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Givewell.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Kevin

Esfeldt. He is a scientist at MIT, where he leads the sculpting evolution group, which focuses

on evolutionary and ecological engineering. He's probably most famous for inventing, in 2013,

a way to alter animal populations in the wild using CRISPR,

which is a technology that basically acts like finely targeted molecular scissors that you can

program to edit an organism's genome. Our conversation has two halves. In the first half, we're

talking about an important and urgent

argument that Kevin has been making publicly about how research that's intended to prevent

pandemics is actually putting us in a lot more danger. In the second half, we're talking about

Kevin's own work on using CRISPR-based gene drives to alter animal populations in the wild.

We talk about the risks and whether they outweigh the benefits, and also about just what it's

like to be the guy responsible for having invented this transformative but also potentially

dangerous technology. By the way, the audio in this conversation is a little echoey.

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