Search for "\"gene editing\""
Gene drive communication: Obstacles and opportunities
January 18, 2019
The other day I was talking to two people about various developments in science. Both are interested in science, but they are not natural scientists. I mentioned ‘gene drives’. Their faces went blank. I then said: “it’s something like the gene editing of a whole population of creatures, such as insects, for example. This can …
Science, life and meaning
December 15, 2018
Sheila Jasanoff has published a new book entitled Can Science Make Sense of Life? This is a big question to which the answer, according to Betteridge’s law of headlines must be ‘no’. The title sets the tone for the book and opens up specific expectations for its readers. What expectations readers have depends on what they understand …
A Science Fiction Movie Guide to Responsible Innovation
November 15, 2018
This is a guest post by Andrew Maynard, Professor at Arizona State University, who is launching his new book today: Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies. I am really happy to publish this post on the Making Science Public blog, as it deals with topics like responsible innovation, synthetic biology, …
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 …