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Welcome to The View from 22 podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast, online editor at The Spectator.

In this week's issue, we'll be discussing eugenics, Tory tensions over Brexit, and what poetry

tells us about 21st century Britain.

Now onto our cover story, the return of eugenics.

It has been denounced as a pseudoscience that led directly to Hitler's gas chambers,

but now it's back, according to Fraser Nelson.

The word is taboo, but the idea is back in fashion,

that you can use science to improve the genes you hand down to the next generation.

I'm joined now by Fraser Nelson and Toby Young, the spectator's associate editor.

Fraser, we all know about genetic engineering, but can you really call it eugenic?

Yes, I think you can. There's understandable squeamishness about the word,

but if you use science to try to improve any way the genes passed on to the next generation,

then it is, by definition, eugenics.

That's what's happening now in certain areas of life sciences.

IVF has been possible for decades.

That's not eugenic.

You simply fertilize the egg outside of the human body, then put it back inside.

But when you start to give parents a choice of eggs and screen them for various infelicities,

perhaps diseases that are hereditary, you don't want past to the next generation,

when you're taking a step further down the road to designer babies, that step becomes a leap

when you deploy the new technology of gene editing. That's when you take a fertilised embryo

...