You said you only wanted to live to 75, okay? I'm not ready to hang it up yet, but I'm comfortable. I think it's more likely that I'm gonna live a normal lifespan and and I'm going to die of the same things that our parents die of, our grandparents, their grandparents.

But I have a 22-year-old daughter, and she's just graduating from USC in a month, okay? And many of you in this room are in the same position, and I think it's fantastic, that she has the likelihood, the possibility of being able to take advantage of all of these possibilities. And your grandchildren are going to be taking advantage of enhancement technologies. I don't know exactly what they will be, but it's almost certain to happen. But it's not just health, and we've come again and again to the issue of what is better. And when I think about what's better, I think, well, it's kind of interesting. Is it that we're more giving, that we're more generous, that we're more courageous,

these sorts of issues? And we expend enormous amounts of money to try and instill these in our ourselves, in our children, and we use institutions like education, maybe religion, maybe parenting of one sort or another to try and make these things happen. And when we're talking about genetic engineering and enhancement, that is just the tip of the iceberg. The things that AI is opening up and in a much more rapid pace are going to offer possibilities of enhancement to our qualities and the way we interact with one another and who we are, they're just unbelievable. So we are going to have a lot of challenges

in life. And I think that the safest place for us and for you is to be living within the future and grappling with these issues and not standing away from it and trying to stop them or saying they're not really going to happen because they are going to happen. And the real challenges we face, and there are going to be tough challenges because it's changing the whole notion of meaning and purpose and who we are and what it means to be a human being, it is not going to be from access to genetic enhancements of one sort or another. This, as long as we have choice over that, as long as we have the option of doing it or not doing it. And so I would say that to protect that choice, protect it so you have a decision to make there. And when we can build better humans and we will all have

ideas of what better makes, I think we should go for it. And at the very least, if you don't want to, we shouldn't be trying to blockade that and stop people who really want to add those possibilities to their children and themselves and give them those advantages. So I think it's time to at least conceptually be open to moving forward into the future. Thank you. Thank you, Gregory. Let's have a big round of applause for all of our...

debaters tonight for terrific, hard thought. Well, that wraps up today's special edition of the Monk Debates podcast. We hope you're enjoying our summer 2026 look back at the greatest mainstage monk debates. Special thanks to our participants for this memorable debate, Joyce, Zeke, Max, and Gregory, Spirit of Thoughtful Conversation at Deerfield Academy. The students and faculty couldn't have been greater partners. After the debate, the audience, was pulled again. This time, the results were 35% in favor of the resolution, 65% opposed the protein. Those in favor of engineering, a better human being, won the debate with a slim margin of 6%. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard on this or any of our

podcast, send us an email info at monkdebates.com. Thank you for listening. And more importantly, thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate and civil dialogue, one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-stri- rating. Thank you again for listening.