Astrogenomics: Integration and inspiration
November 1, 2019
I should have blogged about embryo editing in Russia. I should have blogged about Netflix’s ‘Unnatural selection’ series on CRISPR and genome editing. I should have blogged about prime editing, but life is getting in the way at the moment. That doesn’t mean I don’t look at twitter once in a while (au contraire!). So, …
New genetics and society: A retrospective
June 7, 2019
I am in a collecting mood at the moment [I have updated this collection/blog post on 17 January 2022]. When I heard that an article (with Carmen McLeod and Rusi Jaspal) on faecal microbial transplants had finally been accepted by New Genetics and Society, I began to count back and realised I had published quite …
Blueprint, a broken metaphor?
November 26, 2018
Three things came together that made me write this post: observing an increased discussion of the blueprint metaphor in genetics and genomics around the publication of a book called Blueprint, reading an old article by George Gamow, and reading a footnote in a forthcoming book by Philip Ball entitled How to Build a Human. The …
Genome editing, metaphors and language choices
November 17, 2017
Genetic Alliance and the Progress Educational Trust recently published a report entitled ‘’Basic understanding of genome editing”, based on research supported by the Wellcome Trust. As I have worked on metaphors relating to genetic, genomics and genome editing for more than twenty years, I was particularly interested in this report. Unlike many other publications, including …
Do metaphors really matter?
June 16, 2017
I, like many others, from Leibniz to Lakoff, think that metaphors are important for human thinking and acting. They make us see the world in different ways – for good or evil. So, one should keep an eye on them. Recently I have read two articles which seem to imply that metaphors matter less than …
Biosocial: A brief conceptual history
April 21, 2017
I have recently come across the word ‘biosocial’ in various social science debates about epigenetics and other advances in the life- and bio-sciences. A chapter in a book on ‘social epigenetics’ (and the ‘biosocial’) says for example: “Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social …
Hybrids and chimeras: Mythology, history and science
February 3, 2017
Last week two papers were published about human and other chimeras, one in Cell on ‘Interspecies chimerism with mammalian pluripotent stem cells’ and one in Nature entitled ‘Interspecies organogenesis generates autologous functional islets’. The first one caused a bit of a stir in the newspapers. About 70 newspaper articles covered this potential scientific breakthrough in All …
Gene editing, metaphors and responsible language use
December 11, 2015
Last week I was following the progress of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing, which took place in Washington between 1 and 3 December, 2015. On the last day, I was looking at my twitter timeline and saw that Megan Allyse (a former PhD student) had posted information on a special issue devoted to …
The book of life: Reading, writing and editing
November 22, 2015
I have been observing the use of the ‘book of life’ metaphor in genetics and genomics since the year 2000, when it was used to announce that the human genome, our entire DNA, had been roughly sequenced. The Human Genome Project had begun in 1990 and was completed in 2003. Its achievement consisted in finding …
Dark matter: A mystery metaphor that turns genomic junk into gold
August 28, 2014
I have become intrigued by a new metaphor, most recently used in an interesting Aeon Magazine article. The authors state that the human genome can’t be, as was so long assumed, a blueprint for building a human being, as “science has served up the confounding paradox that the bulk of our genome appears to be …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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