Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
August 3, 2018
Gene/genome editing has been much in the news recently and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of new developments. The last two weeks alone have seen major announcements, which I shall briefly list in this blog post. This leads me to a question that has been troubling me: How does one do …
Designer babies? Not again!
August 2, 2017
Preface: I had just put the finishing touches to this post and I was doing the washing up, when I heard on the six o’clock news that the paper I’ll talk about below has now been published in Nature. I’ll still publish this post though. It would be great to compare the pre-paper news coverage with the …
Ta(l)king responsibility
May 28, 2015
In social science and policy circles there has been a lot of talk about Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). However, nobody quite knows yet what this means and how it works in the context of harsh economic realities. In the meantime, natural scientists have taken responsibility for their research and innovations in the context of …
From recombinant DNA to genome editing: A history of responsible innovation?
March 24, 2015
In this post I shall report on a recent call for ethical and regulatory reflection by scientists engaged in a new genomic technology. I’ll then put this into a historical context of previous initiatives of that kind, and finally ask whether this can be called ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’. CRISPR Recently, a new controversy has …
Designer babies: Are we reaching the end of the slippery slope?
May 5, 2014
A decade and a half ago Ruth Deech, then Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: “The public do not like, and we do not like the idea of designer babies” (quoted in The Independent, 18 October, 2000). That same year, John Harris, Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of …