Post-Brexit gene editing regulation

Some of us are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding genetically modified or engineered foods and crops that raged in Europe (which included the UK) around the turn of the millennium. Some of us are even old enough to remember debates about recombinant DNA in the seventies (for those who don’t, I recommend Matthew …

The colours of biotechnology

I have recently been musing about images used to make science public and wondered what images are out there for synthetic biology. I knew that in the past cloning was visually represented by ‘Dolly the sheep’ or ‘armies of little Hitlers’, nano found its visual incarnation in nanobots and fantastic voyage, but what images would …

GM food, war metaphors and the perils of political entrenchment

It’s the Jubilee weekend. It’s raining. So I am looking through some tweets. Some make me think I should cheer myself up by writing a blog about songs used to make science (especially quantum physics!) public, others make me think that I really should write something about war metaphors in the current GM debate. As …

Putting Science in its Place

Guest post by Beverley Gibbs (Beverley.Gibbs@nottingham.ac.uk), PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society I was at a seminar a few weeks ago at Nottingham University on The Political Economy of Food Security by Gerardo Otero who is visiting us from Canada.  Gerardo has published empirical studies analysing the impact of biotechnology on small …