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Promoting Socially Irresponsible Research and Innovation?: That National Academy of Sciences tweet on genome editing and human enhancement
October 11, 2019
This is a guest post by Michael Morrison, PI on the ESRC BioModifying Technologies project at the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX), Faculty of Law, University of Oxford *** On the 30th September 2019 the Twitter account of the US National Academy of Sciences (@theNASciences) published the following tweet: “Dream of being …
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 …
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 …
Scientists call for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. What do they want?
March 29, 2019
This is a guest post by Jim Dratwa and Barbara Prainsack. Jim Dratwa, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., and Free University of Brussels’ Centre on Law, Science, Technology & Society. e: jim.dratwa@vub.ac.be Barbara Prainsack, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, AT and Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s College London, UK. e: …
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 …
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 …