The CRISPR Children, Episode 3

Conversations with scientists

To go along with my investigative story The CRISPR Children in Nature Biotechnology, I am producing a rolling series of podcasts. This episode is a chat with Dr. Eben Kirksey, an anthropologist at Deakin University, which has campuses in and near Melbourne, Australia.

He has written a book called The Mutant Project, Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans. It's dedicated to Lulu and Nana, two of the three children who are known to have had their genomes edited before their birth. Their birth in 2018 caused a global uproar. there is also a third child, whom I call Amy, who also has a gene-edited genome. Dr. Kirksey talks about the lab that brought them about and offers some background about the social, political, cultural aspects that made the experiments possible.