Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions
October 23, 2020
This is another guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT) at KU Leuven, Belgium. *** Ten years ago the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the birth of …
Synthetic biology, engineering biology and responsible innovation
October 16, 2020
Between about 2014 and 2018 I have been involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’. I was especially interested in synthetic biology with relation to ‘responsible innovation’ or ‘responsible research and innovation’ or RRI (here are some blog posts). Since then other issues have pre-occupied my mind and I lost a bit …
Gene writing: Between art and nature
July 17, 2020
In the past, I have written a bit about genomics, synthetic biology and gene editing, from the perspective of language and culture. So, when Matthew Cobb alerted me to a new thing called ‘gene writing’ at the beginning of July, I pricked up my ears. I told myself that I should write a blog post …
Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses
February 28, 2020
I was reading a recent article on gene drive entitled “Engineering bugs, resurrecting species: The wild world of synthetic biology for conservation” and came across this sentence about a so-called ‘Medea drive’: “This genetic Trojan Horse could then be used to spread elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as triggering the death …
Engineering biology? Sure! But which kind?
February 7, 2020
This is a guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. *** Biology is a mess, not only the natural processes out there but also the science in the lab. Every biological rule seems to have exceptions and all biological laboratories …
Xenobots-Xenowhats? Living machines and zombie metaphors
January 24, 2020
The other day a colleague asked me what I was up to. I said, ‘I am starting to think about xenobots’. ‘Xeno-whats?’ he asked? I muttered something like ‘you know as in ‘xeno-transplantation’, when another colleague butted in and asked ‘like Xenogenesis?’. ‘Xeno-what?’ I asked. It turns out there is a sci-fi trilogy by Octavia E. Butler written in the …
A road called ‘gene drive’ and the road to ‘gene drive’: Trials and tribulations of media analysis
October 25, 2019
As people might know, I enjoy doing media analysis of emerging biotechnologies, from cloning to gene editing and beyond. I have lately become fascinated with something called ‘gene drive’, a new genetic engineering technology that was brought to public attention around 2014/2015 at the confluence of two ‘events’: the outbreak of Zika and advances in CRISPR-Cas9 …
The microbe/gene drive communication confusion
September 27, 2019
Last week I wrote a post about how genetic modification and/or gene drive are used when managing disease transmitting insects. I want to come back to this topic today and talk about another difference, which, yet again, confused me. I hope that these efforts of disentangling stuff also help other people trying to understand and …
The GM/gene drive communication confusion
September 20, 2019
The other day, I was at the airport waiting for a plane back to the UK, when I noticed on twitter that there was some kerfuffle going on about a field trial in Brazil intended to eliminate disease carrying mosquitoes, which had had, it seems, some unintended consequences (see study). Here is a short summary: …
Heritable Genome Editing: National and international governance challenges and policy options
July 27, 2019
This blog post has been co-authored with Achim Rosemann (University of Exeter). A shorter and slightly different version has been published by the BioMed Central ‘On Society’ Blog. *** Germline gene editing has become a hot topic in science and in society, after one Chinese scientist edited embryos in 2018, an experiment that a Russian …
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
Find, follow, join us
