Melissa Chen
Melissa Chen
Melissa Chen is a human rights activist and classical liberal who is the Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders. She is based in New York City. [2]
Early Life
From a young age, Chen realized that she did not describes to traditional religious dogma. [3] When she was 17-years-old, she came out as an atheist after reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. [3]
In a podcast "Walk-Ins Welcome" with Bridget Phetasy, Chen said:
And I immigrated to the U.S. when I was about 17.
I always said I came for an education, but I stayed for the civil liberties, which is true.[22]
Education and Career
Chen attended Boston University for undergrad and was inspired by Dawkins to be a geneticist. [3] During this time, she became more vocal about her philosophical positions on social media. [4] She later studied computational biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [2]
Political and Philosophical Views
A quote from Melissa Chen
Chen is an atheist and a humanist. [3] She considers herself a feminist, but one who is the Christina Hoff Sommers type. [9] Chen is a classical liberal and staunch defender of enlightenment values such as individual liberty, reason, secularism, tolerance. [1]
Interviews
Chen took part in a podcast "Walk-Ins Welcome" with Bridget Phetasy.
Here are some citations from the podcast:
So yeah, I went to Boston University.
The first place I lived in in the U.S. was Boston.
And loved it, and fell in love with the sports teams, the culture there.
It was so liberating 'cause I grew up in a place that was very, it was a nanny state.
You know, they call it a benevolent authoritarian state.[22]
Right, right.
And when I came to America, I realized, I mean, it was just, it was liberating because I knew First Amendment was this shield that protected everybody.
The government can't come after you.
And not to say, obviously, that there are no consequences for your speech.[22]
- [Bridget] That's amazing.
So when, what did you get your degree in?
- [Melissa] Quantitative computational biology, so I did those degrees because I was trained scientifically, you know, in Singapore.
Just high school and everything, I specialize in science.
I really, really love the clarity of the scientific method.
I find it so satisfying when, you know, evidence can support the conclusion, which is why I also naturally have a bit of a resistance to grievance studies.[22]
Well, CRISPR is a very specific gene-editing technology, and it was actually invented.
So the institute that I worked for was in the big patent fight with another person at UC Berkeley.
That was, like, a three-way intellectual property fight for the patent rights to CRISPR because it was just kind of life- changing.
We're talking about the ability to excise portions of your genetic code and insert whatever you wanted in it.
You could make a complete synthetic gene using, you know, some sort of, like, molecular system, scissors kind of system that we derive from bacteria.
And so I was actually working at the time on a platform called the Infectious Disease Platform at the Broad Institute which is the institute that, where one of the claims were for CRISPR, intellectual property came out of.
And it was scary tech-because this was the first time.
We couldn't do this before.[22]
So we started an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders basically to take ideas that are not represented in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish, languages that are widely spoken in the Middle East, but we really focus on Arabic because it is the fifth most spoken language in the world, but represents only less than 1% of the global online content.So
we look at Wikipedia, you know, whatever you and I can access on Wikipedia in English, blot out 90% of that. That's
all you can get in Arabic.[22]
And at the end of the day, I don't think me and my sister would ever doubt that my mother loved us.
She's super religious, and whatever we ultimately feel that she's trying to curtail our way of life, curtail our freedoms, because of her pre-assumption, her set of assumptions, she's doing it out of love.
And you can see the direct line.[22]