The Human Gene Editing Summit in Washington DC was much anticipated and generated many commentaries, before, during and after its completion. Headlines appeared on a daily basis, describing how ‘top scientists’ assembled to discuss the ‘excitement’ of genome editing and its potential to deliver ‘cures’ for almost all diseases, but how there are also ‘ethical concerns’ over ‘designer babies’ and scientists ‘playing God’. Giddy stuff. (more…)

“Are poets the unacknowledged bioethicists of the world?” asked Tom Shakespeare, one of our Council members, on Monday night. Quite possibly so, if the rich ideas and concepts put forward by the poets who entered the Council’s (un)natural poetry competition are anything to go by. (more…)

On 1 December the statesmen and -women of molecular biology will meet in Washington, DC, for a three-day international summit on human gene editing, sponsored by the US National Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the UK’s Royal Society. The meeting coincides with the publication of an open call for evidence to inform our own current genome editing project. (more…)

The Children’s Commissioner’s Takeover Challenge kicked off on Friday – in this post, our Senior Research Officer Kate Harvey reflects on two years of progress in involving children in the design and delivery of medical research.

September 2013 witnessed a milestone moment in the involvement of children and young people in clinical research across the UK: for the first time, young people, parents, researchers, and practitioners gathered at a national event to discuss how children and young people can be meaningfully involved in clinical research.

This discussion took place under the banner ‘Generation Research’ – or, to give it its shorter title – GenerationR. (more…)

Back in June, I wrote about the Beauty Demands seminar we hosted here at the Nuffield Council that looked at the role played by health professionals in both creating and meeting the increasing demand for invasive cosmetic procedures. In the next seminar of the series, held in Birmingham (also see Kate Harvey’s previous blog), we turned our attention to the globalisation of beauty, debunking the myth that the rising interest in surgical ‘fixes’ is a trend emerging only in the wealthy western world. (more…)

Two weeks ago, beautiful Birmingham was home to a two-day workshop on the globalisation of beauty.

The workshop – organised by the network BeautyDemands (more about the Nuffield Council’s involvement with the BeautyDemands here) – saw presentations from a wide range of contributors, but it was one issue in particular which led me to do a little further digging of my own. (more…)

The Council’s report on the impact of big data technologies on privacy, public interest and how these are conceptualised was published in February 2015. (more…)

As part of my role as commissioned poet for  the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ naturalness project, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we use language and also how language resists these uses. (more…)

Many, many years ago, while working part time in the press office of one of the UK’s biggest medical research charities, I was appalled to learn that its policy on dealing with all enquiries about experiments involving animals was not to answer them direct. Callers were instead advised to contact the Association of Medical Research Charities for a general statement about policy on animal work. (more…)