In this wide-ranging Plutopia podcast episode, Dr. Neil Baer — television writer and producer, physician, and public health advocate — discusses The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, a book he edited that explores the ethical, medical, and social implications of gene editing. While CRISPR holds transformative potential to cure diseases like sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia, Baer warns of a slippery slope when it comes to altering human embryos, raising difficult questions about disability, human variation, and who decides what traits are worth preserving. The conversation touches on potential abuses such as eugenics, designer soldiers, bioterrorism, and corporate exploitation, while also examining CRISPR’s impact on biodiversity, animal welfare, and transhumanism. Baer emphasizes the need for public understanding, strong ethical frameworks, and compassionate storytelling in navigating the complex intersection of science, identity, and politics in an era where scientific facts are increasingly challenged.

Neal Baer:

You know, evolution is so long, and this is what makes me nervous when we start to tinker with evolution as well. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have CRISPR to alleviate suffering. I think we should have CRISPR to alleviate the suffering of sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia or many other genetic diseases. Should we use it to get rid of these these diseases? Well I think there would be no one who would argue that Tay-Sachs is a good thing. But in our book, Ethan Weiss, who’s a cardiologist at UC San Francisco, has a child with albinism. And he says that he and his wife would have probably decided to abort had they known that she was carrying a fetus with albinism. But once their child was born — they can’t imagine life without her. So should we get rid of albinism? Should we get rid of Down Syndrome? This is the slippery slope of CRISPR.

Background image by Elena I Leonova, license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International