Jonathan Anomaly and James Lee: is eugenics in our future?

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Recently, the new embryo-selection start-up Herasight has been in the news, finally coming out of stealth. Part of the buzz is because of the public involvement of well-known geneticists and academics like Alex Young and Joe Pickrell in Herasight’s algorithm development. Additionally, Noor Siddiqi, the CEO of Orchid, a competitor to Herasight (and onetime advertiser on this podcast), was a guest on Ross Douthat’s show Interesting Times, triggering another round of conversations around embryo-selection, including in The Wall Street Journal and Breaking Points.

To hash out some opposing viewpoints, Unsupervised Learning decided to bring on two guests that stake out very different positions, Dr. James Lee, a psychometrician and behavior geneticist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, a philosopher and Herasight’s sales lead. Lee has been on the record with his skepticism of reproductive technology, writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal four years ago warning against the consequences of polygenic embryo selection. Meanwhile, Anomaly’s last book was Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement, where he advances the idea that such technologies will unlock human potential.