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Gene drives and metaphors

January 21, 2022

I have been writing about developments in the biosciences for twenty years. In that time, I have covered a wide variety of topics, such as cloning, genomics, the human genome project, the microbiome project, faecal microbial transplants, synthetic biology, epigenetics, genome editing and now gene drive. I was lucky enough to get many reflections on …

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Eyes and organoids

August 20, 2021

I have written in the past about eyes and about organoids (but if you really want to know more about organoids, you should read Philip Ball’s How to Grow a Human). These two topics, eyes and organoids, recently came together. A few days ago, I saw tweets like this: “Small blobs of human brain grown …

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Genetically modified mosquitoes and creatively unmodified metaphors

May 7, 2021

Last week genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes were released in Florida. One news item reported the event as follows: “The British company Oxitec released a cloud of hundreds of millions of genetically modified mosquitoes to study how to control their reproduction and thus stop the spread of dengue, Zika, malaria, etc.” (Entrepreneur, 4 May, 2021). What type of genetic …

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Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors

April 2, 2021

Recently somebody asked me something about metaphor and I thought to myself, what the heck do you know about metaphor? Actually, not an awful lot, given all the stuff I have written about it, or rather the stuff that I have written which involves some sort of reference to metaphor. So, I started to make …

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Protein folding and science communication: Between hype and humility

December 4, 2020

During the afternoon of the 30th of November, I looked at Twitter and saw that somebody had retweeted a tweet by Tom Whipple, the Times science editor, saying that in an hour he would announce a big science story. That retweet was an hour old. I got curious and hunted around a bit in the …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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