Gene editing, gene shears and other titbits from the history of genetic engineering
April 7, 2023
I was wondering what to write about. In past blogs, I have done quite a bit of ‘conceptual history’ about metaphors or phrases like ‘imaginaries’, ‘tipping points’, ‘deficit model’, ‘trickle down economics’ and even ‘gene surgery‘ and ‘gene drive’. I have also written a few posts about gene editing or genome editing. But, come to …
CRISPR, the Nobel, and women in science
October 9, 2020
I wrote my first blog post about CRISPR, gene editing or genome editing on 24 March 2015. It was entitled “From recombinant DNA to genome editing: A history of responsible innovation?” And I have written quite a few more blog posts about this new biotechnology since then. I knew that sometimes in the distant future …
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 …
CRISPR culture
March 15, 2019
CRISPR is a way of changing and replacing parts of DNA using enzymes like a pair of molecular scissors (of course things are more complex than this!). This new technology for ‘editing’ DNA, genes or genomes began to attract public attention between around 2012 and 2015. When I started to write about metaphors used to …
Making science by publicity stunt: The case of the CRISPR babies
November 29, 2018
Science is supposed to be a public, systematic, consensible, evidence-based and collaborative enterprise. It’s also supposed to be carried out responsibly, not recklessly. Making science in public and making science public are complex processes. Making public science normally doesn’t consist in presenting fellow-scientists and members of the public with a ‘fait accompli’. This is however …
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 …
Genome editing: Invisible mending
December 1, 2017
Last week I had a few days in Oxford to visit old haunts, such as the Ashmolean, the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. I also went to a little exhibition in the basement of the Museum of the History of Science. The exhibition by Anna Dumitriu was entitled BioArt and Bacteria. …
Genome editing, metaphors and language choices
November 17, 2017
Genetic Alliance and the Progress Educational Trust recently published a report entitled ‘’Basic understanding of genome editing”, based on research supported by the Wellcome Trust. As I have worked on metaphors relating to genetic, genomics and genome editing for more than twenty years, I was particularly interested in this report. Unlike many other publications, including …
The book of life: Reading, writing and editing
November 22, 2015
I have been observing the use of the ‘book of life’ metaphor in genetics and genomics since the year 2000, when it was used to announce that the human genome, our entire DNA, had been roughly sequenced. The Human Genome Project had begun in 1990 and was completed in 2003. Its achievement consisted in finding …
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
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