In late November, He Jiankui, a scientist in China, announced that he had created the first “CRISPR babies,” meaning that he performed germ-line genome edits on human embryos, which were implanted through in vitro fertilization (IVF), and has now resulted the birth of twin girls. He used CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technology that can target DNA at precise …
Tag Archives: Bioethics
Osagie Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky’s Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics
Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics
Osagie K. Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky (editors)
University of California Press, 2018. 518 pages
“The science will let loose its cascading interactions with utter impassivity; yet how we inhabit that knowledge will be a contest of the imagination, a sedimentation of political futures, a constructed infinity of worlds.” —Patricia J. Williams
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Web Roundup: Death, Life, and the Immortal Brain
Among the many tech-focused booths at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early this year, one stood out in particular: an exhibition of manufactured bodies, or “sleeves,” into which someone could theoretically download their consciousness. The exhibition was a promotion for the new Netflix series Altered Carbon, a science fiction saga set 300 years in the future where individuals can …
Web Roundup: Moral enhancement
This month’s web round up focuses on notions of treatment as enhancement…or vice versa? I’ve recently come off a stretch of spending quite a lot of time reading up on debates surrounding behavioral disorders in children. One issue that seems to crop up repeatedly is whether the use of medications in these young populations, particularly those living with ADHD, is …
Web Roundup: Something Rotten – Scent, Morality, Good and Evil
A well-known quote from Hamlet is “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” This, of course, refers to the illegitimate and immoral reign of the fictional King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle. So, while there is plenty of current relevance related to the political and social turmoil hinted at by this line, instead let’s talk about another aspect that I find …
Last will and predicament?
It was recently reported by the Guardian that there has been drop in organ donation rates in the UK.[i] It was also reported at about the same time that a woman successfully argued in the courts that her mother’s last will and testament should be over-ridden so that she might receive a bequest that her mother never wanted her …